by Ian Hocking
‘Is he alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Let him in.’
Beckmann, today, was as identical in dress and expression as yesterday, but a carnation had replaced the anonymous lemon-yellow flower in his buttonhole.
‘Kommissarin?’
‘Here.’
She unfolded the paper. It showed the reflection of Saskia frowning in disgust over the woman she had murdered.
Chapter Three
‘Well, you have five minutes until the engineer arrives,’ said Beckmann. ‘Do you think this is a frame-up?’
Saskia took the paper and walked around the desk as she spoke.
‘No. The mechanics of the crime are consistent with the notion that the murderer is female. Mary was killed by a single stab wound below the ear. Though that requires skill, it does not require strength. I have recovered video of the murder itself, and this shows the perpetrator struggling to move the body. The murderer also wore a hat—long since destroyed. The effect of the hat was to conceal the face, and therefore the sex, of the wearer, from the cameras in my office.’
Saskia touched her forehead with her thumb. ‘Second, I remember receiving a burn yesterday morning. By afternoon, it was gone. On the assumption that I am not hallucinating at this very moment, then it must be true that I was never burned. My memory of receiving the burn cannot, therefore, be true. And that memory involved Simon, my English boyfriend. He threw a pot of pasta at me when I was recalled from London.’
‘Or did he?’
‘Precisely,’ she said, taking pride in her glacial tone. ‘This suggests a further hypothesis that at least some of my memories are false. The time at which the burn disappeared marks, I believe, the point where my false memories stop and my true memories begin. This point was perhaps my dizziness after discovering the body in the fridge. Some minutes before this, I killed Mary. Then false memories were implanted, or became activated. The key evidence is the computer’s analysis of the knife blade. If it is true—and it must be—then I have been hunting myself.’
Saskia had stopped next to the window. Across the desk, Beckmann smiled, as if at a prize student. ‘Questions remain.’
‘Such as,’ Saskia began, but she was stalled by the sudden understanding that these implanted memories might extend beyond the immediate past. She reached for a childhood, a school, her first love. She found nothing. Unstoppably, other realizations followed: she had remained in the office overnight because she had no home; she had called no friends because she had none. Even Simon (Saskia took his picture, searched his eyes) meant nothing. She was not in the picture because the two had never met. She ripped the photograph from its frame and found a yellowed advert for stationery on the reverse.
She took her revolver and aimed it at Beckmann.
‘What did you do to me?’ she whispered. This might have been the first time she looked at him. His aloofness was better termed coldness. His indifference was the abstraction of his cruelty.
‘Oh, Frau Kommissarin. You are so worried about being caught for your secretary’s murder. You think they’ll wipe your brain and send you out into the community. It’s too late. They already did.’
Saskia let the gun drop to the desk. ‘What? What?’
‘Three weeks ago, you perpetrated a thorough and meticulous murder. I must be vague on the details. You understand. As part of your rehabilitation, you were released into my programme. Do you know the expression,’ he briefly switched to English, ‘“Set a thief to catch a thief”? People like you, Kommissarin, have a talent to know their own kind. I want that. The FIB wants that.’
‘People like me?’ Even as Saskia felt the rise of madness, her intellect pushed on. ‘So this is an interview? A test to see if I could catch myself?’
‘Yes. You passed.’
‘Who was Mary?’
‘One of your kind. She won’t be missed, particularly by her victims’ families.’ Beckmann leaned over the desk. ‘Do you accept my job offer?’
‘What are the alternatives?’
‘You’ll be destroyed and your ashes pinched across the Spree.’
‘So why don’t I just put a bullet in you and leave for Siberia?’
Beckmann looked at the gun. ‘What bullet?’
She checked. There were no shell rims visible in the cylinder. She flicked out the cylinder and found one round in the topmost chamber. She reset the gun and pointed it at Beckmann. ‘This bullet.’
