The Way of Sorrows

by Jon Steele

  “To purify the light before it touches the life within you,” the bum tells her.

  Her eyes afire with emerald-colored light.

  Hash.

  The images faded. But somehow, Harper knew he’d recognize her if he saw her again. A strange sensation it was. He wondered if that’s what a human memory felt like. He reconnected with real time . . . Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh went the trees by open farmland now. He dropped back into last night’s timeline; staring at Inspector Gobet on the altar square, knowing the cop in the cashmere coat had broken every rule in the book to give him a glimpse of Katherine Taylor. Question was: Why?

  “Interesting,” Harper said to the cop.

  “Considering the trouble involved, Mr. Harper, I was hoping for something more insightful.”

  Harper took another hit of radiance; his eyes tracked the lines of causality crisscrossing in his eyes till they slammed to a stop at the intersection of Luke Chapter 1 and Verse 28.

  “And the angel came in unto her, and said, ‘Hail, thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women,’” he said.

  The inspector nodded. “Full marks, Mr. Harper.”

  Click.

  Harper blinked himself back to nowtimes again. The taxi meter had ticked up to 18.90 CHF. It was carrying him through an underpass now, and there was a face staring back at him from beyond the darkened windshield.

  “Hello there, boyo.”

  Captain Jay Michael Harper, formerly of Her Majesty’s Special Reconnaissance Regiment. Born in London, 1972; died thirty-seven years later in the tribal regions of Afghanistan. His body was still alive and kicking courtesy of the medics in Vevey. The face had a broad forehead and a prominent jaw, light brown hair, dark eyebrows, and darker lashes over piercing, emerald-colored eyes.

  “Not bad for a corpse.”

  He heard the dead soldier’s voice in his head.

  Cheers, and remind me, why the hell are we in this taxi?

  Harper thought it only polite to explain.

  After letting Harper see Katherine Taylor for 41.6 seconds, Inspector Gobet ordered him to stand down and return to his flat in the old city. The inspector and Krinkle would maintain their candlelight vigil on the crossing square until dawn.

  “I am advised that you need to tend to your wounds,” Inspector Gobet told Harper. “And by the way, bon appétit.”

  Harper had smoked his fag down to the filter by then. It didn’t make the cop’s valediction any clearer. Not till Harper came through the door of his flat and found a club sandwich, a side of chips, and a bottle of Swiss pinot noir laid out on the kitchen table. A takeaway job from LP’s Bar at the Palace judging from the logos on the plate and serviette. It looked swell; it also looked like a last meal being offered to a condemned man.

  “Veni, vidi, edi.”

  He took off his mackintosh and sports coat. He unharnessed his kill kit and laid it next to the pinot noir. As he tucked in, an envelope was slid under his door—swish.

  Harper took a sip of wine and stared at the envelope. He set his glass on the table, walked over, and picked it up. The envelope bore the seal of the Lausanne Palace Hotel and was addressed to Notre Cher Client. He carried it back to the table, sat down, and opened it. Inside was a handwritten letter from the hotel’s concierge. The cursive script was perfect.

  Harper emptied his glass, refilled it, and read the letter.

  Le concierge hoped notre cher client was enjoying the food and drink and asked him to please remove all personal belongings from your clothing and to place all clothes, with shoes, into the laundry bag provided in the lavatory and to deposit said bag into the hallway, posthaste. He would find a robe and slippers in the lavatory for his convenience and your clothes will be cleaned and returned by dawn. He would also find ointments for the cuts and bruises on his face, as well as potions for his hands for your use only.

  “Thoughtful.”

  Harper slipped the letter into his back pocket, pulled his Glock from the kill kit, and loaded a round in the firing chamber. He took a sip of wine, popped a chip into his mouth, and headed to the loo. He kicked open the door. Clear, and all items listed in the letter were as advertised. He noticed a pale blue box, wrapped in silver ribbon, sitting on the edge of the bathtub. The wax seal on the ribbon said the box was from the hotel gift shop.

  “Interesting.”

