Ian Hocking

FLASHBACK

To those who kept the faith.

‘When, in 2023, I created the first machine that successfully sent matter through time, I was prepared for most of the things that happened to me and my colleagues. I was not prepared for the jealousy and the murder. Those things were not, as I had thought, things of the past. They were real—here and now.’

Jennifer Proctor, interviewed for Newton, Einstein, Proctor: On The Shoulders of Giants (2092)

‘The greatest tragedy of time travel? Nothing can be changed, whatever you do. Trust me on this. What’s done is done.’

David Proctor, father of Jennifer Proctor, in private correspondence dated August 2048

Saskia Brandt illustrated by Pia Guerra

Author’s Note

The Saskia Brandt Series

You are reading the second book of the Saskia Brandt series. It may be read as a standalone novel, but it will spoil aspects of the first book, Déjà Vu. If you intend to read Déjà Vu at all, I recommend reading it first.

Characters and Events

The second of the two aeroplanes described in this book—British South American Airways’ Star Dust—was real. It did indeed disappear in August, 1947, on a daytime trans-Andean flight between Buenos Aires and Santiago. The aircraft was well maintained; the crew was experienced and capable; weather conditions were good. Its last transmission was a single word that the radio operator keyed fast and clear, twice: ‘STENDEC’. I have cast my story with the actual people involved in that flight: BSAA staff, the crew of the Star Dust, and her passengers.

DFU323 is entirely fictional.

Prologue

Autumn, 2003, near Regensburg, Germany

This was the place where Tolsdorf had come to die. North was the Bavarian Forest, a dark froth always visible, even on gloomy days. East: the rich plain of the Danube. To the south were the great stone feet of the Alps, and to the west the uplands of Franconia. He had grown to love this area during his work as a ranger for the forest authorities, and when government cuts made the position redundant, he had chosen to stay forever. The idea that he would die here, alone, no longer scared him, because as the twentieth century ended with the loss of his job, something had changed within Tolsdorf. He had reached an amicable divorce with himself. His eyes were steel grey now, not blue, and his hair was white, not blond. When he spat, perched on his rock overlooking the Danube, he looked down at the phlegm and noted the black flecks with indifference. Something was coming for him, alright, and it would find him here.

Tolsdorf kept a hut about half a kilometre away, down the eastern slope of a valley he called ‘the notch’. The roof and walls of the hut were prefabricated blocks camouflaged with wood drawn, as one might draw teeth, from the mouth of the forest. If a busybody came looking for the old ranger station, they would probably walk right past it. Nobody did come, though, apart from a charity volunteer from Regensburg called Frau Waellnitz who had heard the rumour of an old man in the woods. Tolsdorf tolerated her. He had even told her about the submerged concrete blocks that allowed a person to cross the river to the hut’s dooryard.

Frau Waellnitz was his last connection to society and Tolsdorf knew it. His habits had drifted towards the eccentric. For instance, he slept fully clothed, and liked to take that sleep—when it came—within a secret compartment behind the mirror in the main room of the hut. This compartment was lined with wire mesh because he had come to know these last three winters that people were manipulating his thoughts through focused radio waves. It was for this reason that Tolsdorf kept a loaded, well-maintained pistol on the stand next to his bed. Sometimes, when he could not sleep, and the river hissed louder and louder, he would swing his legs over the edge of the bed and put the pistol to his temple.

If Tolsdorf needed to keep something chilled, he put it in the river. Old batteries beneath the hut powered his lamps and his short-wave radio. To heat food, he had a blackened stove whose chimney continued some twenty metres into the dark colonnades behind the hut. As a boy, in the army, he had been shouted at by hard men. Told which berries to eat, and when. How to start a fire with a bow-drill. How to butcher out the edible parts of an animal. How to take his body to its extremes.

This he had now done. Tolsdorf had reached his last extreme. He did not expect to live through another winter. He would not let Frau Waellnitz take him from his hut. The skin of his heart was tight. It still vibrated to his sprint between the police and the fireman as those well-remembered flames rose through his former home in Regensburg.

~

He awoke in his cot, immediately sensing that something was wrong. Quite automatically, he scooped the pistol and trained it on the plywood reverse of the mirror door. He had a sense that something important was waiting at the limit of his awareness. He sat quite still for ten seconds, counting them off. His forehead was sweaty. He saw sunlight in the air holes near the ceiling. Was it morning? No, he decided, patting his full stomach. It was afternoon. He had come into his compartment to nap.

He paused again as he heard a voice.

‘Help me.’

It came from the door. Tolsdorf was so certain that a boy stood beyond his secret portal, betraying his sovereignty, that he almost pulled the trigger. He tried to get up. He grunted and swore. He pushed the nose of the pistol into his nightstand and, with the little table wobbling, achieved the last of his height. His knees squeaked.

‘Help me,’ said the voice.

The impertinence of this repetition angered Tolsdorf. Surely, the voice belonged to a child on a dare. No doubt his friends had urged him on through the forest and pushed him across the threshold of the hut. Though could it be a woman’s voice? If so, was it a charity do-gooder? He nettled himself with thoughts of a stranger moving through the clutter around his stove, touching the remains of his lunch, pushing the hanging meats aside to find the secret compartment.

Tolsdorf would show them. He looked at the pistol. Though it was not his preferred weapon—that accolade fell to his rifle, which lay across the door lintel in the main chamber of the hut—the pistol would have to do. Tolsdorf could shoot the stranger, parcel the body in newspaper, and send it down the river to the town. But this future was ghostly. Absurd. Tolsdorf didn’t think he had the balls to shoot anyone.

He reached out with the hand of a weak, old man. He pushed the mirror-door open and stared into the gloom of the hut.

‘What do you want?’ he said. As ever, his throat felt dry when he spoke. He coughed. ‘Did you hear me? This is private property. What do you want?’

There was nobody there. He noted the swinging, drying animals, smelled their bloods, and saw his bread and cheese on the table. Nothing, as far as he could tell, had been disturbed. He stepped into the room proper. His boots creaked. There was nothing here but his disappointment at the dwindling of his anger, of its replacement with a sense of foolishness. At once, he saw him himself as the Regensburgers must see him: a silly man in a hut on a hill, dying.

But the words came again. This time, from behind.

‘Help me.’

Tolsdorf tried to spin but staggered clumsily, tasting once more the bitterness of idiocy. He had been out-flanked. As he turned, he told himself not to shoot, but the pistol’s trigger was lighter than the one on his rifle, and he loosed a round into the empty corner of the room, left of the mirror.

In the silence and gun smell, he said, ‘Who said that?’

Nothing.

Tolsdorf waited.

Then: ‘Help me.’

He noticed something strange about the words. They were scratchy, ill-defined, like a recording in wax. The idea came to Tolsdorf with a shock of insight as startling as the gunshot. He did not know how the idea had formed. To be sure, it was incredible: The voice had to be coming from the mirror itself. He approached the glass and put the barrel of his pistol against it. When ‘Help me’ came again he heard a second, harsh component in the sound. The mirror was indeed vibrating against his pistol. Though he could not explain this phenomenon, the discovery was nevertheless sweet. It confirmed his intellect was not yet erased; he could question the world and it would answer.

His questions now doubled and tripled. How could a voice come from the mirror? What would it take to do that? He had been a radio operator and a medic during his national service, and he had heard stories of mirrors and tooth fillings receiving radio transmissions. But this did not sound like a commercial radio station. It was a single voice and it was talking to him.

Before his wonder at this visitation could transform into fear, he heard a dull roaring sound from outside the hut.

Tolsdorf hurried to the door, opened it, and stepped onto his porch. What he saw and felt returned him to the morning his family died: the smell of paints, plastics and clothes on fire; the neighbours preventing his re-entry to the house; the certain conviction that his wife and his boys, the twins, were dying in each other’s arms in a wardrobe; and Tolsdorf, raging, shouting calls that remained unanswered.

Here, on the far side of the valley, a mushroom-cap cloud was turning about a yellow core, hundreds of metres high and climbing. A speck of ash fell on Tolsdorf’s tongue. His wonder grew with every gust of crisp bark and blasting air. He looked at the back of his hands. They were bald. The heat reached his eyes, dried them, and he backed against the hut. He put his knuckles to his nose. The hair was gone: burned.

~

He put the pistol on the table and pulled out the first-aid kit that he had never used. Then, feeling the charge of a life not yet spent, Tolsdorf took a blanket from his bed and left the hut. He was not responding to the mirror, he decided. He was investigating the explosion. He crossed the short dooryard and dunked the blanket in the river. Its sudden weight pulled him forward and he stumbled into the water. The cold found his feet through the eyelets of his boots. Old age was making him a clown. All the while, he felt the singeing of his eyebrows and the growing heat on his cheeks. Then he pulled the blanket about himself. It was cool—like night, his best and clearest time. He pulled down the peak of his cap and crossed the river in large strides that recalled the tall man he had once been.

There was a deer path that coiled around the western shoulder of the hill. Tolsdorf set himself upon it. His legs were pained with cramp and his knees clicked, but he walked this path every morning to claim the vantage of the hill, and with the familiarity came ease. His breath quickened. In the shelter here, the heat slackened and his mind calmed. That much fuel, in so isolated a location, could only mean that a plane had crashed. A large one. Tolsdorf shook out his bandana and covered his nose and mouth. Ash and wood cinders were falling through the forest canopy. Larger pieces—he saw a sheet of paper with a letterhead, a deformed plastic cup—pattered on the trees like fat drops of summer rain. And the smell rolled over him: a bloody stink of incineration.

He reached the top of the hill. Through streaming eyes, he saw that the forest had been wiped away. A foggy bowl of dirt remained. There was an ordinariness about the thin layer of debris. It might have been a steaming rubbish dump. Tolsdorf struggled to understand. How could this have been an aircraft? What could have happened to the mass of it? He could see part of one engine. On the far lip of the depression, almost one-hundred metres distant, was a tyre, still inflated. It was certainly an aircraft tyre. Nearer, he saw a paperback novel. He surprised himself by recognising the cream-and-blue cover. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Frau Waellnitz had wanted to read it to him months ago but Tolsdorf had dismissed the idea with a grunt, playing fully on her expectations of this backward woodsman. Then, as though the paperback unlocked his perception, he saw the scattered, broken pieces of people. His eyes faltered in the toxic air and the heat. He squeezed them shut and knelt fully, coughing.

Not so old to be useless, Tolsdorf. Move.

‘On three,’ he growled. ‘Three.’

He rose, settled the blanket around his shoulders, and walked into the debris. The surface was hot through his boots but the fires had shrunk to flickering islands. Now the ash fell upwards as well as down. He picked a route that took him from one ruined stump of tree to another, and he sometimes crouched, gasping, waiting for the next roll of smoke to pass, praying he would not collapse. His eyes felt ruined. He wanted to be sick but his retches produced only spit. He did not know what to do. There was no-one alive here. Beneath his boots were plastic cups, seat cushions, wiring, and things he would not name.

He focused on the mechanics of the crash. What would it take for someone to survive this?

It happens. Sometimes it happens.

Ten metres away, beyond an upturned tree, was a long sheet of fuselage. It was sooty and mangled but its windows were intact. For someone to survive, Tolsdorf thought, they would need the protection of a strong structure. They would need a space. Tolsdorf hauled himself towards it. He stepped on one of the windows and scraped away the soot with his heel. It revealed something bright beneath the shed skin of the aircraft. Tolsdorf dropped his first-aid kit and blanket. The renewed heat assaulted his body but, with the last of the fires going out, he felt he could work. His head was clearer. He took wood-chopping gloves from the long pockets of his trousers—they had Kevlar pads, what he needed—and thought about the best way to lever up the fuselage. Then he crouched by the edge that looked thinnest, said, ‘On three,’ and felt his muscles gorge on the sorry old blood. The metal began to lift.

Chapter One

Berlin, some hours before

Jem Shaw made a quarter turn so that the hood of the phone booth was close enough to hide her lips. The airport concourse buzzed behind her. She had taken the middle of five booths. She was anonymous. One woman among many. She swallowed and listened to the ringer of an English telephone. It was the first time she had heard the sound in six months of exile. Dialling the number was a betrayal of the person she had been the previous summer: angry, proud, and leaving the island forever. Stepping from the ruins of her family, dressed to kill. On a mission and Arctic cool.

She passed a hand through her gas-flame blue hair and waited for her brother to answer. Never had she needed to talk to him more. She stamped her Cossack boots. At twenty-four, she felt too old for humble pie.

‘Ahoy-hoy,’ said Danny, and with those words, Jem was transported to Exeter and the crappy, 1980s BT phone that Danny now held. She could breathe the shoes-and-dogs smell of that hallway.

‘Danny, it’s me.’

She could accept any extreme from him. Anger. Contrition. Humour. But mostly anger. One moment she felt ready for him, the next off-balance and unprepared. Her brother was her twin, she told herself. They had shared too many pains. Each must know the other.

‘Where are you?’

His question was toneless. She knew, then, that Danny had lost the anger he must have felt when she ran away. What was he thinking? Was he planning an intervention?

‘I’m in Germany.’

‘Where? Are you still with Wolfgang?’

Jem scratched her eyebrow with a thumb, mulling over Saskia Brandt and feeling tired.

‘Not exactly. I’m going to Milan.’

There was a blast in her ear. Danny had sighed across the receiver.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I’ve met someone. I don’t mean Wolfgang.’

‘Who?’

‘She’s called Saskia.’

Another silence. Then he said, ‘Saskia,’ slowly, as though he were writing the name.

‘She wants me to go to Milan with her.’

‘Well, that sounds peachy.’

Jem laughed. A chuckle came back from Danny.

‘Do we get to meet her?’ he asked.

Jem looked at the departure board. She had left Saskia at the gate more than ten minutes ago, too long for her excuse of a toilet break to work any longer. Soon, Saskia would come looking for her.

‘Danny, I have to go.’ Jem spoke her next words with the knowledge that they might undo the good work of the conversation. ‘I shouldn’t have called.’

‘Then why did you?’

‘I’m…’

‘You’re what?’

‘…Worried.’ In a whisper, she continued, ‘There’s something strange about it.’

‘Jem, are you in trouble?’

‘It’s not that.’

‘I want you to stay in Berlin. I’m coming to get you. Stay right there.’

The tears made a shore at her eyes. She looked at her feet. She hated herself for the shame. She did not have to feel this way. The situation was not her fault.

‘Don’t, Danny.’

‘Let me get this straight. You don’t call us in months. When you do, it’s to tell me you’re worried about some new friend.’

‘I love you.’

‘Now I’m worried.’

‘Bye,’ she said. ‘Look… Bye.’

‘I love you, too.’

Jem replaced the receiver and stared at it for a moment. She closed her eyes and listened to the boarding calls, the wailing babies, the laughter, but she did not turn. In the private darkness, one future emerged. Anxiety, guilt and fear were washed out. Her escape from the airport would fix her. She could re-establish a certain version of herself.

Saskia would become a memory, if that.

Escape, then.

She left the airport.

~

At a café near the gate, Saskia Brandt sipped her coffee. She looked, mind stalling, at the great space above the concourse. The roof looked like the inner framework of a Zeppelin. She smiled. Whales of the air. She let her eyes move across the crowd. There was refuge in the mathematics of their movement and form, but her thoughts turned to the coming departure of the flight to Milan and the fact that Jem should surely have come back from the toilet long before now. Saskia looked at the crowd and blinked. There were seven hundred and ninety-one people on the concourse. Jem was not one of them. This understanding, the maths of it, was no antidote to her anger at the realisation that Jem had abandoned her.

I shouldn’t have let her find the gun.

And I should have told her about the other time traveller.

It was absurd that this loss should upset her. They had lived together for a month. Not such a long time. Saskia put her fingers on the ticket in her pocket. There was strength in loneliness, she decided, and she would regain that strength as her loneliness returned, like an appreciation for a cold, mathematical music.

She looked again at her coffee and the reflection of the roof upon it.

End of, as Jem might say.

Chapter Two

Berlin, earlier that morning

There was nothing, thought Jem, like the first flush of trespass. Her stomach bubbled with it. Her body could not decide if the sensation energised or paralysed. She made fists, opened her hands, made fists. She was a gunslinger about to draw. An artist poised to brush the first stroke.

Part of her wanted to return to bed, the better to be discovered by Saskia when she returned from the market with the promised breakfast. Instead she remained on the threshold of the room Saskia had asked her never to enter, and blinked at the muted sunshine that passed through the window. She listened to the lifebloods of the building: water moving through pipes; the tick of warming radiators; the muffled scrape of a faraway chair. And, now, in this room, the unmistakable hum of a computer.

Somewhere in this room was the answer to Saskia Brandt.

‘Arctic, Jem,’ she whispered. ‘Cool as.’

It was larger than the master bedroom where Saskia and Jem slept. She could make out a sofa, sagging in the middle, and an Ikea bookcase, same as the one from the family house in Exeter. Saskia had packed hers with large volumes. Elsewhere, there was a weights bench, a yoga mat, and the desktop computer. The practicality of the room mirrored Saskia. The impression of Saskia’s most private space was that of a nest. Jem recalled Saskia’s expression when she believed nobody was looking: hawkish, alert. Thinking on a distant threat.

She began with the bookcase. It was stacked with texts on neuroanatomy that meant nothing to her and classic computing volumes and journals that Jem half-understood from the computer science degree she had abandoned, ignominiously, two years earlier. She did not touch the books. She had an idea that Saskia would notice their disturbance. She moved to the Tryten Computer Locker. She touched the keyhole, thinking. Power tools would be needed to cut through the steel box that protected this computer. The desk was a long, fine bureau with a glass top. There was a passport (Frau Doktor Saskia Dorfer, born 1974 in Berlin; visa stamps for Turkey and Brazil), a digital camera, one ticket for a West End show in London (The Handmaid’s Tale), and an exercise book entitled Krimskrams with notes in German and occasional English snippets: ‘Forsyth method?’ and ‘Spain—do it!’ and ‘How can I ask David?’.

Jem opened the leftmost drawer.

Game fucking over.

It contained a gun.

The barrel was smaller than Jem would have expected. There was a cylinder attached to one end. A silencer.

Something touched her bare calf. She gasped, imagining Saskia’s premature return, and her sudden anger, but it was only the cat.

‘Shit, Ego.’

The honey-coloured animal corkscrewed into her ankle. His eyes gorged on the room and Jem realised that he had never been allowed in either.

‘You’re curious, too, aren’t you, sunshine?’

Curiosity killed the cat.

She looked again at the gun.

Satisfaction brought him back, baby.

Jem tried to smile at Ego as he strolled towards the weights bench and nosed the stack of discs over and over. Turning back to the desk, her eyes caught the doorway and a chill travelled her spine as she saw Saskia Brandt standing there, silhouetted against the brighter hall and black as the gun. She held bags of shopping in each hand. Her mouth was open.

‘What the fuck are you doing, Jem?’ Her voice was hard.

‘It’s OK, really,’ Jem replied with a confidence she didn’t feel. She walked over to Saskia, leaving a metre between them. ‘Just having a look around.’

‘How dare you? I locked the room.’

‘Listen, I’m just wandering about, no harm…’

Jem talked. She had filibustered people before, and with this confidence she dealt word after word. Though Saskia’s expression did not change—only the direction of her gaze as she looked around the room, checking—Jem maintained her verbiage. Covering fire, she told herself, shooting from the hip, but that only returned her thoughts to the weapon. The idea that Saskia kept a firearm in her apartment could not be positively spun. For Jem, the most worrying element was the addition of the silencer. Was Saskia a policewoman? A contract killer? How did that fit with the extraordinary events of the previous evening?

Jem’s spiel dried up.

As though that were her cue, Saskia dropped her shopping and entered the room, shouldering Jem aside. Her footsteps were silent. Jem remembered trying to walk silently across the floor minutes before. She had not been able to. Saskia could. She knew, Jem realised, which floorboards would creak.

Saskia touched the glass top of the desk. Her eyes moved from the contents—passports, tickets, camera—to Jem, then back again. Jem tried to judge her mood. Saskia seemed to be as preoccupied as a person working through a crossword. Her skin was ghostly, like a figure in stained glass, yet she was beautiful in an undeniable, cold way. Beholder’s eye be damned.

Saskia took the gun.

Jem said, ‘Wait.’

She did not know what to do. There was a chance that Saskia could rule against her in some way, and though the consequences of that were dim, shapeless in her mind—eviction? death?—Jem knew that she had to interrupt the process. She walked to her. In the glass of the desk, she saw an upside-down Jem meet an upside-down Saskia. Jem wondered, as she had many times, whether the reflected world could be the more real. The true world might play out in polished door handles, around bathroom taps, in the waltz of ice-cubes spun by a lazy hand.

They stood hip to hip. Both were looking at the gun. Saskia held it backwards, like a club, puzzling over it.

‘Sweetheart,’ said Jem, pushing away a strand of Saskia’s fringe.

‘How did you get in?’ Saskia asked. Her voice was sad. ‘I locked the door.’

‘It doesn’t matter. I just saw you, that’s all. It was this morning. You were standing at the window of the bedroom. It was after we… it was afterwards. I was about to call your name when you turned away and left the room.’

‘You followed me?’

‘Only to the living room. I saw you pull out that book halfway. I knew it had to be a lock of some sort.’

‘Clever girl.’

Jem smiled, eager to make a human connection between them. Something beyond this exchange of information. But nothing in Saskia’s countenance altered. She looked at Jem, who searched her eyes for meaning, as well as her posture and the memory of her words. Emptiness. Jem took Saskia’s head in both hands and kissed her, hard. Saskia’s lips were dry and unresponsive. ‘You are not going to do this. Are you listening, baby?’

‘Do?’ Saskia asked coldly. ‘Do what? Baby.’

Jem revved herself, raked the throttle on her resolve, and thought, Game over. Saskia did not resist as Jem took the gun. Jem went to the kitchen with an idea to break the gun apart but she leaned over the sink and instead vomit erupted once, twice, onto the stainless steel. It was mostly spit. She looked at the gun. Now what?

Saskia embraced her from behind. Softness at last.

‘Alles wird gut, Schlümpfchen,’ she whispered, reaching around Jem’s waist. Everything will be fine. ‘Here.’ Jem watched the disembodied hands work. Saskia released the magazine with a twist and it dropped into her palm. She thumbed the bullets from the top. Each fell into the sink, dit, dit, dah.

When she had recovered enough to speak, Jem asked, ‘What does Schlümpfchen mean?’

‘Cute little smurf.’

‘Because of my blue hair?’

‘Because of your blue hair.’

Jem felt that Saskia had closed her eyes, but Jem’s were open still, staring.

So that was death, right there, passing me by.

Chapter Three

Berlin, two weeks before

Saskia Brandt lived in an apartment in a north-western borough of Berlin called Wedding, which had formed half of the French sector, along with Reinickendorf, prior to reunification. The area struck Jem as a dead space that had been overlooked by the booming 1990s. Shops signs were as often Turkish as German. There was a Londonish coolness in the expressions of strangers. The houses and apartment blocks were grey cut-outs. It was, however, tidy. Nobody hung wet clothes from windows. The dooryards, driveways and pavements were scrubbed. Recycling bins were orderly and padlocked. This was Germany. But, equally, the fading aroma of dog shit rose from the roadside trees and the air was dusty, even this deep into autumn. Berlin was a flat city but the area around Saskia’s apartment felt too sheltered; it suffered from the lee of greater boroughs, missed opportunities and the doldrums of the everyday.

After shopping for clothes in Charlottenberg, they had returned to Wedding via the U-Bahn and begun the long walk up Dubliner Strasse towards the apartment. Jem listened to Saskia tell her about the borough and its problems while a second voice inside Jem, equally serious, told her that there was something doubly foreign about Saskia. It went beyond the German habit of treating life as a job, which Jem found both sensible and infuriating. It was a feeling that Saskia operated on many levels and Jem could sense only one.

The monologue had ended by the time they reached the apartment because Jem had been too tired to feign interest in tunnels dug beneath a wall that had fallen before her milk teeth. Saskia had not taken this personally. Indeed, she seemed to take nothing personally in recent days. A smile; then Saskia moved on.

The apartment block was six storeys of concrete surrounded by a car park. There was a school opposite. It was closed. Children went home for lunch in Germany. Jem watched Saskia climb the steps to the front door and open it.

‘Could you collect my post from the box?’ she asked. ‘It’ll lock itself when you close it.’

Jem, carrying one bag of shopping to Saskia’s two, said, ‘Sure.’

~

After a simple dinner, Jem helped Saskia load the dishwasher and tried to convince her that she should style her hair. Saskia agreed and Jem took a pair of scissors from the kitchen and followed her to the balcony.

Until now, there had been no question of a sexual relationship between them. They were friends. The question formed as Saskia’s hair fell on the spread towel like cinders and Jem leaned close. They spoke little. Opposite, across the balcony rail, the school’s windows flickered with the last of the sun.

‘You are not giving me a fringe, correct?’ said Saskia, tilting her head.

‘I could just dye it.’

‘No, thank you.’

‘How about platinum?’

‘No, thank you. And not too short.’

Jem gathered the stiff bristles between her knuckles and snipped. She was thinking about the last person whose hair she had cut. Wolfgang, her boyfriend, who was waiting for her back at their own apartment.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Jem. ‘It’ll be short as.’

‘As what?’

‘As possible. It’s an expression. Like when you say, ‘I’ll be there as soon as’.’

In a blank tone that suggested her true thoughts were elsewhere, Saskia said, ‘English has some nice expressions. I like ‘kick the bucket’. And ‘up the swanny’.’

‘‘Pissed as a rat’.’

‘‘This beer belly is a fuel tank for a love machine’.’

Jem gave a forced laugh, partly to cover the tremor in her voice. This was too much. Saskia didn’t deserve what was in store for her. Not the amateur, first-time sex, which was only the start. There was also Wolfgang’s plan.

Saskia said, ‘A Scottish police officer told me that one. He knew a lot about beer bellies.’

‘It’s more like a chat-up line, anyway. Like, ‘If I said you had a sexy body, would you hold it against me?’’

‘‘Get your coat, petal’,’ said Saskia. ‘‘You’ve pulled’.’

Jem put the scissors and comb on the flower-box and tipped Saskia’s head forward, shooing the hairs. Then she moved in front of her to inspect the arrangement. It was shorter. Well balanced. At the same time, for want of a mirror, Saskia evaluated her expression.

‘And?’

‘Pretty,’ said Jem.

‘‘Pretty as’?’

‘Just pretty.’

Saskia smiled with one side of her mouth.

Question, thought Jem. What’s the answer?

‘I hope you didn’t dye it blue.’

‘As if I would.’

‘Yeah,’ Saskia said, ‘like as if.’

‘You’re beautiful.’

Saskia did not reply. She looked at Jem as though the remark was a bad joke. A real groaner. When she rose and went inside, having still said nothing, Jem did not follow. She looked at the sensible German flower-box and the chair that would fold as neatly as a Japanese fan. An early memory returned: telling her brother Danny that if you folded a piece of paper enough times it would get smaller and smaller until it disappeared and, shit yeah, she was prepared to demonstrate the fact if he found it so funny. Jem put her hands on the rail and leaned into the dusk. She thought of the school children. Her ties to the past had been hopelessly snared—caught in aircraft doors, threaded through trains, tangled in those of strangers. The recovery of her former life? Fucking futile as.

She fastened her wristwatch and wiggled her jade ring into place.

Loneliness followed her inside.

~

In the living room, Jem fell into a chair and fixed her expression on a book spine whose silver letters were still sparkling in the dusk. Kinder- und Hausmärchen. There was a lamp at hand. If she wanted, she could turn it on and thumb through the Grimm’s fairy tales. But she sat there. The plan was not working. What was she going to do about Wolfgang? The noise of the shower filled the apartment. The seduction had not worked. Jem held her temples and said, ‘Shit.’

Jem remained in this position until, a minute later, the shower stopped. She dried her tearful eyes on her sleeve and listened to the soft sounds of Saskia’s footsteps. Jem turned her head a fraction and looked in the mirror to the left of the bookcase. At first, the shadows were difficult to interpret. Something grew from the deep blackness. It had hints of human movement. Suddenly, Jem saw that it was Saskia. She was naked. She seemed unaware of the mirror—though Jem did not believe this—and her steps were longer, slower than usual.

A moment later, Saskia’s breath warmed her earlobe.

‘Me again.’

‘I like your perfume, Saskia.’

‘Do you? It was made for me in the south of France.’

Jem did not move.

‘I’m not,’ continued Saskia, ‘a…whatever the word is.’

‘I’m not sure I am either.’

‘But we can try.’

‘Have I chatted you up, then?’

‘Yes. I thought it over.’

‘Well, you had me at ‘Guten Tag.’’

‘Take my hand.’

Saskia’s fingers closed over Jem’s.

Chapter Four

Berlin, three weeks before

It was late evening. Jem and Saskia were sitting at right angles in the glassy bar of the Patzenhofer Hotel on Krumme Strasse. Across the road lay Karl-August Platz and, beyond it, the church where they would meet Wolfgang. Jem’s gaze fell to the espresso cups—Saskia winning two-nil—and she considered the long silences of the evening.

Her new friend sat in an armchair with her legs crossed at the knee. She had not removed her black leather jacket. Beneath it, she wore a loose-fitting T-shirt. No rings. Egyptian-style eyeliner. The cuffs of her boot-cut jeans fell just so. Her black trainers were laced tight. Her foot tapped the air.

At points throughout the evening, Saskia had asked Jem about Wolfgang. Why, of all places, would he want to hand over Jem’s stolen passport in a church? Why the Trinity Church on Karl-August Platz? And why come in person when he could send an intermediary? How had they met, anyway? It was not the first time Saskia had asked these questions. Tonight, instead of being evasive, Jem decided to tell her straight.

‘Originally, he was just a guy on my corridor at university,’ she said. ‘I came to Germany with no money. When I got into trouble—nothing too illegal—he said he’d help me. He’s charming, you know. After a few days of living in his flat, I realised that his… interests were more varied than I’d thought. He sold blow to students, hacked computers, and carried things here and there for people. That kind of thing. Plus porn—which he told me would be a quick way of making money. Well, I refused, and he insisted. That’s when he took my passport. Then someone told me about a lonely, well-connected woman called Saskia who sometimes took in strays.’

‘Who told you about me?’

‘I don’t know his name.’

‘I see,’ said Saskia, looking at her hard. ‘It’s not too late to call the police.’

‘We can’t,’ Jem replied. She tried to ignore the steady heat of Saskia’s regard. It made the story difficult to remember. ‘Wolfgang has connections with the police. I’m not the first person he’s done this to.’

‘Jem, what does he have on you, exactly?’

‘Enough.’

‘What will you do when we’ve got your passport back?’

‘Leave this country and start a new life somewhere, I suppose.’

Saskia looked at Jem for a moment longer. Then she turned to the bar, smiled, and two waiters competed to reach their table. It hurt Jem to be so distant a runner-up. Saskia settled the bill in cash and spoke to the taller waiter in Turkish. He bowed.

‘Shall we?’ she asked. ‘It’s time.’

Jem was afraid. Should she blow the story wide open? Forget the con? Confess?

‘Let’s go,’ she said.

The fear passed, as she had expected, and she followed Saskia from the hotel. The air was cold. Buses and beige taxis choked the road. While they waited at the pedestrian crossing, the green man blinking, Jem was pushed by a surge of wind and rain. She looked at the church, whose blue illumination made inky silhouettes of the trees at its front.

Saskia rose to tiptoes. ‘I see him,’ she hissed.

Jem glanced around. There were fewer than a dozen people, and none looked like Wolfgang.

‘Where?’

But Saskia was already crossing the road. The light was red, and the people waiting by Jem observed loudly that the woman would get herself killed. Jem panicked. She needed to stay with Saskia. She stepped into the road. A horn blared and Jem turned to see a beige taxi slide towards her and stop. She lifted her hand from the bonnet and looked for Saskia. Her friend had reached the platz and was crossing it in the precise bounds of a triple jumper. The wind surged again. It shook the trees and seemed to settle the darkness through which Saskia had run.

She had vanished.

‘Shit.’

~

As she ran, Jem’s heels scraped on the ground, but she stayed upright, waving her arms for balance. She felt absurd and as English as fish and chips. There was a young man standing at the far side of the road. He licked his lips at her. Jem reached the platz and, holding her calm, tried to walk. The knick-knacks in her shoulder bag rattled like a charity tin. She swore at herself. These fears were unfamiliar. She was not the kind of person who panicked like this. She could turn Arctic on demand.

Saskia, she thought. In her head, the word was stretched and plaintive.

‘What’s she bloody doing?’

‘It’s better you don’t know,’ Wolfgang had told her.

‘Bastard.’

‘Pretend you don’t like the idea. I dare you.’

The Trinity Church was a modern building of brown and white stone. The trees moved once more to reveal a slit at the church’s base. The door was ajar. Jem knew that the church was not open to the public tonight. Wolfgang had been sure about that. Saskia must have gone inside.

As she approached the door, her apprehension began to build until it was an unbearable, tinnitus-like sensation that made it difficult to think. She put her palm against the wood and willed herself to breathe.

A hand flashed out from the church.

‘Ssss,’ said Saskia, gripping her wrist. ‘The meeting has been and gone. Pre-empted.’

‘Pre-empted?’ asked Jem, not understanding.

Saskia slid from the church and Jem knew, almost before their eyes touched, that this woman was more dangerous than anyone had guessed.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Been there, done it, got the passport.’

She pushed something into Jem’s hand.

‘Really?’

‘It’s in good condition.’

Saskia was out of breath. She straightened her jacket and winked at Jem. All the silences and thoughtfulness of the evening were behind her. ‘Come on. The police are almost here.’

‘Did you call them? How?’

‘He won’t be blackmailing anyone again. Not you or anyone else. I put instructions for a fertiliser bomb in his back pocket.’ Saskia smiled in the half-light. When Jem did not smile back, she seemed disappointed. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Wait.’

‘There’s no time.’

Jem’s scalp prickled. ‘It’s not over for me. Do you understand? It isn’t finished. That man wanted to… sell me, I think.’

Saskia tipped her head to one side. Jem could see that Saskia did not quite believe her, but, equally, there was no time to talk it over. Each watched the face of the other until Saskia backed away from the church, her feet silent as ever.

‘Alright, Jem. He can’t hurt you now. When you’ve done what you need to do, meet me outside the hotel.’

Jem nodded. She put the passport in her knapsack and entered the church.

~

The foyer was cramped and dark. Jem could smell flowers and wood polish. There were no artificial lights here or in the main chamber of the church, which she could see as a dim expanse through the interior door at the rear of the foyer. She walked through.

‘Wolfgang?’ she stage-whispered.

The nave was lit only by stained light. Her heels clicked across the stone. When her eyes grew more accustomed, she noticed a dark bundle at the end of a pew.

‘Jem,’ he said. His voice was strained. ‘Jem, over here.’

Wolfgang was sitting with his hands behind his back. His head lolled as she approached. He might have been a boxer in his corner, beaten. So much for the arch manipulator. Jem crouched alongside him.

‘What happened?’

‘Never mind. Help me out of these cuffs.’

Jem put a hand on his chest, as fearfully as she had pressed her palm against the church door. ‘Wait. I think it worked.’

‘Worked? It’s gone wrong.’

‘She wasn’t sure I was telling the truth before. She is now. I can find out her system. I just need to get into the secure room.’

‘How are you going to do that?’

‘I’ll need to get closer to her. You know what I mean.’

Jem saw him struggle to think through the pain. He nodded. ‘Good girl. One of us is still thinking straight. If you get in to that room, don’t waste your time tickling the keyboard. Find her desktop, and take it. If it’s secured, yank the hard drive and we’ll crack it at our leisure. The system has to be there.’

‘I’ll try. It could be dangerous. You saw what she did.’

