Flashback (The Saskia Brandt Series Book Two)

by Hocking, Ian

  ‘Is it related to the German plane crash?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You know, you should go back to air-crash investigation. You’re good at it.’

  ‘I tried to get back into it and I couldn’t. It’s over.’

  ‘Why are we really here?’

  ‘Because I promised you a birthday present.’

  ‘Plus you hate not being sure.’

  ‘That too. Now go to sleep.’

  They left the lagoon in a Land Rover brought by Guillermo’s brother, who spoke less Spanish than Hrafn. They bounced in silence to San Carlos. In a basement shop, Hrafn remained silent during the fitting of his gear while Guillermo outlined the itinerary. If they made no discovery at the foot of the glacier, they would attempt the high ice fields, perhaps the summit zone itself. Hrafn nodded as his straps were tightened. From San Carlos, they travelled to Santa Clara, and from there to the Portezuelo del Azufre. Ragnar raised an eyebrow as Hrafn translated the name: Brimstone Gorge.

  Some days later, after four acclimatisation hikes, they entered the array of brown rocks at the glacier terminus.

  ~

  Now, heaving another chestful of air, Hrafn waited for Guillermo and Ragnar to catch up. Their bright clothing bobbed against the dun moraine. Here spread the dying days of the Argentine summer. In three weeks, perhaps less, the passes would be closed.

  ‘So you’ve,’ gasped Guillermo, ‘adapted to the altitude.’

  Ragnar stumbled between them. He put a hand on Hrafn’s shoulder.

  ‘Next time, just buy me a cake.’

  ‘Ragnar, this is an experience.’

  ‘A slap with a wet fish is an experience, with the advantage that it won’t cause an embolism.’

  ‘Mediocrity is climbing molehills without sweating.’

  ‘Tell that to a mole.’

  Guillermo unclipped his GPS unit. ‘Hrafn,’ he said, ‘we should start.’

  Hrafn removed his gloves. They dangled on Velcro straps from his wrists, and he felt a momentary ridiculousness, a touch of childhood. He pulled a sheaf of paper from his jacket. It was an aviation accident report written following the discovery of Star Dust’s debris in 2000. Hrafn read aloud the coordinates of the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine.

  They wandered through the boulders with little breath to talk, and Guillermo stopped often to direct his doubt at the sky. The summit of Tupungato was now occluded by a scarf of cloud. They reached the correct coordinates an hour later, but there was no engine.

  ‘Maybe they took it,’ said Ragnar. ‘When the army came.’

  ‘No,’ said Hrafn, ‘they only took samples. The engine is too heavy.’

  ‘I suggest we spread out,’ said Guillermo. ‘But not more than fifty metres from this point. Understood?’

  Hrafn and Ragnar nodded.

  Guillermo called them back almost immediately. They tottered towards him, down the slope, and found him kneeling alongside a ribbon-like piece of metal. Hrafn asked Ragnar to get the camera from his rucksack.

  ‘So what is it?’ Ragnar asked.

  ‘Part of a propeller blade. See the way it’s buckled towards the end? It was turning on impact.’

  ‘Guillermo, can you move back? You’re blocking the light. Guillermo?’

  Ragnar touched the shoulder of their guide but he did not raise his head. Guillermo had a string of beads in his hands and his eyes were closed.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ Ragnar asked.

  Hrafn cuffed Ragnar’s ear and knelt next to Guillermo. Ragnar, frowning, did the same. They stared at the shingly rock and the propeller and considered the last moments of the passengers and crew. Hrafn scratched his scarred neck.

  ‘Shall we note the location?’ asked Guillermo, at last.

  Hrafn oriented himself. ‘I’m not sure there’s any point. If this propeller is the same one recorded by Bauza in his report, and I think it is, then it’s moved several metres since 2000.’

  ‘It’s the glacier,’ said Guillermo. ‘Nothing stops her. Star Dust is here. I feel every piece. Some on the surface of the glacier, some below. Whatever she holds, she gives up, but in her own time. Who knows how long it will take? She does not listen to us.’

  ‘Are you OK, Guillermo?’

  Their ebullient host seemed exhausted. ‘We need to return to camp. That will take two hours, and we have three hours of light left.’

  ‘Just a few minutes longer.’