‘May I make one point? During the First World War, senior Russian officers would test the cleanliness of a junior’s revolver in a peculiar manner. Cleanliness was important because a poorly maintained gun was likely to jam. So a gun was loaded with one bullet, the cylinder was spun and the weapon fired at the junior. If the gun was well maintained, the cylinder would come to rest with the bullet at the base. The pin would strike nothing. However, if the gun was poorly maintained, the bullet could stop anywhere. Beneath the firing pin, for example.’
‘Russian roulette.’
‘Kommissarin, do you know the true significance of Russian roulette?’
She gasped. A breath-stopping pain ripped along her gun arm. She felt the joints flare and her muscles tremble with effort. Despite her will, the arm began to bend.
‘Your arm becomes my arm,’ Beckmann said, ‘if I wish it. Think of it as a safeguard.’
She strained until her jaw creaked and her chest bulged with trapped air.
‘Don’t fight,’ said Beckmann. ‘Listen. The purpose of Russian roulette is edification. A lesson that poses the question: Is there a bullet or is there not? Some officers were hanged because they did not have the courage to ask.’
Her eyes, which she could move, beseeched Beckmann, but he did nothing. She—or he—dashed the cylinder across her thigh. It spun. Then she raised the revolver to her temple.
Beckmann’s eyes drank her body from toes to crown. ‘Now,’ he continued, ‘do you commit? If so, you will become my property. You will investigate federal crime as a probationary officer within the FIB. You will not be permitted to leave the EU and you will not attempt to rediscover your past. You will tell no one your true circumstances. You will accept anything I care to put in your brain. If you break any of these rules, you will be executed. Do you understand? Answer me now, or you will pull the trigger.’
She felt her jaw unlock and understood that she had been given the power to speak. ‘Yes,’ she said.
Beckmann waited. He looked at her grubby T-shirt and cheap flip-flops, both souvenirs of a holiday she had never taken. ‘Good.’
The spell broke. Saskia collapsed into her chair. It spun with a clicking sound that recalled the revolver’s cylinder.
‘My assistant will arrive in two minutes. She will give you a suit, some money, and the keys to an apartment. I suggest you go there and calm down. Embrace your new life. A second chance. Here is your badge.’ He put a leather wallet on the table. ‘You should deal with that awful smell and…’
Beckmann stopped. Saskia was pointing the revolver at him. She pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. On the sixth click, Beckman shook his head.
‘…you’ll find live ammunition in the armoury, second floor.’
She regarded him blankly.
‘Oh, Saskia?’
‘What.’
‘Here is your first assignment.’ A sheaf of documents landed on her desk. They looked ink-based. ‘The first thief I want you to catch is an Englishman called David Proctor. Don’t worry about the jurisdictional issues—I’ll handle those. Orient yourself, but don’t take too long about it. And remember you’re on probation. If you fail, you die, and at length. There will be another like you. There always is. Good morning.’
Chapter Four
Met Four Research Center, Nevada, USA: The day before
A sound woke Jennifer Proctor. She raised her head from the desk, allowed an eddy of vertigo to pass, and looked about. Richardo’s chair was empty. She scanned the tiered banks of consoles behind her. The
two-hundred-or-so seats were empty too. Maybe someone was sleeping under a desk. If not, she was alone but for party streamers and mugs of flat champagne. By the mission clock on the wall, it was hardly dawn. The transparent screen at the front of the amphitheatre was dark. The lights in the cavernous chamber were out. She thought about black coffee. And water. No; something isotonic. She stood. Too soon, surely, for a hangover. She stepped into her clogs and prepared to initiate a full shutdown of the amphitheatre systems, but there was a man standing in the doorway, far to her right.
‘Who the Christ are you?’ she asked, closing her lab-coat. The man was tall and still. By his silhouette, she could see he wore a cowboy hat.
‘My name is John Hartfield.’
The moment grew long.
Damn it, Proctor, she thought. Hold your shit together.
She licked her dry lips. She felt like a teenager at a dinner party.
‘I’m Jennifer, sir. Jennifer Proctor, head of Project N25. Head of a subsection, rather.’
His face in darkness, he said, ‘N25? Gerald will have given the programme a more memorable name, surely.’