‘Felt it, you mean. Be careful, but remember why we’re doing this. We get her system, place some bets, and retire. Operation Robin Hood. She’s rich and we’re poor. Remember?’

‘I remember,’ Jem said. ‘Listen, I have to go. You’d better check your back pocket. She put–’

She heard a noise behind her. She turned and saw Saskia Brandt. Jem was transfixed by a return of the fear that had almost crushed her minutes before. Saskia’s green eyes were dead eyes. A predator more shark than eagle. Jem had wondered from what place Saskia drew the power to best Wolfgang, who was heads charming and tails violent. In Saskia’s expression she found its source.

She fell upon Jem and seized her shoulder.

‘Komm mit,’ she said, ‘du blöde Kuh.’

Jem felt her shoulder give as Saskia lifted her away. She had time to look at Wolfgang a last time—he nodded—before Saskia hastened her into a jog. Her heels rang harshly on the stones once more. The sound refocused her. Instead of the fear, she felt exhilaration and anger.

‘Let go of me.’

Saskia did not. Jem tripped but Saskia kept her upright until they reached the door.

Jem said, ‘What did you hear?’

‘Shut up.’ Saskia stopped. She glanced through the door. ‘Catch your breath. Don’t speak. Calm? Walk with me and smile if you can. We’ve just come back from the cinema, where we saw Goodbye, Lenin.’

Outside, there was a final surprise. A police car had stopped on the platz. It was parked at an angle, and Jem had the impression that it had skidded. As Saskia marched her away, Jem had time to see that the driver’s door was open. A policeman lay unconscious next to the car with one foot hooked in the seat belt. Soundlessly, the blue light flickered.

‘Christ, Saskia. Did you beat up a policeman?’

‘Come.’

They left the platz and pushed through the group of passersby who had stopped to look at the scene. Saskia led them down the road until, beneath the shuddering bough outside Café Barbar, she stopped and gazed, moonstruck, at the sky. A moment later, she turned to Jem and nodded. Somehow, Jem understood. They began to run. Saskia’s long hair bounced. They passed beyond the lights of the restaurants to the stretch of Pestalozzistrasse where it grew dark.

They slowed. Jem looked over her shoulder to see if more police cars were converging on the church. Her heel snagged on something—perhaps a raised pavement slab—and she spilled to the ground, rolling twice. She remained still for a moment. Then she pushed herself upright and looked for Saskia. She was jogging back to her. Jem touched the white skin through her blistered tights. When Saskia asked her if she was injured, Jem looked at her through a thickening dizziness. Saskia put a hand to her cheek. ‘I’m sorry, Jem. But we have to keep moving.’

Jem ignored the stinging and the aches. She resolved to match Saskia in her energy. ‘I should apologise, not you. Especially after what you’ve done for me.’

‘Did it help?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘To see him again.’

Jem spun the lie with an expertise that startled her. ‘I had the questions but he didn’t have the answers. Like old times.’

Saskia nodded to the street. ‘Here is the second police car. Act like you are drunk. Come on, laugh. Aren’t you enjoying this just a little?’ The question was so unexpected that Jem did laugh, and Saskia looked satisfied, as though she were a doctor confirming a diagnosis. ‘There’s an underground station just down this road and to the left. We’ll be home in time for a Schnaps before Friends. How does that sound?’

Like Wolfgang will be delighted, thought Jem. She looked at the offered hand and grasped it, weaving her fingers. Her palm was grazed. She focused on that pain. I guess this is Plan B.

Chapter Five

Berlin, a month before

On the Friday mornings of her new life, Saskia collected Die Zeit, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and The Guardian from a kiosk on Müllerstrasse. From there, she walked to her favourite café, ordered an espresso, and lingered over the columns and terse leaders, though she could read each word in parallel and be gone before her coffee arrived. Her quiet Fridays were rocks of habit. She considered her loneliness a success.

Six months earlier, she had entered Germany on an illegal passport and made her way to Berlin. She found an empty apartment in Wedding and filled it with second-hand furniture. She had little knowledge of German history and her life became that of an autodidact. Her discovery of Germany was, she believed, a discovery of herself.

It was an August night when she first saw footage of Checkpoint Charlie. She learned there had been Checkpoints Alpha and Bravo at Helmstedt and Dreilinden. Each name a military fingerprint on the map. And there was the Wall. She watched flag-waving young men and women axing and hammering at its grafitti’d face, assaulting it with feet, pressing with the weight of their bodies until a section fell like a concrete drawbridge. East and West together. Past and present combined. And Saskia, viewing the video, had cried with those young men and women from fourteen years before. Now, it was 2003. The protagonists of that night were well into their lives; the length of a generation had passed. But Saskia saw it for the first time.

~

An eddy caught her newspaper and brushed it shut. Saskia looked up to see that a customer had entered the café. She scowled at him and pinned the newspaper with her elbows. Kaspar came to her with a second espresso and shut the door. He nodded to her and she smiled back.

She sipped her coffee and watched the winter crowd through the glass wall.

There was a game she played. She picked two people at random and counted the degrees that separated their lives. With nothing more than a sense of curiosity about a person’s mobile phone number, that number would enter her attention as though whispered in her ear. Or a face. Who? she would think, and, moments later, a pixelated image from a driving licence application would fall across her mind’s eye. From this data Saskia could step to, say, the person’s first school, his employment history, criminal record, credit transaction history, and bank account. Once the first person was known, she selected a second. The only rule was that one of the pair had to be visiting Berlin. On average, a person would have one-hundred close friends and several hundred acquaintances. A pool of contact. Where there was potential for the pools to overlap, intermediate lives were stepping stones. In this way, she knew that the sister of Ibrahim, the kiosk owner, had been to school with the bank manager of her café waiter’s third girlfriend. Saskia made the steps and counted the stones.

Today, she did not play this game. In her pocket was a betting receipt worth more than one-hundred thousand Euros, which she planned to redeem within the hour. The victories survived only as trivia in the year 2023; they had been passed to Saskia by her dear friend, David Proctor, in the fast moments before she entered a time machine bound for 2003. She intended to work through this list and finance her life with winning bets. The receipt for one-hundred thousand Euros represented a risk, but a minimal one. The pink sheets on which the sporting victories were scrawled remained in her pocket at all times. They connected her physically to the future.

Someone in the crowd had stopped walking. It was a young woman with blue hair. She turned to look at Saskia.

Na, Schlumpf? thought Saskia. The Smurf had a looseness to her frame. A scarf flickered around her neck, smoky and silent. Her blouse was open on a T-shirt with the logo ‘cool as fcuk’. The woman’s skin was cloud white. So who was she?

Something inside Saskia assaulted the Internet.

(A match from a photo taken at Maynard School, Exeter, 1998: Jem Shaw, British)

Saskia smiled. The woman smiled back: relief. She entered the café as though the meeting were arranged.

Before the Smurf joined her, Saskia thought, Tell me more. Data rushed through her. She noticed an email attachment from a therapist registered in Exeter and stopped it with a twitch of thought. It began:

Jem Shaw: There is this anxiety in the background… like the hiss of a TV tuned to a dead channel.

Me: This hiss actually comes from the music box, doesn’t it?

JS: (is startled) How did you know about that?

Me: You mentioned it yesterday, when you were under.

JS: Perhaps it comes from the music box, yeah.

Me: Do you know the name of the tune?

JS: No, I never did.

Me: Sing it.

(JS hums a tune which I think is Bach’s ‘I call to thee, Lord Jesus Christ’)

Saskia blinked. Ich ruf zu dir, she thought, Herr Jesu Christ.

Me: Tell about feeling split in two.

JS: Split in two?

Me: Feeling like two people.

JS: Two people. Well.

Saskia lingered over those words.

Two.

People.

She thought back to a letter she had written earlier in the summer.

~

To whom it may concern:

My name is Saskia Brandt but I am living under an assumed name in Berlin. Use the attached information to contact me. It is the year 2003, some twenty years before the summer of my departure, the Indian summer of 2023.

As per the instructions of my representatives, this note should be delivered by hand to my friend Professor David Proctor or his daughter, Dr Jennifer Proctor, no earlier or later than September of 2023. I choose paper and ink because digital media are ephemeral, and I choose plain English because this letter might require the involvement of a third party. This third party should be a close professional associate of either David or Jennifer in the event they cannot be contacted.

Please: To the Proctors—or the person reading in lieu of them—if the technology to travel in time has not been lost or suppressed, I request and require that you make all reasonable efforts to rescue me. I claim this as the right of the second person in history to travel in time. To convince a third party for whom my story is unfamiliar, I will outline my circumstances and how I came by them.

Today, somewhere in Germany, is a little girl no more than five or six years old who will grow up to become the same person who writes this letter. This fact alone makes me sad in a way unique to me.

There was a hope that the time traveller would arrive in some parallel version of their past.

This has not happened. There is one world.

I began this letter with the statement of my name. You should know that my mind is a fusion—I can find no other word—of two people. Some time in the spring of 2023, a woman was convicted of multiple murders. Her name was Ute Schlesinger. This woman was forced to undergo a surgery in which her brain was emptied of all but the deepest structures of her being. Then, a glass bead containing some form of nanoprocessor was implanted near her brain stem. My attempts to identify the source of this nanoprocessing wetware device have come to nothing. It is, I believe, an experimental technology whose existence may not be widely known beyond a few individuals.

The device contains the identity of a second human being. Through some form of impregnating mesh, it imposes this donor mind on the victim’s brain. It is this donor mind that I, Saskia Brandt, am. It is this donor mind that writes these words. Other than my name, I know little about this mind—little, that is, about myself.

I ask but my memories do not answer.

Saskia Brandt was the name given to me by the Föderatives Investigationsbüro, or FIB, upon commencement of my employment (against my will) as a special agent. It was made clear to me that I could leave employment at the FIB only with my death. For this reason, I am wary of strangers here. I have become remote and paranoid. I can only clear my name in 2023.

This is what I know: In May of 2003, an artificial wormhole opened in the sky above West Lothian, Scotland. That wormhole connected to the underground facility of a secret, US research programme codenamed Project Déjà Vu. I tumbled through that unnatural conduit in the brief time that it was open, though my mission—to stop the billionaire John Hartfield rewriting history to his advantage—was over before it began. He was already dead.

I want rescue. Failing that, I want help, or some form of connection to 2023. I want to know that I am not forgotten.

There are, of course, comforts in this period of our history. I am well; I have money. But I am adrift a greater distance than the furthest astronaut. Am I alone? Are there other time travellers?

I want the Indian summer of 2023 again.

If you are not the Proctors and have the power to help me, I hope that my statement has convinced you of my sincerity. I have little in the way of hard evidence. The surgical procedure that led to the imposition of the donor personality left me with intact implicit memory—I have a complete martial skill set—but I find it impossible to recall the name of the German Chancellor at the time of my departure, or the US President, or key figures in popular culture. I am aware, too, that any such information, including the list of sporting fixtures with which I intend to finance my exile, could be viewed as a simple forgery by the time you receive this letter.

But why do I need to send this? David, you were certain that you had seen me, as a woman in her forties, in the year 2023. How certain were you? So certain that you have given me up to a future of waiting for the world to change, to become my future? Ask yourself if your judgement was mistaken and consider whether this is sufficient to abandon my rescue. This belittles me and I know it. Even writing this letter is a risk.

David, you are the finest man I know. Why haven’t you come for me? Did something happen to you? I remain,

Yours, in hope,

Saskia Brandt

Berlin, 2003

~

Close up, Jem Shaw’s eyes were shadowed and full. She might have crossed a No Man’s Land to reach this door.

I have crossed one, too, Jem. Twenty years wide.

‘Guten Tag,’ said the woman.

‘Guten Tag. It’s OK. I speak English.’

‘Please, I was told you can help me.’

Jem’s brother was a lawyer called Danny, and his university roommate had once conducted a romance with a friend of Torsten Wechsler, the son of Rudolf (Rudi) Wechsler. Rudi had moved to West Berlin in the 1970s to avoid national service and now lived above Saskia, where his piano often carried the sombre notes of ‘I call to you, Jesus Christ’.

Small world, Saskia thought.

‘I have time. What can I do to help?’

Chapter Six

Munich: the day of the crash

Cory, known to some as the Ghost, arrived at Munich Airport on the S-Bahn. The carriage was crowded. Cory stood at the rear and listened to the passengers. They discussed nothing but the cause of the turning tower of smoke to the south-west. It was curious, he thought, how stranger now spoke to stranger, as though the crash was a connecting event. He sighed and leaned on his cane. At this, a young woman stood and offered him her seat. Her expression of concern reinforced a truth that Cory tried to avoid these days. He was old. Absurdly old by the standards of these people.

Cory smiled and shook his head.

Soon the doors slid wide and he followed the slow spill of passengers and gave himself up to the coloured routes, the cattle-run simplification of the walkways, slopes, and escalators. Dumb posters rolled in their illuminated frames. He kept to the wall. He was happy to stay in the slow lane.

The Munich Airport Centre was enclosed by a transparent roof. Heavy clouds could be seen beyond. Snow clouds, he guessed. Cory stopped by a tree and considered the windows of a meeting room on the first floor. Through them, he saw a group of men who looked ready to be called to attention. No doubt this was the press conference he wished to attend.

He recalled the southern gentleman he had once been. Then, keeping his youth in focus, he crossed the atrium.

~

The carpet of the press room was hard and its chairs were modernist twists of plastic. There could be neither echo nor fuss. As the air conditioning whispered around them, fifty journalists took their seats. Conversation ebbed. Phones were muted and stowed. A suited man shared a last murmur with his secretary and assumed the lectern.

It seemed to Cory, the Ghost, that nobody had noticed his arrival. He remained at the rear: standing, easy on his cane, quiet behind the cub reporters and the veterans. His frostbitten thumb and forefinger drummed the knuckles of his opposite hand. It was a habit that he could trace back years. It did not matter that Cory was sorry. It did not matter at all.

‘I am Manfred Straus,’ said the man at the lectern. He spoke in German touched by a Swabian accent, ‘It is with deepest regret Free Flight must confirm the loss of DFU323. The aircraft was travelling on a regularly-scheduled route between Berlin and Munich. All 132 passengers and crew are missing, presumed dead.’

The metal tip of the Ghost’s cane put zeros in the carpet as he began to pace. His arthritic wrist ached and the frostbite stung. This news confirmed the obvious cause of the turning tower of smoke. Yet he felt no horror. Even now, the Ghost could see patterns in the victims’ statistics: coincidental shoe sizes, birthdays, those strangers who lived only streets apart in a life they would never regain.

‘Ground staff lost contact with the aircraft at 8:47 a.m. and communications were never re-established. The local authorities in Regensburg received word of an explosion at 9:21 a.m. Though emergency services arrived at the crash site within minutes, no passengers or crew could be saved.’ He paused. ‘On behalf of the airline, I extend my deepest sympathies and condolences to the families of those touched by this tragedy. Our thoughts and prayers are with you. The Bureau of Aircraft Accidents has dispatched a team to the site. It is headed by Dr Hrafn Óskarson, who has more than twenty years of experience in accident investigation. He will be assisted by representatives of the American National Transportation Safety Board and Boeing.’

‘Can you give us some details on the aircraft?’ asked a British man. ‘Make, and so on?’

‘It was a Boeing 737-300,’ said the press officer. His extemporised English was slower than his German, but perfect. ‘The 737-300 uses two wing-mounted turbofan engines produced by CFM International, which is jointly owned by the American company General Electric and SNECMA of France. This type of aircraft has a span of twenty-seven metres, a length of thirty-three metres, and weighs 124,500 tonnes. It can carry 140 passengers. The lost aircraft had eleven years’ active service. It was certified airworthy as little as three months ago.’ He stopped, uncertain of his next words. ‘It was carrying 132 souls.’

Souls.

The Ghost let the word find a way through him. Abruptly, he felt those deaths. Perhaps his humanity was not as buried as he had feared—or hoped.

‘What about the pilots?’

‘The commander, Kurt Weber, had more than three thousand hours’ flight experience with this model of aircraft. He was certified as an instructor. His co-pilot, Rudi Stammler, was his former pupil and had more than five hundred hours’ flight experience. Both men were physically fit and considered exemplary aviators.’

‘Was there a distress call?’ asked a red-haired woman.

The press officer adjusted his notes. The Ghost knew he was playing for time. There was no official line on the transmission. Despite himself, the Ghost felt his interest focus on this disciplined spokesman. How would the distress call be handled?

‘I see that none was received by ground staff.’

‘Are you certain? Amateur radio enthusiasts reported–’

The press officer smiled briefly at the woman. In German, he said, ‘We cannot comment on what radio enthusiasts might, or might not, have received.’

‘They heard a male voice that they described as ‘agitated’,’ she persisted.

The press officer laced his fingers. ‘At this stage, nobody can–’

‘He spoke a single word. ‘STENDEC’.’

Heads turned towards her.

‘Spelled?’ asked a man.

‘We have no comment,’ the press officer said, leaning close to his microphone. ‘However, I would ask that you make your information, and your source, available to Dr Óskarson of the BFU. Next?’

‘Please,’ she continued, ‘can you comment on the fact that the last transmission of the pilot corresponds to that of the British South American Airways airliner Star Dust?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘You refuse to comment?’

The press officer removed his glasses. ‘Frau…?’

‘Frau Doktor Birgit Weishaupt, Jump Seat.’

‘Frau Doktor, many of us with aviation experience will know the story of the Avro Lancastrian.’ He dropped into English as though it were a lower gear. ‘Now let me be brief. There can be no connection between this morning’s crash and that of an aircraft whose trace left radar screens fifty-five years ago. As a mark of respect for those who died today, I will not discuss such, shall we say, fantastic irrelevancies.’ He stared at the journalist for a moment longer, then replaced his glasses. ‘We have time for one or two further questions.’

The Ghost felt the attention of the journalists loosen. If DFU323 were still in flight and set to crash, that would be news. But it had crashed already. The story was over, and they would see no fresh angles from this modernist room and its water-tight press officer, who again noticed Dr Weishaupt’s hand, and nodded reluctantly.

‘If the flight originated in Berlin and was going to land in Milan, what was it doing over the Bavarian national forest so far to the east?’

‘At this stage, we can only speculate. A navigation problem, for example, would be consistent with radio communications failure.’

‘Not hijacking?’

The Ghost looked at his knuckles once more. He was surprised to find himself embarrassed. He could answer every question they had about DFU323, and more, but he was outside this discussion. He was hardly here.

‘We do not rule out anything at this stage. That is all.’ He nodded once, and, with that, the conference was complete. The journalists understood and immediately began to talk, to smooth the edges of the story between them. The Ghost lost no time in approaching the spokesman. The man was winding up the power cable for his laptop and had an impatient expression.

‘What is it?’

‘I’m sorry. My name is Hermann Glöder. My grandson was on the flight.’

The press officer glanced at Cory’s lapel. Seeing no press badge, he frowned.

‘Mr Glöder, you should not be here. I am, of course, terribly sorry.’

‘I need to know what happened to the boy. I-’

Cory seemed to choke. As the press officer clapped his shoulder and passed him a handkerchief, Cory leaned on the lectern. There was a white oblong in his hand no larger than a cigarette. It interfaced with a USB socket on the man’s computer.

‘I would be happy,’ the press officer continued, ‘to have you taken to the hotel where the relatives are staying. There you will be…’

Cory pressed the handkerchief against his forehead. He saw computer files flashing by as though they were faces in a passing train.

‘… and Dr Óskarson will keep you fully informed of…’

PassagierlisteDFU323.pdf

‘… there are practicalities involved, as I’m sure you understand. Mr Glöder? They have commandeered a local school for the… the remains. I could arrange a chaperone. Here, let me help you stand.’

Cory interrogated the document for a name. He found it on the third page.

Passenger 25F: Frau Doktor Saskia Dorfer.

An address in Wedding, Berlin.

‘No, thank you. I will find him.’

Cory, the Ghost, moved away. There was a quietness in his walk, and even the older journalists stopped talking as he passed through them.

Chapter Seven

Berlin, two hours after the crash

Viewed from the S-Bahn carriage, the low, violet sky above Berlin took Jem back to mornings camping on Dartmoor when she was a teenager—when she was a good girl, outdoorsy and bookish rolled into one. She smelled grass instead of the snug carriage air. She felt the dull, scratched handle of a pot instead of the metal frame of the seat in front of her. I’m looking at your future, Good Girl, she thought, trying to project her thoughts backwards, and it features rain, umbrellas and a metric assload of rye bread.

Jem took her prepaid mobile phone from her rucksack. She dialled Wolfgang’s number.

‘Pick up, you lazy git.’

He did not answer.

‘This is what’s happened,’ she said to his answer machine. Her vernacular was back, and it was a dish she would serve cold for Wolfgang. ‘I’m still in Berlin. Yeah, deal with it. I got as far as the airport, but I had to cut and run. I couldn’t go through with it. I don’t want to play any more. I’ll explain. I’m on my way back to yours.’ She looked at the information board at the front of the carriage. Orange letters slid by, as if on their own business. ‘I’ll take my time. Sleep. I’ll bring croissants.’

There was no need to think of Saskia. That story had ended. Curiosity: satisfied.

She twisted her fist around the metal handle of the seat in front. Revved it. Instead of the carriage seat, Jem saw one in the double-decker bus that had taken her to St Maynard’s School. She had once put her teeth on the metal rail just to feel the bus through her skull. The metal had been cold and oddly electric. Jem: hanging onto the bus by her teeth. Her hands in their fingerless gloves. Neeeeow. Her friends laughing.

And now this.

~

At her changeovers, she loitered on the platforms. She crossed Berlin in long, thoughtful strokes. Zigging one way, zagging the other. She was brittle but cheerful as she turned into Wolfgang’s road. It was raining and paper ribbons fluttered from the low branches of the tree near the launderette. Cars planed through the water. Jem was happy in the puddles. She could handle a doobie-doob-doob around a lamppost and a no-nonsense look from a German policeman. All the while, she worked on the speech she would give Wolfgang. It would make her intentions to leave him clear as crystal. She would fly east. She would watch the Urals pass beneath her aeroplane and move on to her Plan B.

She stopped in the drizzle.

There was a man outside the apartment building. He was leaning against the barrier that admitted cars to the rear of the block. His gloves were the colour of midnight arrest and his expensive suit did nothing for the dull impression he made: police from sensible shoes to flat-top military hairdo.

‘Well, doobie-doob-doob,’ she whispered.

He turned to her.

‘Wer bist du? Was willst du hier?’

Jem hesitated. There was a wide pavement between them. She felt the urge to run but knew it would be disastrous.

‘Nichts. Ich bin verloren.’

The man withdrew a pair of glasses and put them on. They were NHS retro, black like his gloves. ‘Are you English?’

Jem said nothing. She stared. It was natural, she told herself, to distrust him, no matter how guilty she felt.

‘Don’t be worried,’ he said, smiling. His age slipped from forty to thirty. ‘I apologise for my manner. It is cold and wet. I am a policeman. My name is Inspector Karel Duczyński. I am employed by the Bundeskriminalamt. I could show you some identification if you come closer.’

Jem bit the inside of her cheek. The steady voice inside her, the compass by which she had always steered, whispered escape.

‘Madam, I must ask if you are here to see Wolfgang Klenze.’

‘I’m not here at all.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I’m just passing by.’

‘Please. Let us talk briefly and I then can, so to say, exclude you from my query.’

I wonder, she thought, if this has anything to do with the plans for homemade explosives in Wolfgang’s back pocket. Jesus, Saskia.

‘Inquiry. It’s ‘inquiry’.’

‘Inquiry. Thank you. Your name?’

‘Nancy Drew.’

The inspector tilted his head. ‘Do you live in this building, Miss Drew?’

‘Nancy Drew just passing through.’

‘But your voice sounds familiar.’

‘We English must sound alike.’

‘Earlier, a young English woman left a message on Wolfgang’s answer machine.’ He shook his head, as though dismissing any inference she might have made. ‘The woman called herself Jem, not Nancy. But if you are to see her, please tell her that I would like to have a conversation. She is not for any trouble.’

Jem glanced at the pavement, toed a broken slab, and looked up.

‘What’s your name again?’ she asked.

‘Yes, it is difficult to remember.’ He produced a white deck of cards. He dealt one to himself and raised it like a cigarette. ‘Please?’

When it was clear the inspector would not move, Jem walked to him and took the card. Her fingers trembled. She put it in the pocket of her coat. His expression suggested that he had complete knowledge of her, but Jem reassured herself that the look was standard issue, like his handcuffs.

‘What are you waiting for?’ she asked.

His composure slipped for a moment. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘You’re just waiting here. Standing in the rain.’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘Well,’ said Jem, as she walked away, thumbs in her belt loops. ‘You know what they say about your job.’

‘That it is mostly legwork?’

Still walking, she said, ‘Ooh, you’re good. You read my mind.’

‘It’s nothing. A cliché.’ He looked at his feet. ‘I hope you find your way, Miss Drew.’

~

Jem bounced around Berlin for the remainder of the day. She told herself, with each stop, that she would hole up and work through the implications of a policeman hanging around Wolfgang’s apartment. She had certainly committed a crime by giving him a false name. Did that leave her with no option but to return to England? She rather hoped it did. There was little of her loyalty to Wolfgang left. But she did not quite hate him enough. Somehow, she had to find out where he was held, and for what. Then she had to talk to him without becoming an accessory or suspect. What did they have on him? There was the con work, yes, like the discovery of Saskia’s gambling system. Jem knew, however, that in the last month Wolfgang had begun to move in another direction altogether. He would go missing for days and return with cash in a plastic bag that he called his Turkish suitcase. He slept with a knife beneath his pillow. Who was he becoming? Who was she becoming?

Enough.

Jem’s stopped at Potsdamer Platz. She knew a café nearby. There she sat, and the thoughts and plans and half-predictions that filled her attention soon moved out of focus. She found herself dozing on her folded arms when a waiter tapped her shoulder with a pen.

‘Fräulein, hier können Sie nicht schlafen.’

Her metal chair was cold, the table colder and the contempt of the waiter subzero. She had to fob him off. Still, no point packing her ideas into the meat grinder of her German language skills.

In English, she said, ‘I’m waiting for a friend.’

‘Zwei Euro fuffzich.’

Jem stared at him. Then she tipped the contents of her purse onto her palm and let him take whatever for the untouched coffee. Like what-ever. As his fingertips walked over the coins, she thought about springing her hand shut. Nobody expects the English humour.

About then, the ARD Tagesschau news programme appeared on the giant screen above the counter. Germany’s hang-dog chancellor, whose name Jem could never remember, was talking from the steps of the Reichstag.

The waiter frowned and fussed. He selected a coin.

Jem watched a banner roll across the bottom of the screen. ‘DFU Flug Berlin-Mailand abgestürzt—keine Überlebenden’.

Jem’s smile straightened.

‘Berlin-Mailand’?

The words plugged the holes in her thoughts, suffocating her playfulness. This was the flight she had a ticket for. But why was it on the telly?

Keine Ueberlebenden.

‘Excuse me, could you tell what keine Ueberlebenden means?’

The waiter completed his work on her palm and shook his head. ‘I think you should go now, please. Sleep somewhere else.’

Jem’s eyes remained fixed on the screen. The programme cut to grainy footage of woodland. The camera shook, tilted to mossy ground, then refocused on a blemish in the sky. It might have been a bird of prey. But, with a perceptual switch, Jem saw that it was an aeroplane in a vertical dive. The camera followed the plane until trees blotted the view.

‘Keine Ueberlebenden means ‘no survivors’,’ said the waiter, wiping the table around her elbows. ‘It is very sad news.’

~

By midnight, at the end of a nightmarish day riding the underground and staring through everyone and everything, Jem found herself at the bottom of the steps to Saskia’s apartment building. The rain had worked its way down her collar. Her damp tights itched and a pimple had taken root in the corner of her mouth. She dallied between the desperate hope that Saskia was alive—in her apartment and cursing Jem—to the certainty that Saskia’s essence yet walked, unreflected, across its ebony floor. Jem pressed and pressed again at the button marked ‘Frau Doktor Dorfer’.

You didn’t get on the plane. You came home. Please.

‘Hallo?’ said a voice, male and unfamiliar.

‘Um, hello. Who is this? Inspector?’

The door buzzed. Jem pushed through to the stairwell, which was dark and echoic. She touched the light and heard its rattlesnake timer rotate. Her tired legs trembled with each step. When she reached Saskia’s door, she found it open an inch. A sound behind her reignited her fear, but it was only her rucksack, settling.

The timer for the stairwell light stopped.

The darkness closed down.

‘Hello?’

With a click, light erupted from the opening doorway. An old gentleman stood there. His eyes were rheumy and his eyebrows stately ticks of white. His thin hair was rusty at the temples. He wore a pullover with shoulder patches and rested both hands on a short, ivory cane. Despite his age, there was something of Saskia about him. The apartment staircase rose, behind him, to darkness.

‘You must be one of Saskia’s friends.’ His accent was American.

Jem wanted to reply that, no, she was Saskia’s girlfriend, but the word would not do.

‘Saskia…’

He cupped her elbow.

‘My poor girl, come inside.’

~

She slipped from her coat, which was heavy with rain, and dumped her rucksack in the space where Saskia stored her umbrellas and black, flat shoes. She followed the stranger up the apartment stairs. His shoes were wet too. At the top landing, he turned and tapped his left shin with the cane. ‘Excuse my slowness. It is sensitive to the weather.’

‘The hallway light is on the left at the top.’

‘I know it. Here.’

He pressed it, and Saskia’s spirit returned with a flash: the antique phone; the ‘wooden man’ kung fu dummy with Jem’s special-occasion knickers hanging from an arm; a poster from the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, the yucca, the curtained door, the sideboard with weight training gloves crossed on top, the ebony floor. The smell of toast made that morning and the perfume mixed for Saskia in the south of France.

The man turned. He, too, had been contemplating the hallway. ‘Dick Cory. But everyone calls me Cory.’

‘I’m Jem.’

At last, they shook hands. His palm had a rough knot of skin and, on instinct, Jem turned it over.

‘An old burn,’ said Cory. He made a fist but Jem had already seen the reversed letters.

‘‘Pyrene’?’

‘They make fire extinguishers.’ He smiled. ‘Ironically.’

‘I came to see if Saskia…’

‘Let me fix you a drink.’

‘She keeps a whisky bottle on the right of the dishwasher.’

Cory searched her face. ‘I know.’

Chapter Eight

Jem took the white leather sofa and Cory the reclining chair. They faced each other, stranger to stranger. The balcony doors were open. The net curtains sagged and bloomed. Rain was loud on the tiles. She rocked her glass: a tick to send the ice away, a tock to bring it back.

‘I am Saskia’s father.’

‘Her father?’

‘She came to us late in life. I retired when Germany was still in pieces. Don’t let the cane fool you. I can still click my heels.’

Jem smiled. His words were at odds with the artificiality of their situation. She suspected that he was used to keeping his head when all about him were losing theirs. It made her playful. She said, ‘Saskia never mentioned her father.’

‘I never mention Saskia.’

‘You’re not German. American?’

‘I was born in Atlanta, but took advantage of economic opportunities in Germany following the war. Dortmund, mostly. That’s where I met Saskia’s mother. Yourself?’

‘I’m from South West England.’

‘Oh, I’ve been to Plymouth.’

‘My sympathies.’

He blinked to acknowledge the remark, but his lips only curled with the application of his glass. He held the whisky in his mouth before swallowing.

‘So were you coming or going?’ she asked.

‘Pardon me?’

‘When I arrived, the lights were out upstairs.’

He sipped his drink again. ‘Going.’

As his eyes moved away from her, Jem considered his story. She believed that a man like him could father a woman like Saskia. The details, though, were too pat. The remark about Atlanta was redolent of rehearsal, smooth as Saskia thumbing bullets from her gun. Jem could imagine Cory as old guard CIA, a high-up bureaucrat who had long since abandoned the physicality of spying but not the comfort of tradecraft.

‘Jem, I’m afraid I have to tell you something about Saskia.’

Spoken, the name unlocked a door inside her. ‘I ran away at the airport.’

‘Tell me what happened.’

But she did not hear him. She gripped her chair and felt the shifting forces of the dive as the passengers held on and prayed that the pilots could solve the riddle of their instruments. Hands groping for other hands. Comfort in the last of moments. Business deals incomplete. Journeys truncated and lives unfinished. Jem shuddered. Something touched her hand and she focused her eyes on Cory’s palm, which he had placed again on hers. She felt his scar. Pyrene.

‘Hush.’ He touched away one of her tears. ‘As Saskia’s father, I am her next of kin. I should take care of her affairs. Do you understand?’

Jem nodded and let the water spill from her eyes. A drop found her lip and she remembered Saskia gathering fistfuls of her blue Schlumpf hair.

‘Jem? Does she have a computer? Is it behind the curtained door?’

‘Mr Cory, I’m tired.’

‘The door has a wirelessly-operated lock. Did you see her use the release? It could be anywhere. A TV remote control. An unused light switch.’

A fairy tale.

Jem shook her head to clear it. She noticed, again, that Cory was holding her hand, but now it felt wrong.

‘Are you really Saskia’s father?’

For a moment, anger collected in his eyes, and Jem wondered what he might do. But he resumed his chair. The lamp behind his head made an eclipse of his face. From the darkness, he said, ‘I should be down in Munich to identify the body. I guess I’m not brave enough.’

Neither spoke for a minute.

‘What do you think,’ she said, ‘about the idea that Saskia didn’t die? That, if there are survivors, she of all people…’

The severity of his expression stopped her.

‘It was a vertical impact, Jem.’ Cory’s eyes burned low like evening stars. ‘Do you want to watch the television? There might be developments.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Absolutely not.’

‘Did you hear about the pilot’s last message? A code-word. ‘STENDEC’. They were talking about it on the radio.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘You want me to tell you what they said?’

‘I think so.’

Cory waited a moment. Then he began, ‘In 1946, the Brits set up a South American airline under an old war hero, Donald Bennett. Many of his planes crashed. One, Star Dust, took off in August of 1947, on the last leg of its journey from London to Santiago, and was never seen again.’

‘Santiago is in Chile, right?’

‘In Chile. The flight involved a journey across the Andes.’

Jem let her imagination drift with Cory to the past. There was a comfort there. The past had already been; it was fixed and known. One could stand above the past. It contained a solace that, given years, Saskia’s death would be so distant that its hurt could dim.

‘That last flight, Star Dust, left Buenos Aires carrying mailbags, movie reels, and several examples of the rich and privileged. ‘Fly with the stars’. That was the motto of British South American Airways, written beneath an Art Deco star man. Each aircraft was given a name beginning with ‘star’.’ Another pause passed between them. It came cold, like an Andean wind. ‘Nobody knows what happened on board the flight prior to the crash. Some minutes before its wheels were due to hit the runway in Santiago, the radio operator on board Star Dust sent the message ‘STENDEC’.’

‘‘STENDEC’.’

‘Star Dust repeated the message once and was never heard from again. In the weeks following the disappearance, the Chilean army scoured the Andes together with hundreds of amateur aviators and mountaineers. But Star Dust could not be found. Donald Bennett, the war hero, personally joined the search and continued it, in one way or another, until the end of his life. It was the last crash that the British government was to tolerate. Bennett was pressured to resign. He did, and returned to England under a cloud.’

Jem puzzled through the letters. ‘What do you think ‘STENDEC’ means?’

‘There are many possibilities,’ he said, smiling, ‘from the stupid to the plausible. An anagram of ‘descent’, for instance. Or ‘Severe Turbulence Encountered Now Descending Emergency Crash-Landing.’ Or perhaps Star Dust had already crashed, and the signal was sent by a third party to sow confusion.’

‘Why would somebody do that?’