  ‘A few, no more.’

  ~

  At first, they found nothing larger than a scrap of pinstripe suit – Hrafn thought of a Palestinian man standing at the window of a departure lounge, separated from the conversation. Then, later, Ragnar saw a mummified hand. Hrafn unfolded his metal detector and swept it over the rocks. He cupped the earpiece to protect his hearing above the wind. When he found a strong signal, he called to the other men and they helped him disinter a tent peg. On the second occasion, he kept his discovery to himself, and proceeded to dig alone. He laid his detector against a rock and placed a pencil as a marker. He scraped but found nothing. Ten minutes later, Guillermo approached.

  ‘We must leave, my friend.’

  ‘Help me.’

  Guillermo gestured to the cloud around the summit.

  ‘Dr Óskarson, please.’

  Hrafn kept scraping until Guillermo joined him. Soon, aided by Guillermo’s trowel, they had cleared a pit thirty centimetres deep. There was no room for Ragnar to help. He pottered through the scree, turning to them occasionally. Hrafn was about to abandon the hole when his fingernail snagged a metal surface. With Guillermo’s help, he revealed the object. It was a grit-filled metal cylinder with the letter ‘P’ visible on one side. Hrafn knew that ‘YRENE’ would follow. He imagined Cory holding this fire extinguisher as it burned in his hand. But, of course, this could be one of the many extinguishers on board. And even if it could be proved that this extinguisher had been housed in the cockpit, it did not directly corroborate Cory’s story.

  ‘So,’ said Guillermo, ‘does this help you?’

  ‘We need to find the hose. He told me he cut it.’

  ‘Told you?’ asked Guillermo. ‘Who told you?’

  Ragnar tapped Hrafn’s shoulder. Ragnar was holding something behind his back, as though playing the childhood game of guess-which-hand.

  ‘It’s a few months early,’ he said, ‘but happy birthday, Hrafn.’

  He gave him a piece of black piping. It was hard and cracked. There was a V-shaped cut in the end.

  ‘So,’ continued Ragnar, ‘is this the thing your friend Saskia wanted?’

  ‘No,’ said Hrafn. He found himself close to tears. ‘I mean, I think she wanted me to find it for myself.’

  ‘Now we go,’ said Guillermo. ‘Tupungato is no place to linger at night.’

  They stood. Hrafn waited, dazed, while Ragnar wrapped the hose in a handkerchief and stowed it in his rucksack. Their two-hour walk did not represent a significant descent, but only at the camp, with its white river and steaming hot chocolate, could Hrafn truly breathe.

  Ragnar joined him at the edge of the river.

  ‘You’re going back to the investigation, aren’t you?’

  ‘If they’ll have me.’

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Berlin

  On Alexanderplatz, at three in the morning, raining, there was nobody around but Saskia Brandt. She looked up the concrete steps of the TV tower and let her gaze travel to the red-winking pinnacle. Her hair, which had almost regained its former length, streamed out in the wind and drizzle. She shifted her weight from her left leg to her right. She needed constant reminding of her body’s capacities. It was reduced in some ways, extended in others. She felt the concrete beneath her trainers; caught her hair and drew it behind her ears. All the while, she stared at the pinnacle of the tower, thinking.

  What are we doing here?

  Ego’s voice entered her thoughts.

  Fourteen seconds to go, it said. Confirm, please.

>   The break-in was about to begin. Black leather jacket: zipped shut. Black hiking trousers: new, four inches narrower at the waist. Black trainers.

  Go, she thought.

  Saskia started up the steps. Slowly. Carefully. She found the entrance door ajar, slipped inside, and waited with her back against the glass.

  Five seconds remaining, said Ego.

  Count me down.

  Three, two, one. Go.

  She ran across the dark foyer, entering both the tower and the abstract clockwork of her plan, which would unwind according to the roaming stares of the security cameras and the singular architecture of the building. This burst of running struck her wasted muscles with a sickly, sizzling weakness. She moved into a space formed by two staircases rising at right angles and dropped to one knee.

  ‘Fuck,’ she gasped, willing away the scintillations from her eyes. ‘Fuck. Fuck.’

  Your heart rate is too high, said Ego. Breathe.

  I’m breathing, don’t worry.

