‘People know what I know. They know that I’m cleared.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means that sometimes I can help people with problems, ideas.’
‘You get used as a sounding board?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And that still goes on, does it? You’re sufficiently…up to date even though you’re officially not on the core design team any more.’
‘There is a process for officially informing people and including them. The architecture hasn’t changed. The implementation changes have been trivial. I’m not aware of any official process for forgetting. Solomon has one, the rest of us don’t. Perhaps your team will invent one.’
‘But presumably you get taken off lists, you get out of date. Doesn’t that mean that the problems stop coming your way, the ideas dry up?’
A look of quiet satisfaction crosses Brodzky’s face.
‘Perhaps that will be the way it goes. I don’t know. Would you like to take that look around now.’
There is little that can prepare someone who has not seen experiments on the brains of live creatures at close quarters before. No Army personnel believe themselves squeamish but Shaw feels a stab of revulsion almost as soon as they enter the building. The smell of institutional cleanliness hits first, then the stifling warmth and the harshly squeaking surfaces. This minor unpleasantness is compounded by the sensations it is intended to mask: the smells of captive animals, of bedding and feed, faeces and desperation, a silence heavy with trapped echoes and imagined cries. As they walk the corridors Shaw can see monkeys constrained in cages, a pair of sheep with their heads held motionless in jigs, their bodies withered irrelevancies under a new fleece of electronics. A bench of computer monitors catches the eye and draws it up from a row of crouching brown monkeys whose heads are lost in silver boxes and braids of multicoloured wire. The monitors show cross sections of brains in lurid colours like Warhol walnuts. Inside each image a hard edged black square sprouts fine black lies into the surrounding glare. They reach a pair of doors with a large sign that reads ‘G5 Secure.’ Brodzky hesitates before swiping his badge. He pushes the door ahead of Shaw and the young man walks past the outstretched arm. ‘Just bear in mind,’ Brodzky whispers as he passes, ‘that without this there would be no Solomon.’
Shaw counts five bodies in a row. His eyes hold on a white body of Christ; a tent of ribs that rises and falls to the beat of a repeated mechanical sneeze at the bedside, a white plastic pod like a fist-sized leech at his hip; the tilted-back head just a jointed piping of throat, a sharp bridge of jaw and a blur of Technicolor dreadlocks. Then he catches movement across the corridor that he first takes as the incongruous entry by someone on a bicycle but quickly realises is a figure suspended inside a steel cage, harnessed into a seat and feeling with blind hands for banks of controls arrayed in the arc of his reach like a drum kit. A bespectacled man in the adjacent glass booth appears to anticipate these movements with exaggerated movements of his own.
‘Christ!’ Shaw whispers.
‘This is what you pay for,’ Brodzky says softly. Shaw walks closer, standing by the exposed abdomen of an obviously female form.
‘So this is the Medipac, huh?’
Brodzky is at his side and reaches forward to open the pod by lifting a hemispherical plastic lid.
‘Medipac Seven. Of course, the final version will be internal but this is just to allow us to manipulate the device.’ So saying, he plucks at a turgid sac which comes away on a transparent plastic umbilical cord. ‘A complete monitoring and management system miniaturised and equipped for remote handling. More technology in this little pod than the average ICU. Your people call it the minibar.’
For once in his life Shaw is glad to turn to administrative detail and to conclude his tour with an examination of the laboratory records system. Brodzky says he’s arranged for Shaw to meet the data manager, Isaac Penge, but he’s late and so they sit in the electronic arctic of the data centre amongst basking grey computer cabinets under gently humming white light.
‘While we’re waiting for Penge, I can show you some of the features. All the resources are monitored electronically and the life signs data are captured on computer. Every intervention is noted with the time, the member of staff and the procedure. The building is intelligent and records every entry and exit for every room.
So this is you,’ Brodzky says, typing Shaw’s visitor number into the machine, ‘…and here you are now.’ The screen shows a column of entries that follow his progress through the building. ‘We can put you on to map view,’ Shaw becomes a flashing dot in a plan of the complex, ‘and we can highlight the areas to which you have access.’ The plan turns into green and red boxes. ‘As you see, there are various places we cannot go.’
‘And if I didn’t have a badge but got in there?’
‘Your body functions would light up our systems like a beacon. There would be an alert within a half second of entry. But I can assure you that you wouldn’t get in. Our security is very tight indeed. As I’m sure you know, this facility is regularly security audited by your people.
Shaw leans forward in his plastic bucket chair and puts his elbows on his knees.
How about stuff going out?
Brodzky pauses. ‘We have RF asset tracking on everything that comes in here even down to surgical instruments. If I do this…’ Brodzky’s fingers perform a tattoo of the keys and a screen display headed Medipac comes up. ‘…here…you can see the entire Medipac inventory on site.’
The screen shows a table with every device listed by serial number and giving its location and status.
‘You’re pretty handy with this Doctor Brodzky. I’m impressed.’
Brodzky shakes his head. ‘Oh no, you’d need to get Penge to take you through it. I have only a rudimentary grasp. Is there anything in particular you’d like to cover?’
