Biblical

by Christopher Galt

  Once they had killed enough to break through the ranks of villagers, the Berserkers charged on towards the village itself. The defenders, who had lost more than half of their number, made an effort to regroup but the axmen were now upon them. Fabian watched, hypnotized by the rhythm of the axes. Compared to the Berserkers, there was something mechanistic about the axmen’s assault. Again it was not at all how Fabian had imagined a Viking attack: the evenly spaced axmen had taken their axes from their shoulders and had begun to swing them, long before they reached their enemies, in a regular motion like a sideways figure-of-eight. The swing of each axman left no gap with that of his neighbor and when they reached the remainder of the defenders, they scythed through them as if harvesting corn. Again there was no defense: the heavy, doubleedged axes sliced though air, flesh and bone with the same callous ease.

  The rest of the Vikings who had been following on, armed with sword and shield, ran through, overtaking their ax-wielding comrades and following the Berserkers into the village. Fabian ran on too, something dark burning in his blood. He started to come across bodies: a second line of defense had been set up by the villagers and had met the same fate as the first. A cluster of rent-asunder corpses and several disembodied limbs marked where the line had been swiftly overwhelmed. He spotted one body, its face pulped beyond recognition by spear or sword; Fabian recognized the boy he had watched on lookout only by his blood-blotted mustard shirt.

  Nearer the village, the bodies were more scattered, women and children among them, some clearly having tried to run to safety but cut down, their backs hacked to raw flesh and the rear of their skulls caved in.

  The young woman he had seen when he had found the village lay close to the lodge from which he had first seen her emerge. She lay on her back, sightless blue eyes staring up at a cloudless blue sky. Her skirts had been hoisted to her waist and her white thighs exposed, as were her pale breasts through the ripped-open tunic with the carefully embroidered brocade collar. A surprisingly bloodless single sword wound beneath her chestbone marked where a Berserker, having finished with her, had ended her life. Fabian looked down at the cruelly pathetic scene of her death and was amazed at how little he cared about her suffering.

  When he reached the village, he saw that the Berserkers were more frenzied than ever. They were now killing everyone and everything they found. Children lay slaughtered next to livestock and some Berserkers fell upon women and raped them on the bare earth of the square, bellowing like beasts. When the other Vikings reached the village, the chief at their head, they tried to contain the Berserkers as much as they could, shepherding women and children to one corner of the square. Any thoughts that Fabian might have had that this was inspired by any sense of humanity were dispelled when a boy of about eleven made a break for it. He was caught by one of the Vikings who drew his sword across his throat, cutting deep into the neck and letting him fall lifeless to the ground: an example for others thinking of escape. To Fabian, the cold, calm ease of the murder seemed far worse than the demented frenzies of the Berserkers; he also realized that these women and children were not being saved by the other Vikings because of their humanity, but because of their value: they were booty, slaves to be kept or traded.

  It was over.

  The Berserkers were gathered in the village square, all still wild-eyed, panting and restless despite the fact that some were mortally wounded, but still so detached from their bodies that they were unaware of their dying.

  Fabian had his answer. He knew why he had been brought here to see this; he understood now where the violence he had launched against Henkje Maartens had come from. Whatever flowed in these men’s blood flowed in his too.

  *

  The feeling came over him again. The world shifted in the universe and the sky changed hue, the air changed texture. Fabian felt disoriented, dizzy, lost in time and place.

  Everything was gone. The village, the Vikings, the bodies of the dead, the rich cupric odor of blood in the air. Fabian didn’t need to turn to see that the dyke was restored behind him or that the lighthouse once more stood sentinel where a thousand-year-dead youth in a mustard shirt had once scoured the sea for longships.

  When he did turn, he saw that the man who had been walking his dog along the shore had reached where Fabian sat, his back against the stone.

  He was an old man, in a time when old meant being beyond sixty instead of approaching forty. His white hair ruffled in the sea breeze. His eyes, staring at Fabian, were full of horror.

