by Unknown
“Here’s to committee members with eccentric habits.” I raised my glass. “And the next step?”
“Find this serial killer who threatens national security.”
“You want a spook to play homicide investigator?”
“Homicide investigators trade in spooks. The ghosts of the dead leave clues for the living.”
“I see. Well, I suppose I am a spook, in every sense of the word.” I capped the scotch and stood up.
“Where are you going?”
“To fulfill my brief. Play detective. I need to see the scene of the first crime.”
“I don’t recall mentioning which of our frameworks was murdered first.”
“The doctor, not the frameworks. Ackroyd was the first victim.”
Dr. Greville Ackroyd’s residence was in Pangbourne, a village on the Thames west of London, in one of those gated communities so popular these days, where the houses of the wealthy sprawl lazily in the sun on spacious lots enclosed by fences and patrolled by security staff. Closed circuit cameras everywhere you turn. A little world of illusory safety from the crime, eroding morals, and terrorist conspiracies of the outside world.
Had this been a routine mission, I would have been scanning for camera dead angles and the patterned comings and goings of the security men. But unfortunately this was nothing more—at least for public consumption—than a follow-up investigation of a doctor’s sudden death. All the needed administrative documents had been prepared, leaving me no interesting challenges. All I did was show my identification card and the court order, and the guard at the gate waved me through with no formalities. It hardly mattered whether cameras filmed me or nosy neighbors spied on my arrival. Nothing was secret about my business here.
Perhaps it was another occupational disease, but seeing the well-planned security arrangements made me yearn to penetrate Ackroyd’s residence undetected. As I drove through Pangbourne Estates’ main avenue, noting the locations of the houses and the various security measures, my brain was running a simulation of where I would go over the wall, what tricks I would use to defeat the cameras, how I would evade the eyes of security and the residents. I pretended I was here for the first time, with nothing to go on, and that I’d infiltrated rather than simply driving through the front gate.
Daylight madness. I chuckled cynically. The accumulated experiences pervading my brain had a tendency to erupt shamelessly without respect for time or place. It wasn’t a matter of conscious effort. Most of what human beings do, we do without even being aware of it.
For me it was work. To live for work. That was why they made me.
I arrived at Ackroyd’s house. The garage was empty. I pulled the Aston Martin in. The doctor had been driving his BMW to work when he took a high dive off an overpass. The impact had totaled the vehicle. Suicide was initially suspected; now we, at least, knew that wasn’t the case.
I walked to the door and let myself in using the key I’d been given at the gate.
Greville Ackroyd, Project 7 Research and Development Leader, Psychoanalyst and Cerebrophysiologist, Military Intelligence, Section 6, Secret Intelligence Service, Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
Whenever I saw his nightmarish job title, I always thought of that Monty Python skit about a man who walks into a famous doctor’s examination room and finds four walls covered with professional titles. But Ackroyd’s card read simply, “Consulting Psychiatrist, Foreign Office.”
I had no idea how many people were involved with Project 7. If all of them were like Ackroyd, it must not be a very fun place to work. Rumor was he’d been on the project since the early days, but I hadn’t seen him then. Of course he had not been involved from the beginning; “7” research had been going on for nearly half a century.
During the war, the Nazis had been working on in vitro fertilization. Test tube babies, as they used to be called. Military Intelligence got wind of it and sent a regiment to Berlin on the last day of the war. Unfortunately, the Empire’s dream of capturing the technology was denied. Red Army looters had already carried it off. Of course, we were all looters in those days, but while the Soviets were bellowing their barbaric victory huzzahs, the SAS spirited another cache of documents out of Berlin under their very noses.
Or perhaps not under their noses. One could just as easily maintain that the Soviets perused the documents and refused to take them, because they recognized the seeds of the technology that ended up being the means for transcribing me into different bodies again and again for over thirty years. The Communists did not fear God, but they may well have feared this.
Yet although the technology had been in our hands since the last day of the war, it had only been applied in “my” case. Not that there had not been others yearning to escape from death, and not that work on the technology ever stopped, but rather, “Because it’s too horrifying.”
People on the project were losing their sanity right and left. Alan Turing joined the project and ate his poisoned apple shortly thereafter. After being convicted of sodomy, he’d apparently been offered a role on the project in exchange for terminating his regimen of estrogen injections, which at the time were thought effective for suppressing homoerotic tendencies. All this was before the sacrificial lamb appeared. Before the project was christened “7.”
As for why I was chosen, it was my capabilities—excessive capabilities—displayed most notably in my cracking the case of the stolen nuclear warheads that rocked the Empire. Everyone who witnessed my performance agreed that I had an irreplaceable gift. I was the perfect sacrifice for the project. Amid the relentless tensions of the Cold War, my fate was sealed.
To be a spy forever. To be an assassin forever. To be myself forever. Every death in the line of duty to be followed by the forcible overwriting of yet another brain. The Original accepted the duty graciously, with aplomb. And until R&D figured out how to grow replacements in vats, “I” would go on being an usurper of other men’s bodies. A transcription written into someone else’s brain. The flesh of those willing to be sacrificed to safeguard England would serve as my papyrus. By now they must have made great strides toward making the process less “horrifying.”