  He made the Glock safe, rested it on the toilet seat. He pulled the letter and continued to read. Le concierge described how the ointments would heal most cuts and bruises overnight. The seeping wounds on the palms of your hands were a different matter. Accordingly, please find in the box provided one pair of fingerless gloves to be worn 24/7. Harper opened the box. The gloves were beige in color, cut from fine Italian leather. The letter instructed him to apply the potions to his hands after showering, and before the potions dried insert hands into gloves, one each. When he did, he got a closer look at the gloves. They weren’t cut from fine Italian leather; they were sheets of artificial skin grown into polymer sheaths perfectly formed to the shape of his hands. He touched the gloves with his fingertips. Lightly padded at the palms, hardened over each knuckle, like some high-tech special ops kit.

  “You must be bloody joking.”

  Click.

  Blink.

  Harper focused on the fare meter on the dashboard: 57.60 CHF. He had lost thirty-five Swiss francs’ worth of real time explaining things to the dead soldier in his head, who had vanished from the windshield to be replaced by a long concourse lined with identical modernist boxes for buildings.

  “Where am I?” Harper said.

  “EPFL,” the cabbie said.

  Harper thought about it. EPFL: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

  “Right.”

  He handed over sixty Swiss francs and told the cabbie to keep the change.

  “Oh, merci. Très gentil, monsieur.”

  Harper alighted from the taxi, closed the door, and headed for the big map posted on the bigger sign at the top of the concourse.

  “Excusez-moi?” the cabbie called.

  Harper turned, saw the man lowering his side window.

  “Where did you say you were from, monsieur?”

  “Romania,” Harper said.

  The cabbie smiled. “Oui, je me souviens. Welcome to Switzerland, monsieur. Nice to have you in our country.”

  The cabbie raised his window and drove off. Harper looked at the palms of his gloved hands.

  “Wow, me.”

  He looked at the big map. EPFL was a big place. Here was the Center of MicroNanoTechnology, there was the Institute of Condensed Matter Physics, and over there was the Rolex Learning Center. Down here was the Large Hadron Collider research center, down there was the Mathematics Institute of Computational Science and Engineering.

  Harper reached into the inner pocket of his mackintosh and found the letter from the concierge. After the instructions on getting his clothes cleaned and wounds sorted there was a final paragraph.

  Please report to the lobby of Building J of EPFL’s Quartier de l’Innovation by 10:45 hours. Re: briefing. Door code: #6969821003.

  The concierge did not state the subject on which Harper was to be briefed, but he signed off with Bonne journée. Harper returned the letter to his pocket and found Building J on the big map.

  “Got it.”

  He walked along the concourse, where the buildings had glassed-in lobbies with secured entrances. There were students rushing across the concourse, loaded down with books and laptops. Harper thought about revealing himself to one of them just to double-check his directions, but all the faces read: Not now, I’m terribly busy.

  There were a small kiosk to the left and a few students sitting at nearby tables. They drank coffee and ate pastries while reading books or tablet computers. A gang of pigeons waddled at foot level, pecking at the fallen remnants of croissants. Harper stopped at the kiosk, waited for the South Asian man behind the counter to see him.
<
br />   “Oh, hello. Have you been standing there long, monsieur?”

  English. Odd, Harper thought. He wondered if he had walked into a trap. He looked back at the crowd on the concourse. Students of all colors from all around the world. Maybe not; maybe English was the lingua franca of EPFL.

  “I’m looking for the Quartier de l’Innovation,” Harper said.

  The man pointed to the left.

  “Go that way and make a right at the Association Euratom, then make a left at the Cyberbotics Center.”

  “Cyberbotics? What goes on there?”

  “I don’t know what goes on there, monsieur. I sell coffee here.”

  “Of course you do. Have a nice day.”

  Harper waved the palm of his right hand before the man’s eyes to delete any memory of their encounter from his consciousness. He walked on, passing two students at a table. A lad and a lass flipping busily through tablets. The lad was wearing headphones, listening to music with a heavy thump, thump, thump. The lass had short hair and a spiderweb tattoo at the back of her neck.

  Harper moved closer.

