Up until three years ago this site was an army listening post. When the army moved out a married couple, Laura and Peter Lewis, bought the site and set up an outbound school: sea scuba and some gliding. But it was winter now, January 10, there were no guests, and we had descended like army ghosts on this place, reclaiming it for our own. Forensics in paper jumpsuits skirted around each other as though rehearsing some intricate, ugly dance. Observers kicked stones and muttered into their cell phones. There were even some soldiers, throat-miked, wrap-shaded: they looked well pissed, given nothing to do.
I looked for someone I knew and found Morley. I'd last met him in summer; with enough red wine inside him he'd passed for chubby. Out of season he wrapped himself up in an ugly sheep-skin car coat; he turned to me looking like something spat out of a tank and said, "Joanne Rynard. Thirty-one years old, Five-foot-seven, brown hair."
"One of ours?"
"Flight lieutenant, retired eight months ago."
"Was she hotwired?"
"There's a jack in her neck big enough, you could plug her into a battleship."
"Where's the battleship?"
"No ship. But there's a hotwire feed in the hangar."
"Bootleg?"
"No, it's legit. A stray. It wasn't in the building specs and it got overlooked when the army stripped it."
"How'd she know about it?"
"God knows. First we knew it was here was this morning."
"She ring any presidents? Fire any missiles?"
Morley looked around, counting the army ghosts, muttering: "Whatever she did, she sure touched a nerve."
"How'd she die?"
"She slashed her wrists diagonally with a scalper and bound the cuts with bandages."
"She was backing off?"
He shook his head. "Each hour or so she'd undo the dressing, let out more blood."
"Slow way to die."
"What she wanted."
"Know why?"
He shook his head.
"She have help?" I asked him.
"What for?"
"The bandages. Retying them can't have been easy."
"You met the Lewises?" he said. "There's nobody else around. If it was anyone it was them."
I remembered, it was Mrs. Lewis who had called the police, who in turn had called us. But why had she called the police? Most people find a body they call an ambulance, not a policeman. The Lewises were somewhere about. I was supposed to introduce myself, but I didn't feel ready. I'd been brought in to reassure this frightened couple, convince them to unsee what they had seen, unhear the things they'd heard, and, if they'd got involved somehow, to tell them it was over; all was fine.
The trouble was, Laura and Peter Lewis weren't frightened. Each hour she undid the dressing and let out more blood. Had they helped her?
If so, why? Until I had those answers, I knew I could not begin to erase what had happened here.
I thought over what I knew. She'd been in the tank. She'd been floating, she was plugged in to the hotwire feed when you found her?"
"Yes."
"Doing what?"
"Nobody knows, or if they do nobody wants to say."
Once you're plugged into a hotwire feed you can surf the world: control in real-time the trajectory of a satellite, lower or raise the price of corn on the Nippon Exchange, read teletext in Urdu, or fire an automated gun on the Iran/Iraq border. There's a price tag to this virtual joyride: the surveillance they put you under is hardly less invasive than the surgery. So how had Joanne Rynard slipped our net? Fortunately, that wasn't my problem. My problem was how to erase the evidence.
"And something else." Morley reached into his coat and pulled out a blisterpack. The stiff, clear plastic was heat-sealed around three slender hypodermics, each containing maybe thirty CC's of red liquid. "This was stolen from an army pharmacy three months ago. We found a stash of it beside the tank."
"What is it?"
"Rose Red."
"What's it do?"
"Cripples your immune system."
I stared at the hypodermics. "Well, who would want that?"
Morley shrugged and walked off, ramming the packet quickly back into his coat. I realized he had told me things even he was not supposed to know.
I wandered around the base awhile, waiting for people to leave.
The site bore little mark of its military past. The hardened bunkers, the offices and barracks, had been ripped out years ago. The radar arrays and satellite dishes had all been dismantled, leaving large, low concrete platforms, their smooth grey surfaces punctuated by rusted spars, irregular brick walls, depressions and scoremarks: the tracks and spoor and burrow-mounds of artificial life. The single concrete runway was crazed and weed-lined and there were shreds of cable rotting in the verges.
I was still avoiding the Lewises, and it wasn't easy: their stone cottage was the only house in sight; the only building the army had left standing when they quit. That and the tin hangar.
I tried the hangar door. It was open.
There was a row of gliders in front, their clean lines blurred and broken beneath shrouds of clear blue plastic. Beyond them the hangar was empty. Just concrete, and puddles, and the sight of my own breath.
Two flights of grille stairs led to a scaffold mezzanine that ran the length of the back wall. I climbed and walked along it till I came to the booth where she'd died. Plastic hung off the plasterboard and perspex partitions in shreds: the remains of her sterile tent. Morley's team had had to trash it, stripping out what they could of her gear.
There was still the tank of course, its glass sides fogged with salt and grease. Beside it there was a medical stand draped with wires. I fed them through my hands. One of them was thicker than the rest. It ended in a jack. It was this that had plugged into the socket at the base of Rynard's neck.