And Ackroyd had climbed to the top of the project.
The doctor’s residence was fitted out with the most banal, uninteresting furnishings imaginable. Even a hint of postmodernism or deconstructionism would surely be unthinkable in conservative Pangbourne Estates, but this was taking things too far. On the other hand, if this anonymous, vulgar kit were a symptom of madness, it might have a kind of style after all.
I climbed the stairs to the study.
The window above Ackroyd’s desk framed a large rectangle of dreary gray sky. I peered out and down, looking for an ingress route. Nothing could have been simpler than climbing up to this window. The ventilation duct snaking up the wall offered ample foothold, and the tree outside completely blocked the view from next door. A perfect dead angle, with none of the vaunted security cameras to cover it.
I closed the curtains, stepped away from the window, and switched on the desk lamp.
The bookshelves were lined with monographs and technical works, but there was a scattering of writers such as Poe and Lovecraft, and the complete works of William Blake. Alone in the study, I found myself humming those hallowed lines from the opening to Blake’s “Milton.”
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England’s pleasant pastures seen!
I never cared for the odor of mysticism that hangs over much of Blake’s work, but the poem that became the hymn “Jerusalem” had taken on a life of its own and woven itself into the DNA of every Englishman.
There was a telephone on the desk by the bookcase. I pressed replay messages. The synthetic voice intoned the dates and times as the messages played bac
k in reverse order. Ackroyd had received several calls shortly after his death. I took down the name of each caller, but likely none of them were connected with the “accident.”
Finally, the last message on the tape. It was recorded the evening before the doctor took his dive off the overpass.
“Dr. Ackroyd? It’s Shepard.” A fresh young voice, female. The lilting tone had that academic sheen. “The routine we initialized last month has finished running. We found something.”
“Hold the line, please.” The doctor had picked up. This was followed by several muffled remarks, also Ackroyd by the sound of it. He apparently had his hand over the receiver and was speaking to someone in the room, but the words were unintelligible. He spoke into the phone again.
“I’m sorry, I have a visitor. I’ll be sure to pick up tomorrow. Could you call me in the morning?”
“All right. Tomorrow, then.”
“End of message,” said the synth voice.
Someone was with the doctor in his study when the call came at 8:44 p.m. No one had mentioned this—neither the local police nor our own people, who must have conducted a second sweep.
One of the buttons on the phone had gate inked conveniently beneath it on a scrap of tape. I pressed the button and the ex-military man who had passed me through came on the line. “The doctor had a visitor around eight-thirty the evening before he died,” I said. The response was crisp and immediate.
“I reported that to your colleagues already, sir. I also advised the inspector.”
“You know how ossified our bureaucracy is. In Her Majesty’s service, collaboration takes the hindmost.”
The guard chuckled. “Yes, sir. I completely understand your position. The visitor was a FedEx courier. Package for Dr. Ackroyd. I let him through at 8:42 precisely.”
“When did he leave?”
“Four minutes later, at 8:46.”
“Thank you.” The receiver made a faint click as I replaced it. The silence pressed in around me.
The police and our own investigators had been told that the visitor was a FedEx courier. The timing matched perfectly. But something bothered me. The courier had been in and out in four minutes. Hand over package, Ackroyd signs at door, done. The whole transaction couldn’t have taken more than two minutes.
Is that why the doctor told his caller to wait until the next morning? For such a brief interruption? Not “Please hold on,” or “I’ll call you back in a moment”? Would he describe a courier as a visitor? There was a classic Monty Python skit about the delivery of a gas cooker that turns into an extended bureaucratic nightmare because the paperwork is not perfectly in order. But fouled-up paperwork couldn’t have detained Ackroyd’s courier.
I went downstairs and stood outside the house, looking up at the window. As I scanned the surroundings, I found what I knew I would find.
Traces no one had noticed.
Branches pushed aside. A boot scrape on a lower branch. More going up, scrawling an unsettling message in this little walled paradise. A message only a professional could read. A message only I could read.
It was nice work. This was the best ingress route given the security system. I could hardly have managed better myself. The night before the doctor’s death, a professional had entered his study using this route, with misdirection provided by the courier’s conveniently timed arrival and departure.
I walked the traces back and came up short against the stout fence enclosing the estate. The trail disappeared beyond the barrier.
I sighed. The Aston Martin was still in the garage. Now I would have to think of an explanation when I appeared at the front gate on foot.
“I’m not sure whether this is espionage or Agatha Christie.”
The audio analyst didn’t answer. His fingers kept flying over the keyboard. Maybe it was some kind of strength training for the digits. He would probably destroy his joints before long.
“Two famous British exports.” His eyes never strayed from the monitor. At least the man had a sense of humor. “Games of wiles and trickery. Gloomy murder puzzles. One would think we could offer the world something better.”