  Five seconds.

  As her vision tuned to the darkness, she noticed a bundle not two metres away. She narrowed her eyes. The thing resolved itself to a prone security guard. Like her, he occupied a surveillance blindspot. His attacker had placed him carefully. Saskia crawled towards the man and put her cheek to his mouth. He was alive.

  Three, two, one, said Ego. Go.

  She ran to the inner staircase and took the steps two at a time. Above her, a CCTV camera made a slow turn. This was the most exposed portion of her entry. She reached the halfway landing and swung on the banister to maintain her pace for the next flight. The muscles of her legs burned. Her fingers slipped on the metal, squeaking once, loudly, then she was bounding upwards once more. She knew that her progress was too slow – that the eastern surveillance camera would now have her feet coming into frame – but the final stairs were shadowed. If she could keep up the pace, and her luck held, she would make it.

  You should run faster, said Ego.

  Shut up.

  Saskia reached the high landing just as the eye of the camera passed. She skipped to the lift doors. As she cuffed the panel, she took great breaths whose half-vocalised gasps sounded pathetic to the part of her mind already calculating the next stage of her break-in. She looked up. The camera was beginning to turn back. She waited. She was transfixed by its slow arc.

  Ego, where is the lift?

  It is sixty metres away and falling. Now thirty. Now twenty. Be ready on my mark.

  Saskia looked again at the camera. Its gaze approached, came closer–

  Hurry it up, Ego.

  Mark.

  – and moved across the front of the lift. Saskia was not there. She was inside, rising through the tower.

  ~

  Saskia was both grateful for this rest and dismayed at the weakness of her body. But the frantic stage was over. Now she could turn her attention from security, and therefore capture, to her own safety. She considered the many turns that the next few minutes could take. What if her intuitions about Cory were wrong? He could do little to Saskia that had not been done already, but he knew the points of Saskia’s weakness by name: Jem. Danny. Karel. Hrafn.

  At the thought of Danny, Saskia dropped her eyes.

  There was a shape in the darkness.

  Ego, I need night vision. Can you push my wetware device to the limit?

  The scene did not brighten, but its contours and shapes became more easily parsed. There were false positives – odd, fleeting geometric primitives and angles. Amid this noise, however, one true object stood out.

  Ego, Cory’s cane is leaning against the side of the lift, she thought. The wave of panic accompanying the realisation triggered a counteracting irritation at her jumpiness. When her fear was controlled, she thought, Ego?

  It may be aware of you, it said. I can’t tell.

  The cane toppled to the carpeted floor.

  She pressed herself into the corner and looked at the red altimeter. She was less than halfway.

  The cane shortened, grew darker, and melted into a black puddle. She tilted her head with a mixture of disgust and curiosity.

  Ego? It’s doing something.

  Describe it, please.

  From the thick puddle – blood-like in the red light – a hand rose.

  It’s... transforming.

  I recommend you abort, Saskia. You should take the lift to the ground floor.

  No, I’m not running up here again. I’m almost at the top.

  She looked up the altimeter. Just a few metres to go. When she looked down, she saw that the hand was crawling towards her using its fingers. She kicked out but the hand snagged the toe of her shoe and swung there. It was heavy.

  The shape crawled up her leg. She could feel the thousands of tiny hooks that gave it grip on her trousers. The revulsion, however, had passed. She understood – not in the explicit, verbal way that she communicated with Ego, but just as certainly – that Cory’s smart matter intended to crawl over her shoulder, down her arm, and take its place at the site of her amputation as a new hand. There it would bind with exposed nerve ends. Faithful as a crow on Odin’s shoulder. Or a dog at the throne of an empress. These metaphors were not hers. They formed part of the intuition that the smart matter used to interface with the will of its host. It wanted her.

  Saskia considered. No longer would she be unbalanced when she ran. The stares of strangers would move elsewhere; she could once more walk the street in anonymity. Yet there were folded papers in the map pocket of her hiking trousers. One was the photocopied topsheet of an Emergency Room report filed in 1994 on a John Doe.

  She waited for the hand to reach her groin. The muscles fluttered there. She withdrew the taser from her jacket and placed both terminals on the black surface of the hand and pressed the trigger. There was a burst of light and a click no louder than the collision of two billiard balls. The smart matter poured to the floor like a Slinky.