  The lad was searching through pictures labeled “X-ray free-electron laser images of single-layer bacteriorhodopsin proteins.” The lass was reading an article titled “A New Model for Isolating the Effects of Nutrients on Gene Expression and Physiology.” Smart, Harper thought; they probably used Planck’s equations as e-mail passwords. He moved away before the students sensed his presence; he continued down the concourse. Four minutes later he was standing at a map for the Quartier de l’Innovation listing buildings A through K. He located Building J. He saw the list of the building’s occupants. It was a list of one.

  BLUE BRAIN PROJECT

  Harper’s timeline ripped back, locked, and replayed the greatest hits from the Paris job in three quick flashes:

  Hash.

  Trapped in the tunnels deep beneath the streets of Paris. He thought he’d been down there three hours, but he’d been down there three days talking to a rotting corpse. He cuts open the palms of his own hands to shed his blood and rub it into the dead man’s eyes. Rescuers reach Harper, pull him from the corpse. Harper has no idea what he’s doing. “From the looks of it, I’d say you were trying your hand at raising the dead,” a rescuer tells him. With his clothes and flesh reeking of death, he’s dragged to the roof of a town house in the 6th arrondissement. It’s a starry night. Inspector Gobet and his computer geeks are kitted out with Crypto Field Terminals and AEHF satellite stations. Everyone’s waiting for the big show. Before Harper can ask what it is, a blazing comet appears in the constellation Draco and hovers above the City of Light at a magnitude of –7.5. No one in paradise knew it would happen; no one but Christophe Astruc, OP, and a young man named Goose. Astruc is one of Harper’s kind, but he went off the rails with his homemade potions and ended up barking mad. He believes Goose is the fulfillment of a prophecy: that a child born of light had been born to guide the creation through the next stage of evolution. He believes it because he can’t handle the truth: Goose, a sickly creature suffering from paedomorphosis, is his own begotten son.

  Fast forward. Lock. Roll.

  Astruc and Goose were on a mission. Stage one: Snatch a five-thousand-year-old sextant from the tunnels beneath Paris and leave Harper for dead. Stage two: Escape to the ruins of the Cathar fortress at Montségur. Astruc tracks the comet with the sextant; Goose switches on a laptop he’d built from spare parts, hooks it up to a satlink, and hacks into a supercomputer named Blue Brain four hundred fifty-seven miles away in Lausanne. Goose begins a series of impossibly accurate triangulations between the comet’s trajectory, the ruins of Montségur, and a billion different stars. He’s building a 3-D model of the Earth’s exact position in the universe. He loads the coordinates into Blue Brain and lets the supercomputer run with it. At the same time Harper watches a mirror image of the hack with Inspector Gobet’s computer geeks. Best guess: The kid is building a cosmic clock that would—

  Hash.

  Harper blinked himself to nowtimes.

  “That would what?”

  He checked his watch. Ten forty-five on the nose.

  ii

  Harper punched in the door code for Building J.

  The glass door slid open and he walked into a sun-drenched atrium. There was a palm tree in the middle of the place reaching five floors up to a roof of steel-framed glass. He circled the tree, saw glassed-in offices on the higher floors. People hustled about up there, but down here nobody was waiting for him.

  In the north corner of the lobby was an entrance to something called Puur Innovation Café. He walked over and looked through the glass doors. It was a decent joint with a rather nice wine bar. This being Switzerland, the bar was already open for business. The dead soldier in Harper’s head suggested they go in for a glass.

  “Later.”

  He strolled around the lobby and saw a small sign at the base of the palm tree: VEITCHIA MERRILLII OR ADONIDIA OR CHRISTMAS PALM. On the other side of the tree he saw another sign: VISITORS PLEASE REPORT TO ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICE, FLOOR THREE.

  He walked to the lift, pressed the call button, and the doors slid open. He stepped in and saw floors one through five; no floors below ground level. He pressed the button for the third floor. The doors closed and up he went. Two signs were posted in the lift. One with a picture of happy people, drinks in hands, pissed to the gills. Accompanying words read, HAPPY HOUR AT PUUR INNOVATION CAFÉ, 5–7 P.M. The sign next to it was an evacuation map for Building J, with the words IN CASE OF CHEMICAL, BIOLOGICAL, OR RADIOACTIVE FIRE, DIAL 115 AND USE ONLY AUTHORIZED EVACUATION PROCEDURES. The emergency number to dial was printed within an exploding ball of fire. Harper’s eyes went back and forth between the two signs till the lift went ding and the doors opened.