‘There was a King’s Messenger on board. Perhaps someone didn’t want his secret documents to reach the British ambassador in Santiago. And there was a Palestinian businessman with a diamond stitched into the lining of his jacket. Perhaps somebody wanted that.’

‘How do you think it relates to Saskia’s flight?’

‘It’s late, Jem.’

She nodded. She did not trust this man. He had vast capability that his age only intensified. The net curtains bloomed like a cape and let in the sound of rain on the balcony. Minute upon minute passed and she fell asleep. When she awoke, Cory’s seat was empty, and in its place was the idea that he had never existed beyond a dream. Saskia was in the shower, surely, and any moment now she would return to Jem and the two would make up.

No, I ran away from her.

There was a sound from the kitchen. A glass being placed just so.

I didn’t escape her after all. I ran away.

Chapter Nine

August, 1947, a hotel in Buenos Aires

He had been told the city was wintering, but Cory lay in his hotel room cursing the heat. Through the shuttered window came birdsong, bicycle bells, and the occasional drill of an automobile. The hotel itself was quiet. Its owner, an old Spanish prostitute, strictly observed siesta between one o’clock and four. It was now 3:16 p.m., and, in the stillness, Cory was at the edge of panic. He fiddled with the long key around his neck. Each touch made him think of the tomb it would open.

At 3:39 p.m., a knock.

Cory rolled from the bed, tensed as its old coils pinged, and looked at his cane.

To me.

The factor did not obey his thought. His intention lacked clarity.

‘To me,’ he growled.

Still, the cane did not move.

Another knock.

Finally, he took the cane. Icons appeared beneath his thumb. He selected the symbol that represented projectile response and the factor transformed in his grip until he was holding a pearl-grey gun. He put the barrel to the centre of the door and stood against the wall, beyond the doorframe.

He struggled to get in character: Simon Wilberforce, English, a local agent for the Shell Oil Company. Rather. What.

‘Um… duermo,’ he said in his British accent. ‘Salga por favor.’

‘Lisandro, Señor Wilberforce.’

Cory relaxed. He returned his gun to its cane form and opened the door on the grinning boy. As usual, Lisandro wore a mismatched ensemble of his older brothers’ clothes. ‘¿Qué desea usted, Lisandro?’

‘Hay una camisa roja en la ventana, como me dijiste. Me llevó un buen rato llegar hasta allí..’ He offered his palm.

Cory gave him a peso but kept his finger on the coin. ‘What do you say?’

‘Thank you, Mr Will-for.’

‘Wil-ber-force.’

‘Wil-ber-force.’

‘Good lad.’ Cory released the coin. ‘Tomorrow, we’ll start on some verbs.’

Nice touch, he thought. Wilberforce had worked at Rutherford Boys’ School during the war.

Cory untied the string that passed through his hanging jacket—he had stayed in too many of these hotels to expect a wardrobe—and brushed the cockroaches from its armpits.

‘Tomorrow more hungry than today, Mr Wilberforce.’

Dirt cracked around Lisandro’s mouth as he smiled. Cory had sufficient anxiety to loose a curt remark, to remind him that Mr Wilberforce was an elder, not a friend, but the boy’s charm had flanked him. Cory tried on his new Dorfzaun panama hat. He pinched the brim. ‘What do you think? Too Mark Twain?’

‘Usted esta enojado, Señor Wilberforce. You pretty.’

‘Handsome, Lisandro. Not pretty.’ He smiled. The moment grew long, and he put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘About the verbs. In all honesty, I won’t be coming back tomorrow. I’ll be gone. Debo irme. Lo siento.. Understand?’

Lisandro pouted.

Cory took a thousand peso clip from his belt buckle, tugged out a note, and placed it over the one peso coin. Lisandro stared at it with wonder.

‘Please pay the señora. You can keep the rest. Buy something for your mother.’

‘I buy her house!’

Cory left the room and strolled along the gloomy corridor. His semi-brogue shoes—white bodies, tan heels and toes—made hollow clonks on the floor. He swung about the balustrade, ready to take the stairs two at a time, when Lisandro called, ‘Cheerio, Mr Wilberforce!’

‘Cheerio, Lisandro!’

He raised his hat and clattered down the stairs. Siesta be damned.

~

Tierra Argentina, land of silver, and this jewel on her eastern hip: Cory loved both. He strode through the San Telmo district, where, on his first visit, he had lingered hours over the bright collision of architectures: Spanish colonial style with Italian flourish and a nod to French Classicism. The Dutch painter, Mondrian was three years dead in 1947, but Buenos Aires held a colourful requiem. Even the streets were geometrically arranged. He skirted a pair of strutting porteños and their bandoneón accompanist. At points, the eyes of fellow European travellers marked his as though they were Geoffroy’s cats making remote acquaintance through the grasses of the pampas. He savoured the boutiques, smiled at prostitutes and declined the split coconuts with twisted straws. He moved, imperially slim, through the tea-like odour of chewed coca leaves and the fall scent of cigars. The vigour of the city awed him, yet this was siesta, the quiet time.

Cory found a restaurant and ate a grilled local fish called abadejo along with an Argentine wine whose sharpness he countered with a Heineken. Anxious to leave, he rubbed his fingers at the waiter before the beer was empty.

‘Quisiera la cuenta, por favor.’

‘Quedate aqui, amigo. Va a llover.’

Cory craned to see the sky beyond the awning. It was slate-coloured and close. The wind had increased.

‘Then I’ll buy a brolly.’

The waiter shrugged.

The rain caught him within a mile. Soon, Cory’s hat was battered and his jacket crushed and heavy. He ducked beneath the awning of a grocer and stood dripping on the apples and potatoes while the street shivered with water. A thin lady stopped at his elbow. She wiped her fingertips on her apron.

‘Las desgracias nunca vienen solas.’

Cory smiled. ‘¿Tiene un paraguas? Se lo pagare.’

The woman narrowed her eyes. Her features were almost oriental, and Cory wondered if she descended from the indigenous Guaraní, who had walked the pampas before the time of the conquistadores. She clacked through a beaded archway and returned with a cloth umbrella. It was tatty and decorated with dragons. ‘Umbrayla, Englishman.’

Cory did not haggle. He gave her a note and re-entered the rain before she could overcome her surprise and shout her thanks. This was not, he knew, good tradecraft. Here he was, bright as a beacon in the empty streets of Buenos Aires carrying a faux-Chinese parasol. Cory smiled at the memory of his mentor, Blake. How much he would have given to travel this Buenos Airean street in a 1947 downpour—in 1947 by God. This was a golden age for the States. Given time, it would bankrupt the Soviet Union and live out its last days as a patrician superpower.

By Cory’s time, the republic would be in pieces. He well remembered the public debates of his childhood. They had been led by old, white men behind lecterns stamped with the Seal of Georgia. The debates concerned the undoing of a centuries-old compact, made when the pressure to unite the states had been equal to that of continents colliding. By Cory’s teenage years, waters had fouled, cities starved, and blood was bad. Talk was suspended, then sense. A posse hanged Cory’s uncle and blinded his father. His mother was sodomised, so a friend told him. The transitional government moved his family to a camp on the Rio Grande run by charities from Europe and China, but the cholera was there too and Cory was back in Georgia before winter, lying about his age, saddling up for the militia. He became a sharpshooter and fought at Chicago.

Cory angled the umbrella to look for a street sign. This was it. On the opposite side of the plaza, high on a building, a red shirt hung in the rain. Lisandro had been correct. After twenty days without contact, there was a message waiting for him at the dead drop.

~

Five feral cats watched him through the gate of the Cementerio de la Recoleta. The rain had stopped. His umbrella was furled but his suit had not dried. He opened the gate and stepped over water-filled bowls that, on his last visit, had contained kitchen scraps. A tabby drove its forehead into his leg as he surveyed the cemetery. It was almost empty of visitors, occupied two city blocks and was grassless and consciously urban. It looked like a trap.

Minutes later, when he found the tiny mausoleum, he saw that there was a vermillion rose on its lintel. On his last visit, the rose had pointed east. Today it pointed west.

Never the twain shall meet, he thought, removing his hat.

He took the long key from around his neck, pushed it into the lock, twisted, and felt the resistance give. The door shuddered open. Inside, the mausoleum was sparsely appointed. The altar held a dry bouquet of wildflowers, a tallow candle, and a cross. Cory lifted the candle and took the note. He read it voraciously.

…beneath a Jacaranda tree…

…the whetstone…

There was a sound behind him, a swish of rat tail through a puddle, perhaps, but he feared that the discovery of the note had compromised his situational awareness. Someone was standing at the door. Cory struggled to sense the stranger’s electrical signature. It was a skill he had yet to master; the human-shaped ghost was fainter than an afterimage.

Cory reached inside his jacket and removed a cigarette lighter. In a flash of solvent, the note was nothing. He drew his cane from the folds of the umbrella, and, turning,

(Transform, he thought, clear in his intention.)

aimed the gun at the intruder.

‘Amigo, Señor Will-for!’ cried Lisandro.

Chapter Ten

Berlin

Jem woke fully clothed on Saskia’s bed. As the fog of sleep cleared and the events of the day before pulled into focus, she noticed Ego sitting in a patch of streetlight near the edge of the duvet. He blinked a slow greeting and looked towards the window.

‘What’s new, pussycat?’ she asked, following his gaze.

There was nothing to be seen through the window but the corner of an apartment block. She turned back. The cat was gone.

‘Ego?’ She shifted the duvet and checked the floor. ‘Where are you?’

But Ego was staying with a Turkish friend of Saskia on the other side of Berlin. Jem had overheard Saskia making the arrangements.

‘I’m hallucinating cats. Different.’

Jem checked her phone. Now, in the dark, she understood that its vibrating alert had woken her. She rubbed her eyes. The bright egg timer tumbled twice before a message appeared.

Wer sind Sie? Who are you? İsminiz ne? ¿Quiénes son usted?

She replied:

Funny one, Danny. How did you get my number?

She flopped back against the oversized German pillow, but a new text arrived before she closed her eyes.

I am not Danny. I am in your apartment.

Jem remained staring at the words until the display dimmed. She could admit that she was scared. No need for lies; not here. Be honest: she had slept fully dressed because there was something odd about Cory. In fact, hadn’t she come in here intending to give it an hour before leaving unnoticed? She must have fallen asleep.

What to do? Who was sending her messages?

She thumbed out a reply:

I called the police. Who are you?

She waited, drumming the back of the phone. She looked at the door. Was it locked? Yes. Her heart was sprinting.

You are in danger. Meet me at the door to the apartment. Cory is a killer. This is the last message I can send.

The screen faded. Its stamp-sized afterimage floated before her eyes as she glanced around the room, checking shadows.

Was someone really waiting for her downstairs? She imagined a man in the coats, studying the darkness of the upper hallway for a sign that she had emerged. With a suddenness that surprised her, Jem decided it was the policeman she had spotted outside Wolfgang’s apartment. What was the connection between Wolfgang and Cory? Why send her a text message? If the policeman had evidence that Cory was dangerous, why not arrest him?

Yet the message felt genuine. She eased herself from the bed, walked to the door and turned its key. The hallway was gloomy and quiet. She strained to hear something from downstairs, but there was no breath, shoe scuff, or creak. The door to the spare bedroom, through which Cory had retired, was still closed.

She stepped out and rolled each foot heel-to-toe. Her rucksack was near the telephone. The rucksack found her shoulder with a practised swing. Another glance at Cory’s door. At the top of the stairs, she checked for Cory once more, and, as an afterthought, swiped her knickers from the kung fu wooden man.

Midway down the landing, she strained to look at the entrance space. Its coats were bulky enough to conceal her caller, and the scattered shoes might obscure his feet, but she felt certain that she was alone in the flat with Cory.

She took careful seconds over the final steps and let her rucksack slip, easy doing it, to the floor. A riser creaked behind her. She looked up. Nobody there. Just cooling wood. She put her eye to the spy hole and checked the outside hall: empty.

She texted:

I’m here. Where are you?

Jem looked at the door and its array of locks. Her doubt rested on the warning about Cory. He had not convinced her that he was the father of Saskia, but, then, there was not a great deal to know about Saskia, as the woman herself had said on countless occasions over the past month.

Her phone vibrated again.

From behind her came the sound of a footstep. She turned time-lapse slow.

Cory’s white cane had fallen across the lowest riser. Jem blew out her trapped breath and replaced the cane among the umbrellas.

The phone felt wet in her grip.

You’re close. Look for an envelope.

Why is his cane down here when he’s up there?

Faster now, she played the glowing screen of the mobile across the black trainers, a pair of Birkenstocks, her own boots, and found nothing. Then she remembered that, two days before, when she and Saskia had returned from their shopping trip, Saskia had asked her to collect her post from the box in the lobby. Had there actually been any post? Jem could not remember either finding any or giving it to Saskia. She reached now into the outer pocket of her duffle coat and withdrew two items of junk mail. The first announced that Saskia had won a lottery and the second that she had been selected for a limited-offer credit card. The latter was dusty and dented. It had been redirected three times. The sender was ‘Proctor Prospects’ and its exterior read, ‘We deliver same day, next working day, and last week!’ Jem flexed the envelope. There was something stiff inside.

She ripped it open and fanned the contents across the floor. The covering letter was dated December. There was nothing in that, or the enclosed leaflet, or the fake credit card, that could be a message from her mysterious correspondent—but, as she looked, a handwritten message appeared near the foot of the leaflet. It read, ‘Hold on, Saskia—D.’ Jem blinked and looked again. It was gone.

A white light pulsed on the floor and she reached towards it, expecting another text. But the phone was already in her hand. This radiance came instead from the credit card. Bemused, Jem touched it. The card was warm. She looked close and saw the long number slide away. The coloured sections parted. It became a pale tile.

Text scrolled across the centre.

Please attach the earpiece.

‘There is no earpiece,’ she whispered. ‘Who are you? Where are you sending these messages from?’

Lower your voice. Where is Saskia?

‘Stop asking me that. Saskia’s dead.’

The text scrolled away. Absurdly, Jem felt that the card was thinking.

How?

‘Her plane crashed.’

Where did it crash?

‘I’m leaving.’

She rose and tugged on her boots. But before she zipped them, curiosity returned her eyes to the card.

WAIT.

‘What?’

We can help each other.

‘How? Who says I need help?’

I know what you want.

Jem paused. The world bled brightly from the edges of the door and through its spy-hole. Behind her, Cory might have been on the topmost riser, watching. She whispered, ‘Her system?’

I will show you, but not here. It’s not safe.’

Jem stood. She was coiled again, set for release. Berlin was out there and ready to absorb her like an electric current, earthed, escaping to everywhere.

Chapter Eleven

The Angleterre Hotel was not far from Potsdamer Platz. Jem approached it carefully, sizing up the silver roof and the facade brimming with glass. She felt hollowed out, scruffy. It was 3 a.m. and Berlin was an inversion of its daylight self. The living people were dead in their beds. The dead—zombies like her, like Saskia—wandered. As Jem entered the hotel, she expected a random icy bitch to refuse her a room on grounds of hair colour, but she found a tall, smiling concierge called Simon, English as leather on willow, who ushered her through the relevant paperwork while monologuing over the sights of Berlin. He moved the pages with the expertise of a croupier.

On the way to the lift, Jem saw a framed British government poster from World War Two. It read: ‘Keep Calm and Carry On.’

‘Roger,’ she said, as the lift closed, yawning. ‘And out.’

Running for her life was not fun, exactly, but it was doable.

~

Jem was woken by the tones of a xylophone. She opened her eyes and blinked at an unfamiliar window. Through it, she saw morning light. She struggled to configure her place in the world. She was in Germany, not England. This was a hotel, not Saskia’s apartment. Jem scratched at the sleep in her eyes.

The xylophone played again.

‘Jem,’ said a rich, unaccented voice. The strange card was flashing on her night table. ‘You have a phone call. It is your brother. He has phoned four times in the past hour.’

Jem made a wounded sound. What did this thing know about Danny? She slid from the bed, gasping as she put weight on her feet. They felt bruised. She snatched her jeans—Saskia’s jeans—and looked for the silent, buzzing phone in its pockets.

When she answered, she aimed for indifference. ‘How did you get this number?’

‘Jem?’ asked Danny. ‘Thank God.’

‘I asked you how you got this number.’

‘Someone called Self phoned me. It doesn’t matter.’

She looked at the card. ‘Well, they had no right to.’

‘Jem, will you just listen?’

‘Why?’

‘I’m in Berlin. Don’t hang–’

She released the phone’s battery over the wastebasket, dealt the SIM card onto the rug, and threw the gutted husk at the wardrobe, where it marked the long mirror with a sugary star. All the things she had left in England—her failure, the betrayal—were about to come visiting and she had no headspace in which to deal with them. Wolfgang was gone. Saskia was dead. Cory was… Jem didn’t know what he was. There was a perfect storm of shit brewing, and Jem, though talented at finding the eye of such things, did not rate her chances.

She sank to a crouch and considered herself as a reflection in the broken mirror: just a girl in knickers and a T-shirt and stupid, blue hair.

~

When she was cried out, she put the phone back together and took a shower. She brushed her teeth. She dressed. She called for breakfast and watched it arrive on something that resembled a float from the Love Parade. There were bread rolls, sliced meats, mango balls and grapefruit rings. A tumbler of orange juice. German-strength coffee.

‘You there,’ she said, ‘who do you think you are, calling my brother like that?’

‘I am me,’ the card said.

‘No, I mean whose idea was it to call him?’

‘Mine.’

‘Where are you?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I want to know who is controlling this device.’

‘I am.’

‘I understand that. But where are you and who are you?’

‘I am here and my name is Ego.’

Jem frowned. ‘Like the cat. Saskia’s cat is called Ego.’

A pause. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘What do you know, Ego?’

‘Many things.’

She tore a roll and dressed the wound with salami. ‘When I studied computer science, you know what was the most disappointing thing? Artificial intelligence is crap. You can’t make a camera that sees like an eye, or a microphone that hears. Forget conversation. Forget language, full stop. There are no machines on Earth capable of having this conversation with me.’

‘One seems capable.’

‘Exactly my point. Am I the mark for a con?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘What model are you?’

‘I’m an Ego-class assistant, third version.’

‘Processor speed? Memory capacity? Juicy details, and quick.’

‘My processor and memory are not independent. I do not manipulate data in the manner of a serial computing machine.’

‘How, then?’

‘I operate using parallel vectors of qubits.’

‘You’ve out-geeked me there.’

‘Let me summarise. I am from the future.’

She rolled her eyes. The conversation had just jumped the shark. ‘No way are you from the future.’

The bedside phone rang. She picked it up.

‘Way,’ said a tinny voice.

‘Proves nothing.’ She put the phone down. ‘If you’re from the future, when do I die?’

‘I cannot say.’

‘Against the laws of robotics or something?’

‘Coincidentally, my reason for withholding this information does indeed conflict with Asimov’s Second Law: A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law, the First Law being: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. The First Law was later modified–’

‘Jesus, you’re boring. Fancy subjugating mankind with your silicon brethren?’

‘No, thank you.’

Jem spread some honey over her bread and chewed it.

‘All this banter just convinces me that you’re an actor and the card is no more than glorified speaker. OK, you sound like a computer, but I can feel your wit. There’s a humanity behind your words. A dash of pride; a pinch of frustration.’

‘Get me a glass of water.’

Jem swallowed and walked to the bathroom. She could not imagine what Ego would want with the water and expected the task to be a ruse that took her out of the room for a moment. When she returned, she looked at the door and the window. Nothing had changed. Likewise, the breakfast platter was untouched.

‘Here it is. Now what?’

‘Drop me in.’

‘I don’t want to void your warranty this early in our relationship.’

‘I cannot be damaged by the water.’

‘Well, here you go. Consider yourself dumped.’

Jem plopped Ego in the water. Part of her wanted to hear its voice bubbling from the surface. Instead, the card changed colour from white to black. ‘Seen that before,’ she said. ‘Unimpressed.’

The water seemed to shrink. Jem frowned and leaned forward. Its level was dropping. She lifted the glass and passed her hand underneath. No holes. When the glass was empty, she said, ‘I’m prepared to exchange my ‘unimpressed’ for a ‘wow’.’

‘My capacitor is recharged.’

‘You’re water-powered?’

‘Today.’

‘But there was more water in the glass than could fit inside you. Where did it really go?’

‘I now possess the water in a denser form.’

‘Gotcha,’ Jem said. She felt pleased to have spotted a mistake in the reasoning of the card, or whoever was controlling him. ‘That isn’t physically possible. Liquid is the densest form of water. Ice is less dense, and so is steam. Am I right?’

‘Is there a second option?’

Jem tipped her head to one side. ‘Funny.’

There was something frustratingly teacher-pupil about their exchange. She took Ego from the glass and rubbed a thumb along one side. It was dry. Her companion had an attractive, alien quality. She was conscious that it reminded her of Saskia.

‘Ego, what can you actually do for me that doesn’t involve posing as a credit card, infiltrating envelopes, and so forth?’

‘I can advise on a safe location for you to meet Danny. He will help us find Saskia.’

Jem was not prepared to hear her brother’s name. It had an unpleasant resonance, like a rhyme. The fun left her.

‘Why would we—I—do that?’

‘Saskia’s system never leaves her person. You want it, don’t you?’

She thought of the hipster jeans she had persuaded Saskia to buy. They would be charred now, torn, lost in a wasteland of wreckage.

‘What about Cory?’

‘Given that his attempt at social engineering has failed, he will be occupied with gaining entry to the secure room in Saskia’s apartment.’

‘Social engineering? You mean me?’

‘Yes.’

She walked to the window and ate the rest of her breakfast in silence.

Chapter Twelve

The Fernsehturm, Berlin’s TV and radio tower, rose from Alexanderplatz to a height that seemed unsupportable given its thin spire. The pavilion at the base always reminded Jem of those jagged bubbles in comics that appear when the hero punches the baddie. Pow! Up goes the tower. Almost at the top was a glittering mirror ball. Very disco. Inside the ball was an observation deck and restaurant. Above it was a thick ring of antennas and, higher still, a long shaft coloured red and white like a barber’s pole. Long ago, Danny had told her what the colours meant; what barbers had once done to people.

For a while, she waited on Gontardstrasse beneath one of the huge trees and watched people entering and leaving Alexanderplatz Station. It was cold. She had bought a scarf on the way and its edges flicked now and then as if shooing something off her shoulder. Jem shrugged inside her duffle coat. There were too many people, trams, and taxis. If someone was following her—someone like Cory—she might never know.

She approached the tower and entered the glass-walled pavilion. She added herself to the tourists queueing for the lifts. The atrium was uninspiring. It felt like a departure lounge to nowhere. That, and the connecting thought to aeroplanes, put more wood on the fire of her anxiety. Jem hugged herself. The truth of it was that Danny scared her more than Cory, more than the police, more than the half-heard revs-up, revs-down of failing jet engines on an aeroplane going down, down, down. There were so many words between her and her twin brother that needed to be unsaid. Jem needed a reversal, the mother of all undo buttons.

~

‘You see, there’s an anxiety in the background.’

The therapist has smelled something. Her blood is up.

‘Yes?’

The blood going down. The TV tower. Danny, what did the barbers do once upon a time?

‘It’s like the hiss of a TV tuned to a dead channel.’

Oh, how analogue. (TVs don’t do that anymore. No tuning. No snow. Those snows are gone.)

The therapist leans forward. Her MiniDisc recorder spins, swallowing their words byte by byte.

‘This hiss actually comes from the music box, doesn’t it?’

Jem looks at her. The therapist thinks she has made a discovery. There, in her eye: the mote of triumph. The self-congratulation and validation. I am a good therapist. Breathe. I am a good therapist.

Jem will hear that sentence one more time—I am a good therapist—when she confronts the woman on her doorstep, months after this conversation. ‘Is this real? Did I misremember what we said?’

‘How did you know about the music box?’

The therapist smiles. Her baggy, friendly face is close to Jem’s. Anything that Jem says will now be added to that growing edifice of certainty.

The MiniDisc recorder spins. The blood spirals down.

‘You mentioned the music box yesterday, when you were under. Do you remember the tune?’

The tune.

Ich ruf zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ.

~

Danny was waiting for her on the observation deck of the tower, unmistakable against the ashy sky. He was taller and broader than most—rowing, rugby—and dressed as if he was new money, which he was. His eyes were narrowed by habit and darkened by his pronounced brow. His blonde hair was thinning. He kept it short. As he noticed Jem and moved towards her, his long coat billowed. She felt a flush of privilege and fear as though he were a hawk coming to her arm. His swoop ended in an embrace. She pressed her cheek to his chest. He was squeezing too hard, but no less than she deserved.

‘Did you think I’d died in the crash?’ she asked.

‘I never would have believed it,’ he said. He took her chin and guided her face to his. There were tears in his eyes. ‘I’m here to rescue you, of course.’

‘How very you.’

She stepped back but kept a grip on his coat. She looked left and right. Danny followed her eyes each time. He smiled with half of his mouth.

‘If it’s legal trouble, I’m your lawyer.’

‘Family discount?’

‘Nice try.’

~

Jem walked alone to the edge of the deck. It was rotating perceptibly. A rail protected the slanted glass panels. She looked for St Mary’s Church and the Warenhaus. Traffic leaked between buildings. At her elbow, an English boy in a Manchester United T-shirt listened to his father tell the story of a wall that once cut Berlin in two.

‘Here,’ said her brother. ‘Without milk.’

Jem took the coffee. She imagined the cup falling through the glass and down the tower.

‘How many sugars did you put in this?’

‘Two. Looks cold down there.’

She sipped. ‘The wind comes from Russia today. It was on the radio.’

‘So you learned German.’

‘Don’t ask me to translate Nietzsche, but I’m a black belt in fruit and vegetables.’

‘Black belt, she says.’

Jem laughed, but felt the next throwaway remark die inside her. This conversation was a tipping point. Here was Danny. She only had to push and the baggage of memory would totter over this cliff and drop away, forever out of mind. Danny was here because he did not want to lose her again. So be it. She could fuse her half with his. Return to England in disgrace.

‘Jem, I brought you a pressie.’

‘Let me say something first.’

‘Wait. This is important.’ He took a doll from one of the deep pockets in his coat. It was six inches tall and wooden. It wore a Tyrollean hat. Jem remembered deciding, as a twelve-year-old girl, that all Germans wore hats like that. Tucked into its crimson band was a feather whose highlights had been brushed on by an old doll-maker in Bremen. ‘Hänsel,’ her father had said. ‘To rhyme with ‘pencil’.’ The doll still had its ambiguous expression.

‘Poor Hänsel. What happened to Gretel?’

‘They were separated, I suppose. I found Hänsel on eBay. He’s a collector’s item.’

In her little sister voice, she said, ‘But is he our Hänsel?’

Danny lay the doll across her palm. She inspected the elbows, the knees, and the head. Hänsel’s cheeks were expertly freckled. His eyes, however, were dead.

‘I know what you’re looking for,’ Danny said.

‘There are no holes.’

‘There were never any holes,’ he said. ‘There were never any strings.’

The half-remembered notes of a music box picked through the tower. The turning tower.

Ich ruf zu Dir.

I call to thee.

‘Danny, how can you even look at me?’

She had never told her brother, face to face, that she loved him. Not once. But, at this realisation, her eyes stopped on something that reset her thoughts.

~

A man stood at the vanishing point of the curving deck. He wore a black leather jacket, buttoned, and an English flat cap, reversed. His hips were slanted and his eyes easy. His grin was too broad; it underscored his awkwardness. Even at this distance, Jem could see the bruise beneath his right eye, and it reminded her of the steady right hand of Saskia Brandt. What was he doing here? She had last seen him half-senseless against a pew in the Trinity Church. A man propped up by his desperation. He began to walk towards them.

She whispered, ‘It’s Wolfgang.’

‘Your friend from uni?’

Wolfgang no longer seemed like the player who could cut coke with any number of household chemicals when the con work dried up. His eyes were bloodshot. On top of everything, thought Jem, he was probably going cold turkey. The three of them made a strange triangle. The twins kept their backs to the panorama while Wolfgang, his face cooled by the light, smiled with a patience that bordered on British.

‘This is Danny,’ she said.

Wolfgang shook his hand. ‘Jem talks about you all the time. Big Danny.’

‘Hello, Wolfgang. Guyliner? You shouldn’t have.’

The German chuckled, touching a hand to his bruise and said nothing more. The expectation shifted to Jem, but she could not voice her questions for Wolfgang without presenting a version of herself that she wanted to withhold from her brother. She sipped her coffee and tried to read Wolfgang’s demanding eyes. The silence was interrupted by her vibrating phone, number withheld. She mumbled an apology and took the call.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello, Jem,’ said Ego. ‘The person who has just joined you is wearing a device that transmits your conversation by radio.’

She blinked.

‘What?’

‘The man is wearing a ‘wire’. He is ‘bugged’.’

‘OK, OK.’

‘Say ‘who’.’

Jem switched ears and looked at the horizon. ‘Who?’

‘I would advise you and your brother to leave immediately. Now say, ‘Sorry, wrong number’.’

‘Sorry. Wrong number.’

Ego hung up. There was no dialling tone. Just emptiness. She kept the phone to her ear and tried to assemble a plan, but she was panicking. Wolfgang must have been arrested in the Trinity Church. And here he was, wearing different clothes. So the police had let him go back to the apartment to change. Had that been why she’d found the police officer waiting outside the apartment? It had to be one of those plea-bargain things. But what had Wolfgang offered the police? Saskia? Jem?

She looked at Danny. If she tried to leave the tower with him, he would be incriminated. She didn’t know what to do. She said, ‘He’s wearing a wire.’

‘A wire?’ Danny raised his eyebrows and turned to look, down, on Wolfgang.

The hustler gunned his charm. He laughed. ‘Clever girl. I told him it wouldn’t work. You’re as smooth as your friend Saskia, aren’t you?’

‘Who?’

‘Tease,’ he shot back. His apparent good humour only emphasised his malice. ‘The police talked to you outside my apartment yesterday. They know about Saskia, the meeting at the church, and the officer she assaulted. They know that she tried to frame me. There’s nothing they don’t know. She bought your ticket to Milan, for Christ’s sake.’

Danny put two fingers on Wolfgang’s collarbone. ‘Step back from my sister.’

‘What do you want me to say?’ asked Jem.

Wolfgang looked beyond them. ‘Scheisse,’ he hissed. He frowned into the turning crowd. Jem followed his eye until she saw the smartly-dressed police officer who had stood in the rain outside Wolfgang’s apartment. He had one arm around a telescope, and it flopped skyward as he forged towards them, craning around the children and prams, skirting the hooked teenage couples, apologising to the adults.

Jem’s phone vibrated. It was a text message from Ego.

We’ve been found. I’m under attack. Leave immediately.

Before Jem could sort her thoughts—found by whom? The police? How could Ego be under attack when he was in her purse?—the officer gripped her upper arm. She yelped and the phone tumbled to the floor. ‘You,’ he said, ‘are under–’

Danny had put his hip into the punch. It landed between the policeman’s jaw and his ear. He fell against Jem. In the bubble of interest that spread from the punch to the crowd, she remembered Saskia turning in the night wind, reaching for her.

‘Take my hand.’

The policeman struggled upright. He did not release his grip on her and, for a moment, the two stood like dancers on the brink of a tango. His glasses were designer, she noted. He was furious.

‘You’re not called Nancy Drew.’

‘And?’

‘Both of you are under arrest.’

‘Good luck with that,’ said Danny. ‘You tried to attack my sister.’

‘I am an officer of the police.’

‘How the fuck should we know?’

The man twisted his neck. The cartilage clicked. He withdrew a wallet and flapped it open. ‘Karel Duczyński, Inspector, Bundeskriminalamt – the Federal Criminal Police Office.’

‘Your mother must be very proud. I’m Danny. This is Jem.’

Jem’s phone rang again. She looked at the inspector, who nodded.

‘Hello?’ she said.

‘Hello, Jem.’ It was Cory. ‘Good location for a meeting. Plenty of radio interference, and people.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I see you’ve met the inspector.’

Jem cupped the handset and said to Duczyński, ‘He can see us. The man you should really arrest.’

‘Who?’ He looked at her with suspicion, but there was clearly something truthful in her expression—fear, perhaps—and she was relieved when he opened the holster of his sidearm.

She turned back to the phone and said, ‘What now?’

‘I don’t know where you found an Ego-class computer, but I want you to put it on the observation deck and leave. It will have the information I want. Forget about me and Saskia. Do you understand?’

‘Perfectly.’

As she cut the call, the three men looked at her with expectant expressions, but she ignored them, looking vainly for Cory in the crowd.

‘Well?’ asked Danny.

Jem’s phone buzzed again. She looked down at it. Another text message from Ego.

I’ve thought of something.

Abruptly, a siren split the air and sprinklers opened, dropping icy water on all. Some people hunched and swore. Others shouted urgent questions about fire exits at the barman, who shouted back and waved his arms towards the stairwells. Two waiters hurried down from the restaurant and directed people into lines. Meanwhile, the water continued to fall from the sprinklers with such energy that it seemed to reflect from the floor.

Jem shaded her eyes and tried to take a breath without swallowing water. Her focus remained on the faces in the crowd. Which one was Cory? Was he even here? Intuitively, she was certain that he had been on the observation deck when he made the phone call.

‘We should go,’ shouted the inspector.

‘Agreed,’ Danny called back.

Someone took Jem by the arm, but she was not sure who. All her attention was on the left archway. Cory was standing there, easy on his cane, wearing a light-grey suit and expression whose subtleties, at this distance, Jem could not make out.

‘What are you waiting for, Jem?’ said Danny. ‘Move.’

‘It’s him.’

‘What?’ said the inspector, leaning toward her.

Jem said her next words quietly: ‘I think he’s going to kill us.’ There was no panic in her tone; she had moved beyond it. Perhaps it was this sobriety that truly spoke to the inspector. He raised his gun—left hand cupping the butt, right hand gripping the handle—and his words

‘Polizei!’

barked out

‘Keine Bewegung!’

while the slow, bulky shape of Danny moved towards her—swooping like the hawk coming to her arm. And equal slowness characterised Cory’s face as he frowned.

Screaming.

Screaming from those people in the path of the inspector’s gun. Bodies twisted aside. Fathers cuffed their sons away and reached out for pushchairs. Children looked on with open mouths. Arms were flung protectively over heads. Crouching.

Cory was raising his white cane. Slowly. Slowly.

‘Get her out of here!’ shouted the inspector.

Danny collided with her and–

(But it was not a cane. It was a gun. A gun the colour of old marble.)

–Danny and Jem tumbled down, down.

Something puffed from the nozzle of Cory’s gun and at the same time the air above her head split with a sharp, hot flash. The inspector had fired.

~

Her nightmarishly slowed perception ended as Jem struck the floor and Danny rolled across her. Suddenly, she was winded, alive, and deafened. Jem saw the queues break apart as people surged into the stairwells. Some were crushed. Still the water came down and Jem brushed her slick hair aside to see what had happened to Cory. Before she could stand, she was lifted bodily towards the open lift.

‘Danny, let go of me!’

Lifts were not meant to work during a fire—this she knew—but when Danny punched the panel, the doors closed on her and she dropped, alone, filling the silence with calls for her brother.

A few metres from the ground, her phone rang.

‘Ego? Ego?’

‘Turn right when you leave the lift, Jem, and don’t look back. Hurry now.’

~

Inspector Duczyński could not move anything other than his eyes, which slid around uselessly, failing to focus in the falling water. His shoulder burned with the most terrific pain he could remember. Did I get him? I think I got him. He pressed down on thoughts of failure and bad luck. He redrew his next decision draft upon draft. Reach for his radio. No, turn his head. No, stanch the bleeding.

I think I got him.

God, my shoulder.

Maybe I killed him.

He spat out the water that had collected in his mouth.

Move, Duczyński. Now.