  “Did you see?” he asked Fabian, his voice tremulous, terrified; a frightened child’s voice from an old man. “Did you see it too?”

  29

  JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON

  After he got back to Casey’s from the Schilder Institute, Macbeth checked his email to find three lengthy messages from Poulsen in Copenhagen, each with specific questions that Macbeth could not answer fully without direct access to his team. That, he guessed, was the point Poulsen was making: he needed Macbeth back in Copenhagen.

  The ghost folder on his computer desktop taunted him after he closed his email. It didn’t open, as he had known it wouldn’t; his repeated clicking on the icon habitual and vaguely compulsive, like someone absently picking at a scab they know they should ignore. It was Melissa who filled his thoughts and he felt something cold and heavy starting to coalesce in his gut: the deferred sense of loss he had known would eventually come.

  Casey had given him a key for the apartment and the first thing Macbeth had done after Bundy dropped him off had been to note down the names the FBI agent had mentioned, while they were still fresh in his memory.

  Now, as he sat alone in the apartment, Casey at work in MIT, Macbeth opened his web browser and searched for the names. Nowadays people – as he had explained to Casey in weak justification for sending texts to their year-dead father – existed not just physically, but virtually. Melissa would still be out there somewhere, a ghost of scattered electronic data.

  He found the website of her company, as well as a dozen references to it and its work, including a business section profile of Melissa from the Chronicle. The company website was the thing that troubled him most. On the ‘about us’ page, Melissa stood front and center in a photograph with her key staff. They all displayed the essential sunrise-industry credentials of youth, informality and cool. Yet they were all dead. No one had suspended the website, because there was no one left alive to suspend it: a Marie Celeste adrift on the waters of the Internet.

  Scanning the caption for the photo, Macbeth noticed that the company’s deputy CEO was called Deborah Canning. He checked again the note he had made after talking to Bundy: Deborah Canning’s name was there. Macbeth went through the full list of victims of the Golden Gate mass suicide: she wasn’t listed. Not everyone involved with the company had died, after all. Maybe she was who Bundy was looking for.

  He checked the name John Astor. Macbeth had heard the rumors about him, of course: everyone seemed to have heard them, yet no one seemed to know who Astor really was. The Internet was surprisingly empty of references to him: Macbeth’s search results were dominated by the two John Jacob Astors of the famous family: one the dynasty’s founder, the other a descendant namesake who went down with the Titanic.

  What mentions he could find of the contemporary Astor were on conspiracy sites, one of which claimed the FBI and Homeland Security had red-flagged any site referring to the ‘leading Simulist thinker, John Astor’. Macbeth remembered Bundy referring to ‘Simulists’. There were the usual paranoid ravings about a global conspiracy and Macbeth decided to stop chasing a ghost and try the other two names dropped by the FBI agent.

  He had no problem finding either.

  Jeff Killberg had been one of the world’s leading movie effects specialists. His company had been behind the CGI effects of some of the biggest-grossing movies over the last five years, and had been the target of the firebombing attack by Blind Faith eighteen months earlier. Macbeth couldn’t understand why re
ligious zealots would deem special effects as an offense to God.

  Killberg, a mix of creative and technological genius, had played his cards, and his patents, close to his chest, doing most of the key research and development himself. He would, apparently, ‘farm out’ elements to his employees and outside contractors, but nothing that would give an insight into the central concept or innovation he was working on – exactly how Casey described Professor Blackwell’s methodology.

  Killberg had recently announced he was about to unveil new visual effects technology that would shake the movie industry to its core and offer moviegoers a completely new, totally immersive experience. The technology was never revealed: Jeff Killberg had been found tortured to death and hideously mutilated in his Pacific Heights home. Someone had worked on him very expertly with some kind of blade. The secure computer suite in the basement of Killberg’s house had been stripped, systematically and totally. Despite the previous religiously motivated firebomb attack, suspicion for the murder fell on Killberg’s commercial rivals. The computer effects industry had become, it seemed, literally cut-throat.