‘What happened with the guy who died here – the one who was brought here after the shooting incident?’
Brodzky seems unsurprised. ‘It was very unfortunate. He had actually made a good general physical recovery. The indications were good. Despite signs of disruption to the Solomon functionality, indications of trauma, we hoped to be able to save his life. In the end it proved impossible.’
‘What happened, exactly?’
‘Subarachnoid haemorrhage – bleeding inside the brain – blood loss from an aneurysm. When you’re dealing with Solomon resources you have to take into account that the control of the body is different. Solomon uses encoded reframing techniques to enable the individual to go beyond normal limits – to perceive their capabilities differently – to create a more powerful and determined version of themselves – but of course the physical stresses are real. The Medipac intervention will assist to a point but you can never know where the absolute limits are. It seems he was unlucky. Probably a pre-existing weakness. The damage was done.’
‘A brain haemorrhage?’
‘Indeed. It’s all in my theatre notes. There was a complete audit and a report at the time – in fact two reports because they did another one about a month later – someone else from your side – but a medical doctor that time. No doubt you’ve read them. There was an alert. I diagnosed a haemorrhage. It was clear we needed to act immediately and we did. But I’m afraid we quickly realised we were fighting a losing battle. We reached the situation where brain function could only have been maintained by artificial means. I had to make the decision – no longer really a medical decision.’
‘You mean a decision under the Solomon protocol? The point of no return?’
‘Indeed. And so we followed the specified procedures – to remove the Solomon device and have the body destroyed. Cremated. Process and procedure. It was all spelt out very clearly. Stupid.
What, not necessary, you mean?
Such a waste. All opportunity for learning closed off. What’s the risk of exposure here? It was the same with some of the early cases. Paranoia turned into
policy.’
And their families?
Brodzky meets Shaw’s eyes. ‘Ashes are ashes. They knew what they signed up to.’
I see. So there’s a medical emergency. You had to act fast – you took the decision alone, you said.
Yes and no. It was the middle of the night and I did what I had to do – with no recourse to any external assistance. But of course all the facilities here. Which is a better environment than anywhere else, of course. I have everything here, everything. But for the decision – I had already received a very unambiguous briefing from the officer they sent to watch him, Lieutenant Danvers. She made it clear what should happen under specific circumstances we were likely to encounter, that we were to observe the Solomon protocol and that, now the programme had transferred, this individual would not be considered a case for any overrides for further research. Your people were taking no chances on a non-US national they hadn’t really wanted on board in the first place. The clinical decision was not the difficulty. I imagine the intricacies of that situation might be more intelligible to you as a lawyer than to me. My understanding was that a deceased Solomon resource, this resource in particular, was a liability to be removed as soon as possible. That is what happened.’
‘Danvers wasn’t present?’
‘She had returned to The States. She found little to do here and there was…some pretext or other, something that required her attention.’
‘You didn’t get on?’
‘This is a specialist unit. What we do is world class and unique. It is a grown up business. What could she bring?’
‘And so you destroyed the body, you cremated him and returned the Solomon device to Belvoir. As you had to do.’
‘Yes. The device was returned whole and untouched and the body cremated and pulverised.’
‘Taking no chances.’
‘That’s the idea. They didn’t want identification by the teeth. You’re the lawyer.’
‘But there was a DNA test I read about – in Belvoir. How did they do that?’
‘Yes – traces on the device itself. The priority was to despatch it. A quick clean – but there would have been some traces…some blood adhering. So they got a little blood on their hands after all – after all that effort to stay clean.’
The silence that follows as Shaw digests this is interrupted by the arrival of a slim, balding man who turns out to be Penge. Brodzky excuses himself and hands over to the younger man. Penge holds out a drooping hand to be shaken, or perhaps kissed.
‘Isaac Penge,’ he says in a borrowed bass voice. ‘Data and things administrative, ancient and modern. Sorry I missed your arrival. Circumstances, in the form of a skills updating course and the exigencies of air traffic control, conspired to take me away over the last few days and return me late today. Dr Brodzky is very keen for me to keep up with the latest techniques. I hope I shall be slightly more useful to you as a result.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Penge.’
Shaw already knows that Isaac Penge had postponed, probably permanently, his post-graduate studies in medieval history in order to earn some money as a contractor managing the databases and procedures of this facility. He begins by asking him to explain the administrative system and the way that the information is held. Penge calls it the architecture. It is stupendously boring and Penge’s sonorous rumbling voice makes it all the more soporific. Shaw comes to at the point where Penge seems to be repeating the overview of the security and monitoring system that Brodzky had already covered. ‘The computer keeps an up to date record of each member of staff, resource or visitor. It can tell where every single one is at any time. Here is a list.’ He prods the keyboard a couple of times. ‘No, sorry, you have to enter the ID number, there. So you see you are Shaw, John, then the date and number 9. We enter that here and…there you are.’ The screen shows a panel with a column for each room in the complex. Penge puts his finger to the screen to show their respective ID numbers. I can pick you up and flip to follow your visit…like this.’