Someone seized his chest.

‘Come on.’

It was Jem’s brother, Danny.

‘Danny?’

‘Move.’

The ceiling passed through his vision as though he were flying. Fountains of water chilled him. ‘Ist er tot?’

‘Shut up. I think you got him, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Habe… habe ich unseren Mann erschossen?’

The floor slid beneath his back, tugging on his belt.

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. For fuck’s sake hold on. We’re almost at the lift.’

A second man began to shout—an official?—but was cut off by Danny.

‘Get out of my way. I’m serious. He’s injured and we’re using the lift. No question.’

Duczyński thought about the thousands who could see the TV tower from their apartment, café, or aeroplane. He considered their indifference. The rain battered his knuckles and warped his vision through his glasses.

‘Notarzt zum Fernsehturm!’ he shouted, sure that his police radio was at his mouth, and this was his last chance. ‘Zwei Männer wurden angeschossen!’

‘Easy, tiger. You’ll get a medal. Think how proud your mother will be.’

Blackness, marked by red numbers counting down.

~

To the Ghost, the four words were written in fire across the darkness:

Emergency neurotransmitter augmentation successful.

He was immobilised. No breath passed his lips. The message disappeared. Then:

I-Core has been forced to restart in safe mode. Full restart in one minute.

No, thought the Ghost. Restart basic…

He died.

Then sensation grew again from his fingertips: the factor had slid home to his hand, adding enough resources to raise him above the threshold of consciousness.

Restart now and establish basic life support, he thought.

Words only he could see scored his vision.

Welcome to Intelligent Core (I-Core™) BIOS v7.01

Water assaulted his face. There would be time to think over the failures that had led to the hot metal in his lung. Where in hell had that police officer come from? His overclocked nerves had passed notice of the bullet before it had met his flesh, but not soon enough for him to twist aside. A lucky shot. Or a good shot.

Warning: Brachiocephalic artery has lost integrity.

Warning: Systolic pressure critical.

Warning: Sinus rhythm and QRS complexes abnormal.

Warning: Lactic acidosis detected.

I-Core has begun the repair of Cory, R. 6457-1112-1111 and will remain in autonomous mode until the repair is complete. Nanochondrical base functions will not be affected. Stand by, please.

Cory’s fight to stay conscious brought back memories of swimming at his grandfather’s fishery, not far from Atlanta. He had visited the lake with his wife Catherine not two months after their wedding. At noon, they had dived down, holding hands, competing to reach the lake bed. It surprised neither of them that Cory, the soldier, had reached it first. He put a full palm to the gravel then he kicked himself upwards, twisting to see the naked silhouette of Catherine already halfway to the surface, having abandoned the attempt. Cory remembered rising towards her. The chilly strata were topped by warmer draughts; all the while a sleepy panic marked the time before he could take a life-saving breath.

Chapter Thirteen

August, 1947, Buenos Aires

As Cory crossed the city, he thought about the message he had found in the mausoleum. It had confirmed a rendezvous. His twenty-day wait was over. He could avoid the traffic-choked streets by taking el subte, the underground, but he wanted time to think, and the narrow, crowded pavements answered wonderfully in this regard. They forced him to drift, to slow. In truth, the underground held a certain anxiety for him. It was crowded and airless. The last time he had used the service, there had been a blind man moving through the cramped tranvía subterráneo selling shirt stiffeners. The passengers had jostled him, complaining in that Buenos Airean manner about their rights and the many things they had to talk about without interruption from this man. So Cory walked the streets and sometimes thought about the man, and his own father, just as he now thought about the message in the mausoleum. The streets were wet with the recent rain and smelled of tar and petrol.

He asked himself why Jennifer would take the risk of a rendezvous. There were surer methods of communication. She could send him a coded telegram or letter. The energy and risk of injecting a human through more than one hundred years of time were considerable.

However, he looked forward to the meeting. He had a growing sense that the people he met, even little Lisandro, were dancing to a tune that only he could hear. Cory, the vagabundeo, was wandering through a monument to the past perfect: past completed. These people had already lived and died. He convinced himself that these thoughts were intellectual musings in the style of a reductio ad absurdum. He would not voice them to Jennifer when he met her at the prearranged time. The notion sounded too much like Jackson, Cory’s predecessor, who had cracked under the strain of time travel. For Jackson, the zombies were too much. Not Cory. He would cope.

Cory reached the art deco apartment block ten minutes early. Following a reconnoitre, he waited outside a hotel. Some builders were observing the midday ritual of a street-side barbecue. Cory declined the offered meat and moved along to an intersection. Being an intersection, it was thronging with people. Two men argued about Peron and five-year plans; their discussion was punctuated by the sudden intuition and non sequitur of enthusiastic but inexpert debaters. Behind them, three ladies managing fans declared them stupid. A young woman in light, black petticoats offered Cory a flower from her stall, but he shook his head, smiling. Then he looked at his watch. It was time.

He approached the gated hallway of the apartments. Two elderly porteros porteños were sweeping the floor beyond the gate. They looked up at Cory but did not let him in. He pressed the buzzer for the second of the apartments. A minute passed. The taller of the porteños, who was looking at Cory, stopped sweeping and wiped his mouth with the edge of his neck cloth. When the gate unlocked itself, Cory stepped back. It was the first electric entry system he had seen in Buenos Aires. He passed through, whistling, and raised his hat to the sweepers. They frowned and moved into the shadows on either side of the hallway. Cory’s expensive shoes and cane reflected in the polished wooden floor.

He found Jennifer on a bench in the centre of the courtyard. There was a jacaranda tree between the bench and the white wall. Beneath the black branches and purple-blue corollas, Jennifer sat like an arachnid, shaded and still. Her outfit was black. She wore a wide-brimmed hat, a black top—anachronistically tight—with blooming cuffs. Her skirt was ankle-length. A veil darkened and blurred her face. It was, however, the bracelet on her right wrist that drew most of Cory’s attention. With that device Jennifer could conjure a wormhole on demand. It permitted her a direct connection with the future. This connection was denied to Cory, who had no rank for such a privilege. His communications were limited to cryptic announcements in the classified advertisements of newspapers; to be read, if at all, by automated agents that Jennifer had assured him would scour the archives.

As Cory approached the bench, he offered his hand. She ignored it.

‘I think–’ he began.

‘You’re the monkey,’ the woman replied, ‘and I’m the organ grinder. So stop thinking. Sit down and code in.’

Cory sat. The bench was wet from the recent rain.

It was 1st August, 1947. That meant he had to code in with a fragment of poetry.

Where is Echo, beheld of no man, only heard on river and mere? he thought.

The answer came as a second thought, not his: But where are the snows of yesteryear?

‘So,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Do you understand the seriousness of what you did, Cory?’ she said. Only her lips moved. ‘The calculations require a precise mass. Precise. You almost destroyed the bridge. Dumb luck kept your atoms together.’

Cory shook his head. What the hell was she talking about? He had wanted to tell her that she was the first real person he had met in months. He had wanted conversation.

‘Never mind that it weighs next to nothing,’ she said, half to herself. ‘The further back you go, the more sensitive the insertion becomes to initial conditions. It took a whole bloody day to reset.’

‘You’ve gotten it wrong,’ Cory said, smiling crookedly. He still hoped the conversation could be salvaged. He needed, he supposed, her humanity. ‘I’m meant to act British, you’re meant to act American.’

‘Don’t question my patriotism,’ she said. ‘Hand it over.’

‘What?’

She snapped her fingers. ‘The ring.’

Cory stared at her until the moment grew long enough for her head to turn, cold and slow, towards him. Until those eyes were fully on his, he had not believed that she could be serious.

‘Can’t I keep it? The thing’s travelled with me already. It represents my promise.’

‘Sweetheart, don’t try to be profound. Not in that hat.’

He sighed and gave her the ring. She placed it in her small handbag and relaxed somewhat, letting her back curve against the slats of the bench. She took a long breath and looked at him as though this action—the handing over of the ring—represented a second beginning. She even smiled. Cory did not smile back.

‘Cory, my Cory. So young and yet so serious.’

He looked at the handbag. ‘We should be less candid with proper names.’

‘Ever played that child’s game with the paper cups and string? That’s the game they play in 1947, only they call it the telephone. Don’t let the sunshine fool you. This is the fucking dark ages.’ She lifted her head and, as the hat’s penumbra moved up, Cory saw the paleness there in her face and the unfamiliar deltas that had formed at the corners of her eyes and, lower, sour grooves drooping from her lips.

‘When are you from?’ he asked.

‘It’s been a few days since you crossed the bridge. Why, do I look older?’

By years.

‘No.’

‘Liar,’ she said, but her flippancy betrayed a certain self-consciousness. ‘Now, how about a report? Speak, don’t think.’

Cory looked around the courtyard. Its walls were conspicuously pink in homage to the palace where Peron conducted the orchestra of government. The colour fused the warring red and white of Argentina’s past, a blend as silly as raspberry ripple ice-cream, as incongruous as the woman on the bench: fifty-five kilogrammes of matter that did not belong to this time any more than Cory himself.

‘Eventually,’ he said, packing unspoken adventures into that word, ‘I traced the item.’

‘How?’

‘In Durban, I picked up the Portuguese link from the daughter of Rodenbach.’ Cory removed his hat and placed it on his lap. ‘I flew into Lisbon a week later but the offices were closed. Turns out two men—matching the descriptions of the target and the underwriter—had hired a local airman to fly them to London via Paris two hours before I showed. I hired the airman’s partner to take me to London in their spare plane. Two days later, I discovered that the target had flown to Buenos Aires. He used his own name.’

‘Harkes?’

Patrick Harkes. Cory wondered what it meant to Jennifer when she spoke the name of the man who had killed—who would kill—her father. There was no change in her expression.

‘Why would Harkes travel to London when his business is here? Why not fly direct to Buenos Aires?’

‘Perhaps his first instinct was to escape me, London being the most convenient route.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Have the archivists unearthed anything?’ he asked.

‘The evidence trail stops in South Africa, as you thought.’ She glanced at him. ‘Don’t flatter yourself with a sense of accomplishment. If Harkes used his own name, he must be confident in his escape plan. You can’t let the Cullinan vanish with him. Is that clear?’

‘I was briefed, ma’am.’

‘Not well enough.’

‘Expatiate.’

‘You let the boy follow you to the cemetery. He compromised the dead-drop.’

Cory did not know what to say. There was embarrassment, yes, at this failure of tradecraft. But he had contained the situation. He wanted Jennifer to know that he had exercised his professional judgement. He closed his mouth and tried to relax. He was, he realised, crushing his hat. He relaxed his grip and smoothed the rim.

‘If you gave me more information about this time,’ he said, ‘I’d be in a better position to operate effectively. I need day-to-day intelligence on organised crime, developing black market routes, safe houses, and full access to the news media archive.’

‘Oh, no particulars, Cory,’ she said. Her voice had assumed a didactic tone. This annoyed Cory. She had no right to consider herself the equal of his instructor, Blake. ‘You only need generalities. Drifts. Particulars give you information log-jam. You know what happened to your predecessor.’

‘I can handle it. Jackson had psychological problems.’

‘And you are immune? No stirrings of madness yet, Cory?’

‘When I stop asking to come home to my wife, you’ll know I’m mad.’

‘No. It’ll prove you’re sane, trying to act mad to escape an insane situation.’

‘Catch-22?’

Jennifer tipped her head to one side. ‘Let me tell you something. Heller wanted to call the book Catch-18, but another author was about to release a war novel called Mila 18. So he changed it to Catch-22.’

‘I didn’t know you read novels.’

‘Why would I? Dad told me.’

‘What’s the moral?’

‘Catch-22 means something, Catch-18 means nothing. All because of an accident. Things start random, then they… congeal.’

‘In that case,’ said Cory, ‘things cannot be random to start with—that randomness is only the solidified product of the apparent randomness before.’

‘Result?’

‘It’s randomness all the way down.’

The smile again: tutorish, distant.

‘You scared yet, Cory?’

‘Always.’

‘So you’re sane for now.’

‘Jackson was the first time traveller,’ Cory said, ‘and we learned from his mistakes.’

‘You’re wrong. Jackson wasn’t the first.’

Cory raised his eyebrows. There was a brotherly grin on his lips. It told her that he wasn’t about to fall for the joke. But Jennifer nodded slowly.

‘Jackson was the third,’ she said. ‘The first didn’t survive the trip. The second did more than survive.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The second washed up in 2003. Marooned. But she has a part to play yet. We have evidence that she’ll be alive in the year 2023, aged forty or so.’

Cory knew that he resented the bump from second place to fourth. He had gone from being a Buzz Aldrin to… whoever was fourth on the moon. ‘At least she has a telecommunications network to interact with. What have I got? Paper cups and strings.’ Cory waited for his angry thoughts, like winds, to blow themselves out. Still waiting, he changed the subject to Lisandro. ‘Forget the boy. He’s nothing to do with us. I took him back to his mother’s apartment.’

‘You always were an idiot.’

‘What now?’

‘Don’t come the southern farm-boy with me.’ She opened her handbag and produced a rolled newspaper. It was the Buenos Aires Herald. ‘This is tomorrow’s newspaper. Let me show you what the Lady Saint Maria has in store for Lisandro. Here.’ She passed it to him. ‘Read it out loud.’

Cory looked at the newspaper and gasped. He pictured himself astride a horse—a trick inherited from Blake at Base Albany—and reined his heart to a trot. He became stony and controlled.

STREET BOY BUTCHERED, ENGLISHMAN SUSPECTED

‘I have to kill him?’

‘That dead drop has other functions. If Lisandro tells anyone about it, several operations will be compromised. He has to go.’

‘This changes things. They’ll be looking for me. I need a new identity.’

‘Of course you will. Ready?’

In their mental connection was a touch of the numinous. It rendered quaint the narrowband contact of fingers, or his lips on hers, or the first slide of intercourse. Cory knew the mundanities: a wireless handshake between his ichor and that of Jennifer; a wide-band burst of procedural and episodic memory; a fake personality violating the closed universe of his mind. It hurt.

Slowly, she eased out of him.

The new identity was that of a German flying ace who, Cory was amused to learn, had never existed beyond the sensational pamphlets of a junior clerk at the State Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. The Nazi phantom was known as Wittenbacher, der Vitvenmacher. Wittenbacher the widow-maker. Cory felt the man like a corpse laid out in the parlour of his mind.

She turned his chin with a fingertip. Her eyes, at last, were soft. ‘Cory, the boy has always been dead. He was dead before he was born and he was dead after he died. His life is just a blip on a line: a two-dimensional irregularity on the forever one-dimensional. Here’s the secret: That blip gets smaller when you zoom out.’

‘You want me to think like that?’

‘I want you to face the fact that you’re going to kill him.’

‘You sound like Jackson.’

Quietly, she said, ‘My poor, dumb Charlie. Your body made the small step, but your mind couldn’t make the giant leap.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘What’s new, soldier?’

Chapter Fourteen

Berlin

Cory stumbled against some bins. It hurt to breathe. He pawed at the lids. Locked. He had spent the day asleep beneath a disused bandstand not far from the TV tower. Automated systems in his immortal blood were weaving new tissue, conjuring life, but it would not be enough.

‘Move it, Georgia,’ he growled, using the nickname given to him by his old Gunnery Sergeant. The rain drummed his shoulders. ‘Elbows and assholes.’

Another step. The Ghost felt old beyond his eighty-eight years. The very clockwork at the centre of his cells had unwound. He was far beyond the help of contemporary medicine.

He followed a green line visible to him alone. One hand kept him steady against the closed shopfronts. His feet sucked at the standing water. Some passersby slowed with horror. Others saw nothing. For them, he had taken on the invisibility of a man to look through. There was a litter bin on the corner. Cory found half a kebab in it and took two bites.

The green line went on. The ground swayed and the Ghost recalled a young fisherman, Gomez, who had taken him out on a moonless Christmas Eve in 1949. The jewelled string of Montevideo had lain behind them. As Gomez and Cory dealt the nets, they stopped in wonder at the glowing green channel that crossed the ocean ahead of them. It was clear to Cory that this was phosphorescent algae churned up by the screws of the US Navy frigate that had cut through the bay an hour before, but Gomez was spooked by the colour. The sea’s dead are marching, he said, crossing himself. He would not listen to the reassurances of Cory. They gathered the nets and went home. Cory left South America before the next winter.

One hundred metres on, the Ghost took a right turn. This, he knew, was the last turn he could take on this night. His muscles burned with the acids of prolonged labour. His eyelids trembled. He walked down an alley and fell against a painted wooden door. A sign read, Jesus hört dir zu. It flickered in his eye: his bodily repairs were taking priority over the translation. Then the meaning broke through: Speak and Jesus will listen.

Help me, he thought.

He heard a telephone ringing far away.

Then there was a voice his head: Church of St Mary, Father David Hildegaard speaking.

Cory already knew much about Father Hildegaard. He did not how he knew; but this man could heal him.

I am at your door, thought Cory. I need a Samaritan.

My friend, Hildegaard replied, it is late.

Cory knew that Father Hildegaard had run a prison-visiting society in Copenhagen, under whose auspices he had raped young men.

Father, please.

He heard footsteps on the tiled floor beyond the door, the click of a light, and the clatters of locks being undone. The door swung inwards. The young priest wore a dark cassock, which soon gathered sequins of rain. A cordless phone was pressed to his ear.

Cory said, ‘Listen,’ and reached out.

Father Hildegaard’s breath blew white and a line of blood ran from his nose. He stood as though immobilised with pain. Cory sighed. He felt his health return like youth and purpose.

~

Inspector Duczyński turned from his balcony and thought of the people he knew well—a civil servant, an artist, a singer, the young man in the apartment above who was, for his own reasons, in love with him—and wished them fairer fortunes. He looked at his empty hand and decided that it needed a drink. Perhaps Florian, his would-be amore in the apartment above, would care to join him. Duczyński’s grin was sickly. His sling was tight and his fingers had pins and needles.

He stepped through his balcony door and shut it. The rain sound muted. Instead of a drink, he returned from the kitchen with a probiotic yogurt and a pill box. He sat in the dark. The rain drew his thoughts once more. He raised his yogurt.

‘Cheers.’

Then he took the phone. It felt light and cheap next to his left ear. It was unusual for him to use the landline, but his mobile phone had disappeared during the day. Perhaps someone at the hospital had stolen it. In the morning, he would report it missing.

‘Who is it?’ asked his mother.

‘It’s Karel.’

‘Who?’

He sighed. ‘Mama, I was shot today. In the shoulder. I’ll be fine, but I lost a suspect. I’m suspended and it’s probably the end of my career.’

He told her everything. In the gaps between his words, he pictured an aeroplane carrying Jem, his only lead, back to England. Her face was pressed against a window. Duczyński’s Polish was slow, while his mother’s had flourished with age. When he cut the call, he noticed an unread answerphone message from a withheld number. He hit ‘play’.

‘Inspector, this is Danny Shaw. How’s the shoulder? I think we can help each other. My sister has done this before—run off, I mean—and I need to find her. I know where she’s going. What I really don’t need is to be arrested. If this sounds like something you can work with, call me back. You know the number, don’t you?’

Duczyński smiled. He punched the number of his mobile into the telephone. After one ring, an English man answered.

‘Hello, Inspector. It’s Danny Shaw.’

‘Good evening. I would like to have my phone back.’

‘Of course you would.’

‘I wish to thank you for saving my life.’

‘You’re welcome. I should apologise for giving you the slip.’

~

After the call, Duczyński went to a cardboard box and took out the Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms. He read:

To escape from someone who is with you, following you, or watching you. Example: ‘There was a man following me when I left the office, but I gave him the slip on the crowded main street.’

Duczyński opened the pill box. Inside was the white marble of unknown substance that the emergency doctor had cut from his shoulder. He watched it roll. It looked like no bullet he had ever seen. Then he placed it in the pocket of his long, black coat, laid the coat around his shoulders like a cloak, and left his apartment.

~

Several hours later, as the red digits of the cooker clock approached midnight, the apartment door opened. Danny struck the light switch and marched Duczyński to the bedroom as he had conducted him from the club: steadily and without pause. Duczyński fell back upon his bed. Danny adjusted the sling to make sure his arm was comfortable.

‘How’s the injury?’

‘I can’t help you with your sister, Mr Shaw.’

‘Yes, you said.’

‘It breaks too may regulations. Technically, I should arrest you.’ A pause. Then, sleepily: ‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m opening the bloody window. Your bedroom stinks. It’s the bachelor life for you, isn’t it?’

‘No. It’s too cold.’

‘Really.’

Danny patted Karel’s chest. The man was already snoring.

In the kitchenette, Danny rinsed the dust from an apple and walked into the living room, where he had half a mind to catch up on the investigation into the air-crash in Bavaria. But Duczyński had no television. The apartment was undecorated and almost empty. It looked like the inspector had moved in the previous week.

He moved to the balcony and ate the fruit as he considered the problem of Jem. A few minutes later, he found a pen and paper. He wrote on the reverse of a receipt:

Fine, Karel. I’ll look for her without your help. See you around, Danny.

He put the receipt on the telephone and opened the apartment door. He stopped on the threshold. The hallway was black and empty. Finding a hotel at this time of night would not be fun.

‘Fuck it.’

He closed the door and stole one of the pillows from Karel’s bed. On the rug in the living room, parallel to the coffee table, he stretched out. The pillow was feathered and double the English size, but he made himself comfortable enough. His back ached like it used to in the days when he sculled. The bachelor life alright.

Chapter Fifteen

In the Zoologischer Garten underground station, Jem stopped as she noticed two uniformed police officers twenty feet away from her. They were eating curried sausages near an information desk. She hid behind a postcard carousel, thinking, Don’t be so obvious… don’t be so… so fucking Clouseau. She felt the strain of predation, but its pressure could be transferred: it was potential energy, like that of a coiled spring, and when released she would launch and lose them all. Her eyes hurried over the options as they were served on the departure board. Three hours to Hamburg, door to the North Sea. Four hours to Cologne, the Rhineland city she had visited with her school as a teenager. Four hours to Frankfurt—a blank space on her internal map. Munich, six hours. But why limit herself to Germany? There were night trains to Scandinavia. In short hours, she might part the curtains in her sleeper compartment to view the sea beyond the Danish peninsula. What was that called? The Baltic? Scapa Flow?

‘Scarper,’ she said, testing the word.

She gave a euro to the woman who tended the ladies’ toilet. Inside, she found a disabled stall. Jem put her plastic bag on the cistern and dealt her tools across the seat: hair clips, plastic gloves, towels, and a hand mirror. She re-checked the chemical names on the reverse of the hair dye and asked Ego to reassure her that Wasserstoffperoxid was hydrogen peroxide and Ammoniaklösung ammonia. She smiled as she thought back to the girls in that crappy little hairdresser’s in Exeter.

Twenty minutes later—hair witchy black—she passed the cleaner and dropped a second euro on the plate. It would not cover the damage she had done to the sink. She put her prepaid mobile phone into a bin and bought a second, including a Bluetooth earpiece. She loaded the earpiece with a battery and slipped it over her ear, careful not to touch her hair.

‘Ego?’

‘Jem,’ said a voice in the earpiece, ‘I have booked your flight.’

‘I don’t want to fly.’

‘That is your best option. Other forms of transport are less safe.’

‘Less safe? From Cory?’

Ego paused. ‘I’m afraid he is certain to find you. He is focused on locating the information that he believes Saskia possessed. If he can’t have Saskia, he will have you.’

The coldness came. Jem tried to picture a life on the run from Cory. She could not.

‘There’s still the computer in her apartment.’

‘According to the German AP, an apartment on Dublinerstrasse was destroyed by fire in the early hours of this morning. I’m certain it was Saskia’s.’

‘Did Cory do it?’

‘Or incendiary countermeasures triggered by his attempts to access the computer.’

‘What will I do when he finds me?’

‘Imply that Saskia was carrying copies of her important documents on her person when the plane went down. That will give him something to go on—something to leave you for.’

‘If he thinks that I believe that, then I should be travelling to Saskia myself when he finds me. I’ll tell him I want her gambling system.’

‘Is that a lie or the truth?’

‘Up yours.’

‘It might be important, given that Cory might have enhanced sensory capabilities.’

‘He’ll be able to tell when I’m lying?’

‘Just so. Now, I will book you on five trains over the next two days. This should cause confusion. Begin by collecting your ticket from the information desk on your right.’

‘I have to get my gear first. I stashed it here this morning.’

She located the bank of lockers near the first platform and took the key from her pocket. The rucksack was still there.

‘Your train will leave from Gleis 4 in half an hour,’ said Ego. ‘Please collect your ticket.’

‘I’ll pretend to be French. You know, just in case they’re looking for an English woman.’

‘Pouvez-vous parler comme une personne native de France?’

‘Que?’

‘Try Lithuanian.’

‘Get bent, K9.’ She hefted the rucksack. ‘What about Danny?’

‘There is some chatter on the police network concerning Danny and Inspector Duczyński. Danny cannot be located and the Berlin police have instructions to detain him for questioning. However, their physical description is inaccurate. This is due to some nuisance phone calls on my part.’

‘Is the inspector hurt?’

‘It appears that Inspector Duczyński is not severely injured. He received a concussion and a flesh wound. He will be discharged from the UKB hospital later today. He has, however, been suspended pending disciplinary action for involving Wolfgang and losing Cory.’

‘Who, let me guess, is nowhere to be found.’

‘Correct.’

The crowd flowed around her stopped body and cold air touched the last of the water on her neck. She thought of Cory watching the flames in Saskia’s apartment.

Pyrene. ‘They make fire extinguishers. Ironically.’

Fire: Did it roll up the cabin of the aircraft as it dived? Burned jeans and cowgirl boots. And in the jeans: the pink sheets of an unbeatable gambling system, edges charred.

‘Where might Cory be?’

‘I have no idea.’

Jem remembered the sensation that had overwhelmed her the previous night, just after she had returned to Saskia’s apartment, when Cory walked into the kitchen: the silence had been so complete that she had questioned her perceptions of the man. Was Cory even there? Had she imagined him?

‘Jem,’ said Ego. ‘We must go to the library on Fasanenstrasse to locate a book called Resources and Parsing.’

‘Why?’

‘It is one of the few books in that library that has never been borrowed. It will make an effective hiding place.’

~

Jem walked to the end of the platform, where the long train began to curl. She entered the tenth couchette and found an empty compartment. Its four beds had been folded out. The mattress on each was hard. The pillows, at least, were English in size and shape. Thick curtains covered the window and the door to the corridor. The compartment smelled of feet. Jem finished her baguette, screwed up the paper bag, and put her bottle of water on the small table beneath the window. There was a ladder against the bunk. She put an elbow on a rung.

~

As the train pulled away, she was watching her expression in the mirror of a washroom. The configuration of her eyes and mouth—the triangle one might draw between them—seemed different. Perhaps this was due to her hair. It was now black, not blue, and the loss of the gas-flame colour was like misplacing an enjoyable book half-read.

She returned to her compartment. No late-boarding passengers had joined her. This part of the couchette was empty, though she could hear a group of Dutch students at the far end playing a drinking game. She twisted the door lock and pressed the switch that toggled between the ceiling light and the lights in each berth. She fell across her mattress and climbed, fully clothed apart from her skirt, beneath the thin sheet. It was stitched along one side to make a bag. She lay there, thinking. Raindrops made slick diagonals on the window. There was a cord to pull the curtains but she wanted to keep the night close. Outskirts of Berlin. Factories. Endless flatness. Did Regensburg mean ‘city of rain’? She had no-one to ask. She tugged the string and the curtains shut.

~

She dreamed of a castle whose walls moved at night. Saskia was there. She knew its secret passages. Her eyes were swollen and her hair long—the hair of the dead grew—and her lips were like meat on a barbecue, part-cooked and split.

~

When she awoke, it was still night, but the train had stopped. She plumped her sweaty pillow and waited for the beat of the wheels to resume. After some minutes, they did, and she let the movement wash her to the edge of sleep. But she had a headache where the plates of her skull met, at her crown, and the pain in her abdomen refused to let her move from doziness to true sleep. Her eyes wandered over the sooty shapes in her room and she named them, in order, as the overhead luggage basket, the laminated fire safety poster, and the door. A glimmer winked from the lock. The other beds, the bottle of water, the ladder. Her eyes returned to that glimmering lock. Something was wrong.

Like the sudden falling away of the sea before a tsunami.

Like everything was about to go wrong.

The tab was vertical. Unlocked.

She heard a sound from her nightstand. In the pile of coins she had scooped from the pocket of her duffle coat and placed there, an unnoticed bead the size of a breath freshener rolled—impossibly—over the raised edge and bounced twice on the carriage floor. She heard it cross to the door.

Blood hissed in her ears. Her muscles reeled tight. She could not move anything but her eyes. She found a shape in the darkness. Incidental light shifted in the tell-tale pattern of another person, reaching down to pick up the white bead.

Her struggle resolved to a thought. It condensed on her lips.

‘Cory?’

Suddenly, the cabin was filled with light.

Cory was wearing a black overcoat. There was a dash of white at his neck. She stared at it, conscious of the absurdity but not sure why, until she released that he was disguised as a priest. His hair was wet and his eyes had lost the depth of their blue. White stubble dusted his cheeks. He looked like a man in the last days of an illness. His finger remained on the light switch. As she looked from his hand to his face, Cory nodded slowly. It was the nod of a boxer before a round.

Jem recoiled from this propriety. She repeated the line she had rehearsed with Ego.

‘I thought you were dead.’

Cory moved forward. Jem recalled the moment she had first seen her brother at the TV tower. He had seemed to swoop upon her, like a bird of prey to her arm. Cory’s eyes, this close, were bloodshot. He gripped her head by the ears. This was at odds with the elegance of the man in Saskia’s apartment. She gasped and put her hands over his.

‘Jem, do you understand the danger you’re in?’

He won’t kill me, she thought. Ego had been certain. She had information. She might be able to cooperate. But there was a blankness in his eyes that suggested the professionalism of an executioner.

‘How did you find me?’

Cory blinked. Wrong answer, the movement said. He lifted her head and dashed it against the metal rim of the window. Jem heard the sound as though it came from outside the train. She almost laughed. Cory had wanted to hurt her, but she was fine. He had underestimated the toughness of her nut.

‘I know exactly how much energy your head can take before the skin splits, or the bone cracks, or your brain is damaged. Do you understand?’

‘Yes–’ A sudden dizziness made her head feel hollow. There was a little blood in her eye. ‘Yes, you cunt.’

‘Where is the Ego unit?’

‘Where do you think? I posted it to my Aunt Mavis in Scunthorpe.’

Jem thought once more of the debonair spook who had told her the story of the Star Dust in Saskia’s apartment. She tried to count the distance between that image and the man before her, as one might count the seconds between lightning and thunder.

‘I’m going to ask you a question. Think carefully before you answer. Now, where is the Cullinan Zero?’

‘Wait. I…’

‘What?’

‘Saskia survived the crash. She knows, doesn’t she? About…’ She struggled to remember the word Cory had used. ‘The Coolinan?’

All movement ceased in Cory’s expression. He leaned forward, as if he was going to bite.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No.’

He put his lips on hers. Jem frowned but did not recoil. Well, she thought, if that will… and her consciousness flatlined like a leaf pressed beneath the iron wheels of the train.

~

August, 1947, Buenos Aires

It was the evening after Cory had met Jennifer. Cory and Lisandro were alone in an alley alongside the restaurant where, not minutes ago, he had treated the boy to a farewell treat of ice-cream. Now he had Lisandro in his arms, crushed too tightly to draw breath—a snake’s trick—and the white knife pierced the boy’s chest.

He remembered Jennifer’s advice. ‘Cory, the boy has always been dead. He was dead before he was born and he was dead after he died. His life is just a blip on a line: a two-dimensional irregularity on the forever one-dimensional. Here’s the secret: That blip gets smaller when you zoom out.’ The last two words looped in Cory’s mind. Zoom out. Zoom out. Now he spoke them aloud.

‘Zoom out. Zoom out.’

‘Ah,’ said Lisandro. He might have been grasping a mathematical principle at last.

Zoom out.

Cory would never be the same. He knew this.

He watched blood well over his shaking knuckles as the factor probed the heart through those ribs, those little fishbone ribs dressed in cast-off clothes. The boy’s heart valves were fluttering. Cory could feel them. He levered the blade again. A tremor shook Cory’s neck and he felt tears run from each eye. Entrada. Lisandro: held too hard to shout. Abrazo. Ice-cream bubbling on his lips. Cory crouched and let the dead Lisandro come to rest in the puddles and feathers of the alley. Volcada. The boy had passed into the forever one-dimensional.

‘You shouldn’t have followed me,’ Cory whispered. He coughed to recover his voice. ‘But you were already dead. I could have read that newspaper at any time. It was archived long before I was your age. You were always dead.’

Cory checked the alleyway. With his augmentations, the rats were clear shapes among the rubbish. He saw no people. There was a blue pinstripe suit in his gunny sack, and he changed into it.

‘Forgive me, Lisandro. Le llegó la hora.’

He squatted and took the one-hundred peso note from the boy’s bloodied trouser band.

Where the alley opened onto the street, he paused. Martín, the overweight owner of the restaurant next door, was standing on its porch. He described a shape with his cigar to a group of men who were dressed for an expensive dinner, which ruled them out as customers of Martín. Cory turned and put footsteps between him and Martín and Lisandro. His suit’s blue pinstripes complemented the rich colours of this night, though his shoes were bone-white beacons.

Cory remembered the bloodied one-hundred peso note. He changed direction and passed into the crowd. The trinket sellers jostled him and he barked gruff idioms drawn from Lunfardo slang. The throngs multiplied, and he avoided the improvised clearings where dancers moved foot-against-foot, belly-to-belly. Abrazo, the embrace. Entrada, the entrance. Volcada, the capsizement: the dancer tilts his partner, then, at the last moment, catches her.

~

To judge by the light in the door’s frosted glass, Lisandro’s mother was awake. Cory did not knock. He pushed the bloodied one-hundred peso note under the door. Turning away, making zeros in the dirt, subtracting himself, he heard laughter behind the door, and it might have been Jennifer laughing at the sentimentality of a fool.

Chapter Sixteen

In her dream, Jem had accepted the invitation of a gentleman suitor to travel in his carriage through a twilit city. They passed roadside mourners: her mother, her dead father, Danny. She was cold in her nightgown and shawl. She smelled coal and chrysanthemums through the open window, and horse sweat. When the suspension ceased its rattle, the day had passed, and the gas lamps were like moons. Her suitor hooked his cane in his elbow and helped her from the carriage, and, with that, his winged collar became priestly and his dark eyes amused. As her bare foot touched the snowy road, the cobbles vanished. She wore Cossack boots again, and her nightgown had become a duffle coat. She turned to the horses but they had vanished, replaced by a stolen BMW. Its four corners winked. Groggily, Jem let Cory take her arm.

Through a tall gate and up a gravel path.

Watching a cat watch her as a keypad was tapped.

A hallway.

Darkly.

No sounds of clockwork.

(A poem.)

No smell of food.

(Because I could not stop for death.)

An unoccupied house.

Cory removed a glove and slapped her face.

Jem’s eyes opened fully and she coughed. There was a bitter taste on her tongue.

~

It was late in the evening of the day that Cory had murdered Lisandro when he stopped beneath a gas lamp to re-read Jennifer’s newspaper of the next day. He looked for clues about his immediate future. Finding them, he walked to the docks and located a tall, crumbling warehouse. He slipped into the shadowed alley on its eastern side. The alley formed a space narrow enough for him to launch off one wall and reach out for the lower rung of a fire escape. He swung for a moment. His heart surged. He climbed steadily towards the roof until his view became one of scintillating lights.