  What troubled Macbeth most was that one of the companies to which Killberg had farmed out work had been Melissa’s gaming technology company.

  Samuel Tennant.

  Again Macbeth’s search was easy. There were references to Samuel Tennant across the Internet: photographs, articles, forums. Tennant, it seemed, had everything: looks, brains, money. A lot of money.

  Tennant was rich twice over, having inherited family wealth but also amassing a second fortune through the companies he had set up himself. Having studied molecular biology at Caltech, Tennant had combined scientific understanding with business nous and set up a string of related biotech R and D companies, all of which seemed to have won significant government contracts. The most commercially successful part of the Tennant empire was, however, cosmetics research: Tennant had ring-patented several anti-ageing skin agents that beautyproduct companies paid through the nose to buy as an ingredient.

  Tennant – unlike the retiring, almost reclusive Killberg – had cultivated a playboy image. There were dozens of press pictures of him, mainly being seen where the young, rich and glamorous were expected to be seen.

  One photograph took Macbeth off-guard. It was a society shot taken as Tennant was leaving some glitzy Platinum Triangle party. The girl on his arm was slim, with thick, shoulder-length dark hair and large, strikingly blue eyes. And she looked happy; in all the time they had been involved, Macbeth could not remember ever seeing Melissa look as unguardedly, completely happy as she did in that photograph.

  He sat and looked at the picture for a long time, the uneasy feeling in his gut taking a more defined form. Melissa had been connected to both dead men, one professionally, one personally. And there was more to the Tennant story. A lot more.

  There had been a buzz of press stories, conspiracy theories and half-assed speculations about what had happened to the young billionaire, the most reliable article from the New York Times. Eighteen months before, Tennant, the partygoer and bon viveur, had suddenly dropped off the West Coast social radar. Even his colleagues and employees had seen less and less of the young tycoon, and those who had had been alarmed by Tennant’s sudden loss of weight. The last press photograph, of a gaunt Tennant failing to fill his expensive tailoring, confirmed something was far wrong. It had been assumed that the young man had fallen victim to illness, probably cancer, and his privacy had been respected.

  But there had been no cancer.

  The Times headline read: AUTOPSY REVEALS BIOTECH ENTREPRENEUR DIED OF MALNUTRITION. It had been one of those stories that had registered with Macbeth at the time without him taking much notice of it: a strange story, but at a time of general, and increasing, strangeness.

  Tennant had been found dead in his New York penthouse, to which he had retreated presumably to remove himself as far as possible from his colleagues in California. Increasingly reclusive, he had refused even janitorial or cleaning staff access to his apartment, and was scarcely seen outside it.

  His reclusion became complete invisibility and total silence.

  Eventually, Tennant’s concerned family and colleagues had entered the apartment, accompanied by police and the apartment building’s management. The scene that had confronted them had been bizarre. Tennant had been found sitting in the middle of his opulent apartment, surrounded by designer furniture, fine art and sculpture valued at two million dollars. The temperature- and humidity-controlled apartment was also found to contain half a million dollars’ worth of high-tech electronics. Thirty thousand dollars in cash was found in a desk drawer and his wardrobe contained nothing but the most expensive designer wear.

  Yet, in the whole of the apartment there was no food other than three apples in the refrigerator. Kitchen cupboards were empty of food but stacked with vitamins and supplements. Vials of human growth hormone were the only things other than the apples found in the refrigerator.

  And in the middle of it all, looking out over Central Park through the apartment’s vast picture windows, sat Samuel Tennant. Not only was the thirty-four-year-old entrepreneur dead, he had been dead for three weeks. During that time, the dehumidifying air conditioning he had had installed to keep his computers and electronics in the optimum conditions, coupled with the lack of fatty mass in his body, had begun a process of mummification. Accurate measurement had been difficult, but it was estimated that Tennant had weighed less than seventy pounds at the time of his death.

