by Ian Hocking
‘Operation?’
Klutikov exhaled smoke from his nose and beckoned Saskia. Again, her understanding lagged. Oh, he wanted her to lean forward. When she did, he put his hand on the back of her head. He touched a scab that Saskia had not noticed.
‘This is where they fired it in.’
‘You lean forward.’
Klutikov paused. Then, with a nod, he bowed. He let Saskia search his hair. She found a knot of skin no larger than a vaccination scar. Klutikov sniffed and checked the other customers.
‘The chip is a small computer, but quite powerful. One of its talents is telecommunication.’
‘It connects to the Internet?’
‘Just so.’
‘What else?’
‘The specifications aren’t well known. To me, at least.’
‘Who made it?’
‘That’s above my pay grade.’
‘Does it suppress my memories? Why can’t I remember anything?’
‘No, that’s not it.’ He jammed his cigarette into the ash tray. ‘Your brain is made of little cells, following? The reason that I’m me and you’re you is that the cells are wired differently. One pattern of wiring is me, one pattern is you, and another is the King of England. It’s all about the pattern. If you took a recording of my brain and imposed that pattern over another brain, then that brain, and therefore that person, will start to sound and act like me. They’ll think that they are me, and, in important ways, they will be. Your chip contains the memories of another person in a compressed, digital form. Reasonably high fidelity. It would take an expert to tell the difference.’
‘An expert?’
‘The chip is connected by tiny filaments to more than half the neurons in your neocortex. Your neocortex is where the more “human” functioning goes on. The chip remains in contact with your brain and constantly imposes the donor pattern over your own.’
Saskia looked at her hand. She realised that she did not know whose hand she was looking at. The chip is like a parasite with its feeding tube in my brain. She moved a finger. No, the parasite moved the finger.
‘That’s enough, Klutikov.’
I’m the parasite.
‘No names. Are you going to be sick?’
‘No.’
‘Good, because I haven’t finished. The imposition of the donor pattern must be constant. If not, the original pattern—that is, the personality and identity extant in your brain—will resurge. If you switch off the chip, you switch off “you”, the you you now know as yourself.’
‘My…body’s personality—my original brain and body before the chip—was convicted of murder.’
‘Don’t get distracted. You need to protect that chip. If you ever receive an electric shock, say goodnight. Likewise don’t let yourself be put in a scanner that uses magnets. You could get a bracelet like mine. It says I have metal in my head from a hunting accident.’
‘I can use a gun, a computer, and I know the layout of this city. Why can’t I remember anything else?’
‘Slow down. You’re conflating episodic and procedural memory. Speech, for example. You haven’t forgotten that. Walking too. That’s all procedural memory. Some of those skills will come from your brain, some from the chip. If you’re talking about memories of people, holidays, and your childhood, that’s episodic.’
‘Then why don’t I have any of those memories?’
‘I guess our boss didn’t think you needed them on the chip.’
Klutikov shook his wrist to expose his watch. ‘I have to go soon.’
‘What’s your story?’
‘My story.’
‘Why did our boss recruit you?’
‘The same reason her recruited you.’ He lit another cigarette and put it in her mouth. ‘My body, the criminal, will talk to me through inspiration, intuition, gut feeling—call it what you like. That gives me an operational advantage. My mind—the donor pattern on the chip, what I feel is the real me—gives me the discipline, the analytical firepower, and keeps the instinct in check.’
‘What you’re telling me is unbelievable.’
‘Then you must concentrate. First, you need to understand that you’re not responsible for the crimes of your body. You—the person I’m talking to—are completely different. You’re brand new. You’re not answerable for the crimes of your body any more than you’re responsible for the crimes of your parents. Understood?’
‘No.’
‘Good. That’s honest.’ He looked past Saskia’s shoulder. ‘One year ago, I discovered that I was a fraud. In my own mind, I had been working criminal cases for ten years, but, of course, the truth was that I’d been active for less than two months. Before that, I—well, this body—had been a real terror. When our boss told you what you were, he let you keep your memory of the event. You have Beckmann’s explanation for why you are who you are. Not me. He wiped my memory soon after telling me. My big wake-up call came this summer when I was on holiday in Poland.