Cory slid his cane between the attic door and its upper hinge. The wood split and he moved inside. The attic was long and low. There was a zinc bath beneath a skylight. So too a bed, a couch, a changing screen, and a lamp. Cory stepped between the lamp and the bed. He pulled the cord and his shadow pounced across the prostitute.

Her wigless head was downy, not bursting with the mane so beloved of the Argentines, and her sad, thunderous face was hollow at the eyes and cheeks. She sat up and her blanket slipped to the tips of her breasts; she might have been a debutante in a curtsy. Her tinctures and condoms were arranged on the dressing table in a croupier’s semicircle: expert and honest, no cheating.

‘Get out,’ she said. There was a hunting knife in her slim hand.

He laid a German accent light as silk over his Spanish and said, ‘Where is Patrick Harkes?’

‘Turn around. Go.’

‘Harkes.’

Cory wound her bedsheet in his forearm and flung it away. She scooted into her pillows. Naked, she was gangly. All the play anger from her eyes. ‘Bastard,’ she said. ‘Do what you want, then get out.’

Cory knelt on the bed and took her knife. ‘Shhhhh,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk.’

She assumed a pout. ‘Something special, my dear? Here: Whisper in my ear.’

‘Harkes told you I would come for him, didn’t he? Otherwise, you would have cut me without asking.’ At this, she shrugged, one-shouldered. Cory let his thoughts progress. ‘You didn’t want to kill me, but you wanted to look prepared. So I wouldn’t be suspicious. You want to deal.’

She was smiling. ‘Deal?’

‘So innocent. You must be the oldest virgin in the house.’

‘Play fair, Mr Cory.’

Cory reached behind him and

a gun, to me

brought the snout of the weapon to her nose.

‘You know my name? It changes things.’ Straight Rioplatenese Spanish now, his German accent gone: ‘What’s yours?’

‘Paloma,’ she whispered. Her pupils were huge. ‘I liked the trick with the gun. How it flew to you! Are you a magician?’

‘Cory the Great. Pleased to make your acquaintance.’ She frowned at the formality, then, seeing something in his eyes, giggled. ‘Now, Paloma. Deal. Let’s say four hundred pesos for the information.’

‘Eight hundred,’ she mumbled.

‘A thousand.’

She dropped her head back and purred. Cory moved alongside her.

‘Harkes leaves for Santiago tomorrow,’ she said.

‘He told you that?’

Paloma looked at the skylight. ‘I found myself in his pockets. There was a ticket.’

‘Time? Flight number?’

‘I didn’t notice. But it will leave early. Nothing crosses the Andes at night.’

‘With whom will he fly?’

‘There was a logo with a star man.’ She stretched her legs. ‘He looked like you, Cory the Great. Will you show me another trick?’

‘Only if I believe you.’

‘Harkes told me that you know when people lie.’

Cory rolled onto his back. He closed his eyes as Paloma unbuttoned his shirt.

‘The star man had a strong jaw like yours. Ah, your teeth are beautiful.’

She drew her lips over his, and down, tracing the ridge of his Adam’s Apple.

Cory stared upwards. ‘Harkes would choose a small company. Harder for me to find.’

‘No small companies fly to Santiago. One needs a big plane. Wait, I just remembered the name.’

‘What?’

‘‘Star Dust’. Like the song.’

‘There’s a song?’

‘Dummy. Everybody knows it.’

‘I don’t know it.’

She sang the song in lisping English.

~

When the sickness that followed Cory’s slap had faded, Jem found herself sitting in a winged armchair. The lounge was small and lit by three frosty lamps. Its brown scheme took her back to never-ending visits to elderly relatives in the late 1980s. She recognised a painting above the fireplace, but its name, like the falling snow, now dissolved in the warmth of her attention. Her lips were still numb from Cory’s bitter kiss. Was he venomous, like a blowfish?

‘This used to be a safe house,’ said Cory. ‘It was forgotten. We won’t be disturbed, and it was designed to make escape difficult.’

‘KGB or CIA?’

‘What’s the difference?’

Jem let her head loll against the headrest. Cory placed his gloves on the coffee table and sat opposite, still the priest.

‘Jem, you are in love with Saskia. You think about her. It’s natural. Her body. Her eyes, the way they look green in sunlight. You’d do anything to wake her memory. But is she alive? No, Jem. She is nothing more than cold cuts. However, I would like to hear why you think differently.’

‘Who are you? Is Cory your real name?’

~

Cory washed his hands and got dressed. He watched the dozing prostitute. His automata made a liquid metaphor of the electrical resistance on her scalp, showed him peaks and troughs. He might drop a word in her ear and see the ripple of its effect. He might wait for the spike that signalled her intention to blink; and he would know that intent before she did.

Then he recalled the newspaper article that Jennifer had shown him. By morning, ‘The Englishman’ would be suspected of Lisandro’s murder. He would also be sought for the murder of a bordello madam, past her prime but fighting fit, found naked on her bed with skull grit in her changing screen. But there would be no bullet. And no powder burns.

Her eyes opened.

‘You think I’m scared of you, Cory the Great?’

The pupils were wide with something home-brewed.

‘Paloma, let’s play a game. I’m thinking of either night or day. I want you to tell me which. If you are correct, I leave and you never see me again.’

‘That’s easy. I have the touch.’

~

‘I never wanted to kill you,’ Cory said. His words came with enough insouciance for Jem to recognise the lie. The implication was clear: she was in immediate danger. Yet, to her surprise, she did not collapse. ‘I only want information.’

‘I’ll tell you everything. But I need to use the toilet.’

‘Be my guest.’

There was a falling line of red on Cory’s upper lip.

‘Your nose is bleeding,’ she said.

Cory produced a handkerchief and pressed his nostril. Then he walked to the wide fireplace, took a match from the mantel, flicked it alight, and put it to the lattice of paper and wood. Jem paused in the doorway.

‘I heard,’ she said, ‘about Saskia’s apartment.’

‘One is never too old to play with matches,’ he replied, not turning. ‘The bathroom is down the hall.’

~

Once upon a time, a woman called Catherine had consented to marry Cory over pan-fried bread in a field outside Jesup, Georgia. The ring—the very ring whose undeclared mass had almost ended his mission—had been warmed by his anxious hands that day. Her fingertips were cool as he slid it on. ‘Yes,’ said the soldier’s daughter.

Cory smiled.

Now, in 1947, he rose from the prostitute’s bed and walked towards the door of the attic. Paloma seemed to drift alongside him. Her footsteps were soundless. She stopped in the neon glow beneath the skylight. She was changing colours.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘it’s raining again.’

They stopped and looked at the veins of water on the window. Cory heard the glug-glug of filling gutters. For South America, this was subtle rain.

He looked at her. The neon light gave her no shadow and her quicksilver eyes were translucent opals and her mouth had a lunar shimmer like water whirling colgada into a drain. As Cory reached for her shoulder, the apparition disappeared. His eyes refocused on the bed.

Paloma had turned and kicked when Cory shot her. Her blood had slicked the pillow and the changing screen. Some feathers still fell.

‘I am so sorry. Not my decision.’

Haunted, young Cory closed the door.

~

Water poured from the basin onto Jem’s bare feet. She closed the tap and waited for the overflow to swallow the excess. Then she immersed her hands to the wrists. The plates of her nails went red. She brought a handful of wetness to her face and enjoyed its cool bite. Then she twisted her skirt clockwise and unfastened the rivets on her hip. There was comfort, almost, in the familiar blood. She inserted the tampon and dropped the applicator into the toilet bowl, covering it with a few wads of paper. As she did so, she looked at the bathroom door. She could almost hear, deep beyond it, the plucked prongs of a music box. It scared her beyond Cory’s coldest promises.

In the larger mirror above the sink, her eyes seemed narrow. They became hawkish.

So she was a con artist. She had conned Saskia. She had even conned Danny. Now her mark was Cory. With the last of the water, she finger-combed her hair with her left hand.

~

In the lounge, where the fire crackled drily, Cory had slouched in the winged armchair. His eyes moved under their lids. Murmured words were caught in bubbles of reddish spit.

‘Paloma,’ he whispered. ‘Where is it?’ He licked his lips. ‘You know what. The Cullinan Zero.’ He coughed. ‘Tell me.’ His fingertips fluttered and Jem saw the discarded cane twitch. ‘I have Jem.’

She closed the door. The hallway was quiet and empty. This would be like her escape from the apartment in Berlin, easy doing it. She crept down the hallway and touched the keypad. A heartbeat throbbed in her palm. If only she could impart her desperation to the door, beg it to unlock. She remembered Cory’s lips on hers. Death as a suitor whose carriage kindly stopped. Death as Saskia, with full, relaxed lips, wanting her. Her short hair. Yes, Jem had shorn Saskia lock by lock. Wind had played with the clumps of hair.

Ssssss. Saskia.

Calm as, Jem, she thought. Arctic effing calm.

She looked at the door. Her attention snapped to Cory’s reflection in the cold, black finish and she sighed, sagged against the wood.

Chapter Seventeen

Jem made fists and turned towards him. She had never been so scared and ready to fight. She considered the idea that she was standing in the place she would die.

‘I have to go on alone,’ he said, into the distance, perhaps into the reflected world. A ruby tear squeezed from his eye as he smiled.

Con him.

‘What’s wrong with you? Why are you bleeding?’

‘Old wounds reopening, I guess.’

Cory moved closer. One shoulder touched the wall. His expression was regretful as he lifted the cane. With an organic, bloating action, it became a sword.

‘Relaje, Paloma,’ he said.

‘I have a question.’ If Cory was sleepwalking, the girl in his dream—Paloma—might have been his love, to judge by the hope in his eyes. ‘Who is Paloma? Who am I?’

‘Two things, can happen now. Truthfully, I don’t know which. Either I put this sword through your heart or I let you live. From the perspective of five years hence, or fifty, one of those things is history. Perhaps you died here. Perhaps you died a great-grandmother. I could set the event in stone. I could collapse the wave. But I want you to understand that it isn’t really me making the decisions. I’m thinking of night or day. If you can guess which, you will leave and I will never see you again.’

Her intellect braced for bodily revolt—tears, a moan, a whisper upon his mercy—but the muscles held. Her eyes did not leave his, though Cory still stared into the deep distance behind her, into the door. She understood that she had been dead the moment the shadows in her train compartment had gathered to form this man.

‘Day,’ she said, surprised by her confidence.

Only his bloodshot eyes moved. Changes crossed his face like the rushing pages of a book. The sword edge shifted.

Arctic.

‘Do you know what we call people like you where I come from?’ He smiled. There was blood on his teeth. ‘Archaeology.’

‘Archaeology.’

‘Never follow me. Understand?’

‘I understand.’

‘Find your brother and return to England.’

‘I–’

Cool as.

‘–understand.’

‘Do you? Do you really?’

Cory let the sword drop. It transformed into a cane and he tipped his weight upon it like the old man he could be. Jem watched him tap a number on the keypad. Bolts relaxed. He inverted his collar and turned to Jem once more, looked at her, and walked into the snow.

~

Young Cory woke to a wintry Saturday in Buenos Aires. He breakfasted in a café, asked to use their candlestick telephone, and was put through to the Buenos Aires Herald. After five minutes’ conversation, he checked his pocket watch. ‘Hello? Repeat that, please.’ He paused. ‘Yes, it must run in the evening edition in the exact form I have given you. Do you understand?’

Cory hung up. He slipped a banknote under the telephone and left. He hesitated on the porch and fitted his hat. From where he stood, the grass of the Plaza de Mayo was blotchy with shade. Cory, both hands on his cane, turned to the Casa Rosada. In his first week here, a bar-top philosopher had told him that la Casa was pink because it represented a fusion of the red and white flags of the opposing political parties extant during its construction. This explanation was countered by a snort from the man’s older companion, who went on to give his version: gouts of cow blood mixed into the paint helped protect the palace from the humidity.

Cory respected a government honest enough to paint the house of its executive in blood.

His two-colour brogues swished at the tough grass as he crossed the plaza. On the Avenida de Mayo, he found the gates of el subte. His cane clicked down the stairs.

~

Jem stepped onto the porch. The snow was an inch deep. She approached the ironwork gate at the front of the concrete forecourt. There was a CCTV camera high on the wall. She pushed through.

Cars were parked either side of the boulevard. Nothing moved. No traffic drove through the slush. No Cory. She walked to the end of the block and found a yellow telephone box. She pushed a euro through the coin slot and dialled a number.

‘Well, it’s me.’

‘Good evening, Jem.’

‘He let me go. I don’t know why. Can you call me back?’

‘Wait a moment, please. There are twenty-nine mobile phones within fifty metres of your location. Nearly all of them are to be found within houses. However, one is near the front wall of the empty lot to your east.’

‘Somebody dropped it?’

‘Probably.’

Jem smiled at her mental picture of Ego, tucked away within Resources and Parsing, lonely in a corner of the library on Fasanenstrasse. The little bookmark that could.

She hung up and wandered towards the wreck of a petrol station on the windy side of the street. Her feet scuffed. She was cold and numb, and nausea was beginning to swill in her empty belly. It was a once-removed sensation. Her mind was relatively clear.

A glow: greenish. Jem approached and saw the lost mobile.

‘Hello?’

‘It’s me. How are you? Have you eaten? Are you cold?’

‘Fine, no, yes.’

‘Keep moving.’

‘Where?’

‘South, towards the intersection.’

Jem began to walk. ‘What’s south? Is this south?’

‘Yes.’

‘I feel sick.’

‘It’s Cory’s saliva.’

‘What?’

‘Coming up is a right turn onto Karl Marx Strasser. Please take it. Do you see a silver Volkswagen Golf? It should have a large blue logo along one side that reads interRENT. It will be parked near a hotel called the Gasthaus Edelweiss.’

‘Wait a minute. What do you mean, Cory’s saliva? Did he put a drug in his mouth and pass it to me?’

‘Do you see the car?’

‘Answer my question.’

The smallest of pauses. Jem kneaded her stomach.

‘Cory’s blood contains experimental nanoparticles in suspension. They are subject to his conscious control. The technology was developed by a group of industrialists building upon the work of a cancelled US military project. Dubbed ‘intelligent core’ or ‘I-Core’, it is known colloquially as ‘ichor’. Leaked documents suggest that the I-Core nanoparticles can build ad hoc structures within the host’s body, including electromagnetic transmitter-receivers, and chemical factories. Primarily, the nanoparticles function as a medical adjunct. Secondly, they optimise performance.’

‘Ichor, right.’ She steadied herself against a thin tree and saw the Gasthaus Edelweiss. It was dark but for a porch light near its sign. ‘Does Saskia have ichor?’

‘No.’

‘I see the car.’

‘Reach under the front bumper and retrieve a magnetised box. It contains a key. Tell me when you have entered the car.’

The interior of the Golf was chill. She sat on the passenger side, feeling stupid, one seat away from where she needed to be. She remembered the green eyes of a German woman in a café who had known nothing of an English stranger but who had, nonetheless, offered help in the recovery of a stolen passport. A series of older memories covered this one like dealt cards: Wolfgang smoking in bed; Wolfgang planning to turn Robin Hood and steal from the rich, which was to say Saskia Dorfer, to give to the poor, which was to say Wolfgang and Jem.

Jem watched her breath grey the windscreen.

Never follow me. Understand?

‘He asked about a ‘Cullinan Zero’. What did he mean?’

‘Just a moment. The term refers to a mythical counterpart to the Cullinan diamond, which is the world’s largest rough gem-quality diamond. The first polished gem made from the diamond was called the Cullinan I, or the Great Star of Africa, and was presented to King Edward VII in 1905 on his sixty-fourth birthday. The Cullinan II was a smaller cut from the remainder, the Cullinan III smaller still, and so on, until we reach the Cullinan IX. Rumours of a larger diamond began to circulate after the geologist who first examined the uncut Cullinan indicated that it was likely to comprise less than half of a larger, distorted octahedral crystal. However, the existence of the so-called ‘Cullinan Zero’ has never been independently established.’

Jem tried to put this into focus. ‘So he thinks I’ve stolen a diamond?’

‘Or know its whereabouts.’

‘Do you think Saskia knew?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do you know?’

‘Saskia may still be alive.’

Jem looked at the driver’s seat and felt the absence of her once lover.

‘Are you serious?’

‘You don’t need to believe me. Not yet.’

She looked for Cory on the white, blank street.

‘What if he let me leave, knowing I’d contact you? What if he’s watching me?’

Slowly, she turned to the back seat.

It was empty.

‘Ego?’ she continued. ‘What do you think?’

‘Jem, press the red button next to the satellite navigation device. This will connect you to a response specialist. Pretend that you’ve lost your swipe card. Try a Latvian accent. He or she will give a code that you must enter into the navigation device. This will start the car.’

Chapter Eighteen

Near Regensburg

Hrafn Óskarson lifted the peak of his yellow baseball cap and looked at the wall of the school’s assembly room. On it, Little Red Riding Hood fled through a paper forest. Hrafn turned away from the display and crossed the hall. He wondered why the memories of his childhood in Iceland quickened as he entered middle age. He could remember a morning in his tenth year when he and his younger brother Ragnar had raced to their aunt’s farm near Akureyri hoping to dissuade her from making their beloved rabbits into gloves. She had laughed at their naïvety, at the last of their childhood. This was not news. The rabbits had been born for gloves. Ragnar had cried all the long trip home while Hrafn had framed the experience as his first dose of adult medicine. Children petted rabbits; men wore rabbit gloves.

Why that? he thought. Why remember that, here, when I haven’t thought about it in years?

Hrafn took the passport from his jacket and rubbed away the blood from the gold-stamped title, which read Unione Europea Repubblica Italiana. Inside, the photograph showed a pretty woman with shoulder length, auburn hair. He let her eyes imprint his vision.

In the hours following the loss of DFU323, the Regensburg authorities had sent requests for assistance to the Federal Ministry of Transport, who in turn engaged the Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accident Investigation. The Gold Group of Dr Hrafn Óskarson—a veteran of sixteen inquiries—had been instructed to fly from Lower Saxony to Munich and rendezvous with specialists from Europe and the United States: external field investigation experts, psychologists, and engineers from Boeing. Meanwhile, disaster management teams in Regensburg set about requisitioning administrative offices for Gold Group, hangar space for wreckage, and, as an emergency morgue, a local primary school, where the dead now lay.

Hrafn crouched. Gently, he selected one of the two-dozen recovery bags that covered a third of the floorspace. Its zip moved with a low, throaty sound.

The smell: raw hamburger meat, aviation fuel, soil.

The smell recalled the closed investigations of his career. They formed a crossing, each like a stone in a brook, back to the night his Boeing 747 experienced an uncommanded rudder hardover on the approach to Singapore Changi Airport. The anxiety of the memory stung him even now. That roaring thought: No; not on my watch. The full starboard rudder lock would have put the 747 into the Singapore Strait in the time it took to take ten breaths. Only a rapid turn using the ailerons and a sudden push on the stick had saved the aircraft and its three hundred passengers. His luck had been astounding. He had repeated the manoeuvre a dozen times in the simulator and failed to bring her home.

The next day, during the pauses in his interview with safety investigators, Hrafn had composed his resignation letter. He returned, by land and sea, to that cold farm near Akureyri, where his aunt was preparing for the last months of her life. He went back to school and recovered his love of engineering. Five years later, having gained his PhD from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, he joined the FBAAI.

On a whiteboard next to the assembly hall door—here, among the art of children—a doctor had written, Mortui Vivis Praecipant.

Let the dead teach the living.

As Hrafn left the assembly room for the open air, he realised why he had recalled the memory of Ragnar and him hurrying to save the rabbits. Tomorrow would be his brother’s birthday.

~

Flurries of snow blazed in the glow of the temporary lights that ringed the playground. He passed police disaster cabins, parked fire engines, and the skyward satellite dishes of the media village. Nobody else was around. He stopped, just to appreciate the quiet. Then he pushed on. He was late for a meeting with Human Factors.

~

Hrafn, and the small audience, leaned forward to scrutinise the photograph that Marcus Bower of Human Factors projected on the screen. The image had been recovered from a charred digital camera. It was pixellated and oddly coloured. It showed a woman in mid sprint. She was running down the aisle of the aircraft. A blur in her hand might have been a gun. Hrafn studied the object as Marcus zoomed into it and resumed his interpretation. There was a Holmesian touch to the fervour with which the psychologists and engineers swooped on the slightest of details. Did the shape of her hair indicate acceleration, and thus the aircraft’s movement? Did lighting inconsistencies imply electrical problems? And, at root, was this person working for the good of the passengers, or had she precipitated the crash? Both? Hrafn accepted a coffee as Marcus wrapped up his presentation. It was midnight, and he had a 6 a.m. appointment with Chancellor Schröder. He said, ‘Marcus, I just came from the morgue. Nicolleta Valli has red hair in her passport photograph, but she recently dyed it blond. That leaves Saskia Dorfer as our candidate for Ms X.’

‘Sure you looked at the right body?’

‘Certain.’

‘If we go for Saskia, then there’s a Berlin angle.’

‘How?’

One of the group leaned into the coloured beam of the projector. ‘Dr Óskarson, a passenger called Jem Shaw, a Brit, failed to board. Shaw’s ticket was bought using the same EC card as Dorfer. The Berlin police report that Dorfer’s apartment was destroyed by fire several hours after she boarded the plane.’

‘Interesting.’

‘One more thing,’ said Marcus, ‘Petersen, the hiker who filmed the crash, told me about a camouflaged man he saw hanging around the scene. We think the guy is a reclusive woodsman called Tolsdorf. Some kind of Boo Radley figure to the locals, I understand. He only comes down to the village at Christmas for a good feed. But he robbed the local Aldi this morning. Beer.’

‘So? It must get lonely up in the woods.’

Marcus smiled. ‘He left the beer.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Emptied the bottles before he left the car park, then took the bottles with him.’

‘Why?’

‘That is the question.’

‘OK. Goodnight, everyone. Tomorrow, we’ll talk to Shaw.’

~

In the hallway, Hrafn found a cleaner mopping the floor. He smiled apologetically and stepped across the wet laminate. He entered the adjacent classroom. Its walls were covered with circuit whiteprints and telemetry plots. Beneath them, partly obscured, were lists of English verbs and pictures of Tony Blair and Big Ben. Trays of wiring and smashed equipment had been laid across the low tables. A dozen men probed the avionics with their pencils, delicate as watchmakers. Hrafn found a warmish coffee near a stack of miniature chairs and touched the shoulder of William Daker, who straightened. He was an old-school Boeing engineer. Gone were the days, told his weary expression, of analogue flight instruments whose dials held their readings at the point of impact.

‘What do you have?’

‘Bad news,’ said William. He indicated a blackened, curved piece of metal. ‘Here are the docking pins for the cockpit CVR/FDR breaker. The short version? The fuse was deliberately removed before impact. I think we can forget the flight recorder data. It’ll be blank.’

Hrafn sighed. If he were abandoned by his primary diagnostic tools—the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder—he might never file a worthwhile report. The solid-state recording chips in each engine were poor substitutes for the parameterised data of the dedicated recorders.

‘Walk me through it. And slowly; it’s late.’

‘If the fuse had been present at impact, we’d expect damage between the pins, where the fuse scoured the housing. But the damage is uniform. The very fact that we haven’t found the fuse is also telling. It should have been near this breaker. We can give you a ninety per cent certainty that the fuse was not on the flight deck at impact. I’ll know when it turns up.’

‘Maybe the pilots were trying to isolate an electrical fire.’

‘Come on, Hrafn.’

‘Come on what?’

William tapped the fuse housing with his pencil. ‘Someone cut the power in a deliberate attempt to obscure the last moments of that flight. We know the flaps were not deployed at impact, so the pilots had not begun the emergency landing procedure. The crash either came without warning, or they were not in control of the aircraft when it happened.’

‘You’re getting way ahead of yourself. Let’s just assemble the data.’

‘At least we got the pilot’s last transmission—‘Stentec.’ What does Human Factors think of that?’

‘It’s STENDEC, and not much,’ said Hrafn. He yawned and twisted his neck. Around him, the men studied their jigsaw. One had a jeweller’s loupe. Another had a shard of plastic in tweezers, which he waggled in saline solution to rinse off the last of the fuel, soil, soot, and human remains. ‘An anagram of ‘descent’. Also, ‘scented’. And ‘send etc’. There’s not much else to say.’

‘I wonder what the woman in the photograph has to do with all of this.’

‘I wonder too.’

‘Night, Hrafn.’

‘Yeah, sleep tight.’

Outside, Hrafn looked into the eddies of snow and saw the sleepy eyes of a beautiful Italian woman. He pictured zipping up the airtight recovery bag to quarantine inside himself the image, the hamburger smell, and the tears of a young co-pilot just happy to bring his 747 in to Singapore. Absently, he zipped his coat as he walked. He would buy Ragnar a book for his birthday. Something funny. With rabbits.

~

The drive to his temporary office in Wallhalla would take half an hour, but, given an empty road, Hrafn could shorten his journey by several minutes, thus banking some bonus sleep. A single windscreen wiper slung the snow clumps aside as he pulled onto the road. He searched the passenger seat for his pocket computer and put a headphone bud into his ear. His eyes switched between the road and the screen. He thumbed through the audio files and hit ‘play’.

‘Hi, this is Siggi,’ said a female voice. ‘I found something after all. Most of it is from the Ministry of Civil Aviation crash report and a book called ‘Star Dust Falling’. There’s a copy in your glove box. I’ve e-mailed you the report.’

Hrafn leaned across and opened the glove box. The rust-coloured paperback rested atop the car’s rental documents. He looked up and corrected his position on the road.

‘Star Dust,’ continued Siggi, ‘was an Avro Lancastrian Mk. III, which is basically a Lancaster bomber without the guns. This flight was designated CS-59. Chilean South, service fifty-nine. The operator was British South American Airways. It was merged with the British Overseas Airways Corporation in 1949.’

He watched the curving banks of snow.

‘Star Dust left Buenos Aires, Argentina, on the morning of August 2nd, 1947, for a short flight across the Andes to Santiago in Chile. It carried four crew and six passengers. They included a Palestinian businessman with a diamond stitched in his suit. A self-made–’

Hrafn paused the audio. He tapped his forehead. Remember the diamond. Then he pressed ‘play’ again.

‘–British businessman, a Swiss playboy, another Brit, an elderly German émigré returning to Chile with her dead husband’s ashes, and a British government agent escorting secret diplomatic documents. As for the flight itself, Star Dust made regular reports throughout its three-hour trip. The journey should have been straightforward from the perspective of the former RAF personnel, though the route was so high that oxygen canisters had to be used. Their navigation techniques were primitive. Advanced American navigation equipment was available, but Don Bennett, the boss of BSAA, refused to install it on patriotic grounds. The crew had to navigate by ‘dead reckoning’ and star fixes.’

Hrafn pushed his thumb into the book and held it to the light of the glove box. He looked at the monochrome photographs of RAF pilots and dapper civilians.

‘At 17:33 GMT, Star Dust radioed to Santiago that their estimated time of arrival was 17:45. It is understood that Star Dust had cleared the Andes and begun its final descent. At 17:41, the aircraft confirmed its ETA of 17:45, but the Morse code transmission was appended with the letters S, T, E, N, D, E, and C. The radio operator at Santiago Tower questioned it, and the letters S, T, E, N, D, E, C were repeated ‘loud and clear but rapid’. That was the last message sent from Star Dust. Some wreckage–’

Hrafn stopped Siggi’s briefing as the floodlit prominence of Walhalla rose above the trees. He waved to the security officer at the gate. The car slewed into the approach road, which had not been cleared since the last snowfall, and stopped on the quiet flatness in front of the building. Hrafn knew he should turn his mind to the meetings and their agendas, the crash and its lines of evidence—but seven letters stubbornly occupied his attention.

S, T, E, N, D, E, C.

He opened the driver’s door so the interior light would help him gather his belongings. As he reached for the PDA, he heard footsteps crunch to a halt behind him. Hrafn turned to the blackness.

‘Na, und?’

Two black shapes interrupted the bluish snow. Men. Hrafn stepped from the car and raised his torch. The first man wore designer glasses and a black greatcoat with shoulder-boards of snow. One sleeve was empty, and Hrafn could see the edge of a sling at his collar. The second man was taller and well built.

‘Guten Morgen, Herr Dr Óskarson. I am Inspector Karel Duczyński with the BKA. I must speak English in deference to my companion. Please don’t be afraid.’

‘Good morning,’ said Hrafn.

‘Hi, I’m Danny Shaw.’

‘Perhaps we could talk inside,’ said the policeman. ‘We’ve driven a long way.’

‘Duczyński, is it? I read about the disturbance at the Fernsehturm. Weren’t you suspended?’

‘Look,’ said Shaw, ‘my sister didn’t board the flight. She travelled down here and she may be in danger. It’s vital that we speak to you.’

‘Your sister?’

Hrafn held the torch on Shaw’s face. He could have both men arrested and let others unpick the threads of their involvement. But the seven letters had not faded from his mind. S, T, E, N, D, E, C. The CVR bus: sabotaged. The landing gear: not deployed. He let his mind travel the curves of a 737-800, felt the forces on its airframe, the cracks of overspeed vibration, and the insistence of a question for its answer.

‘Dr Óskarson,’ said the inspector, ‘I must tell you that an associate of Jem Shaw, Wolfgang Weber, was arrested two days ago with bomb-making instructions in his pocket.’

Hrafn’s tiredness evaporated. ‘What kind?’

The inspector raised a hand. ‘Don’t let me mislead you, sir. I believe that the papers were put on his person by a third party to incriminate him. Further, I believe that the party in question is Saskia Dorfer, a known alias of Saskia Brandt.’

Hrafn knew that any explosion severe enough to threaten a 737 would produce a wreckage footprint kilometres in area. There was, he had to admit, the possibility that a charge could be placed at the confluence of the hydraulic lines that connected the cockpit to the control surfaces. Then a non-compromising explosion could disable the aircraft. A variation of that malfunction had caused the crash at Sioux City in 1989. But, on the heels of this thought, came another: the pilots would retain some basic attitude control through the increase and decrease of engine thrust. And the problem with the radio communications blackout would not be addressed by that hypothesis, unless the saboteur had disabled the radio too. And what about the final transmission, ‘STENDEC’?

‘Mr Óskarson?’

‘You know, blowing up an aircraft, even a large one, by detonating a bomb is easy. I would say trivially easy, given the narrow range of forces the airframe is designed to cope with. But.’

‘But what?’

‘Inspector, my line of work discourages the development of premature hypotheses. If you try enough keys in a lock, you might find one that fits, but it may not be the correct one. Between ourselves, I indulge my imagination a little in that regard. But I can give you two reasons that make me think Saskia Dorfer/Brandt did not blow up that plane with a bomb.’

‘Go on,’ said Mr Shaw. His eyes were fierce. Hrafn began to like him.

‘One, the wreckage pattern tells us that the crash was a C-FIT, or Controlled Flight Into Terrain. The aircraft was in one piece and travelling under power when it crashed.’

‘And the second?’ asked the inspector.

‘The bomber doesn’t usually board the plane.’

Hrafn opened his briefcase and removed the picture of Saskia taken mid-flight. He gave it to the inspector.

‘Is this Brandt?’ he asked. ‘You’re sure?’

‘Alias Dorfer, yes. One of the passengers had a camera. If the date stamp is correct, this was taken four minutes prior to impact.’

Mr Shaw said, ‘You know, there are plenty of bombers willing to give their lives for a cause. The terrorists who flew into the World Trade Centre seemed cool with it.’

‘I have to make decisions based on probabilities, not absolutes. A German woman in her late twenties does not fit the profile of a suicide bomber. Not these days. Besides, she’s carrying a gun in the photograph. That implies that things are, well, complicated.’

‘But whose gun is it?’ asked the inspector. ‘Did the flight have sky marshals on board?’

‘No. Current German transport policy keeps sky marshals on randomly-selected transatlantic flights, not intracontinentals. Now, gentlemen, given the late hour, I must press you. Do you have any information that might help determine the flight’s last moments?’

Again, the inspector and Mr Shaw exchanged a look. Mr Shaw, the taller man, folded his arms. ‘My sister, Jem, has some connection with Saskia Brandt. They were both due to board that flight. My sister–’ Danny faltered. ‘Look, she hasn’t done anything wrong, I promise you. She works in a hairdresser’s.’

Hrafn’s reply was interrupted by the overture to The Marriage of Figaro, which played when Siggi, his assistant, called. As he reached for his phone, he heard the chirrups of two more. Danny Shaw and Inspector Duczyński, each with trepidation, answered their mobiles too. The three men stood in the snow and listened. Their expressions questioned one another.

‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ said a voice in Hrafn’s ear. ‘Call me Mr Self. I’ve taken the precaution of speaking to you simultaneously. I wish to avoid misunderstandings. Now, please listen. We don’t have much time.’

Chapter Nineteen

Jem did not pass another car on her journey into the mountains. After half an hour, there were neither city lights to be seen nor moon. She phoned Ego and spoke about the special regard Germans had for their forests. Then she asked it who Saskia really was, expecting it to be reticent. The candour surprised her.

‘Saskia’s identity is a computerised representation stored on a high-density, solid-state device of uncertain origin. It has been surgically inserted at the back of her brain. Everything about her can be attributed to this device. That is, everything you would consider the product of her mind. When you asked Saskia a question, it was the device that replied. When you reached out for her, it was the device that took your hand. The device felt your touch.’

‘That’s weird.’

‘Think of it as a homunculus, or little person, truly controlling Saskia’s body.’

There was a logic within the idea. It explained Saskia’s perfect recall, her oddness, her virtuoso performance of violence. And yet: Whose eyes had Jem stared into? If Saskia’s conscious mind was contained within the device, what was contained within her flesh-and-blood brain? Was there another woman trapped inside that body, screaming unheard?

‘So the device sent you a mayday.’

‘It did once, and that confirmed its approximate location. It has not signalled since. I can’t be sure if it has survived the crash intact. Saskia may not be recoverable.’

‘God,’ said Jem. ‘It’s like she’s… a black box.’

‘We’re here.’

Jem steered the car into a small lay-by. She extinguished the headlights. The silence and the darkness, though expected, became a space for her loneliness to fill. She closed her eyes for five breaths. They opened with clearer night vision on snow-bright ground and glistening tree-trunks. She remembered the leather spine of the Grimm’s fairy tales that had unlocked the curtained door in Saskia’s apartment. And she recalled a music box that had played something by Bach. She opened the car door. She imagined new sounds in the silence: the patter of a wolf on patrol, its mouth shut and low, the flutter of a witch abroad.

Ssssssssssssss.

‘It’s cold out there,’ said Ego. ‘If your phone’s power fails, warm the battery. We may be separated. Don’t lose heart.’

‘OK.’

‘Do you see the dusky colour reflected by the clouds? That’s Regensburg. Keep it behind you and try to stay walking uphill.’

~

She locked the car with the radio fob. The indicators splashed orange. Then she took the torch—a metal, heavy comfort—and cut a piece of light from the darkness. She moved through the powdery mires, alert for other footsteps in the hush. The trees were black bars. She drew the cold air through her nose. At first, she could not separate the odours. Then she identified something like incinerator smoke and remembered the putrid rat Danny had discovered that wet August in Poole when they were eight or nine. And the tang of polystyrene melting on the woodland fire that had warmed Jem and her mates when, years after the rat, they downed Diamond White by the bottle, and spun the empties to mark the unlucky victim of an interrogation, sexual and hilarious.

‘One is never too old to play with matches.’

‘KGB or CIA, what’s the difference?’

‘Never follow me. Understand?’

‘I understand.’

She stepped on something that deformed like an oil can, and when she raised her foot, it barked across the forest and she understood that a great space had opened before her. In the failing light she saw scabs of ash and the grave of a whole aeroplane, wings and engines and all. A yellow cordon stretched away to her left and to her right.

Holy fuck.

Then.