  “My kind of place.”

  He stepped out. Still no one to meet him. He looked down over the railing to check the atrium. Still no one down there, either. He followed the walkway toward the office entrance. There was a doorbell, and he’d almost pressed it when he heard a door creak open behind him.

  “Pssst, over here, if you please.”

  He saw a round face under a head of thinning gray hair. The face wore bottle-thick eyeglasses and was peeking from behind the stairwell door.

  “You talking to me?” Harper said.

  “Yes, this way, sir. Quickly, please.”

  The man turned away, and the door closed. Harper slipped his hand inside his mackintosh, grabbing hold of his killing knife.

  “Sure.”

  He walked over and pushed through the door. He saw a small man in a white lab coat scurrying down a set of metal stairs; two returns per floor, and the man was already two floors down, chatting as fast as he scurried.

  “Terribly sorry I was late, sir. I was monitoring a reboot of one of Blue Brain’s vector machines. A tricky thing when dealing with four thousand quad-cores of supercomputer. But it went very well, very well indeed. I say, I’m so glad I found you before you pressed the doorbell.”

  The small man unlocked a door that was marked JANITOR’S CLOSET: NO UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS. He walked in.

  “I thought I was expected,” Harper said, following him.

  “Oh, yes, sir. By me. One moment, please.”

  The small man waited for Harper to get into the closet to close the door. With the brooms, buckets, and mops, it was a tight fit. The man pushed aside the mops and repeatedly rapped his knuckles on the wall opposite the door.

  Beep, thunk.

  The wall slid open. There was another stairwell going down.

  “This way, sir.”

  “You first.”

  The small man passed through and waited for Harper to exit before pressing a button to close the wall.

  Beep, thunk.

  “This way, please.”

  Heading down, Harper considered how nothing in paradise surprised him anymore, not even a set of stairs hidden in a janitor’s closet. But the dead soldier in his head had other idea
s. Oy, what’s this shit? Harper tuned him out till reaching the seventh set of stairs; then he heard the dead soldier scream, No, not again! Harper pulled his killing knife, jumped ahead of the small man, and forced him to the wall.

  “Ten seconds. Who are you?”

  “Sir, I don’t understand.”

  “Me neither. Seven seconds.”

  “Wait, sir.”

  “Six seconds. I knew a lad with a lantern once. I can’t see his face or say his name, but I do recall he taught me the importance of counting steps.”

  “Please, sir, wait—”

  “Three seconds. We’re already seven floors under a building with no basement and still heading south. I don’t like being underground. It gives me the creeps. Two seconds. Who are you?”

  “But you know me.”

  “One second. Wrong.”

  Harper set the blade to the small man’s throat.

  “Wait! After the incident at Lausanne Cathedral, we had dinner together at Café du Grütli in Lausanne. I’m the light mechanic from Bern. I installed the Arc 9 filters in the streetlamps around the cathedral.”

  Harper raced through his timeline; found him. Same round face, same eyeglasses, full of breathless excitement explaining how the Arc 9 filters improved the ability of Harper’s kind to detect increased levels of black body radiation. The better to see bad guys in the dark, the small man tells him.

  Harper blinked himself to nowtimes. “You’re the guy who keeps pictures of cats in his wallet.”

  “Yes, yes. Pictures of cats. My cats. That’s me.”

  Harper pulled away the knife. “Right. Sorry.”

  The man gasped and coughed. “Oh, my word.”

  “You’ll be okay. Just breathe,” Harper said.

  “No, no, I’m fine. I assumed you would recognize me.”

  “I should have, sorry. Just keep breathing. And you might want to loosen your tie.”

  “Yes, yes. Thank you.”

  Harper took a slow breath himself. “Look, I thought I was here for a briefing on Blue Brain.”

  “You are. With me.”