‘I was out fishing. A man walked by with his two sons. He took one look at me and literally had a heart attack. Fortunately, I had my field kit, so I could treat him. Shouldn’t have bothered. When he woke up, he shouted to his sons that I was the bastard who killed their mother during a bank robbery the year before. I…’ he shrugged. ‘I buried them where I shot them, the sons and the father. By morning, I was two hundred miles away. I went straight to Beckmann, confronted him, and he told me everything. Since then, I’ve found it difficult to concentrate. So I do odd jobs.’ He paused. Saskia did not know what to say. ‘There is one more thing,’ he said. ‘It’s the answer.’
‘The answer to what?’
‘The question you’ve been asking yourself since yesterday.’
Klutikov reached for his coat. He withdrew a broadsheet newspaper and handed it to Saskia. The script was Cyrillic. The lead story was accompanied by a picture of her.
No, not me; this body I’ve infected.
Her hair was much longer and the wind had blown it wide. Two police officers held her arms.
‘Sorry it’s in Russian. I could translate it for you.’
‘Could my chip translate it?’
‘Given time, you will be able to translate anything.’
‘What does this bit say?’
‘“Angel of Death in Custody”.’
Saskia felt the words in her belly. ‘They call me the Angel of Death?’
‘Yes. You were a mass murderer. You were captured at the German border.’
‘No. No.’ She wiped away a tear with her knuckle.
‘Listen, you were a murderer. Past tense. That was just your body. You’re a blank slate now. Look at your badge. Ex tabula rasa.’
‘But surely I’m still responsible?’
‘Don’t get philosophical about it. Be pragmatic. Do you feel like a murderer? Could you kill someone now in cold blood?’
Saskia’s eyes were fixed on the article. The Cyrillic letters seemed to warp. ‘You did,’ she said. ‘That Polish man and his sons.’
The end of their conversation. Coffee in a cinder-grey room, murderer to murderer. Saskia put her lips to the cooling rim of her cup. Klutikov gathered his cigarettes and flung his coat about his shoulders.
‘Where will you be?’ she asked.
He took the newspaper. ‘East of the Urals, if not west. Remember, your past is just a tabloid horror story. Give it up. If our boss finds out I told you, he’ll kill us both. But I thought you should know. Just work the case he gave you. Find this David Proctor.’
As he left, Saskia sent a thought to her chip.
Who am I?
Chapter Ten
David had been given orange overalls and cuffed to the floor of the hotel’s wine cellar by a short shackle, which forced him to crouch. He wore a hangman’s hood. A faraway speaker blasted static. He remained still and silent. Let his captors think he was done. He daydreamed that he was poised on a starting block. He could maintain the stance. He played squash twice a week. Cycled to and f
rom work. The room here was cold, but he had known colder.
He sterilised his thoughts through the slow recall of his graduate seminar on psychological interrogation. The physical stress of the crouch was designed to weaken him physically. The static filled his hearing; the hood removed his sight. Given time, such sensory deprivation would turn his mind upon itself, trigger an incestuous multiplication of thoughts would lead led to hallucination and breakdown.
There was a crack in his composure that McWhirter could probe. Bruce was dead. David had murdered him. The stain would mark David forever, but his deeper fear spoke to his daughter’s reaction.
Any further thoughts were smothered by the sudden silence. The speaker had been turned off.
David heard flat shoes approaching slowly.
A woman said, ‘I can get you out if you come with me and ask no questions.’
‘Deal.’
~
The hood was pulled away by a woman whose seriousness reminded him of Jennifer, but whose eyes were bottle green. She was dressed in black, slim, and perhaps in her forties , David thought. Both crouching in this wine cellar, he looked at her and smiled as her power-cutters sighed through his chain. She did not smile back. Instead, she took his hand and touched the sound system. Its speakers roared with static once more. Rapids, thought David. Deep breath. Hold it.
‘Quickly.’