The north wall of the large, dimly lit room was occupied by a huge flatscreen display. I half expected a close-up of Big Brother to flash up at any moment. Ranks of smaller monitors on desks glowed blue under the faint indirect lighting. Before bringing the audio of Ackroyd’s last phone call here, I had checked with GCHQ and confirmed that they had no record of it. Ackroyd and the woman who called herself Shepard had spoken over “our” communications circuit—a secure service line that could not be tapped.
I had to go through the Director to access the circuit logs for the night in question. It didn’t surprise me that the call originated from Pinewood R&D. Shepard was on Ackroyd’s staff.
I always play my cards close to my chest when I deal with someone for the first time, even if that someone is one of ours. Shepard’s connection to Ackroyd was clear, but I still needed to know more about the second person in the room. I decided it would be best to get my ducks lined up before confronting Shepard.
The analyst’s fingers moved so steadily that I began to wonder if he was actually conscious of what he was doing. Yes, maybe he was conscious in the sense that I was when I jumped the fence at Pangbourne Estates to follow the traces. I believe it when specialists say most of what we do is without conscious volition. How much consciousness did this man need to do his work?
He finally turned to me for the first time. “That should do it.” His eyes had that ordinary look of someone in his early thirties—not dead, but without a spark. Murky and very English. He’d even taken the data stick from me over his shoulder without turning around. This was starting to get interesting, but when he finally turned to look at me, he didn’t appear at all lobotomized. I almost laughed, wondering what kind of eyes I’d been expecting.
“As soon as the doctor puts his hand over the receiver, you can hear another voice in the room. Just for a moment. ‘Who’ or ‘what,’ or maybe a short name, ‘John’ or ‘Jack.’ One syllable, two at the outside. Not ‘Ariadne’ or ‘Fotheringay.’ Probably a male voice. The intonation sounds interrogative, but I can’t confirm it. The audio’s too poor, nothing we could send round to ECHELON for a voice print search. An unknown voice emanating from, let me see, somewhere in the vicinity of the sofa, based on the map you showed me.”
So there had been someone else. This was no courier. Would Ackroyd have invited a courier to take a seat on the sofa? Offer him tea and scones, perhaps? It was hard to picture that mild-mannered reptile behaving like a typical English pensioner, pressing hospitality on whoever crossed his threshold.
“What about Ackroyd?”
“Everything’s sharp and clear. He has his hand over the receiver, but a gap or two between the fingers is all we need. I was able to enhance it. Yes, it’s very clear.”
“Play it.”
He hit the return key, and the time bar began to sweep across the waveform on the monitor. I listened tensely, expecting something indistinct. I wasn’t certain what “clear” meant from someone whose job was to unearth decent audio from thickets of noise. But to my astonishment—the original had been totally unintelligible—the doctor’s voice came from the speakers as if he were with us in the room. I found it hard to believe so much detail had been hidden in the recording.
“One of my staff members. It’s about our little matter. Rather a coincidence, I’d say.”
“Sounds as if he’s talking to someone familiar,” said the analyst. “I think your doctor was acquainted with his visitor.”
It’s certain, I thought. Finding an enemy under the bed is never pleasant. Espionage requires a healthy distrust of everyone, but in Britain all attitudes are colored by the Philby case. In the secret world, betrayal is something that can happen at any time. Still, one never gets used to it.
�
�I’d better inform my boss—” the analyst began. I cut him off.
“Mention this to no one. Not your colleagues, not anyone. If this is evidence of some kind of penetration, it has to stay with us. You understand?”
He stared at his lap. I clapped him on the shoulder and hurried out.
Pinewood.
I hadn’t been here since my semi-yearly extraction. Six months of experience to wring out of my brain, cooling units cranked to maximum to freeze the output, data transferred to archival storage. My backup brain. A chain of experiences stitched together and buried forever, my giant Shadow, accumulating for over thirty years.
So far these extractions were the only thing that kept me coming back to Buckinghamshire. Now I was here not as the subject of an experiment, but as an inquisitor. It seemed slightly absurd.
“I” awoke here, was blessed by the Archbishop here, began “my” life here. As I listened in a daze to the ancient cleric reciting the Old Testament, I wondered—what happened to the spies whom the Israelites sent to infiltrate Jericho? Bidden by an Old Testament God who boldly named himself “Jealous,” the spies entered Jericho to destroy it, to expunge it from the face of the earth. Rahab the prostitute and her family sheltered them and were protected by God in turn, and Jesus of Nazareth traced his lineage to her. This prostitute who protected Israel’s spies was a traitor to her people. The blood of a traitor ran in the veins of the man given to the world as the Son of God.
But the name of this woman, whose existence was a preparation for a manifestation of the divine, also meant “the abyss,” and even served as a name for Leviathan in the Book of Job.
I gunned the Aston Martin down the tree-lined avenue flanked by soundstages, keeping an eye out for my destination. Hollywood used Pinewood Studios extensively. I’d heard Sir Ridley Scott was once the owner. Scott’s soundstage had burned to the ground during his filming of Legend with Tom Cruise.