I passed the hotwire feed twice before I recognized it. It looked innocent enough. Easy to mistake it for an IBCN socket: plug a phone into it, you wouldn't get a tone; you'd think it was disconnected. But Rynard could have jacked into just about anything on the system.
I leaned against the side of the tank and looked in. Most of the water had been drained off but there was a puddle left in the bottom, purple with a dark scum: brine and old blood.
This wasn't suicide. It was something else, something more. What, I didn't know.
The beaches here were shingle. For sand you had to drive two miles up the coast, past the power station, but I prefer stones, I like the sound they make. I leaned back against a breakwater and watched the sea roll in awhile and when I got bored I phoned in.
They had little enough for me. Peter first: "He graduated from Central St Martin's twelve years back. No employment record."
"None?"
"An exhibition in Karsten Schubert every couple of years, a few sales, that's all."
"Where's his money come from?"
"Rich family. Landowners. Nothing to tell."
"He have any political affiliations?"
"He subscribed for one year to Marxism Today."
"Naturally. Movements?"
"Bradford, Bristol, London. lain, he's clean. I've nothing to give. There's a roomful on Laura-"
But I learned little from it. Laura Lewis's record was long but inconclusive. She'd belonged to a lot of organizations but she'd made the grade in none of them. Her politics were unformed; she was happier on protests than in political meetings. There she was in all weathers, before bulldozers and lines of mounted police and even soldiers once or twice, one week chained to a tree, the next roughing it in some school hall due for demolition. She was a regular at county courts, consistently refusing to plead in cases involving trespass, criminal damage, even assault. She'd spent about four years in prison between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six. After that her record was clean. She was thirty-one, the same age as Joanne Rynard.
I thought, Laura Lewis's politics wouldn't favor the virtual world. That unaccountable space was open to so few, and yet it was ther
e that all the big decisions affecting people got made. Did that mean she'd help someone use a hotwire illegally? Was this why Rynard had been made welcome here? Was she trying to damage some part of the virtual world? Had she turned saboteur?
I was heading back up the beach when I heard the car. I topped the bank and saw a 4X4 shoot past, rocking heavily from side to side. The back door was off, and through the empty cabin I caught a glimpse of black hair, woven by the wind. The tresses curled in on themselves like storm eddies, a hurricane of ink.
I wondered where she was going. Was she trying to break the cordon? If so, we would steer her back: we've had practice. I wondered whether to wait for her here, to flag her down and speak to her before she reached home, familiar territory, known space. But it got so cold waiting I gave it up and walked back to the grey house.
Peter Lewis was tall and skinny and his mouth was hidden by an overgrown oval of beard. He was baking; wisps of ginger hair stood out like wings above each ear. I wanted in out of the cold but he stood blocking the door, staring out at me from under his pale eyebrows like an indignant owl. "I thought you'd all left," he said.
I shrugged. Time was on my side, and so was he, though he didn't know it yet. He sighed and let me in. "Peter Lewis."
"lain Prior."
His handshake was warm and wet. "Sit down."
The door gave straight onto the kitchen, a city folk's dream of a country parlour: Aga stove, blue cheek curtains at the windows, stripped pine cabinets with diamond panes of blue and red glass, terracotta tiled floor.
"Coffee?"
"Something stronger?"
Sure." He handed me a finger of scotch and sat opposite me across the table. "What do you do, then?"
I erase things. A death's more than a body: it's witnesses, loved ones, memories. An eraser is more than a detective: he has to dig deeper than facts, and he has to know how to bury it all afterward. "Your wife's in trouble," I said. "I'm here to help her."
"Trouble?"
"A woman died here. We know she had help doing it. We think your wife helped her."
He blustered for a while. The Lewises had been assured there would be no police here after us, no inquest, no charges, that all was contained. He'd taken that to mean there'd be no trouble. So when I started talking to him about his wife's politics, I expected him to be angry. But it was better than that: he simply blanched, smiled a lot to cover his fear, and tried to get me drunk. A smart man. Frightened, but smart. A good choice of whisky, too, but a bad choice of target: I drank two for his one and when he went upstairs to sleep off his drunk I helped myself to the rest of the bottle. I thought about what he had told me, seeing how it meshed with what I already knew.
Laura Lewis had been born into the sort of politics she'd go to jail for in her teens. Her mother had been a spokeswoman for the protestors at Greenham Common. She'd had two children: Laura's brother was two years older than her, a blue-eyed wonder who naturally enough given his upbringing joined the Royal Artillery Regiment the moment he was old enough. He died of Gulf War Syndrome when Laura was fourteen. All the while the army was claiming no biological weapons were ever used against Allied forces, Laura's brother was wasting to a stick. The older Laura got, the angrier she got, first about that and then about everything Tyres slewed in the gravel outside. Peter must have popped a pill because be shot down those slippy beeswaxed stairs sober and pale as hell. He shot a glance from the door to me and back to the door like we'd been fucking and it was his mother. The door opened.
It was his wife.
Her hair preceded her, black snakes weaving in the wind coming off the sea. She brushed them back from her face and looked around. She took me in her stride, walking straight toward me, red lips upcurved, politely smiling. If she'd run up against our cordon during her drive she gave no sign of it.