Clock hands meeting at midnight. The night, under whose auspices Saskia had blossomed like a moonflower. Perfume drifting: conservative and sensible, mixed for her in the south of France. Her hair was long and never stronger was Jem’s urge to nose its waves. Later: a policeman, unconscious alongside his car, and Saskia reaching back for a fallen Jem.

The cavalier smile.

‘Take my hand.’

Reaching back.

The hopelessness was devastating. On what, truthfully, had she based her hope that Saskia was alive? A feeling? How could her intuition compare to the forces that could undo the fabric of a building’s worth of metal and plastic, swimming pools of fuel, this tonnage of raw meat? Saskia was hopelessly gone. Perhaps her superimposed spirit watched, alongside fellow passengers and crew as Jem lifted her phone and sobbed, ‘Ego, what now?’

But the phone had died. She pressed the power switch. Nothing happened. Was the battery too cold? She slipped the phone into her waistband and stepped back from the debris, fleeing, heading towards the blackness. The powder reached her knees as she strode. She pressed the car key. Nowhere did indicator lights blip.

She had been cut off from Ego and the heavy torch was no longer a comfort. It was painting her like a target. She turned it off.

Unseen, a branch broke.

‘Sss-sss-sss,’ she stammered, looking for the branch. ‘Sassssssssssskia?’

Calm. Only the weight of snow had broken it.

She backed against a trunk and slid down. Clods of snow struck her shoulders. She felt as though she could stay here. She put her nose to her knees and pulled a full, chill breath.

Her neck straightened.

Perfume.

‘It was made for me in the south of France.’

Her muscles, tired to the point of collapse, quivered as she stood.

‘Sssssss,’ she whispered. ‘Sss-sss…’

Her sudden, downhill strides slit the dunes. She fell from one tree to another. Fronds scratched her scalp. The powder grew wet underfoot and the dampness reached her ankles. The perfume was a will-o’-the-wisp; present and absent by turns. When, seconds later, she reached the trough of the valley, her exhaustion could no longer be outrun. She let her forehead rest against bark.

Snow quietness descended.

Yet the air was not empty. There was an element of static, of ssssssssssss.

Running water.

Jem crawled on, though her palms flamed with cold. Her breath shrank to snorts. A stone struck her shin and she was felled. She tumbled down a stony bank and stopped, sitting upright, with her boots on a hard surface. She had lost the torch but she could see a frozen stream sparkling beneath a sickle moon. There was a hut on the opposite bank. The wide, low roof was decked with firs. Behind it, trees rose. The forest and the hut had combined like the hands of father and son. Only a halo of red suggested the doorway.

Jem walked upstream and crossed the water on three concrete stepping stones. She placed each foot heel-to-toe until she reached the door. It did not squeak as she pushed it open. Warmth and smoke and a meaty smell puffed from the interior: a room lit by oil lamps and the flickering roundel of a pot-bellied stove. She looked about in wonder. A chandelier of powdered sausages and game birds hung from the low ceiling. A Dutch drier rocked over the stove. It held camouflaged trousers, long underwear, socks, and a dripping newspaper.

‘Hello?’

Jem closed the door and pulled across its blackout curtain. There was a cloth-covered table beyond the hanging sausages. She remembered her mobile phone and placed it near the stove to warm. On the table were empty beer bottles and a stack of newspapers. Next to them was a half-bitten piece of bread. An opened plastic container held some sliced meat and a paring knife.

Chapter Twenty

On the hill that overlooked the small hut, there was a triangular clearing formed by three ancient pines. The limbs of the largest had bent under the weight of snow. Tolsdorf, the woodsman, was braced in a familiar wedge halfway up the trunk. His deer-hunting rifle rested in a notch convenient for surveillance of the hut and its small hinterland of piled wood.

Tolsdorf was as still as the tree. He felt twenty years younger. He had gathered his wits to a single point: his left eye, open on the rifle’s burning green image intensifier. He breathed through his nose. He was not too cold; rather, the cold of this night had entered him and calmed him.

He had been settled against the trunk for more than four hours and was now ready to climb down and call this night done. But, in the instant before he looked down to place his feet, he heard a new note in the sounds of the forest. The new note did not belong.

Sure enough, she came from the south-east. Her footfalls told him that she was no native of the forest or the snow. She was easy to locate with the rifle. Her arms were outstretched like bird wings, aiding balance, whiskers for tree fronds in the dark. Everything about her confirmed that she was the help Tolsdorf had been waiting for.

At first, her physical weakness puzzled him. How would she be able to fight the Ghost? Could it be that her purpose was to bring the killer here, nothing more? Tolsdorf tried to arrange the discrete elements of his knowledge as though they were playing cards in a hand, but his concentration—narrowed to that green, blazing disc—was not equal to it. The scattered pieces were little more than knucklebones. They told him nothing beyond his fears.

He felt for the bar of chocolate in his hip pocket, broke off a piece, and chewed slowly as the woman crossed the stream. He saw only part of her face beneath her hood. She stopped. Looked around. Looked at Tolsdorf, who she could not possibly see. Tolsdorf smiled. The lower spike of his three-point crosshair rested on her chin.

And then she was gone into the hut.

Tolsdorf’s bristling at this trespass was, he noticed, both automatic and useless. The sensation made him smile. So I am not dead yet. I am still connected to something of the world. There is still meat on the old bones.

Behind this feeling was one of excitement.

It is happening. The Ghost is coming.

Tolsdorf did not know how long he would have to wait. He knew to expect that this man was following the girl. But at what remove? Might he be biding his time? How strong was his knowledge of the forest? Could he read the forest like Tolsdorf could read it? Did he know that Tolsdorf waited, armed?

These questions itched at him. He was no man to answer them. He was old and wily, but no strategist.

A second, discordant note rang through the empty air. It was dulled by the snow but Tolsdorf’s heart accelerated again.

‘So soon,’ he whispered.

The sound of his voice surprised him, and its disagreeable edge of satisfaction. This would not be easy. He would need to play this like the most serious of hunts. This was not deer. This was the Ghost.

It was no less than fifty metres to the hut. The air was empty. Fresh snow might fall soon, but for now Tolsdorf could see the hut in great clarity. Intensified. Raging green: the halos of the doors and windows. The moving fringe of branches at the eaves. And there: twenty metres beyond the woodpile, the unmistakable brilliance of fluorescent material.

As Tolsdorf eased his index finger through the hole in his glove, the fluorescence—two horizontal strips, perhaps—moved slowly down. It could only mean that the person wearing the jacket had crouched. Were they taking cover? Had Tolsdorf been seen? He doubted it. The man had crouched because he was cautious. Perhaps he had just caught sight of the hut.

The overall range was less than seventy metres. Tolsdorf did not hesitate, though part of him was doubtful, still trying to read the knucklebones of this moment. Was it not foolish for the Ghost to approach the hut wearing such conspicuous clothing? But the man had no reason to suspect that Tolsdorf even existed, let alone had an open shot from an elevated position.

The bullet left the gun with little fuss. The noise, though terrific, was absorbed by the snow-covered trees. Only a familiar tinnitus remained in Tolsdorf’s ears, buzzing like those questions—rattling bone-like—and he still could not read the future, still could not be sure whether he had won or lost.

Tolsdorf knew that the bullet had passed through the left breast pocket of the jacket. He watched his target shift down (a man slumping to his knees) and forward (a man collapsing, dying on his face).

He slid the rifle’s bolt. He did not regret the kill. By habit, he remained in his tree. He discovered a need to urinate, to drink, and to sleep. The quietened drives of his body were clamouring. However, he did nothing but curl his finger back into his glove, to warmth. The unanswered questions faded now, as all questions must fade. Never was his age further from his thoughts. In his chain of duty since overturning that smoking piece of fuselage, every link had held. He was proud.

After a time, Tolsdorf climbed down the tree. The movements were economical. His feet found well-remembered places and his hands, taking no weight, passed from friend to friend until he dropped the last half-metre into soft snow at the base.

Tolsdorf slipped the rifle from his shoulder. He was prepared to shoot from the hip else club with the stock. He approached the hut. He stepped slowly. New questions arose. What if the man was wearing body armour? What if the jacket had been a decoy?

He glanced at the hut. He wanted to talk with this woman. She must have answers—some, at least.

There.

A touch of yellow-orange in the gloom. Tolsdorf had been favouring his left eye, which had kept its night vision, but now he stared at the jacket, both eyes open, and all the demons of his doubt and helplessness returned.

Question: What made you think you were good enough?

The jacket had been sprung on a low branch. It still bobbed from the impact of the shot. The bullet hole had drilled perfectly through the green cross on the lapel. It was the jacket of an emergency worker.

Before Tolsdorf could formulate a thought beyond contempt at the ease of this defeat, he made out a shape in the darkness. A man was standing less than five metres away. As Tolsdorf turned his rifle, the doubts rose again. Why didn’t the man move?

Something struck Tolsdorf in the belly before he could fire. He looked down and swore. His rifle had been broken in two. He was holding each half. The stock dropped from his left hand: there was no longer any power in his grip. He looked up helplessly as the man stepped forward. Sudden moonlight highlighted the essentials of his expression—curiosity, pity—and Tolsdorf felt his anger return.

This could still be a victory. He could undo his foolishness and

mirror, mirror

defeat the Ghost just as Saskia

the corpse

had told him.

‘It can only work once.’

‘How?’

on the wall

Tolsdorf turned, holding his belly, and poured the remainder of his life’s worth into his legs so that they might carry him to

mirror, mirror

the

on the wall

No more. A second bullet, silent, struck his back before he had reached the space beneath the hut. It was like the darkness coming in.

Chapter Twenty-One

Jem looked at herself in the mirror. She reached out, hand to hand, and pressed the surface. It clicked and swung open to reveal a cavity. She dropped to her knees and cried out. Saskia’s eyes were filled with blood. The lids were swollen and ripped. Her jaw had dislocated and a safety pin had been pushed through her cheek. Her left arm was broken and its hand missing. A rust-coloured bandage had been wrapped about the stump. Toes—wearing the nail polish that Jem had applied—poked out from a blanket of sacking.

Air moved through the shell of a ballpoint pen in her throat: sssssssssssssssssssssss.

‘Oh, Saskia.’

Jem took the folded jeans from the foot of the cot. She pressed away her tears on their empty pockets, folded them, and put them back. On a stool was Saskia’s neoprene wallet, some chewing gum, house keys, a handkerchief, receipts, tampons, and a folded wedge of pink paper.

Jem put her hand on the paper.

Unfolded it.

Remembered the disappointment in Danny’s expression.

On the table, her phone rang. Jem backed out of the anteroom without looking away from Saskia. She picked up the mobile.

‘Hello?’ she said. Her voice was quiet.

‘Bitte rufen Sie die Polizei! Eine Person ist in Lebensgefahr und–’

‘Saskia, is that you?’

‘Please contact the police. A woman is in danger and needs your immediate help. You will be rewarded.’

The caller identity information was missing. Yet Saskia’s voice was clear in the earpiece. Jem leaned towards the cot. Saskia had not moved. She was clearly unconscious.

‘What… how do you feel?’

‘It’s dark.’

Jem looked at the closed, blackened eyes.

‘Sweetheart.’

‘Did you die too?’ asked the voice. ‘Are we ghosts?’

Ego: ‘When you reached out for her, it was the device that took your hand.’

‘No.’

‘Saskia’s hand itches. She wants to scratch it herself, but she can’t.’

‘Which hand?’

‘Her left.’

Jem looked at the bandaged stump, but did not move to scratch it. ‘How’s that now?’

The voice sighed. ‘Better.’

‘Saskia, I want you to listen to me. I don’t know how much you remember. My name is Jem and I’m your friend. Once, you helped me. Now,’ she said, a tear running onto her lip, ‘I am going to help you. Do you understand?’

‘The woodsman helped too.’

Jem drew Saskia’s fringe through her fingers, as though weighing it for a snip. ‘Am I talking to a computer? Are you like Ego? What can I do?’

‘Find help. But be careful.’

‘That’s why Saskia’s still here, isn’t it? She’s hiding.’

‘I’m sorry. It may be too late already. We’re dying.’

Jem looked at Saskia’s chest. It was still. Had it been moving at all?

‘No!’

~

Cory put on his jacket and approached the hut from the higher ground at its back. He looked at the woodsman, who had died face down after a crawl of two or three yards. Cory moved over him and located the smouldering hole in the man’s coat. He held the gun above it. There was a brief tent of fabric, then the coat tore and the bloody pellet rejoined the heel of the weapon. Mass restored: Cory watched it melt into the stock.

Cory crouched and considered the puzzle of the man’s outstretched hand, which had gripped the edge of a blue tarpaulin. He lifted the sheet and looked into the hollow beneath the hut. His ichor processed the darkness. As it brightened, he saw five pairs of beer bottles. They had been wrapped in foil and placed on a metal tray. Behind them was a stack of newspapers. Cory took a pen from his fluorescent jacket and dipped it into one of the bottles. He touched the pen to his tongue. Salt water. A cable, secured with duct tape, led to an upright tube. Behind that was a battery. The apparatus was a homemade capacitor, probably for a television. But why had the woodsman crawled here? Cory moved further inside. His zero-light modifications chewed the dark until it was an overexposed blaze, and still he could not discern a weapon.

Cory was still thinking when a radio signal stormed through him. It was a high-strength burst from a mobile phone trying to contact a tower and it came from inside the hut. He sighed as he rose. The old wounds in his chest leaked. He pressed a hand to them and walked to the front of the hut.

‘Saskia,’ he said, entering. He noted the chair, the bread on the table, and the stove. He enjoyed its flames with the intensity of an aesthete. Its light dimmed as he stepped closer. The reservoirs of power inside him—stings drawn out by the cold—recovered their extents. The room cooled and Cory healed a little.

He licked his dry lips and stopped at the mirror.

By his own clock, the man who looked back was two years from his ninth decade. This man pitied the youth who had told the Provisional Army recruitment sergeant back in Atlanta that he wanted to enlist to honour his state. In truth, Cory’s reasons were threefold: breakfast, lunch, and supper. Make that fourfold: to put many miles between him and the choleric water that killed four of his six brothers, between him and the Transitional Authority camps, between him and his blind father.

Even now he remembered how gently his mother had read the newspapers aloud to that man, sometimes closing her eyes in sympathy, the better to propagandise hope.

Cory had decades-brewed hate—for himself, his father, this face in the mirror—and he lashed out. The heel of the gun made a star. By his second strike, fractures radiated to the frame and black-backed pieces fell upon the floor.

Where the shards used to be, Cory’s ichor overlaid the heat signatures of two people: one crouched, one lying. He paused: the desperate boy who had signed up for the army was still part of him, was a component that could be resolved with the correct function.

Walk away, soldier. Your superiors aren’t here. You can’t kill Jem now any easier than you could kill her at the safe house. Admit it. She’s too much like…

Cory dug his fingernails into the crack of the false door and tore it off. He was not prepared for the absolute dark inside. A ghost erupted.

Catherine?

The blade stopped before it touched his neck. He had caught her wrist. He paused. He let the moment pay out.

‘Jem.’

‘Get fucked.’

The muscles in his jaw bulged. He felt her wrist bones shift. Grimacing, Jem supported the wrist with her left hand, but his strength was beyond her. She screamed through locked teeth. Cory shook her and the knife fell. He kicked it towards the stove and looked back at her. With one strike, she was unconscious, dropping. He caught her awkwardly and laid her down. He put his gun over her forehead. This woman had hindered him from the start. He noted the syrupy blood that bubbled from her nostrils. He huffed and lowered the gun. Later, he thought. Her immediate death would only distract him. His attention moved to the body in the dark anteroom.

It took only a moment to see that Saskia was dead. Not, perhaps, beyond resuscitation, but her breathing had ceased and her lips and earlobes were darkening to the cyanotic shade that he had seen countless times. Saskia was drifting away from him. He could feel the distance increase with each second, and his anger grew in equal measure. It was not conceivable to come so far and risk so much for the information she surely held about the Cullinan Zero. But, despite her death, there was time. He had to be quick.

‘I’m impressed, Saskia,’ Cory said. And he was.

He closed his eyes and strained to feel the smallest hint of a…

Yes, it was there. The device in her head—a crude prototype of his ichor—was functioning enough to permit narrowband communication. The device would not last much longer, however. Cory felt it was too closely bound to the flesh; the cyanotic, failing flesh.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Cory prepared himself to interface with the device. It would not be easy. Such an antique would need careful handling—the personal touch. He would insert his very personality. First, he slowed his breathing and lifted his face. In this darkened hut on this freezing night, he had a test of his ability to transmit himself. Cory said, ‘I see a fine mesh.’ He imagined taking a single step down a curving, shadowy staircase and felt a growing detachment. It was working. Sergeant Blake would have been proud. ‘I see knots and whorls in the wood.’ Another step into the gloom. ‘I see a window, also covered by the mesh.’ A third step. And, speaking again, ‘I see a bandage,’ he took a fourth. The hypnotic induction continued with four things he could hear—Jem’s breathing, the flexing wood beneath his feet, his pulse in his ears, the hiss of air in the chimney—and four things he could feel. With each verbalised sensation, his mind went deeper down the imaginary staircase. He spoke in groups of four sensations, then three, then two, then one. His eyes closed on the hut and (now) the ichor in his blood began to march. The machines wove his mind thread by thread into the program running on that vital, elusive device at the back of Saskia’s brain. Where was she? How deep had she gone?

~

He opened his eyes on a vast firmament, infinite in all directions, whose colourless fractals reminded him of feathers, shells and galaxies. Worlds within worlds, he thought. The illusion did not quite surmount the evidence of his bodily senses, which insisted that he still stood in the hut on the mountain, but laid itself like scales across his vision. As he looked deeper into the fractals, his body grew less substantial. The firmament might have been a photonegative starscape. Close by—yet thousands, perhaps millions of miles distant—were darker, larger orbs at the heart of the fractals.

Cory could not move. He might have been an astronaut in free-fall. His breathing became irregular.

I’m still in the hut, he thought. Easy. There is a whole mountain beneath me.

From behind him, he heard the wing-claps of an approaching bird. There was no time for fear. Only a tension before the impact of its talons, which fastened on his shoulders. The bird thrashed on, dragging him through the air towards the closest of the dark orbs. Cory looked up to see a black breast and a scythe-shaped beak larger than his head. He shied from the thumping wind and looked down.

My feet. I must have feet. Why don’t I see them?

Easy.

The hut, the mountain, and Saskia—all were gone.

‘What are you?’ he shouted.

‘Ee-caw! Ee-caw!’

Ichor, he thought. Ichor.

~

He awoke on a forest path looking at the fractal sky. How much time had passed? His head hurt. When he tried to move, plates of armour shifted about his shoulders. He stood slowly and looked at his hands. He was wearing leather gloves with a metal carapace that shifted as he turned his hands and rippled his fingers. His head was covered with a faceless helmet. Cory suppressed his unease.

So I play the knight.

He was standing in a petrified forest. Behind him and ahead, a mist obscured the beginning and the end of the path. Cory felt certain that each direction stretched to infinity. If this were a planet, the path was an equator. Next to the path, a horse ripped at the short grass. It wore a metal faceplate. The saddle was loaded with bedding, a broadsword… and the bird.

It was perched on the haft of the saddle, watching him. Cory’s instinct was to step back. Its crest was reddish brown and the breast black with blue streaks. The raptor-like eyes were trained on Cory, who put his hands akimbo and said, ‘So what now?’

The bird—if it was a bird—leaned forward and opened its mouth, black tongue pointing as though to vomit.

‘Ee-caw!’

The screech could not mean anything, but it meant everything to Cory. Suddenly, he knew that the program running this simulation was about to stop. The program existed on the device in Saskia’s head, and as she died, the program died. This knowledge came to Cory as though he had always known it; yet he also realised that he had not known it before the bird had screeched.

‘Show me,’ he said, climbing onto the horse. The bird flung itself into the white sky, became another of the black dots, then returned to Cory. The curve of its fall became a tangent and it skimmed the path at great speed. Cory wheeled his horse after it, flicking his reins left and right, Western style.

~

The horse cantered for a time that Cory could not measure. A sun appeared ahead, above the bird, and wintered to a bloody eye. In that instant the path widened to a clearing and Cory found himself at the edge of an immense wall of thorns. Their twisted branches looked ancient. Cory’s horse trotted around the perimeter of this wall and it became clear that there would be no easy way through. He looked for the bird, but it had gone. Not that it could help. He knew he had to cut through the barbs before this program, and this reality, failed around him. He pulled the horse up and withdrew his sword.

As he dropped to the ground, his armour clanked. He took one breath. Two breaths. He ran at the wall and swung two-handed strokes with such ferocity that five strides were his before the tendrils began to close in and he swung again and again, huge figure-of-eights, and the tangles parted on the edge of his blade. His ankles snared but he ripped them free. Fingers of wood hooked his elbows and slipped around his neck but he continued his berserk onslaught until the darkness changed to evening and he was finally through, his arms burning, and he was crouching in the dust of a vast, thorny cavern that held a full castle in perfect gloom. Only as Cory struggled for air—an illusion—and leaned on his sword did he see that the blade was marked with a spiralling rose.

Cory did not linger. It was possible that he could die here if he had no time to prepare his escape before this illusion failed. He used the sword to help himself stand. Then he walked through the barbican. The drawbridge flexed and rattled. He looked up at the murder holes. He was ready to dodge, but there was nobody. He passed through the lower bailey, where a hunting dog slept in the shadow of a cart, and entered a cloister. Its pumiceous lawn was dying. Through the open roof of the quadrangle, he could see three towers. Thorns obscured the sky yet by some illumination the walls of the towers were bright as porcelain and their pinnacles gun-metal blue.

He crossed the quadrangle and kicked open the door to the great hall. Around the table, a king and his retinue drowsed on their plates. Cory scanned their faces. None was Saskia. Even disguised, he would know her. She had to be in one of the towers; they were the truest places of safety in this illusion.

He hurried past the King and Queen, their crowns tilted. No heat shone from the fireplace. Stopped clocks read noon. He caught himself looking at his wrist, but time was not trustworthy here, however much he worried about its passing. He pushed through a second door, then a third, and climbed to the flagstones of the keep, the castle-within-a-castle. The three towers rose from its roof.

Cory rushed for the leftmost tower, then stopped. The door had a lintel embossed with a stone swan. The letters ‘Pb’ were cut into the swan’s wing. He sheathed his sword and strode for the middle tower. Another stone swan on the lintel, this time with ‘Ag’. And the third tower held a swan with ‘Au’.

He spun in frustration. Should he charge each tower in turn? No, he thought. She might have countermeasures, like before.

A twig fell onto a flagstone. Cory looked up. The simulation was dying.

‘Bird!’ he shouted. ‘‘Pb’ is lead. ‘Ag’ is silver. ‘Au’ is gold. What’s the answer?’

Beyond the dome of barbs, he heard a distant, ‘Ee-caw!’

And he knew. Three caskets, one each of gold, silver and lead, were offered to suitors of Portia in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare had adapted the idea from a manuscript called the Gesta Romanorum. Lead: Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath. Silver: Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves. Gold: Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire.

She wants me to think that it is gold. It must be lead.

Cory ran to the left tower, marked ‘Pb’, and pushed the door. It opened easily. He took the spiral stairs in skips of three. He stumbled as a wash of nothingness passed underfoot and again there was a sensation of no time passing. Glitches in the simulation.

Just as the forest had seemed infinite to him, stretching around the planet, so this spiral went on and on. He considered with unease the notion that his ichor and Saskia’s wetware device had taken one another in a deadly embrace, and that his mind was trapped in a loop.

Then—and had any time passed?—he saw the door to the attic. He laughed with relief and burst through. The attic was empty but for a simple bed, whose blanket he pulled away. His grin froze.

The cot was empty.

He did not flail at the sheet with his sword, though he wanted to. He moved to the open window and checked the sky. The dome of the thornwood was falling as dark rain, lightening the battlement with sunlight. Deep growls of collapse echoed about like cannon shot. He hurried down the staircase and ran onto the flagstones. The door of the middle tower, marked ‘Ag’, had split under the weight of moving stones, but the tower had not yet collapsed. Cory kicked in the door and climbed the identical stairs to the attic room.

Saskia Brandt lay on the cot beneath the small window. She was dressed in her shirt, jeans and cowgirl boots. Every item was intact and clean. Her hands were clasped below her breasts. There was nothing remarkable about her appearance apart from the length of her hair: in this world, it was shoulder-length.

Cory frowned in the doorway. His breath came in gasps and he wanted to cough. He let his sword fall against the floor. The sound was muffled, as though the air was losing its capacity to conduct sound. Saskia slept on. Cory approached the cot, took a handful of her hair and prepared to shake her.

Saskia awoke.

She had no eyes. The sockets were red and dry and infinite as the paths and stairwells of this world.

Bricks fell from the roof as Cory stared at her. He wanted to break her neck but he knew the gesture would be pointless. More bricks fell. They split in chalky puffs against the floor. Abruptly, the tower shifted. Cory braced himself against the wall and looked through the window.

The bird was coming.

‘To me!’ he shouted. ‘Quickly!’

This reality was folding away. With that, the information he needed would be lost. He heard the steady flap of bird wings. The idea of the bird no longer horrified him. Here. Carry me home to

(Camelot)

the mountain.

Then the sun extinguished and not even an afterimage remained in his eye. Reality stopped. The tower was gone, the castle with it, and Cory could not be sure who he was. There was nothing but the bird holding his shoulders and the rushes of air as it flew across emptiness.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Each of his bodily senses returned with petitions for attention. He staggered back against the chipboard partition. Touch competed with sight. In the instant before they synchronised, Cory imagined he was aboard a rolling ship as it crested a swell. He ignored the oncoming nausea and waited for the inconsistencies to cohere. One, two… yes, the hut. The mountain. He was standing over the body of Saskia Brandt in a hut, on a mountain, in Germany, in the year 2003, and he was eighty-eight damn years old and not finished.

The castle and the battlements, and the thornwood and its sun, were as gone as melted snows. Dead, like everything on this planet. Walking archaeology that refused to get with the programme, to lie in its grave and cool. He booted the cot and it knocked against the fine mesh that covered the wall. He did not touch the body. Saskia was dead. It was pointless; it would diminish him still further in his own eyes to attack her now.

Through a rent in Saskia’s shirt, Cory saw part of her breast. Without the steady expansion and contraction of the cavity beneath it, the curve was subtracted of its power. A statue could be beautiful, but not a corpse.

How much do I need you, Saskia?

He decided.

‘You’d better be worth this.’

There would not be enough ichor in his spit to do the job, so he had the factor form a lancet while he shrugged off one arm of his jacket and exposed his radial artery. His incision released a gout of blood. He directed this towards the tracheotomy hole and allowed some to splash over it.

The blood was golden with nanoparticles. He commanded them to enter an emergency reverse-entropy mode that would draw upon all energy in the vicinity to effect repair—except that within Cory’s body. Immediately, the liquid fizzed. The oil lamps guttered and the stove light weakened. Pinpricks appeared on the face of the corpse: intrasomatic tubules that pulled the oxygen from the air. Cory became dizzy and half-dreamed the buzz of piston-driven propellers, smelled leather and sheepskin, and felt the very boards beneath his heels rock as though the hut had swung in a steep bank.

Through this disorientation, he saw the swollen mass of Saskia’s forehead detumify with a hiss.

He remembered a mountaintop.

Tupungato.

A place to observe the stars.

Saskia convulsed once, and old blood, crisp as rose petals, burst from her mouth. A gasp followed, then an exhalation. In the dust, bright blood mixed with the old.

As once it did, thought Cory, in the city of Our Lady, Saint Mary of the fair winds.

Saskia’s arm slipped from the cot, almost tipping a nearby vase. Cory stared at its three flowers and pictured flowers on a grave. Flowers for…

Movement behind him: a flutter of cloth.

Cory did not turn. He said, ‘I see you, Jem.’

The cloth rippled once more.

As Cory turned, he wore the expression of a thoughtful man forced to pinch the life from a bug. The expression changed to fury. Jem was gone. He had not been thinking clearly. He glanced back at Saskia and decided that the ichor needed several minutes longer to heal her to the point where a verbal interrogation was possible. In the meantime, she was going nowhere.

Move it, Georgia.

Cory hurried to the veranda, where he searched the night. Then he jogged upriver. His cheeks were ruddy with embarrassment. When the divots became lost in bushes, Cory stopped. He brooded on the forest. Its wood had closed about him. His visual modifications counted six glimmers of heat through the trees, and any one of them could have been Jem.

He looked at the sky, selected the crest of a sturdy fir, and discharged his gun. A bone-coloured grapnel plumed upward. Behind it trailed a hawser. Cory felt the weapon lighten as the grapnel reached the treetop and bit the trunk with the hunger of a sprung trap. He turned and wrapped the hawser about his chest. The material fanned to a sling beneath his shoulder blades. He detached the gun—now skeletal—and placed it in his outside pocket. He zipped it shut.

He thought of Sergeant Blake from Base Albany. There, climbing had been the easiest of his tradecrafts.

I said, ‘Move it.’

He locked his knees and walked the trunk.

A starfield of snow fell by. When he was five yards from the top, he settled his boots and let the line pull him vertical. Then he hooked an arm around the tree. The sling was tight around his back, and his old lungs worked hard.

The soundless vista stilled him. Its passing, baggy clouds recalled the moon phases on the pocket watch given to him by Catherine’s father on that afternoon, a humid Tuesday, when Cory had sought permission to marry his daughter. How the collar of his new shirt had scratched. Catherine had worked the knot of the tie while they looked in the mirror. She had given him luck with a kiss and whispered that her father was a pussycat really.

Cory forced his gaze into the dark cavities of snow. A sense that the wood guarded Jem infused his perception and, with it, came the bitterness of foreboding. But he smiled when an electromagnetic burst flared in the middle distance. Jem’s phone.

Cory zoomed in. There: Her heat made an intermittent blip as she ran between the trees.

Gotcha.

He unzipped his pocket, pulled out the gun, and let it acquire lock.

Head shot, he thought. End it.

The weapon bucked. The tiny sound reminded him of a kiss. Catherine’s kiss in the mirror.

Damn it.

Trajectory change. Take out the phone.

He sensed the projectile swerve and pass through the plastic case. Beats of his tired heart later, the projectile returned to the gun with a gentle kick.

Cory made a funnel with his hands.

‘There’s nowhere you can run!’

Catherine—no, Jem—had tripped and fallen. Her heat stain was a distant star. She writhed. ‘Fuck you!’ came a moment later.

Cory smiled. Then dread smothered his amusement once more. Her sprawl recalled the dead woodsman, who had dropped inches from the hut, his fingers mixed with the tarpaulin. Sure, Cory thought, uneasy. The man wanted cover. But, more than this, Jem’s shape brought to mind Saskia as her dead hand slipped towards the vase next to her cot.

There was a metal mesh on the ceiling of the antechamber. And its walls.

‘I see a fine mesh.’

‘I see knots and whorls in the wood.’

‘I see a window, also covered by mesh.’

Cory watched the dissolving tusks of his breath.

He had made a tremendous mistake. The woodsman had not been reaching for cover. He had wanted the home-brewed battery.

‘Also covered by mesh.’

Cory swerved in his crow’s nest. Information streams jammed at his centre: the angle of the gun, Saskia’s likely position within the hut, wind speed, and the gloom that he had been outdone by a woman in a coma.

Saskia. Head shot.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Saskia Brandt twisted in the cot. She was past agony. Her back was shattered and her legs broken clean. Her ribs were cracked and her nose was smashed. Despite this, she was healing. Her left eye had opened and, with it, she tried to focus on the pink carnation in the vase. Then she tried to reach for it. Her arm swung like a boom. The bloody stump felt cold.

Take my hand, she thought.

They felt like the only words she knew. She did not mean take my hand. She meant-

Help? came a soft voice. So let me help you. Do you see the carnations? Reach for them. Push the vase.

The arm swung again.

Good. You touched it. That proves you can do it.

Saskia smiled.

Take my hand, she thought.

Soon. Now the flowers. Aren’t they pretty, Saskia? Push the vase.

~

Cory willed the projectile to go faster.

Hurry.

~

Beneath the tarpaulin, whose corner was closed in the hand of Tolsdorf, there was a crude pipe. At the end of the pipe was a ball bearing. A wire attached the bearing to a tractor battery and a homemade rack of beer-bottle capacitors. A second ball bearing was suspended at the top of the pipe. It too connected to the battery. The second ball bearing was held in place by string, which led through the wall to the neck of the vase in Saskia’s anteroom. As the vase fell, the string released the upper bearing. It connected, clack, with the lower. The spheres exchanged a spark. An electromagnetic pulse, its lifetime less than one quarter of a millisecond, flashed through the forest.

Cory’s orphaned bullet tumbled, lost speed, and dashed the hut like the knuckle of a night caller.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Jem watched the chalky outline of Cory convulse, then fall. The crackle of broken branches reached her a moment later. She could not begin to imagine what had happened to him. Had he been shot? She reached for her phone and brushed the snow away. The phone’s keyboard had been destroyed by the bullet but the screen was still bright and the battery compartment intact. The display was a solid block of pixels. She removed the battery and reinserted it, but the phone would not boot. Only the backlight worked.

Jem rose. Part of her wanted to find out the extent of Cory’s injuries, but she had come here for Saskia. She walked towards the hut. Her steps were high in the deep snow. She put the mobile phone in her pocket to smother the glow of its screen.

As she looked up, something moved to the left of the hut.

Cory? The woodsman, perhaps?

She paused at the last tree that provided cover from the dooryard. She waited, side-on to the trunk, breathing through her nose, watching.

Another movement.

She remembered how the darkness in that Berlin church had seemed to gather into the shape of Saskia. Could she have come back to life? The idea was

(stupid)

possible.

What are you really, Saskia?

Curiosity killed the cat.

Satisfaction brought him back.

Who had she seen?

Brought him back.

Jem left her hiding space and walked around the hut. She could hear her heart. When she saw the person-shaped shadow again, this time in front of the woodpile, and caught the eyes watching her, Jem snatched a breath and held it. Then she raised her mobile phone.

Saskia moved into the light. Her eyes were shark-dead. Their blown, trembling pupils turned away, searching the trees. A thick tongue probed a tooth gap. Jem put a hand across her mouth as she gagged. She could not shake the feeling that Saskia was still dead and that her body was being moved by strings in the tree above her. Saskia—the body of Saskia—turned. Jem watched it shuffle away on bare feet. She followed, quietly.

How could this be her friend? She had been smashed: months away from any recovery, if that were even possible. But Ego had told her about the machines in Cory’s blood that could repair tissue. The ichor, Ego had called it. Had Cory somehow infected Saskia with the substance? Why would he do that?

Around the hut, snow fell soundlessly. There was a body lying face down—the woodsman?—obviously dead, greyed out by the recent snow. Jem continued to watch Saskia as she stared at him. Was there sadness in her expression? Saskia turned and took two paces uphill, away from the hut, where she dropped to the ground. Jem was worried that Saskia had fallen. She moved towards her and touched her shoulder. Blackish blood dripped from Saskia’s nose. The jaw worked while the tongue remained still.

Gently, Jem reached for the safety pin that had fastened her tongue to her cheek. She released it. Her fear and revulsion were distant places now.

‘Talk to me, sweetheart.’

‘Take,’ Saskia whispered, ‘my hand.’

‘Of course I will. There. Now let’s get out of here.’

The face warped. ‘Take my hand. Take my hand.’

Saskia snorted in frustration and looked down. She began to dig at the snow with her stump. Jem hesitated. She was uncertain whether Saskia wished her to help. When Saskia had cleared six inches, she rocked back, gasping, and looked at Jem as though for the first time.

‘You want me to dig?’ Jem asked.

In reply, Saskia blinked.