‘Déjà Vu.’
‘The psychological phenomenon. Well chosen.’
‘He says that what goes around comes around.’ She forced a smile. ‘Mr Hartfield, on behalf of the team, I’d like to express our gratitude for your financial support.’
Hartfield stepped into the room. Below the cowboy hat, he was wearing a blazer, shirt, and jeans. Jennifer thought that he was almost handsome in a middle-aged playboy way, but his eyes lacked something.
‘No, it is we who are grateful to you,’ he said. His boots double-clicked on the linoleum as he approached. ‘I’d like to talk about the project. Perhaps we could do that in the context of a tour?’
‘A tour at 5:00 a.m.?’
Hartfield smiled. There was an odd quality about it: On-off. Digital. Jennifer wondered whether she should ask this man for identification. After all, she had only seen the true John Hartfield in pictures. But nobody had ever infiltrated Met Four Base. It was deep beneath the sandstone some miles to the north east of Las Vegas, and protected by formidable security forces.
‘It’s quiet now,’ he said. ‘I like it that way.’
‘I’m not sure where everyone has gone. Usually there are technicians around the clock.’
‘I had Déjà Vu emptied.’
‘You had it emptied?’
‘I know,’ he said, ‘I’m acting like I own the place.’
Jennifer took the cue and chuckled. But she thought, Yes, actually, you bloody are.
‘Why do you want me to give you the tour? Gerald—Professor Jablonsky, I mean—would be the best person.’
That on-off smile again.
‘I wanted to meet the wunderkind. Do you forgive me?’
Jennifer hated to be reminded of her age. When the topic was introduced in conversation, it was typically followed by exasperated comments from the white, middle-aged scientists nearby that they owned shoes older than her. They found that funny. She did not.
She forced a smile and said, ‘Shall we begin?’
‘Thank you.’
Outside the control room, Jennifer covered her eyes preemptively and touched the relay to activate the ceiling lights. The cavern was one closed section of an enormous, spiral cavity excavated from the rock by a nuclear subterrene tunneller, and its convex roof and walls had been melted to a glass finish, wet-looking with reflected light as the LEDs created a starfield. The floor of the cavern had been terraced to create three level sections, each eighty yards long and about fifty feet beneath the tunnel roof. The amphitheatre control room, where Jennifer and Hartfield stood, filled the highest terrace. The middle contained a reservoir of sand, large enough to protect the scientists in the control room from catastrophic failure of the two centrifuges in the third, lowest terrace. Scattered throughout the chamber were equipment crates, vehicles, work cabins, and construction materials. The air was dry, dusty and hot.
Looking down the cavern at the floor-to-ceiling bulkhead that separated Project Déjà Vu from whatever existed in the next chamber, Jennifer thought of the nuclear subterrene tunneller at the terminus. Its plant could power the complex for another twenty-five years, or, should the need arise, destroy it with an inferno that would roll up the spiral excavation in a fraction of an instant.
Jennifer always shuddered when she considered this, and she was glad when Hartfield interrupted her.
‘I wonder if you could explain the significance of the first experiment, which you described in your report.’
‘Here,’ Jennifer said, producing the savonette pocket watch. ‘It’s the star of the show.’
She put the watch into Hartfield’s hand. He read the words that Jennifer had written on the case in magic marker. His thumb rubbed them. Slowly, the two began to walk down the steps to the middle terrace.
‘It happened on Tuesday,’ she said. Her throat was drier than usual. ‘One hour before we received presidential authority, the re-injection alarms sounded. These alarms are designed to respond to certain gravitational anomalies that correlate with the re-injection of matter. They’re automatic.’
‘But you hadn’t sent anything through time.’
‘Not at that point. The reception centrifuge began to spin up at 11:52 a.m. At precisely noon, with the rotation arm at full speed, our cameras captured the materialisation of a plastic box. It struck the reception container at the perfect angle. Splashdown. Turn the watch. You see the time and date?’
‘Yes.’
‘I wrote that at 2:00 p.m., two hours after the watch materialised.’