"Laura."
"lain."
I reached out to shake her hand. She ignored me, smiling, skirted the table and went upstairs. She was wearing a green wool suit, the skirt cut well above the knee. I watched her legs sway as she climbed, heard the click of her heels on the stone steps and the hiss of her pantyhose.
I watched her all the way up, watched as the black smoke-curls of her hair melted and spread into the darkness of the stairwell. I stared into the darkness while she changed, and I watched as she came down again, her hipbones tight against her jeans, the cotton twill shirt downplaying her generous breasts, a city folk's dream of a country wife. Peter must have seen me staring. I didn't care.
She told me to stay for dinner. She'd guessed they couldn't get rid of me, and she wanted to put the best face on it she could.
While she cooked, Peter told me about the outbound school they ran. "We started five years ago. In a few years' time we'll sell this to the Parks Authority, go inland, start again, move into Executive Vision." He chewed up his roll. He made noises when he ate. "There's a lot of money in Executive Vision." what he meant was you take a bunch of pen-pushers and dump them up a hill in dodgy weather until they're cold and scared-about ten minutes-and they pay you for the privilege.
All the time he was talking I was looking at Laura. I said to her, "That's your ambition?" like I didn't believe it.
She said, "We got to make this place pay first."
Then Peter started telling me what great potential this place had, like he was selling it to me already. That was when the argument started. Laura kept contradicting him. No, the scuba classes were not full last year. No the weather wasn't ideal for gliding; ideally they needed to be ten miles up the coast where the strong thermals were. No, cooking was a bore and a pain and if they could have afforded the help she'd have hired it.
They were building a story for me, the story of their life here, but they couldn't agree on the design. One would furnish a room, then the other would come along and ])rick up the door. Walls got knocked out and the upper storey fell in. Stairways rose into nowhere. Roof beams creaked and foundations trembled.
So I gave up and studied their hands instead. Peter's were soft and fat. I wondered what he did around here. Nothing very practical, I guessed. Laura took a tureen out of the oven and set it on the table. She shed the oven mitts. Her hands were hard and muscular with short nails. White lines crossed the backs of her delicate wrists.
She put a plate down in front of me, and served me, and asked me what I wanted, and damned if I couldn't get a word out. It was the smell that did it: behind the gravy there was something else, something astonishing and sweet. Not perfume-, flesh. I summoned my strength and looked deep into her face: her strong, wide, red mouth; her deep blue eyes; cheekbones so sharp they could cut you. She saw me staring but she didn't let on.
She was too busy avoiding her husband.
Now and again, as she was serving, Peter would reach for Laura's band, to stroke it or squeeze it: some gesture of ownership. The way she steered away from him, he might as well not have been there. There was something going on. Some piece of language. Big trouble between them.
I realized that this was my best hope. There was an aggression about Laura, a liveness, a heat. She was angry with her husband. If she was angry enough, perhaps she would open up to me. By now she'd know I wasn't the police. After me there would be no investigations, no charges; only the anger, charging up inside her like static. I had to ground that anger, feed off it, learn from it.
I felt myself smiling.
Of course I was smiling. I had my excuse.
After dinner I went out to the car and opened a secure channel. "You've got to give me more," I said.
"It's all in the medical report," Morley said. "Use your eyes."
"One, my fax is back at the hotel; two, you know the shit your department puts out gives me a headache; three, you showed me those syringes for a reason."
There was a pause.
"Let me call you back."
I waited. When he came back on-line, the room tone had changed. Maybe he'd shut himself in a broom cupboard somewhere to be out of ears
hot: maybe he was using some kind of scrambler because his voice was cleaner now: no stray aspirants. "When Joanne Rynard left the air force she went straight into one of our classified projects."
"Which one?"
"Fuck off, lain."
I grinned at the mouthpiece. "Go on."
"While she was there she developed biclonal multiple myeloma. Abnormal concentrations of immunoglobulin, types A and G. Ig As in the blood: alkylating agents dealt with it. But Ig As in mucosal surfaces-"
"Her implant."
"It triggered a massive immune response. Meningitis, possible brain damage "So what did we do?"
"Booked her in for an operation to remove her hotwire jack."
"Only she never turned up." I thought about it. "Could Rose Red have let her keep her jack?"
"At a price. Kaposi's, Candids, the rest."
"She was immunocompromised?"
"All the way, lain. She was dying."
I was beginning to be glad that I'd never met Joanne Rynard: what could she have been thinking of, to kill herself twice over, and in such slow and painful ways? Putting aside for a moment the business of her wrists, what purpose had the Rose Red served? Only that it compromised her body's defenses so much, she got to keep her hotwire jack. But I couldn't believe that was worth dying for.
True, I knew nothing of the virtual world's strange exhilarations. True, I had long ago given up trying to grasp what it was like there: the inhuman euphoria; the sense one had of one self unspiraling, metastasizing, recombining into new and florid forms. I knew nothing of those strange, nameless senses through which the hotwired perceive the virtual world; indeed, knew less about them than a blind man knows of colour.
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection Page 86