Jem set about scooping away the snow. The surface was brittle and wet but the deeper snow was packed hard. She dug until her fingers caught a metal edge. It was a small fuel container, perhaps bearing a gallon, and too heavy to move.

‘Take my hand.’

‘You want me to open it?’

Saskia blinked again.

Jem considered the container. It was lying on its side. ‘But the fuel will pour out.’

Saskia looked at the body of the woodsman and said no more. Jem sighed, covered her nose, and unscrewed the cap. Fuel poured out and dissolved a cavity in the snow.

‘What now, Saskia?’

Saskia pushed at the container. It was almost empty, but something metal knocked against its interior. Jem turned it upside down. She shone her phone on the object that fell out.

Saskia took the gun and struggled to her feet.

‘What are you doing?’

Saskia took uncertain steps through the snow. She passed the woodpile, raised her head to get her bearings, and walked around the side of the hut. Jem followed her; her desire to stop Saskia checked by the presence of the gun and the knowledge that this… this thing was not quite Saskia.

They crossed the emptiness of the dooryard with Jem lingering two paces behind. Every few metres, Saskia stopped, as though listening. Jem wondered at the technology in her head. Not just the device itself, but how it communicated with the brain. How did it move her legs and arms? Was the process something Frankensteinian, like frog’s legs twitching on a dinner plate? Was the device a puppeteer?

No, thought Jem. I shouldn’t call it ‘the device’.

Saskia stopped briefly once more.

I should call it Saskia.

They found Cory on his back with fallen branches around and across him. His fluorescent jacket had ripped open at the chest but there was no sign of serious injury. Only his lower leg seemed broken. It was bent at an impossible angle and his foot was turned inward. His eyes were closed.

Jem had time to notice a small, white cube nearby—was it the thing that sometimes took the form of a cane?—when Saskia raised her gun. She pointed it at Cory’s head. The sight of it focused Jem on the implications of killing him.

‘Wait, Saskia. What if he hasn’t finished fixing you? Maybe what’s happening inside you needs him to be alive.’

‘Take my hand.’

A paroxysm overcame Saskia. She doubled at the waist, screaming silently at her bloody feet. Jem moved alongside her. When she straightened, Jem took her in her arms. The gun remained pointed at Cory. Jem touched Saskia’s cheek with hers and closed her eyes. She remembered a morning two weeks ago when Saskia’s breath smelled faintly of the night, and Jem thought, An imperfection at last. She had faced her across the pillow in the white sunshine and kissed the tip of her nose.

The gloved hand of a stranger—leather, the colour of midnight arrest—closed around the barrel and twisted. Jem gaped at Inspector Duczyński, of all people, who put the weapon inside his jacket. Solemnly, Duczyński turned to a taller, older man wearing a fluorescent jacket and a yellow cap. Snow had gathered on its brim.

‘We found her,’ said the taller man. He was speaking into a mobile phone. ‘Hello? Mr Self?’

When Danny stepped from behind him, Jem felt her strength diminish. Saskia slipped through her hug and Danny caught them both, and the three sank, Saskia sighing as he looked from one to the other. Air blew through the black colonnades of the forest, bringing sparks of snow.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Cory woke from a dream of the crowded recruitment office at Peachtree Creek; of the coughing men in the queue; of the laconic sheriff taking temperatures with an ear thermometer. As it faded, he found himself in the woodsman’s hut. He kept his eyes closed and assembled the footfalls, scrapes of furniture, swallows: one woman, three men. His senses had been reduced to his God-given five but that was fine. More serious was the absence of his factor. Not once in six decades had Cory lost its heartbeat. When he felt ready, he opened his eyes on a tall man wearing a yellow cap. Next to him was the Berlin police officer Cory had shot at the Fernsehturm. He wore a sling beneath his coat. Danny Shaw, nearby, was biting a nail. Jem stood at his shoulder. Her nose was red and swollen.

A thick collar ringed Cory’s neck. It was leather and smelled of dog. Its chain had been fed around the stove.

His broken shin began to fill with a familiar heat that meant assisted repair was underway. So the ichor had not been totally disabled. That made sense, because the improvised capacitor under the tarpaulin could not have generated a pulse greater than a gigawatt. His ichor would return to full strength within half an hour; faster even, if he could talk them into returning the smart matter. He rose to his elbows. The inspector, sitting at the table, noticed the movement and leaned forward. At the opening of his arm sling was a gun.

What manufacturer? How many shots?

But his ichor was silent.

‘I am Inspector Karel Duczyński,’ said the man. The remaining captors straightened their backs and Cory, smiling, knew that this interrogation would pale against Hole Eight, a pit in a field in Base Albany—not yet dug—where the young Cory had learned to build a wall, brick by brick, between him and his pain.

‘Who are your friends?’

‘Dr Hrafn Óskarson,’ said the tall man. ‘I’m in charge of the investigation into flight DFU323 and I’m tired because I haven’t slept in thirty-six hours, so let me make this simple. Behind this hut is a corpse. A few kilometres to the south-west is the grave of one hundred more.’

‘Don’t forget Miss Brandt,’ said Cory.

‘Brandt?’

‘Alias Dorfer, Dr Óskarson. Where is she?’

The Icelander shifted the bill of his cap. ‘I want you to tell me the complete story of your involvement.’

‘Shouldn’t this be conducted in a police station, Inspector Duczyński, with due process?’

‘Fuck due process,’ said Jem. Her voice wavered. ‘What did you do to Saskia? She was dead.’

Cory grinned. ‘Inspector. Doctor. You see the ridiculousness of this conversation? Miss Shaw seems to think that I can raise the dead. Perhaps you should talk to her first. After all, she decided not to board a flight that crashed.’ He blinked slowly at Jem. ‘Did you feel a twitching in your pussy?’

Danny stepped forward and balled Cory’s jacket in his fists. His cool broken, Cory met the man’s hate with his own, which ran in his veins aplenty, whether the ichor slept or not.

‘Karel,’ said Danny, ‘tell Hrafn where you shot Cory.’

‘I saw it go through the neck. It should have been fatal.’

Danny pulled the collar aside.

‘The wound has healed,’ he said. ‘There’s a red mark, nothing more.’

‘Saskia died,’ said Jem. ‘She stopped breathing. But now she’s awake. Cory can administer some kind of treatment—to himself or others.’

The inspector moved alongside Danny to examine Cory’s neck. ‘It certainly would appear…’

Cory drew a sweet breath as the ichor stirred in his blood. A small piece of smart matter had entered his proprioceptive sphere. Energy clicked between the ichor and the smart matter. The trickle was enough to reset the essential gimbals of the nanomachines coasting in his blood.

Online.

Cory instructed his ichor to ramp the release of catecholamide neurotransmitters and he braced for the whetting of his mind. It came. He looked sidelong at the thumb-sized bump in the lapel pocket of Inspector Duczyński’s coat. It felt like a thing long lost: the ghost of a heartbeat. The fabric of the coat distended and, with a tear, the pellet burst out of its pillbox. Impossibly slow, it drifted towards Cory and stopped before his eye. Gasps from his captors. He studied the bead of smart matter. There was a word whose meaning set his murders as stars in a shrine not yet built.

Camelot.

He imagined a billion infantry heels coming to attention.

The mote zinged away and punched a hole through the plank above the stove. Soon it was ten metres out, twenty, then thirty. When it had collected enough distance, he called it

come

back

faster

to the hut.

The stove pipe exploded. Cory clenched his eyes and turned as timber shards dashed his shoulders and a dusty tide washed over the floor. Shouts across the aftermath. Knocked by the mote, the inspector’s gun cartwheeled into the swinging meats and camouflaged clothing. Cory had to smile. Jacked on his chemicals, he was fast as a nightmare and his enemies impotently slow. Into the dust he stepped, between the stove and the wall, and, wedged, straightened his long legs. The stove pitched, teetered, then boomed onto the floor. Its porthole erupted charcoal and brick-red wood, which flared alight. The chain was freed.

Before Cory could consider how to break the links around his wrists, Danny rammed him against the wall. Cory made fists to protect his fingers, but they crunched on the boarding. He shouted, then brought his knee into Danny’s chin. It was a lucky blow. The man slid to the floor. Behind him, Cory saw Hrafn and the inspector emerge from the smoke.

To me, he commanded. And sharpen.

Jem screamed, ‘Look out!’

The inspector, who was shorter than Hrafn, flinched clear of the coin-sized fragment of smart matter, but Hrafn was caught across the neck. He barked and slapped a hand to the wound. Cory felt the spinning mote jam in the boards above the door. The inspector came on and Cory read his scalp for the voltage spike of intention. Cory let his answer draw upon the power of his hips and legs. He headbutted the inspector on the sternum. Duczyński clattered against the table and fell across Danny.

Gasping, Cory looked at his work. Danny and the inspector were down. Hrafn sat against the table; his hand was a bloody glove and his head rocked with sleep. A rosary of blood, thought Cory, like the night Lisandro was killed.

Jem spread her arms protectively across the broken mirror. In it, Cory saw pieces of an old man glowing with fury. Jem might have been a mother stretched across her pram. Cory licked his lips and turned to the mote. It detached from the woodwork and dropped into the chain between his wrists. It became a pin, then a wedge, and the chain split.

He impelled the mote to fly from the hut into the night once more, conducting its impressions of passing fronds, the creak of wooded hillsides, and

there

the factor’s signal

dit-dit-dah

from the base of a tree, where it had been buried so hastily.

To me.

In two breaths, he opened his palm and the factor burst through the wall and slid home; wet with snow; deliciously cold. It quickened to a gun and Cory paired its snout with his sight line as he scanned the room. Hrafn, dying against the wall; Danny and the inspector dazed. Jem had retreated to the outer doorway. Her eyes were downcast.

Cory stepped towards the mirror. Once it was open, and the seal of Saskia’s Faraday cage broken, he would scrape her wetware device of information once and for all, and be gone.

But he hesitated as his reflection swished left and the secret door opened. Saskia stepped into the room. She wore jeans and cowgirl boots. Her shirt had been buttoned. Three teeth remained in her grin.

‘Tell me what I want to know,’ Cory said, ‘or I’ll rip it out. The thornwood can’t hide it.’

She shook her head. ‘I have… set traps.’ She swallowed. ‘Device will destruct. If cracked.’

‘I didn’t know that suicide was one of your talents.’

‘Do, now.’

‘What’s your plan, Saskia? We all want to know. Don’t we, Jem? Gentlemen?’

The table scraped as Danny used it to stand. He helped the inspector into the nearby chair and crossed to Hrafn, who hissed as Danny checked his wound. Jem backed into the curtain that covered the outer doorway.

‘Running away again, Jem?’

He smiled—aware of the blood on his teeth, empowered by it—and set the benefit of killing all the people in this room against the cost of a manhunt and the threat to his anonymity. When he turned back to Saskia, she held the inspector’s gun in her hand.

‘Ah, Saskia. Not one of your better ideas.’

‘Shoot. Me. And I shoot. You.’

‘How did you rig up that EMP weapon? Did the woodsman help?’

‘It’s. Secret.’

Cory looked from the gun to her shaded, broken face. ‘Come back with me. In the present, there’s work to be done.’

‘Present?’

‘This is the past. It’s finished. Can’t you feel it? They are flies in amber, all of them, and they don’t know it.’

‘You. Idiot.’

Cory sighed. Saskia had joined the cult of the walking dead. He was genuinely sorrowful. She had deep courage. She would have made a singular friend. He tossed his gun to his left hand and put the barrel to Jem’s nose. Around the room, heartbeats raised, pressures ramped, muscle gorged and flickers of charge spent themselves across sweaty skin. Except Saskia: she was cold.

‘Wait,’ she said.

‘Tell me what happened on that flight,’ said Cory. ‘Before and after. All of it. I know Harkes passed something to you.’

Saskia swallowed again. She removed her forearm from her back pocket, looked at the ghost of her hand, and began to speak.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Berlin, before the crash

Saskia Brandt, who was certain of most things, could be certain of the exact moment she realised that the tall gentleman walking away from her on Bismarck Strasse was an anachronism. There was nothing unusual about his appearance. He was elderly, slim, and walked with a cane. He was one man among the hundreds taken in her glance.

An instant before, she had experienced an utter violation. It had not been maleficent. More a neutral excavation of her mind by a force that overpowered her. Thoughts had been inventoried: the position of her body mid stride, the rubbing sensation of her canvas bag’s shoulder strap, her satisfaction in picturing, at will, Jem’s blue hair; the loss of her loneliness, hair strands falling across her left eye; hunger. Everything in her awareness, and perhaps the unconscious layers below that, had been breached by some form of electronic, viral attack. Fortunately, before this information could be transmitted back to the originator of the virus, safeguards in her wetware device had been tripped. The virus was contained and killed.

Saskia had stumbled in the street and looked for the source of the assault. It could only be a time traveller. The encryption on her device was unbreakable by contemporary technology.

There he was.

The elderly gentleman paused on the corner of the block, tipping his head to one side as though he had half-heard his name. He looked in her direction and she turned away. She turned back when he continued walking with his easy, imperious gait.

Saskia matched his pace. It was ten minutes later that she sensed a GSM transmission from the man. Saskia felt the information as though it were a gossamer strand trailing from his gentlemanly hat, sunlight glissando on its lone string. The transmission contained TCP/IP packets—easily decrypted—destined for an online travel agency. He had just booked a flight to Milan.

~

Why Milan? And was he aware of Saskia? Did he know Jennifer Proctor and her father, David? Saskia worried at these questions for every step of the return journey to her apartment. Part of her curiosity was a need to know what had happened to her friends. Had Jennifer become the Einstein of the twenty-first century, a media eminence? And what of David? Had he been fully reconciled with his daughter? It was carrying these thoughts, along with breakfast from the local shop, that she re-entered her apartment one full hour earlier than she had told Jem with a plan to follow her time traveller to Milan. She found the woman in the secure room, where Saskia kept her more personal souvenirs, her financial paperwork, and her weaponry.

‘What the fuck are you doing, Jem?’

~

Who was

‘I bought us Battenberg cake… and proper English teabags. I was going to invite you on a trip.’

the time traveller? Where was

‘Where?’

he going?

‘Milan.’

Milan?

‘Milan.’

Echoes of her former life.

Sounds dying but not dead.

Saskia boiled with the implications of her discovery—a time traveller, like her—for the short hours of the day with Jem, the barren night, and the morning.

~

Saskia had taken her usual seat in the rearmost row of the aircraft. Here she could see without being seen. A girl of twelve or so, travelling alone and clearly nervous, looked at her across the aisle. Saskia took her hand briefly. Then the jet engines tuned up and up and the rough take-off pushed her into a doze, eyes dry even beneath their lids, her shoulders cramped and tense, forgetting the girl but remembering the time traveller. Where was he? She had not seen him come aboard. The engine noise played on all the intensity of her anxiety, which itself was buoyed by the absence of Jem. Saskia was conscious that her outfit—a disguise, in part—had been chosen by the woman: the Loblan cowgirl boots that made her feet ache; a fancy knapsack that could carry nothing more than her mobile phone, her wallet, a tampon or two; a tight, designer shirt; a necklace that bounced on her exposed sternum. Each discomfort made her think of Jem. For a time, she had been everything. Everything. Jem with the blue hair, draped over a sofa in the changing room, yawning thoughtfully at Saskia’s new groove and calling it good with a mimed pistol shot.

Peow.

Airborne.

Saskia cuffed away the cold tracks of her tears as a steward passed her, heading towards the rear galley. She watched him return with a rattling cart. As he pushed this along the aisle, she heard a door open behind her. She frowned. It was impossible that someone could be back there. Nobody but the steward had passed her since she sat down, and he would not have allowed the plane to take off with the bathroom occupied.

Saskia turned fully.

The woman who emerged from the dark, L-shaped corridor, and who was now looking nervously down the cabin, was Jennifer Proctor.

Saskia’s memories of 2023 had been dulled by the stresses of 2003, in which she was a fugitive. But she had not forgotten Jennifer Proctor (hair held by chopsticks, arrogant but principled), the woman who had created a time machine and helped Saskia return to 2003. The version of Jennifer who stepped back into Saskia’s life was older. Her hair was cropped and oiled. Her black T-shirt was tight and her stomach was flat. She wore dark gloves and, on her right wrist, a bracelet. Even in the gloom, her eyes were azure. They moved around the aircraft with unconcealed interest.

Saskia watched her. Since appearing in the air above Scotland, Saskia had been too busy with the reconstruction of her life to consider in detail what her escape would mean for Jennifer. There was a thread of worry in Saskia’s thoughts. Had Jennifer been reprimanded? Or had she risen with the star of her invention?

‘Sweetheart,’ she whispered, reaching out. ‘It’s me, Saskia.’

Jennifer was startled by the motion. She hesitated. Time traveller looked at time traveller and Saskia’s guarded expression changed to one of delight. She had disconnected herself from her home and her time more fully than any human before. Only now, sharing a look of relief and growing good humour with Jennifer, did she understand the cost of that amputation.

She released her seatbelt and stood. She had wanted to embrace Jennifer, but something in the woman’s eyes—shame? secrecy?—checked her. Jennifer, slightly shorter, looked up at Saskia and smiled. They might have been sisters contemplating the fruition of a prank. Then Jennifer took Saskia in a fierce hug. Saskia closed her eyes and pressed Jennifer’s forehead into the hollow beneath her chin. When Jennifer stepped back, she took Saskia’s hands.

‘You’re exactly how I remember,’ Jennifer said. In her smile, Saskia noticed surgically-straightened teeth. Yes, Jennifer had changed. Once their relationship had been that of an older Saskia to a younger Jennifer. Now their roles were reversed. The teeth made Saskia wonder about further advances in cosmetic treatment. Was it even possible, for instance, to tell how old Jennifer was?

‘When are you from?’ Saskia asked.

Jennifer paused. She was reluctant to answer. Why?

‘Decades have passed,’ she said. The words were delivered with the fondness of a person recalling childhood. ‘Did you receive the Ego unit we sent you?’

‘No, not yet.’

‘Decades, for me,’ Jennifer repeated, ‘since you crossed the bridge.’

Saskia nodded, though her understanding lagged, swirled in the disorientation of this unexpected meeting. She thought, What is the bridge? and the answer came as fast as an echo: The Einstein-Rosen bridge. Project Déjà Vu. Saskia remembered the empty winds of the desert around Las Vegas. She remembered the centrifuge turning, turning. But those moments were gone; history to come. She focused on Jennifer’s face even as the uncountable years returned to her eyes and, with them, the determined expression of someone set for grim work.

‘Why did you have to be here?, Saskia?’

A slow-burning horror passed through her. They were on the cusp of something: Saskia, Jennifer, and everyone else on this flight. What did it have to do with Jennifer’s abrupt appearance?

‘Tell me,’ said Saskia.

‘DFU323,’ replied Jennifer, almost in wonder. ‘The Freedom Flight.’ She seemed to recall herself, and looked at Saskia. Her tone was confidential. ‘What’s your role in this?’

‘My role in what?’ Saskia placed her palms onto Jennifer’s shoulders. The gesture was intended to emphasise her question, to steady Jennifer, but Saskia felt her fingertips lock on her bones. ‘Tell me what is happening. All of it.’

A muscle twitched at the edge of Jennifer’s mouth.

‘We’re inside a mystery,’ she whispered. Her next words had the monotone of rehearsal. She might have been repeating a line from a multiplication table. ‘Half an hour before it was due to land, DFU323 lost radio contact and went down—straight down—into the Bavarian National Forest.’

Saskia stared at her. Her thoughts looped. Crash? How could they crash? They couldn’t, it was impossible. Saskia’s death was impossible. She had a role to play in future events that had not yet come to pass. If that role were not to be, then Saskia herself would never be able to travel in time; she would not be here. Paradox. Impossible.

Jennifer smiled. It was a copy of that schoolgirl joy that had gripped them only moments before, but now it found no answer in Saskia’s face.

She is more different than I guessed, Saskia thought. Something happened to her.

‘Nobody knows why it crashed, Saskia. DFU323 is like the Mary Celeste. A riddle inside an enigma.’

‘Why are you here, Jennifer?’

‘I was summoned by a word. It was sent from this aircraft shortly before it crashed. The news media will report it. ‘STENDEC’.’

‘What does it mean?’

Jennifer took Saskia’s hands and continued, with a subdued fervour, ‘It means the end of a great journey.’

‘For whom?’

She shook her head. The question would not, or could not, be answered.

‘Come with me, honey,’ said Jennifer. ‘I can take you back. The band is calibrated to 48.98 kilograms. How much do you weigh?’

She reached for the black bracelet on her wrist and placed her index finger and thumb around its circumference. Then, carefully, she rotated it ninety degrees. Saskia saw the ugly, ripening indifference in her face. The young scientist she remembered was gone.

Saskia pushed her deeper into the galley. Jennifer said, ‘Hey!’ as she fell against a tall rack of metal lockers, but she did not twist out of Saskia’s grip.

‘Whatever game you want to play,’ said Saskia, ‘stop it. Who will send ‘STENDEC’? A pilot?’

‘It was sent by my Huckleberry, only moments ago.’ Jennifer chuckled, as though remembering a joke. ‘He thinks that I work for a collective called the Cabinet, a revolutionary cabal that wants to put in place an American Confederacy. He thinks he’s chasing a spy.’

‘Thinks?’

‘That’s what counts. Now, are you coming back with me? It’s what you asked for in your letter.’

Saskia was not listening. She looked along the length of the plane. Halfway up, a steward was leaning into a row with a coffee flask. The view beyond him was blocked by the first-class curtain. Saskia turned to Jennifer, hesitated, said, ‘Sorry,’ and pressed a nerve beneath her chin. She met Jennifer’s surprised expression with determination, then worked the bracelet from her weakened, quivering arm.

‘Is your so-called Huckleberry going to crash this aircraft? Tell me or the bracelet gets flushed, and you’ll be joining everyone for the ride down.’

‘Last chance,’ said Jennifer, hoarse with pain. ‘Are you with me or against me?’

‘Don’t be stupid.’

Before her last syllable was spoken, a storm entered Saskia’s head. The surrounds of her vision sparkled and she felt an intermittent immobility, as though a fundamental connection in her mind were working loose. Her awareness opened and closed, opened and closed. The waves of disorientation reminded her of passing above and below the threshold of sleep.

She opened her mouth to speak, but her breath caught.

‘Let me tell you about stupidity,’ said Jennifer. ‘Complaining about events is like complaining about the weather. Just stop. Enjoy the rain, the thunder.’

Saskia gasped, ‘What have you done to me?’

She tried to move back from Jennifer but her balance was upset. She succeeded in turning towards the front of the aircraft. Her arms were wide, bracing. Ten metres away, the steward was still pouring coffee. The hairs on his wrist moved in and out of focus.

‘The technology in your head is old-fashioned, Saskia.’ There were years of telling in that voice. Years of telling and not being told. ‘Asymmetric encryption went out with the dinosaurs. Now, we’re going to wait here a while longer until I’m ready to make my appearance.’

Dinosaur, thought Saskia. Exactly.

She pictured a huge, lumbering Tyrannosaurus rex clawing through a forest, ripping at branches with its tiny hands. The visualisation brightened. The up-and-down plunging of her awareness steadied to a slow, manageable numbness. Dinosaur. Exactly. She stumbled into the aisle and clawed along, headrest-to-headrest. Jennifer’s attack on her wetware device had to be based on radio communication. It must, therefore, weaken with distance.

Inverse square law, she thought. Interference. From the avionics.

The passengers barely noticed her, but Saskia focused on their details, conjured lives from their scant exteriors. Some were businessmen. Others were boys on first holidays unaccompanied. These mothers and fathers and wanted and unwanted children. Retired, precise ladies and gentlemen. A police officer. A musician. Those who constructed their personal spaces from Evian, iPods, their lap-held fictions. Saskia scrambled along the aisle. Dinosaur. Her fingers groped for gross visual features; seat-backs, armrests. Exactly. She fought her way towards the steward.

The storm in her head redoubled. She lost her sense of orientation. Spokes of sunlight, anchored by the portholes, slit the compartment like swords through a box. It became a shaft down which she stared.

Not enough interference, she thought. More. How many passengers had forgotten to switch off their phones?

Inside her head, she screamed, Answer me!

The first call came through on the phone nearest to her. The woman said, ‘Preggo?’

Another phone, two rows back: ‘Yeah?’

‘Hallo?’

‘Si?’

As the handsets punched signals through the fuselage to masts thousands of feet below, the high-strength defence washed through her. She crouched in the aisle, having regained control of herself, and turned back to Jennifer. Their stares met. Jennifer was frowning.

Saskia hurried towards the steward. As she ran, she transferred Jennifer’s bracelet to her pocket. The steward was talking to a passenger. Saskia put a hand on his shoulder and whispered into his ear. He laughed, but the noise slurred into a snore and Saskia guided him into an empty seat. She tugged his collar to cover the red marks made by her fingertips. She glanced back and saw Jennifer walking up the cabin.

Three flight attendants in total: two remaining, both women. Are there sky marshals on this flight?

No.

Saskia swept beneath the curtained arch that marked first class. A sense of the cabin became part of her proprioceptic awareness before her second footfall. As naturally as she knew the position of her left hand, she knew that the width of the cabin was four metres. She felt the exits: six, evenly spaced. She saw the halo of a wiring bundle where its current leaked and, from that, she pulled an instant of flight deck sound (static and a steady bleep) as it passed to the (black box) rear of the aircraft.

There was a stewardess on the other side, and she turned with a bright smile that presaged a rebuke.

In Italian, Saskia said, ‘Behind me, there’s a lady dressed in black. She’s just left her seat and is scaring the other passengers. She won’t sit down.’

Saskia put a firm hand on her arm and pushed her towards the rear of the aircraft. It worked. The stewardess made a soft, placating noise and moved to intercept Jennifer. Saskia continued along the cabin. She smiled at those passengers who met her eyes and concentrated on reaching the captain.

There was a food cart near the door to the flight deck. Saskia glanced at it for weapons. The trays looked like they contained snacks in plastic wrappers, bottled water, and ice. Saskia pulled out one of the trays. Cutlery: plastic. Useless. She took the coffee flask from the top and turned to the keypad next to the door of the flight deck. No time to pick it.

Saskia lifted the wall-mounted phone and pressed the button marked ‘flight deck’.

‘Capitano, la serratura è rotta. Per favore apra il portello.’

She looked back once more and saw Jennifer passing through the first-class archway. There was no sign of the stewardess that Saskia had spoken to. Two flight attendants down. One left. The last had to be with the pilots.

Saskia turned back to the flight deck and was surprised to see that the door had opened. An elderly man stood on the threshold, regarding her with equal surprise. He wore a light suit and leaned on a cane. Saskia dropped her glance to the red spatters of blood on his left hand. The man looked behind her, probably at Jennifer.

The time traveller.

Her Huckleberry.

Saskia turned in time to see her nod.

His age belied the fury of his attack. She had room to turn and loop the phone cord around his cane, which cut through the plastic (How? she thought, angry at this miscalculation) and licked at her ribs. She saved her heart by bringing the coffee flask down on top of his wrist. The flask struck the sword’s handle—for it was a sword, not a cane—and spoiled his thrust. He had the advantage of her, though, and followed through with his elbow, which sent her tumbling into the fuselage at the foot of the exterior door.

‘That’s enough,’ shouted Jennifer. ‘You’ll damage the recall band.’

The man stepped away from Saskia. In a moment, she was submerged into lake-cold paralysis once more. She could not turn, or blink. Her eyes were stuck in their sockets. She watched the man move back from her statue. His form was clear, but the surroundings—beige plastic, a little of the flight deck door, a galley cart—blurred with static, then faded. Saskia became blind.

He asked a question in a language she did not recognise. The translation came in her native German: Who is she?

‘Never mind,’ Jennifer replied in English. ‘You did the right thing.’

‘She damn near knocked my head off.’

‘You got old, Cory. Look at you.’ The words carried contempt. ‘She’s stolen my recall band. If you’re still my Huckleberry, take it.’

Saskia felt hands enter her pockets. She was sickened by her immobility. Where were the passengers? Why weren’t they helping? She wondered how she could recover from this. The aircraft was still due to crash. As she had feared, she had become part of events. She could face the likelihood that her actions would lead to the loss of the aircraft; indeed, she could embrace this and trade it for the chance that Jennifer was mistaken, or that lives could be saved. Saskia waited for another opportunity to take control. The man, Cory, had left the pocket of her shirt until last. The recall band was there. But before he could reach it, one of the passengers spoke.

‘Leave her alone,’ said the stranger. ‘Now move away from her. That’s right. Jennifer, you too.’

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The code spell released its grip and Saskia stumbled against the fuselage. Immediately, she looked for the source of the voice. It came from a first-class passenger, standing in his seat three rows back. He seemed about the same age as Jennifer’s Huckleberry, but just as spritely. He wore a grey suit and held a

GLAS 1 ceramic subcompact pistol with electric ignition, fourteen rounds

gun in his right hand that would not be manufactured for a decade.

In his left was a tumbler of liquor. A ruby canine flashed in his smile. His eyes were steady. As he moved along the row of shifting, panicked passengers to the aisle, Jennifer and Cory looked at the newcomer with expressions that Saskia could not interpret. They were, however, tense and poised.

‘Kommissarin Brandt,’ said the man, ‘you’re wondering whether you should take the weapon from me. Don’t.’

American accent. Eastern New England. He knows my former job, my name, my face.

‘Who are you?’ she asked.

‘I am Doctor Patrick Harkes and you are my enemy’s enemy. I am, therefore, entirely at your service.’

Harkes stepped between the galley cart and Saskia. It was an oddly chivalrous manoeuvre. They now stood, shoulder to shoulder, facing Jennifer and Cory. Like a duel, the air was charged with certain, oncoming violence, and Saskia felt its menace creep across the passengers. One lady sobbed. Another murmured. Heads met and whispers passed. The murmurs grew. Saskia saw movement in the lap of the woman nearest Cory. Her fingers were curling around a ballpoint pen. If that woman stood to attack him, the situation would escalate and the brief advantage lent by Harkes’s gun might be lost. Saskia looked at the intercom panel and pressed the button that activated seat belt warning lights throughout the cabin. She lifted the handset.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she said, in Italian, ‘this is not an exercise. My colleague and I are sky marshals. We have just made a precautionary arrest. There is no danger to yourselves or this aircraft. The captain has been informed. Please stay calm and do not attempt to leave your seats.’ In German, she added, ‘As you can see, the situation is under control. Do not obstruct us.’

Jennifer, Cory and Harkes remained still during Saskia’s speech. Then Harkes laughed. The sound was abrupt and forced. He tapped his forehead with his free hand. She wondered how the three had come to arrive at this extraordinary meeting. Was Harkes the spy that Jennifer had spoken about? If so, what had he spied upon? The time machine?

‘I carry no modifications that you can influence, Jennifer, so you needn’t bother. They are long gone.’

Jennifer continued to stare. There was no sign that she found this surprising or frustrating.

She said, ‘It doesn’t matter any more. I found you.’

Harkes rested the gun on the trolley. Saskia, concerned by this insouciance, inclined her head to check if his finger was still on the trigger. It was. Harkes smiled at Saskia, then at Jennifer.

‘I’m a little old to be tarred and feathered, don’t you think?’ he said.

‘It’s personal,’ replied Jennifer.

‘Listen to yourself,’ Harkes said. His voice had developed an edge. ‘You’re talking about something that happened fifty years ago.’

Saskia saw the muscles in Jennifer’s jaw flex.

‘Three days, you fuck. It’s been three days since I buried him.’

The silence played out. Saskia felt the heavy air of calculation, interpretation, prediction. She was not yet ready to intervene, but, when she did, it would mean disarming Harkes. It was not enough that he was her enemy’s enemy. She looked at Cory and found him looking at her.

The frisson of this exchange seemed to prompt him.

‘Harkes,’ he said, turning to the man, ‘where is it?’

Calculated or not, this question seemed to strike Harkes with an almost physical impact. He let his glass drop loudly on the galley cart.

‘It? How can you still believe that this is about an object? It’s about an idea.’

‘Of course it’s about an idea,’ said Cory. ‘Where is the diamond?’

‘Somewhere at the back of Jennifer’s mind, dummy, where it’s always been.’ He swilled the ice in his tumbler but did not drink. ‘The Confederacy was over before it began. It’ll take a whole lot more than a precious stone to kick-start their revolution. Lookit, you’re a trigger-happy grunt. A psychopath. You think you’re married? You have no wife. Forget the diamond. Forget carbon focusing. It’s a story. A fucked-up lullaby for a halfwit.’

Saskia studied Cory for the physical correlates of his thoughts: a faster blink rate, a skin conductivity spike, micro-movements in his muscles. But Cory did nothing. He did not look at Jennifer to seek a denial. And, as far as Saskia could detect, no electromagnetic communication passed between them.

Harkes sighed. He looked disappointed with the effect of his speech.

‘I know you like a work of art,’ said Jennifer, ‘so I hope you appreciate our finishing touch. S, T, E, N, D, E, C.’

‘What have you done?’ Harkes looked towards the cockpit, then back at Jennifer, who was beginning to smile.

‘What is gravity, but action at a distance? Harkes, that spinner ripped him apart.’ She swallowed. ‘Ripped Dad apart.’ Her next words came cold and slow. ‘In eight minutes and fourteen seconds, this aircraft, and everyone on board, will crash. There will be no survivors. Only a mystery: seven letters that could mean anything.’

At this revelation, Saskia expected the passengers to surge up. She had braced herself to disarm Harkes and attempt to control the crowd. But the men and women within earshot did nothing. One woman lowered her head in despair. Another raised her hands to her ears. There was a sense of sadness, impotence, and of worst fears confirmed.

‘You made a mistake at last,’ said Cory, relishing his words. ‘You spent too long with the zombies. You became part of their danse macabre.’

‘Wait a damn–’

‘I’ll give you one chance. Tell me the location of the Cullinan Zero.’

Harkes was trembling and flushed. His lips pouted childishly. Though Saskia had guessed that, like the passengers, he would either explode or acquiesce, she was surprised by the further deflation of his posture: his chin sank to his chest and he gave up the impression of youthfulness. He grew into his age.

‘Even if I could tell you,’ he said. ‘I’m still dead. I’ve been dead the whole time, from a certain point of view. Isn’t that right, Jennifer?’

‘Yes. Think about that on the way down.’

‘No, thanks,’ said Harkes.

He drained the liquid in his glass and turned to Saskia. In the instant their eyes locked, a transmission pip five hundred nanoseconds long passed from him to her:

‘Well, my enemy’s enemy, I see you’re carrying Jennifer’s recall band. You will be aware that there are two ways out of this situation. The first is to use that band. The second is this. I’m too heavy for the band, though I can’t be sure about you, my dear. STENDEC.’

He winked and put the gun between his teeth.

‘No!’ she shouted.

A rush of panic carried her through a series of ballistics equations, even as she saw Cory lunge forward and Jennifer sink to a crouch. She considered the crushing force of the bullet and its cavitation; the kinetic energy and its reflection through the incompressible liquid matter in Harkes’s skull; the impact velocity and the residual velocity and the efficiency with which its energy was imparted. Each calculation folded within the next until she knew where the bullet would exit. She sprang into the air behind Harkes and put her head in the path of the bullet. Now, her death was as predictable as the products of the formulae. She closed her eyes. She would bring to bear the strength of physical laws that could never permit the time paradox of her death. She would cause the gun to misfire.

Wait.

Still in the air, she opened her eyes.

He sent me that message wirelessly. If he has hardware, it might deflect–

The electric ignition made no sound, but the bullet roared as it left the barrel. Saskia felt the airwash of the projectile like a slap to the head. Suddenly, there was blood in her eyes and she had slammed against the airframe. Through her disorientation, she became aware of a whistling sound near her shoulder. A man—Cory?—was shouting Harkes’s name. She turned. There was a hole in the exterior door. Saskia stared at it stupidly until the pitch dropped and

move

she sprang aside as the door boomed into the daylight.