  Macbeth leaned back in his chair, staring at the screen and trying to work out what connection there could be between Tennant’s bizarre death, Killberg’s horrific murder and Melissa’s inexplicable suicide.

  He had just gone back to the article on the Golden Gate suicides and noted down the CHP police officer’s name when he heard Casey’s key in the door.

  30

  ZHANG. GANSU PROVINCE

  Looking at herself in the mirror, she brushed back blonde hair that was between red and gold from her oval face, her forehead wide and pale above bright green eyes, before fastening her hair behind her head with the clasp she had until then held between tight lips.

  A foreigner gazed back from the mirror. Or at least parts of a foreigner. Hers was a face that spoke of two worlds, two hemispheres, but belonged to neither; a face whose detail – the high cheekbones, the shape of her eyes, her small, heart-shaped mouth – was Han Chinese, but whose general form and architecture, whose skin tone and hair color, was European. It should have had the effect of making her look like the child of mixed parentage, but it didn’t because she wasn’t. She looked exactly what she was; she looked like many others from her village but like so few in a nation of one and a third billion.

  Growing up in Liqian, Zhang Xushou had not felt foreign or different, because there had been so many others in her village with hair shaded from red and blonde to chestnut and auburn; eye colors from hazel to green to pale blue. It had been an accepted part of her childhood, when her universe had extended only as far as the stumps of the ancient city walls at the edge of the village. It had only been when she went to the senior school in the neighboring village that Zhang Xushou became aware that there was something different, odd, about her village. About her.

  It was then she had heard the legend of the legionnaires: the tall blond Roman soldiers, separated from their commanders in the ill-fated expedition of Marcus Licinius Crassus against the Parthians. The legend told that legionnaire survivors of the battle ended up impossibly far east and lost in the Gobi Desert, eventually washing up on its shores and finding refuge in her village, then a frontier city, where they were pressed into service by the Han Dynasty.

  At one time, Zhang Xushou and her kind were shunned, mocked. As the borders of her world had expanded, so had her understanding of what it was to be other, different; to be one blonde head in an ocean of China Black. And then, as she grew older, she had begun to stand out from the crowd even more. Literally. The length
of bone her ancient genetics had given her made her taller as a thirteen-year-old girl than many of her male teachers at the school. At an age and in an environment where conformity and acceptance was everything, Zhang Xushou had been subjected to hostile stares and name-calling; mainly wai guo ren. Foreigner.

  Her isolation had not made her resent her individuality but value it, embrace it. She welcomed the nicknames, turning insults into compliments and particularly liking it when others called her Lijian, which meant Greek or Roman. Her heritage became a passion, then an obsession. She spent hours reading all she could on the Roman Empire, about the six thousand lost legionnaires, about the people and culture of Europe. She pinned pictures of Western models and pop stars on her wall.

  Then, as she grew older, she saw attitudes change around her. Tourists began to visit Liqian to stare at the villagers who paraded proudly and often took money for interviews from the Chinese and foreign press. One day, a day she would never forget, a film crew from an Italian television station came to the village. She had, at first, been disappointed because the Italian men in the crew had not been much taller than the average Han Chinese, and their hair had been as black. But then she saw the reporter, dressed in baggy cargo pants and sweatshirt, her hair tied back into a clasp at the back of her head. Her hair. Her bronze-gold hair, exactly the same shade as Zhang’s. Zhang Xushou had thought the Italian journalist the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. Zhang’s joy had been immeasurable when the Italian woman had spotted her and, recognizing her as one of the ‘Roman’ children, had come over and chatted to her as best she could through the medium of a squat, stern government translator.

  After the film crew had gone, Zhang had sought out a friend who she knew had a hair clasp similar to the Italian woman’s and bought it for much more than the clasp was worth. From that day forth, Zhang Xushou had worn her hair scraped back from her face and clasp-fastened behind her head.