‘And there’s a map view that shows where I can go, isn’t there?’ Shaw adds, close to sleep.
‘Mmm, you could be right,’ says Penge.
‘And this is all stored is it? You’d be able to look me up in say three months and still see where I went?’
‘Oh yes, it all gets archived. I can show you, for example where I was…let’s say…the same day last year.’
Shaw gives him another idea. He asks him to go to the date that Rees died.
‘Show me what happened that night. Show me who was where.’
Penge’s fingers peck slowly and a dialogue box comes up. Penge taps in the date, twice, messing it up the first time. The columns come up. Shaw can see the entries that time stamp Brodzky’s movements through the building.
‘It’s a bit confusing. Talk me through it.’
Penge double clicks on Brodzky and selects an option to show progress. ‘So here he is. I see what’s going on. The first entry on that date is actually him leaving. This is his car being logged out of the car park at 12.04. He left just after midnight. Typical Jozef. Then he’s back at 02.48. See the flag there – he was auto-paged at 02.11. That’s a system alarm he’d have set. If you check that reference – if I right click that, no, if I go to options and then select ID – there it is. You see? Rees. And if we switch back…Here he is back in the car park and again at the security doors – where we came in…’
‘So he was paged automatically and came back in at two-thirty in the morning?’
‘That’s right. Middle of the night.’
‘On his own?’
Penge flicks through another series of options and a different list pops up. ‘Looks like he was joined by two others. That would be the surgical standby team. It looks like more but they to and fro a bit – probably brought some equipment in.’
‘Can you show Rees?’
Rees’s final hours at the hospital flip up on screen. ‘Yep, there’s the alarm. I don’t know what that code is; Dr Brodzky would have to tell you – heart rate, bloods, could be any of a number of things that he’d have set up. He sort of does that side of it himself. Then here he is moving out of his room and you see him going into B1 – that’s theatre. See there? I’m afraid these data seem rather meagre when one thinks…’
‘And what are these other entries below?’
‘Well, the tag is still running. So what you see here is, I’m afraid, after they’ve done all they can and the poor chap’s body is being moved to a spare room and then…I’d guess the tag was taken off there. This code looks like an asset tag. I think he’s logged the tag to the…er equipment they removed. If there’s a possibility of reuse or some tests required or some such then that’s what happens. I’m not sure what that code is.’
Are there spares? You have a stock of, say, the Solomon circuits themselves?
God, loads of everything. Dr Brodzky goes ape if anything runs out. There is so much experimentation all the time.
‘I suppose you can’t…or do you keep a track of the bodies…?’
Penge looks at him as though considering a mordant joke. He decides against it. ‘The medical side of the system is really more of a monitoring application than, er, stock control. All this RF stuff is really about tracking the kit. I’m afraid there’s rather more emphasis on the silicon than on the carbon, if I could put it that way.’
‘What happened next?’
‘To The body? There’d be a sign off to move him. But he’s off this system once he’s separated from the asset itself.’
‘So the system is tracking the circuit from that point on, right?’
‘That’s right. It was signed out of our inventory. The code, there. The next day. If we open the flag…there…that means it was dispatched off site. I believe it would have gone to your people in Virginia. We don’t have it any more: you do.’
‘And the people – on that night. Can we see them all leave?’
‘Yes. We can go down to the mai
n exit, here. Looks like the backup leaves around five. Brodzky stays on. I don’t see him leave. Ah – there he goes – not till nearly seven. No wonder he takes the next day off.’
Eighteen
‘Good evening, Eva, my name is Euan Summer. I am calling from Network One in London. I understand you have some information regarding KomViva? I’m an assistant to Mr. Matzov. I’ll make sure it gets dealt with in the right way.’
Eva feels a sudden scampering in her guts.
‘Hello,’ she says.
‘Mr. Matzov is away at the moment but I will try to help you. It’s Eva Aguilar, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right,’ she says.
‘Great, well, Eva, I appreciate your getting in touch. Why don’t you fill me in on what this is all about and we’ll take things from there?’
‘I know who KomViva is. I want to talk to him.’
There’s a brief pause at the other end. ‘I see. Well, I guess a lot of people would like to do that. He’s a very popular figure, a pretty busy one too. He’s travelling right now. I’d certainly be happy to relay a message to him…’ He pauses but Eva doesn’t speak. She’s thinking about the way he had used her surname. She hadn’t given it. She’d like to think that meant Rees had told them and was sending a message back but she realises that it probably means they have checked her out. The mobile number would have been enough to get them started.
‘If you can tell me what you want to talk about, I’ll see what I can do. Just as a matter of fact there is an email address that you can always use to send a message to him and I can guarantee you that it will be read. What I can’t do is just hook you up to speak to him directly but I can…’
‘That’s a shame. I thought I left a clear enough message. It doesn’t sound as though I’m being taken very seriously. I said I know who he is. I know where he came from. I gave a specific indication, an initial, just so we could avoid any of this messing around. I think Reuben Matzov would appreciate what that means. Perhaps it doesn’t have the same significance for you.’
Solomon's Keepers Page 17