  A final metaphor appeared in her mind: a noble bird in flight that is winged by a shot and pinwheels to the ground.

  The smart matter had transformed into a white, luminescent cube. Saskia knelt and thumbed the pulsing light on its side. A dialogue tile appeared, reading, ‘Are you sure?’ She touched ‘Yes’ and the cube dulled. She skipped from the lift and elbowed the panel. The doors closed.

  Three, two, one, said Ego. Go.

  ~

  Richard Cory’s white hair guttered in the night wind. The cold hurt his ears but did not mute the electromagnetic traffic that blared from the antenna array. He was studying the horizon, where the grounded galaxy of city lights flattened. He looked down into the depths of air. Even the globe that housed the observation deck seemed far away. He felt the buzz of his caesium clock, tutting away the time, regret by regret. Nowadays, tiredness did not leave him until the smallest hours. An hour like this. Three hours beyond midnight. What form would the fourth hour take? Did it exist, just as, somewhere, little Lisandro still ran through the alleys of Buenos Aires and Star Dust flew?

  ‘Cory,’ a woman called.

  Saskia Brandt was standing in the black rectangle that led to the hub. Thirty feet of curved gantry separated them. Her dark clothes made her face seem pale and those sad eyes drew out the memory of a story once told to him over tea in Shanghai: the legend of the panda, whose eyelids, once white, had blackened in mourning for a lost princess.

  ‘Saskia,’ he said, watching her approach. ‘I’m glad you came.’

  She struggled as the wind tipped her this way and that. Her hair was longer than before. It flapped to a buzz and Cory liked how she aimed her face against the gusts. Here a glimpse of her strength. There a flash of her beauty. He remembered the curve of her uncovered breast and considered making her body his hearty meal. But no. Those travellers in postwar Buenos Aires: how they had blinked to one another, predator to predator, across bars and railway platforms. He imagined himself and Saskia as passengers on the windy deck of some old sailboat bound for the New World –
when it was new.

  Of all the people I have met, he wanted to say, I regret meeting you the least.

  He watched her pull a folder from a long pocket on her thigh. She slid it across the five remaining feet between them. Cory stopped it with his foot.

  ‘I wanted to make sure,’ she called. ‘Open the folder.’

  ‘Why don’t you come closer? I’ll establish a wireless link through the interference, then we won’t need to shout.’

  She did not smile. Fair enough, he thought. It was a poor joke to begin with.

  ‘No, thanks,’ she said. ‘I’d rather keep my muscles under my own control.’

  This connected too closely to the train of his thoughts. He looked at the plastic folder beneath his foot, page corners ruffling in the wind.

  ‘You still believe that’s possible?’

  ‘I’m here to help. It’s a choice I made.’

  ‘It’s a paradox. Acquiesce to it.’ His frustration rose like bile and he turned away, near to tears. ‘Sleep.’

  ‘One day. Not today.’

  Cory looked at her. What was that in her voice? Triumph? But her expression was blank. Perhaps that computer of hers – Ego – was regulating her physiognomy. How he missed the contact of his smart matter. It had been left behind, however, as a token of his determination that he, Cory, should end here. There could be no rescue. He wondered whether Saskia had adopted the substance and saw that her left arm was hanging freely.

  No new hand.

  She passed the test. Good for her.

  ‘I can’t help but notice the bulge in your jacket,’ he said. ‘An electrical firearm?’

  ‘It can disable your ichor long enough for death to be irreversible.’

  ‘Very thorough, you Germans.’

  She looked away, over the millions of lights, then turned back. Her expression was fierce.

  ‘Read.’

  With a sardonic smile, he crouched for the folder and opened it. There were three clippings to read in the carnival light. From Shanghai, Santiago, and Louisville. His smile waned. Three anonymous Emergency Room reports. Each a twist on the last. Each undid his sanity one turn. Finally, when he had gulped the information away, reading each word in parallel, the spy understood the bitter medicine that was knowing. He understood why Jackson, his predecessor, had been driven so deeply into insanity. The workings of Jackson’s mind had gummed with the minutiae of the knowledge of things to come. The knowledge had been too detailed. The resolution had been too high.