‘What did you do after it appeared?’
‘I couldn’t believe it. I ran to the office, opened a drawer, and took it out. The same watch, that is.’ Jennifer laughed. The rush of success reddened her ears, but she knew the machine was an emphatic screw you to all those who had questioned her youth, her worth. ‘There was…there was a moment when I held both watches. In my left hand, the original watch showed the correct time. In my right, the duplicate showed two hours’ hence. The same watch. We had done it. But we had only two hours to prep the machine.’
‘Were you tempted to not send it back?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Were you tempted to let 2:00 p.m. pass by without firing up the machine and sending the watch back to 12:00 p.m.?’
‘That would have been impossible, Mr Hartfield. The effect of the cause had already occurred. You can’t have an effect without a cause.’
‘What if you tried?’
Jennifer frowned. ‘I’m not making myself clear. The watch had already been sent; it just so happened that the sending had not yet occurred. Do you see what I mean? It’s no different from firing a gun at a target. You can, as the shooter, wish that travelling bullet should not reach the target after the gun has been fired, but the bullet doesn’t care what you think. It will always hit. Always.’
Hartfield listened to the watch. He closed his eyes. ‘It’s running fine.’
‘No, each tick is marginally slower than the last. The error was three nanoseconds per second on Tuesday. Now it’s three microseconds, an order of magnitude greater.’
‘Is that why you can’t send a living person?’
‘You’re asking Wilbur Wright how to put a man on the moon.’ She took the watch and let the chain spiral into her left palm. ‘The two things are entirely different.’
She stopped to pass him a hard hat. They moved into the zigzagged canyon that bisected the sand barrier. The walls of the passage were twenty feet high.
‘Jennifer,’ he said, ‘I need to tell you something.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘I don’t know how much Gerald has told you, but more than twenty years ago now, I was a businessman shopping for a thoroughbred in Kentucky. That life ended when I fell unexpectedly from my mount. The diagnosis, made some days later, was that I was suffering from a malignant brain tumour
. In the years that followed, I underwent many treatments, from the medical to the medieval. Ultimately, I went public. I offered half of my empire to anyone who could cure me. As you would expect, I was approached by several con-artists and idiots. But one e-mail, from an Argentine medical student, intrigued me. He had an idea for a non-surgical procedure that I’m sure you’re familiar with.’
‘Orza’s nano-treatment,’ she replied, nodding to the door in the fence. They passed through.
‘In its initial runs, non-cancerous cells were also attacked, particularly neurons associated with higher brain function. In that respect, it was as blunt an instrument as chemotherapy. But I took the treatment with only weeks to live and, as you see, twenty years later I’m not yet dead.’
They walked on. Jennifer gestured to the smaller centrifuge that had been built at the edge of the larger one. She explained how the two formed a transmitter-receiver arrangement. Hartfield nodded, but his eyes were elsewhere, and he touched her elbow to interrupt her explanation.
‘Jennifer, I made Orza a famous man. One day, you too will be renowned. People will want your money and your time. Are you prepared?’
‘I’ll get used to it.’
‘How old was Einstein when he published his Special Theory of Relativity?’
‘Twenty-six.’
‘And Newton his advances in physics?’
‘Not forgetting mathematics and optics. Twenty-two.’
‘And you your time machine, Jennifer?’
She felt the tension that gathered in her muscles when people probed her background, tried to divine her wellspring. ‘Twenty-one.’
Hartfield stared. ‘You’ve beaten them both.’
Jennifer met his gaze. ‘But I had Einstein, and Einstein had Newton.’
‘And you had your father. We should not forget him. Did you know that he once worked for me?’
Jennifer could not conceal her surprise. ‘You ran the West Lothian Centre?’
‘I owned it, and others. These were investments I was happy to make. I owe my life to science.’
‘But you owed nothing to my father,’ Jennifer said. She surprised herself with the old anger. ‘I remember the problems he had when I was growing up. Doors closing, friends not returning his calls. Was that your doing, letting him go from the Centre? Because of the bombing?’