They ran through a corridor into a kitchen—mortuary-clean, prepped for new day—and into a pantry, and through chambers where old washing machines had once laundered great and good clothing, and down spiralled, wobbling stairs into darkness, and then she turned and said, ‘They’ve realised. Faster.’
David still wore his work shoes. They had no laces and he slipped against the dusty brick work. ‘Slow down.’
‘Nearly there,’ she said. The door ahead was haloed. She barged it and they were outside the hotel, in a yard. Recycling bins lined a low wall.
‘It’s daytime,’ said David.
‘Quiet.’
She pulled him into the gap between a bin and the wall. There was a police motorbike on its lay stand. Its white panniers gleamed in the nodding shadows.
‘Get behind me,’ she said, swinging herself across the seat.
‘Don’t we need helmets?’
‘Come on.’
David heard a shout pass through the firs upwind of them. He settled behind her. Oddly intimate. Her long hair smelled of coconut.
She touched the ignition. A windscreen rose from the fascia and fairing grew out around their legs.
‘Are you the woman who burned my house down?’
They erupted from the hotel. The wind recalled the interrogation static as they erupted from the hotel. David put his cheek to her ear, trapping her whip-like hair. His trouser cuffs buzzed. He looked up. They left the grounds and a tunnel of trees closed over them. The woman downshifted.
She turned to David and said, ‘Yes.’
The bike shuddered. She cut left, though an open gate, and rooster-tailed through a slush of mud and leaves. Then the bike found its grip once more. They rode uphill.
‘You’re right,’ he shouted. ‘We are lucky.’
‘Opened the gate myself,’ she called back.
The bike shimmied briefly and David, unbalanced, dropped his grip to her hips. The flush of impropriety warmed his core.
They kept to the incline. Ahead, panicked sheep had clotted in a corner. The woman swerved across them and abandoned the field through another open gate. She downshifted again and shouted, ‘Lean with me.’ They made a deep turn that scraped the fairing. The corner opened to reveal a dozen more sheep. Escaping too, David thought. Go.
‘Hold tight,’ she called, slaloming through the animals.
‘A helicopter,’ David said.
‘Where?’
He pointed.
‘They can join the queue,’ she said.
David waited for a straight section of road before he turned. Behind them, a marked police car canted on its suspension as it emerged from the bend. Blue lights flickered on its roof.
The next few minutes were disposed in a tiring series of accelerations and decelerations. They took the bends hard and roared along the straights. The road steepened. Soon, David could see the valley floor. It was bluish with distance. Above them, the helicopter remained fixed, thudding.
‘Hold on,’ she shouted, and David tucked himself into her shape. The lane lost its hedges. She swerved onto the stony, grass-splattered shelf that overlooked the valley, hundreds of feet below. She wove around the rock piles. David struggled to look back. The police car had parked and its doors were open. Black-vested officers, their arms open for balance, teetered through the uneven rocks in pursuit.
She stopped.
‘Get off the bike and run.’
He hopped sideways. His legs smouldered with cramp. ‘Where?’
She nodded at the house-sized heap of rocks in the near distance. Then she pulled away towards the cliff edge. David glanced at the policemen. They had slowed to a walk. It was no challenge to understand their complacency. With the helicopter, David could not hide from surveillance, and the foot officers had him trapped against the sheer drop.
He looked for the woman, but the motorbike had disappeared, sight and sound. Gasping, he loped towards the tor. His posh shoes slipped on the stones and the wind cut through the fabric of his orange overalls. Finally, he rounded the granite slabs and settled in their lee. He hugged himself and considered the lip of grass only twenty feet away, and the valley floor so far below that. He was in greater trouble than ever. His house was destroyed; his career was over. Bruce was dead. He would never see his daughter again.
David lowered his face to his knees.
When the woman lifted his head in both hands a few moments later, he was surprised by a tear in her eye. She brought his lips to hers as if he was a cup. There was no desire in the kiss. Only a relief.
‘I am so glad to see you, David.’
He studied her face. ‘Who you are?’
She placed a gloved finger to his mouth. ‘Put this on.’
The rucksack was no larger than an archer’s quiver. It had loops for his shoulders. As he struggled into it, he saw that the woman wore a similar pack.
‘Wow, it’s heavy.’
‘See this, David?’
She was holding a piece of paper in front of him. High, like ID. The pink paper had lost its corners, and the fold lines had almost torn, but David recognised it as the only personal item he had rescued from the burning house in Oxford that morning.
‘Who gave you that?’
‘Never mind. Look at the number.’ She tapped the corner of the drawing. In ball point pen, someone had written TS4415. ‘I need you to remember this code.’
‘Why?’
She glanced at the helicopter. ‘Just do it.’
‘Shit.’ Tom Sawyer with a .44 Magnum shooting a partridge in a pear tree and getting five gold rings as payment. ‘OK, I’ll remember. What is it?’
‘The cipher.’
She took his hand and led him to the corner of the tor. The two policemen were thirty feet away. David glanced at her, ready to panic, but said nothing. Her lips were moving. David looked back. The policemen had split to approach the tor from opposite sides. ‘Whatever the next part of the plan is,’ he said, ‘can we please proceed to it?’
‘Every police vehicle in the UK is fitted with a trip code in case of hijack. When you send the code, the vehicle locks down and returns to its depot. The instruction cannot be countermanded. Check the car.’
David leaned out. He saw the doors of the patrol car close. A moment later, the sound reached the police officers. They stopped and exchanged a glance. The taller policeman touched his throat and radioed to the other.
‘The policemen are wondering why that happened,’ said the woman. ‘The short one has just realised. Now they’re wondering if they can get back in time.’
David watched them dash to the car.
Their runs were ungainly on the slippery rocks. ‘What about the helicopter?’
She seemed to consider his question. ‘The pilot took it calmly. He’s having a coffee. His co-pilot is agitated. But the flight computer will return them safely to the heliport.’
The helicopter tipped forward and, as David stared, became a receding dot. ‘How do you know all that?’
‘I can’t answer any more questions.’ Absently, she moved a lock of his hair. ‘There’s no more time. I’m sorry. All will be well.’
‘Why should I trust you?’
‘Take this. I know you want it. I stole it from the evidence locker in McWhirter’s suite a few minutes ago.’
She handed him the pink sheet. It was Jennifer’s drawing. But, as it fluttered in the wind, David noted that its edges were pristine. Its fold marks had not yet scored the paper. And, below the crayon house and the three stick figures, no code had been written.
‘Now I understand even less. But thank you. I didn’t want to lose this.’
‘Let the parachute do the steering.’
‘What?’
‘See ya.’
She sprinted towards the cliff edge, launched like a long jumper, and was gone. David felt his stomach drop in sympathy. He looked around the side of the granite pile. The policemen seemed angrier than before. They were almost at its edge. The patrol car had gone. David looked into the cobalt sky and hoped his shoes would keep their grip on the grass. As a talisman, he rolled the pink paper and held it in his fist.
He ran towards the edge.
Chapter Eleven
Saskia’s apartment was a nondescript box in Schöneberg, three stops from her office on the S2 line. It had bare wooden floors, white walls, and black furniture. Its curtains were closed. There was no evidence of a previous owner. On the breakfast bar, she found paper manuals for the boiler, washing machine, and oven. She only stared at them before moving on. She felt like she had died and now haunted this apartment on Belziger Strasse.
At length, her glassy indifference cracked. She lifted her hands. There were calluses where the palms met the fingers. She walked into the bedroom and looked at herself in its full-length mirror. She leaned close, turning her head from side to side. She unzipped the boots and dropped them next to the bed. Then she removed her suit and underwear. She looked again at her reflection. The individual muscles across her belly were visible. The physique was not bulky—it was suited to running, perhaps swimming—but she could hardly imagine the level of exercise required to maintain it. The torso and thighs were pale, suggesting a one-piece swimming costume. She turned, looking for a birthmark. None; but there was an appendix scar, a vaccination mark and two dots either side of her left nipple, where a piercing had once been. She smiled at the marks until the macabre implication struck her. How different was she from Beckmann, who had commanded her movements in the office the day before?