The sound was like the roar of the passing bullet—but stretched. Her breath left in a sigh she could not contain.

She held the fold-out seat near the bulkhead of the flightdeck. She had twisted as she fell, and now she watched as Harkes was sucked outside. Cory was standing with nothing to hold. His jacket bloomed like a parachute and he reached towards Jennifer, who had pushed herself into the opposite corner of the bulkhead. She did not move to help. Cory was ripped from the aeroplane. Instantly, his white cane—no longer a sword—tumbled after him.

Saskia and Jennifer looked at one another across the foggy air. The woman’s expression was remote. Saskia reached for the oxygen mask that flapped above the fold-out seat and tugged the elastic strap around her head. For a moment, she looked at the sky through the doorway. It held a certain peace. All she had to do was release her hold on the seat. Lean into the river of air, close her eyes and wash away. Instead, she looked at the passengers. They stared mutely over beak-like oxygen masks. Scarves and hair fluttered. Saskia drew a breath and removed her mask. Jennifer was holding her elbow, as though injured, and Saskia remembered the girl that she had once been.

‘You killed both of them,’ she shouted. ‘Even your Huckleberry.’

‘Cory is a survivor like you,’ Jennifer called back. ‘And he’ll be on your trail unless you come back with me. What do you say? Still want to play the heroine?’

Saskia did not hesitate. She took the bracelet from her pocket and held it across the sucking, open doorway. Irritation, little more, crossed Jennifer’s face.

‘I think we can land this thing together if you’re sufficiently motivated, Jennifer. What do you say?’

Saskia felt the oncoming attack as an undertow before the crashing of a great wave. She began to open her fingers.

‘No, Saskia. No.’

Saskia could not complete the movement. Her hand locked tight around the bracelet. Every muscle jammed, and she lost command of her arm. Though she could not blink to oil her eyes, she saw Jennifer reach over, keeping herself low to the floor, and take the bracelet. She passed it over her wrist and elbow.

A single, burning filament of light appeared behind Jennifer: a vertical line about two metres high. It might have been the crack of a door opening onto something brilliant. Jennifer turned to it. The filament bobbed and canted as though its position relative to the aircraft was not perfectly fixed.

The filament began to pulse. Daylight. Night. Daylight. At the peaks of its intensity, Saskia felt sensation and control return to her body. Interference? Saskia tried to capitalise on these intermittent spells but she could not make large movements without revealing herself to Jennifer. She settled for blinking and taking long breaths of ice-cold air. The paralysis came and went with the regularity of a revolving door.

The filament expanded on the horizontal axis, left and right, forming a rectangle of solid light at right angles to the hole in the fuselage. Jennifer glanced at it and completed her work on the bracelet, which she tapped like a keyboard.

Then, without fear, Jennifer touched the centre of the rectangle. The portal lost its brilliance and assumed the reflectivity of a mirror. In it, Saskia saw the open doorway, herself, and an object that lay between the loafers of the foremost first-class passenger.

Jennifer cocked her head. She might have been listening to the equivalent of a pre-flight check. She stepped into the mirror. Its watery, reflective surface closed on her hips and shoulders until nothing remained.

With that, Saskia felt movement return. She leapt across the cabin and punched into the quicksilver. She was face to face with her fury. She groped for Jennifer’s arm and found her elbow. She squeezed, rotating the bracelet to crush the tendon of Jennifer’s triceps. She felt Jennifer stop and spin. Saskia squeezed harder and pulled her through the door. As the woman emerged, her scream mixed with the waterfall-boom of rushing air. Her eyes cleared and focused on Saskia. Jennifer tugged back, desperate to extract her arm, and she slipped out of Saskia’s grip, relinquishing the time bracelet.

‘Don’t forget this,’ said Saskia.

She raised her free hand and put Harkes’s GLAS 1 pistol to Jennifer’s forehead. The shorter woman screamed and shut her eyes. But Saskia did not shoot. She pulled out the collar of her T-shirt and dropped the gun inside. At this, Jennifer opened her eyes. She looked down in horror.

‘The mass–’

Saskia shoved. The quicksilver swallowed Jennifer and her scream without a ripple.

A boom, deeper than the noise that had accompanied the decompression, and fundamental, shook the aircraft. Heatless light raked the cabin. Saskia crouched. Her hair streamed towards the exit door. Unmoved by this, she transferred the recall band to her pocket as white flames trumpeted from the mirror. Tendrils spiralled towards the cabin lights and the EXIT/SORTIE sign above the intact starboard door. The mirror gathered to a silvery point, hovered for a second, then fell. A circle of floor immediately below it crunched to nothing. Saskia moved to the hole and looked down. She could see through to sunlight on the clouds below. The wormhole—or whatever it was—had collapsed to something infinitesimal and fallen through the aircraft. She watched the shaft close with a sound like that of a suction toilet. Baggage had tumbled into the gap and sealed it.

Saskia rose. She felt for the mechanisms controlling the communication system onboard the aircraft. There were… twenty antennas. No, twenty-one. Only two could be hacked. The rest were hardware-locked. She concentrated and, on the cramped deck, the Internet opened as wide as the sky. She downloaded their flight plan from EuroControl and confirmed the model of the aircraft. A Boeing 737, the 800 series. Fine. From there she skipped to a company who trained pilots for this model; she burst through their security measures and pulled a flight manual from their server and read each word in parallel. She downloaded several electronic textbooks on avionics, aerodynamics, and jet propulsion.

Meanwhile, she tried to access the flightdeck, whose door had been sucked shut. She pushed against it but the lock was engaged. A wash of anger surged through her body. The keypad comprised plastic keys of numbers and letters. Even if she knew the length of the code, it would be impossible to guess. She kicked the door in frustration. Harkes’s gun could have shot through the lock. She scanned the vicinity for anything useful, but there was nothing. Just then, the aircraft banked steeply to the left. Saskia steadied herself against the fuselage. Passengers screamed.

She looked for wiring around the lock, but there was none. How had Cory gained access? She inspected it more closely and saw a mark on the LCD. She touched the crack and hissed; the edge had cut the pad of her finger. The blood welled to a teardrop and Saskia noticed clear fluid around the wound. She sniffed. It was odourless.

Yet Cory had defeated the lock. Perhaps it was still broken. She pressed the key marked ‘enter’ and heard the bolts snap back. Saskia pushed through. Before she did anything else, she reached beneath the left seat and withdrew a bulky oxygen mask and, as she inhaled, the dry gas cleared the butcher-shop smell. Her vision brightened. She took ten breaths—counting each one—and looked at the pilots. Their white shirts were crimson with blood. A stewardess was slumped across the engine throttles, perhaps dead, perhaps not.

Saskia moved her gaze from the bodies and looked for the artificial horizon on the instrument panel. At the moment, it was level. The windows were opaque with condensation. An intermittent siren bleated. The sound matched a flashing button near the pilot. It read ALT HORN CUTOUT. Saskia almost touched it, hesitated, then pressed. The siren stopped.

Beyond the dead pilots, the two yokes moved as one. Their countenance was ghostly.

Saskia was considering which pilot to remove when an itching, stinging sensation spread from her cut fingertip. She raised her hand. It was numb.

‘Fuck,’ she said.

Cory undid the lock. Now he’s undoing me.

But the defeat should not have surprised her. After all, Jennifer had warned that the aircraft would crash and, despite Saskia’s desperate hope, Jennifer could not have lied. Still, she heard herself repeat, emphatically, ‘Fuck.’

At the same time, the yokes drifted forward and to the left. Saskia lost her balance and fell sideways as the aircraft dived.

She felt a disturbance at her core. Rolling shutdowns passed through her mind. Death by degrees. The wetware device at the base of her brain winked out and

Whoop, whoop.

she went

‘Overspeed warning! Overspeed warning!’

offline into sleep without end.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Ute Scheslinger, last conscious many months before, awoke on the flight deck of an aeroplane. She was gripping her right hand; blood was bubbling from a cut on its index finger. Her eyes left the wound and widened on this sudden, bright cockpit. The fittings shook and the alarms sang. She was being pushed into the bulkhead by the force of acceleration. She looked at the blood running into horizontal lines across the pilots’ necks, dripping towards her. Disconnected memories returned: a girl without a passport, a cat called Ego, a new apartment in Berlin, pink sheets that foretold the future, and a rendezvous in a darkened church. She had no narrative that gave meaning to Saskia Brandt, a mind once burned onto the device that pierced the back of Ute’s brain.

Ute had woken to her death. She struggled to stand, flung back the door to the flight deck, and entered the cabin. As she moved between the seats, the passengers beseeched her with masked faces. No. Nothing I can do. Ute climbed the ramp-like deck. The narrative of Saskia’s last hours took shape in her mind. Ute remembered feeling excitement at the prospect of a journey to Milan with

a new lover

and irritation at a desertion, then a hurt that struck deep.

The overhead lockers had sprung their loads. Bags and clothes blocked the aisle. Extraordinarily, one man, who wore a bow tie, was reading a newspaper. He lifted it to follow a moving track of the sunlight. Another man was dead. His skull had ruptured. Jammed between his thighs was a bloody laptop computer. His neighbour stroked his hair. Others held hands. Some embraced. Puke. Plastic cups, rolling.

She trampled copies of Die Welt, The Times, Corriere della Sera, and found the summit of the aircraft: its tail, a dark space that struck her as fundamental, but as what and for whom, Ute could not say.

There was a girl alone in the row. No-one had attached her mask. Ute sat next to her.

‘Komm,’ she said, ‘gib mir deine Hand.’

The cabin lights stuttered; gave up. Spokes of sunlight slit the compartment and Ute felt a sense of déjà vu. The G-force pulled a starfield of tears upwards. Oxygen tubes swayed. She heard the faint whoop-whoop of a cockpit alarm, unanswered.

She squeezed the girl’s cold hand. Her last thought was triggered by a jade band around her bleeding finger, flashing in unexpected sunlight.

Jem. Her name was Jem.

~

Everything stopped.

~

For lifetimes, she was wind across an empty steppe. Then, one day, she settled as dew on the grasses and coalesced to a watery archipelago. She disappeared, trickle-clean, into the roots of trees whose branches were bald and crooked. She grew glassy and cold.

Solid.

Wake me.

Baba Yaga: the witch who moved through eastern minds. Baga Yaga: the witch who travelled in a mortar with a pestle rudder that scored the forest floor. A silver birch to sweep her track, to erase all but a sense that something had been and gone. Saskia looked at her translucent finger. Blood dripped from the tip.

Wake me.

A forest grew and night fell upon it, moonless and still. Saskia felt her body sublimate. With this, she understood that the forest was a fiction. It had been cut from her memories like a string of dancing silhouettes. Now it folded and halved, folded and halved again, folded and vanished.

This way.

Wake me.

This way comes.

‘Something wicked,’ she said at last.

‘Don’t try to talk. I put a tube in your throat. In the army, I was a medic.’

‘Who are you?’ she asked the darkness.

On the wall.

‘You fell from the sky. I wrote down what the mirror said.’

‘What did the mirror say?’

Mirror. Mirror.

‘I wrote down what the mirror said.’

‘There was a girl next to me.’

‘Don’t try to talk. There is a tube in your throat and I had to pin your tongue to your cheek.’

‘Help the girl. There may be time.’

‘I have what the mirror asked me to buy.’

‘What did it ask you to buy?’

Stars moved in the darkness. Her constellations. The shadow. The heroine. The villain. Beer bottles and ball bearings. She remembered a child’s game that used a tray and a cloth.

‘Memory,’ she said.

On the wall.

‘Really, don’t try to talk. The mirror told me about the Ghost. I won’t ever let him find you. Don’t be scared. My name is Tolsdorf.’

‘Where am I? I don’t understand.’

‘Sssh,’ he said. ‘Sssssh.’

Over time, Saskia came to know that she lay on a cot, the type with a sprung mesh. Her wetware chip had rebooted since Cory’s attack and she felt whole. The chip blocked her pain and conducted unspoken information as certainties: she was smashed; she should not move—soon her tissues would swell. She had to let Tolsdorf take care of her. On and on the fiction wove. The husk on the device—the afterglow of her mind’s heat—had drawn upon the paranoia of this man, probed his needs and promised to fill them, and in return the man had taken Saskia to this anteroom in this hut and assembled the pieces of a desperate defence against someone called… what… yes, Cory, who was chasing something not easily destroyed.

An idea.

Jennifer’s Huckleberry.

Chapter Thirty

To Jem, Cory seemed older. His eyes were shadowed and bloodshot. His breath twirled white. ‘You were waiting for me.’

‘We were waiting for you,’ said Saskia. ‘Tolsdorf and I.’

The woman stood braced, as though leaning into a wind. The truncated wrist was behind her. She was covered by the jacket that Danny had slipped across her shoulders halfway through the story. Danny, like all of them, was in thrall to Saskia. He leaned against the table with his arms folded. Hrafn stood next to him. His bony face was thin and bloodless. He had jammed the gauze between his neck and his shoulder, and Jem might have mistaken him for a man on the phone. The inspector, for his part, sat at the table with his hands pressed between his knees. His mouth was open.

‘Well, Cory?’ asked Saskia, her love.

~

He watched snow crystals stir in the draught beneath the door. Questions burned. Was this fiction? If so, was it designed to misdirect him? Why would Saskia want him to give up the idea of the diamond? He considered the advantage this might lend her. If she was also in pursuit of it, then the advantage was considerable. It would leave her free to obtain it. But Cory did not view Saskia as a competitor. She was a bystander, or a player late to the game. And she was from the past. She had travelled in time fifty years before him. Had she lost her will too? Like Jackson?

Think, Georgia. Is she telling the truth?

Cory shifted his grip on the gun. If she is telling the truth… He would not permit that thought to complete. Its implication might undo him.

‘What now?’ asked Danny.

‘You know what,’ said Saskia.

‘He’s going to kill us?’

‘According to him, we’re already dead.’

Cory smiled. ‘You’re getting with the programme, finally.’

‘The paradox,’ said Saskia, straightening her back. ‘Test it.’

Cory drank the data from her body. She was serious. He switched his gun from Jem to Saskia. The answer to his unspoken question—can Saskia be killed?—came in the utter calm of her expression and the absence of any physiological changes that should have accompanied the threat of the gun. Yet he paused. If he killed Saskia with a bullet to the head, would the ichor he had donated be sufficient to rebuild her? He didn’t think so. He pointed at her head. And if this did not kill her, what then? Did that mean her entire story was correct? Was Cory a patsy? The impact of the truth of her words was too much.

He cut off his thoughts by squeezing the trigger.

The weapon did not discharge. Instead, it flexed like a muscle and jumped from his hand. Cory felt the psychic frisson of the smart matter’s software as it crashed. The mishandled kinetic energy split the device in two and its spinning halves clattered to the floor.

So she is connected to Jennifer. So she really is the second time traveller. What would she care about the Cullinan Zero?

Saskia grinned. Her remaining teeth were cracked, bloody.

‘Well, what now?’ she asked.

The wooden floor amplified her footsteps—heel-toe, heel-toe—until Saskia stood within the reach of his fist. The uncertainty churned within him. But he did not strike. Saskia raised her gun. Still he did nothing.

‘I can shoot most of what matters out of your skull,’ she said. ‘Maybe you’ll be rebuilt by your nanomachines, but it won’t be you.’

‘I’ll know your intention before you do. You aren’t fast enough.’

‘Begin at the beginning. Think. Jennifer sent you back to recapture an item, but the item was not her prize. She wanted Harkes. She wanted revenge. Think back, whoever you are.’

He looked at the men and considered their murders once more. Then he looked at the broken factor.

‘When I was young,’ he began, ‘my father called me ‘the Ghost’. He was blind, and I crept around the house because I was scared of him. Kind of funny, because I became a spook. My father was right. I spent my life elsewhere. My physical body is here, at the turn of the century, but my soul could not cross the bridge.’

Chapter Thirty-One

August, 1947, Buenos Aires

Cory walked to the airport at Morón. Once, an intellectual called Jurado had taken him through the difficulties of selecting the correct verb for travelling on foot through The Great Village, as he called Buenos Aires. Callejear must be rejected. That was clear. Pasear would not do. Never in life. One must plump for vagar, to wander. One wanders the labyrinth. One considers the changing street names as the retelling of Argentine history. These are golden threads to be plucked as strings to the past.

Cory, vagabundeo, arrived at the drab industrial estate just as the early afternoon sky was darkening. The offices of the British South American Airways Corporation was an unremarkable block with a striking emblem: an art deco star man. It reminded Cory of Hermes. Ancient Greek god of boundaries and those who cross them. Of the orator, the poet, and the shepherd. Of the core of thieves: their cunning.

He removed his hat and touched his forehead with a handkerchief. On the forecourt, a glorious, cream-coloured Packard was being washed by a chauffeur. Cory used his best Rioplatense Spanish to compliment the Packard. The two spoke for five minutes, during which Cory discovered that the Packard would be parked here until the early evening, and thus perfectly placed for hijack.

He raised his hat to the man and walked into the offices. He felt alive and happy. His grip was about to close on Harkes. The crushing sensation would be sweetness itself.

~

The waiting room outside the office of Air Vice-Marshal Bennett was empty. Cory sat in a low leather chair with his hat on his knee. He looked at the wall opposite. There was a painting of a tiny gaucho riding across a stylised representation of the South American continent. An aircraft-shaped shadow had fallen across him. He had turned his face upwards. The strapline read: ‘In South America To-Morrow!’

The window was north-facing and dull. To his right, in the office, two men were talking. Cory was looking at his knees, but he was listening to the men.

The younger man said, ‘About this weather, sir. We’re clear out to Mendoza, but it’ll be no fun over the bumps. The visibility is zero.’

The older man replied, ‘You’ve got the top seat. Tell me what you need.’

‘I should like to up the fuel load. Thirteen-hundred gallons would give us a cushion.’

‘Very well. What will that make your weight?’

‘A whisker off fifty-one thousand.’

‘Tell Pilkington I gave the word. Then tell him he can even put some fuel in the aircraft, instead of peeing it halfway across the hangar floor. But Reggo?’

‘Sir?’

‘This isn’t BOAC. Keep that juice for a rainy day.’

‘Sir.’

The door opened and the younger man emerged. He was no older than thirty and had a lightness in his movement. He wore a captain’s uniform and carried a clipboard. In an instant, Cory read all he could from the topmost sheet. The information was not useful. Just some figures and statistics associated with the flight plan. It was not, crucially, the passenger manifest.

The man smiled from the corner of his mouth and said, ‘How do you do?’

As Constantin Wittenbacher, Cory smiled back and said, ‘Very well, thank you.’

Then the young pilot was gone and Bennett called, ‘Mr Wittenbacher, is it? Do come in.’

The Air Vice-Marshal’s office was bright and spacious. The window overlooked the runway. An Avro Lancastrian was chocked up and gleaming in the sun. Men were standing on its wings. In groups of three, they were directing a fuel hose into the tanks.

Don Bennett was a short man who wore a suit with slightly baggy trousers, the English style. He was underweight, too, and Cory had no difficulty imagining him as an anxious and strict director. As Cory approached, Bennett switched from placing his knuckles on his desk to putting his hands on his hips until finally he reached out to shake hands. He was about forty, but his eyes were cynical and the constant motion of his body suggested a man bothered by time.

‘Constantin Wittenbacher,’ said Cory. ‘I am entirely at your service, Air Vice-Marshal.’

‘Please sit down.’

Cory tapped his cane against his shin. ‘I would prefer to stand.’

With an abrupt, interrogative tone, Bennett said, ‘German, are you?’

Cory knew that his worth was being weighed. There was an openness about Bennett’s expression that suggested this was nothing more than, say, an enquiry about Cory’s eligibility for a drinking club. Cory’s augmentations offered a numerical index of Bennett’s credulity by combining blink rate, vocal stress, and skin conductance, but he ignored these data. This came down to tradecraft. He had to win his support. He wove his words from the fictional threads of Wittenbacher, whose half-memories informed his own.

‘Air Vice-Marshal, my name is Colonel Constantin Martin Wittenbacher. I was formerly with fighter squadrons 26, 27 and 44.’

Bennett tipped his head back and opened his mouth as though this exactly confirmed his suspicion. He walked around the desk and stood next to Cory.

‘What did you fly?’

‘The Henschel H-123, Bf 109, and the Messerschmidt Me 262.’

Bennett leaned forward. ‘The 262? There’s a plane I’d like to fly.’

‘I flew it under Nowotny,’ said Cory. ‘It was a beautiful machine.’

‘How many successes, Colonel?’

‘Ninety-nine.’

‘One off a century.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Well,’ said Bennett. The interest in his eyes had begun to fade. He walked around his desk and collapsed in his reclining chair. ‘What brings you to Buenos Aires?’

‘Some friends connected me with Peron’s associates in Berlin. Apparently, the man wants to build an air force. I was invited here to act as a consultant.’

‘A bit ruddy late for Peron to start up,’ Bennett said. He checked himself, looked for Cory’s reaction, and continued in a more confidential manner. ‘For all the favours we’ve done Argentina over the years, they were too bone idle to help us out when we needed them. Peron is a tricky customer, though. I’ve met him. He needs to learn some manners. Our problem is that Peron is well aware of our island’s taste for Argentine beef.’

‘Indeed.’

Bennett stood. Cory let the haughty eyes of the AVM sweep him from brogues to oiled hair-parting. Bennett did not blink easily. Just as Cory began to fear his Plan B had not worked—perhaps, after all, he would have to fight his way to Harkes and damn the consequences—Bennett opened a drawer and took out a bottle of Glenkinchie and two shot glasses. He poured two fingers’ worth in each.

‘What shall we drink to?’ said Bennett.

‘How about the elephant in the room?’

‘I don’t know the expression.’

‘It means that I hope you will help me with something very important as-yet unsaid.’

‘Go on.’

Bennett looked over his tumbler as he tipped it back. Cory sank the whisky too and released a contented breath. He put the glass on the desk and turned it, absently, one quarter. He drew upon a notion of Harkes, his quarry. Empathy came with surprising ease.

‘A man has followed me from Lisbon. He wishes me dead.’ How fluently the lies ran. How closely they brushed the truth. ‘He is working for a woman, a widow, who believes I killed her husband during the war.’

‘Well?’ asked Bennett.

Cory looked up. Bennett’s eyes had resumed their interested twinkle.

‘We scrapped over Leiden. Both our aircraft were hit, and we made landings less than a mile apart. I found him first and shot him, but not before he had put a bullet in my leg.’ Cory tapped his shin with his cane once more.

‘British?’ asked Bennett.

‘A Pole.’

Bennett sipped his whisky. ‘Tell me more about your pursuer.’

‘The private detective? He is a… a schrecklich… a formidable man. He found my hotel this morning. I fled in the clothes I stand in. My one hope is to escape to Chile.’

‘Do you have your passport?’

‘I do not, sir.’

‘Money?’

‘Gold sovereigns inside my belt. I have enough for whatever I need.’

Bennett waved his hand. It was enough to dismiss the thought of a bribe. Clearly, he considered himself above this. He collected the glasses and returned them to the desk drawer.

‘Paperwork is the plumage of bureaucrats, Colonel, and I don’t intend to spend my life preening it for them. A phone call to our Chilean office will work the requisite wonders. Are you prepared to help me in return?’

‘If I can.’

Bennett opened his blotter. He placed a sheet of headed paper on it and began to write.

‘When you reach Santiago,’ he said, not looking up, ‘you will be met by a man called Jack Leche. He’ll take care of you. Nobody, officially, needs to know of your presence aboard CS-59.’

‘Jack Leche?’

‘Let me be quite clear,’ said Bennett. He stopped writing, looking up this time. ‘His Majesty’s government has an interest in Chile. If you were to work for the Chileans in an advisory capacity, perhaps within their military, I’m sure any information you might pass back to us would be viewed appreciatively. I’m aware that you could disappear over there, even buy your way to Brazil, but I judge you to be a man of honour who will consider himself much obliged.’

‘Do you think a man of honour would spy?’

‘That,’ said Bennett, returning to his blotter, ‘is an excellent question.’

Chapter Thirty-Two

Miss Evans was a capable, pretty young woman in a uniform that reminded Cory of the British WAAF. Her designation ‘Star Girl’—the BSAA equivalent of stewardess—did not match her countenance, which was part matron, part butler. The impression she made on Cory was striking, to be sure, but this impression faded as the pair approached the passenger lounge. Harkes had to be inside. Cory knew that he carried enhancements that were rudimentary compared to I-Core. All things being equal, Cory would best him. But Harkes knew this, and unless he was stupid—which, as a scientist, Harkes was not—he would assume the advantage by other means.

As Miss Evans opened the door to the passenger lounge, Cory rose to the balls of his feet. He made a flash-bulb inventory of the passengers and referenced the passenger manifest he had glimpsed on the rack in the Star Girls’ office.

Miss Evans said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we will be boarding in a few minutes’ time. This means a slight delay, but Captain Cook is confident we can regain the time during flight. Please may I introduce Herr Wittenbacher?’

With a perfect recollection for names, Miss Evans presented each of the passengers. First was a Middle Eastern man silhouetted against the glass wall. His hands were clasped at his back and he nodded to Cory without expression. ‘Mr Casis Said Atalah,’ said Miss Evans. At an upright piano, stroking notes, was a gentleman with playful eyes. ‘Herr Harald Pagh.’ She turned to another who sat in a wicker recliner smoking a drooped pipe. ‘Mr Jack Gooderham.’ A fourth man, ‘Mr Peter Young,’ was playing cards with an elderly woman, ‘Frau Martha Horniche.’

None of the four men resembled Harkes, and Cory, slipping into the infrared, saw no evidence of twentieth-century plastic surgery. Harkes might have altered his appearance before he escaped, but Cory had not been apprised of this during his briefing, and he discounted the possibility.

‘Delighted to meet you all,’ said Cory. He turned to Miss Evans. ‘I do hope we can take off soon. Is the last passenger due imminently?’

Miss Evans blinked. ‘How attentive of you. We are indeed one short. Mr Simpson has special requirements and has already boarded.’

Cory struggled to quell his triumph. I have him, he thought. Harkes was waiting on the plane under the alias Simpson.

‘Is anybody else worried that our captain is called Cook?’ announced Pagh, at the piano. ‘It would give my travel plans an awful crimp if we were eaten by the natives upon arrival.’

‘Oh, Harald,’ said Gooderham, ‘you aren’t even drunk yet. Don’t offend.’

‘Whom do I offend? Tell me.’

Harald Pagh looked around the room, but the other passengers ignored him. Pagh raised his eyebrows at Cory. ‘Herr Wittenbacher, erkennen Sie diese Melodie?’ He conjured a tune with a melancholic opening followed by a forlorn chord, and a rising cluster of notes, growing hopeful. Pagh’s hands alternated base and treble, systole and diastole, drawing Cory’s thoughts out and in. Cory opened his mouth, ready to gasp, ‘Stop,’ but bile surged up. What was happening to him? He had barely enough time to command his automata to inhibit the nausea. The music ended with a chord unresolved. Concerned hands closed on his shoulders and arms. He allowed himself to be led to the sofa.

‘Harald,’ said Jack, ‘why must you always play the fool?’

‘It’s just a piece of music. Something by Carmichael, I believe. You must know our dear old aeroplane is called ‘Star Dust’ too. Herr Wittenbacher, was ist los?’

‘Here, Mr Wittenbacher,’ said Miss Evans. She put a glass of water to his lips.

Cory swallowed. ‘Thank you.’ He tried to smile. ‘I’ve always found that piece of music… rather moving.’

‘You needn’t be concerned about the flight,’ said Miss Evans.

‘I’m not.’

‘That’s the spirit,’ said an unfamiliar voice. Cory turned to see Peter Young, his playing cards held to his chest, leaning over the sofa. ‘There’s no sense being worried in this day and age.’

‘It’s only across the hills,’ agreed Pagh. ‘And I’ve made the trip hundreds of times.’

‘They are not just hills, Mr Pagh,’ murmured Casis Said Atalah. He had not moved from the window. ‘They are the Andes. And this company has already lost two planes.’

‘Please,’ said Miss Evans. She chuckled. ‘We at BSAA enjoy a reputation for safety that is the envy of the world. Now, I believe it is time we embarked.’

Frau Limpert shuffled to face Mr Atalah. Her widow’s clothing reminded Cory of Jennifer beneath the Jacaranda. ‘Es bringt nichts, sich über das Reisen Sorgen zu machen. Jede Reise hat ihr Risiko.’

Dismay fell across all faces, even the Star Girl. Cory frowned. Limpert’s words were muddied by a difficult mix of accents. Finally, a meaning broke through. Jede Reise hat ihr Risiko: All travel has its risks.

Harald Pagh played Chopin’s funeral march and flourished his elbows. Nobody laughed. Even Jack Gooderham, his companion, turned away. Pagh closed the piano and slapped his own wrist.

~

As the bus came parallel to the Lancastrian, Cory saw sunlight flicker down each of her twenty-five silver yards. Her engines were loud and blaring. Just fore of the cockpit were the words ‘Star Dust’. Her raised nose was open. A ramp led to the gap, through which ground staff passed sacks of mail. There was a crewman visible inside the cockpit. He waved to the man in charge of the chock cable. The man waved back, then indicated the approaching bus with a tick of the head. Cory watched this exchange and envied its camaraderie. Never more intense was the feeling of being shanghaied. He was isolated from the good people at Project Déjà Vu, among whom he had been a favoured son.

Miss Evans parked upwind of the idling engines. She slipped from the vehicle to station herself by the wing. The passenger door was a rounded rectangle in the fuselage covered by the G of the aircraft’s huge registration code, G-AGWH. The door opened and a uniformed officer emerged.

‘Please approach First Officer Cook directly, ladies and gentlemen,’ called Miss Evans.

‘Zu viele Köche,’ muttered Harald Pagh, elbowing Cory. ‘Sie verderben die Suppe. Mr Atalah, don’t you agree that too many Cooks spoil the broth? You have a similar idiom in Arabic, of course.’

‘I am Chilean, Mr Pagh,’ said Atalah. His coat whipped in the propeller draught and he fussed with the hem. ‘We do have a proverb about cooking, however. Nunca defeque más de lo que come.’

Pagh looked at Cory. ‘What did he say?’

‘‘Never shit more than you eat’.’

Pagh gasped, then erupted in laughter that rivalled the Lancastrian’s engines for volume. ‘Is that so, Mr Atalah?’

‘You had that coming,’ said Jack Gooderham.

‘A pen, Jack! It might prove profitable.’

‘Grässlicher Spruch,’ observed Martha Limpert. As she dismounted from the bus, she accepted the forearm of Peter Young. The pair drifted towards the aircraft.

Cory noticed that the burly first officer was checking tickets as passengers boarded. Cory opened the slim wallet that a member of the ground crew had passed to him: he found his expedited ticket and baggage check, and a leaflet about onboard entertainment—chess, jigsaw puzzles, poker dice—medicaments and (Cory smiled) ‘works of reference such as the Railway A.B.C. Guide’.

‘Do come along, everyone,’ called Miss Evans. She watched Frau Limpert place her feet uncertainly on the steps. ‘That’s it. Warmer inside.’

While Cory waited, he regarded the Star Dust. It was still a Lancaster bomber at heart. Though the nose- and tail-guns had been amputated, the fuselage had been polished to the pointless shine of an infantry boot. Once military, always military.

He ascended the short stairs in his fancy shoes and feigned the ease of a fighter ace who had never existed. His mood had sunk. What if Paul Simpson, the only passenger he had not yet seen, was just a man called Paul Simpson, not Harkes? That, Cory had to admit, was unthinkable. He had killed Paloma for the information. It was charged with value. How could it be a ruse, when Paloma had maintained it to the end? If a lie, it was a weapon, but she had been unarmed when he stopped her life.

There was not, yet, a scent of the digital radio traffic that would betray the automata in Harkes’s body, but Cory knew that the signal could be smothered by the electromagnetic wash of the engines and the Faraday cage of the airframe. Cory needed to enter the aircraft to be sure.

He stepped into the sloping cabin. He was the last passenger to board. First Officer Cook followed him. He slammed the door and put his shoulder behind the locking lever. It clanked home.

~

Within the Lancastrian, the air smelled of the Elsan toilet, old clothes and fuel. Two ranks of winged seats lay either side of a raised aisle. At the head of the aircraft, rear-facing seats were separated from the rest by small tables. In one of those seats was a man whom Cory had not yet met. He moved forward, floor plates flexing, but was blocked by the wide back of Jack Gooderham.

Cory scanned for Harkes’s automata, but could only find the dim crackle of conversation from the cockpit voice loop.

‘Altimeter, flight instruments, carb heat.’

‘Check, Skipper.’

‘VG. Where’s our First Officer? Denis, go back and unplug him from Miss Evans.’

The passengers continued to mill in the aisle. Collars were upturned and woollen blankets shaken out. Dust snowed in the light of the portholes. Again and again, Cory glimpsed the stranger in the front-most seat. The space next to the man was filled by a canvas sack. Cory tried to continue forward but Peter Young was stretching his calves against the airframe.

‘The cramps become worse,’ he explained, ‘as altitude increases.’

Cory’s reply was interrupted by the approach of a young man in full flying gear. The practicality of the leather helmet and sheepskin coat contrasted with his shirt and tie. He pushed between Cory and Young with a shy, ‘Excuse me.’

‘Not at all.’

‘Hilton,’ Cory heard the young man whisper behind him, ‘Cookie’s getting one of his moods.’

‘The cargo hasn’t sat down yet,’ replied Hilton Cook. ‘Tell him to keep his hair on.’

‘Hilton.’

‘We’ll be taking off soon, Herr Wittenbacher,’ said Miss Evans, loudly. ‘You may wish to take your seat. Then I can see about getting you a newspaper or a book. Here, this one is empty.’

Cory patted the bulge in his coat. ‘I already have a newspaper. But I am a little chill. Is it warmer further up the plane?’

‘Moderately, sir. The rear door can be quite draughty. There is a place next to Mr Simpson, the King’s messenger.’

Cory smiled. ‘A rather grand title.’

‘Poor man can’t leave his bag under any circumstances. I feel rather sorry for him.’

‘What’s in the bag? Do you know?’

‘I’m afraid we’re not allowed to ask.’

Cory calmed himself. A diplomatic pouch was an ideal container for the Cullinan Zero. ‘So it could be anything.’

‘I imagine the contents are between Mr Simpson and the King.’

Her expression was at once reproachful and humorous.

‘Quite,’ said Cory.

‘Let me take you to your seat.’

The King’s messenger smiled as Cory fell into the port-side chair. He wore a woollen suit and a greatcoat with its collar inverted. There was an unlit cigarette in his mouth. ‘I don’t smoke, of course. It’s just a superstition. I always have one out during take-off. That’s the most dangerous part, you realise. I haven’t crashed yet.’

‘I’m Wittenbacher.’

‘Simpson. Call me Paul.’

‘Constantin.’

They shook hands across the aisle.

‘You’re Austrian?’

‘German.’

‘Ah.’ Simpson nodded. ‘Have you flown before?’

‘Not as a civilian. Yourself?’

‘Ceaselessly. I’m afraid our conversation will not continue for long. These things have about as much soundproofing as you’d expect from an ex-RAF crate. Just wait until we take off. Your eardrums will rattle like castanets. We crossed from Lisbon in an Avro York. A much finer aircraft, relatively speaking. My niece informs me that, one day, we’ll travel using jet propulsion. God only knows what racket that will make. But, then, I always did prefer candles to electric light and hansom cabs to aeroplanes.’

‘Mr Simpson, forgive me, but are you a courier?’

The canvas sack opposite Simpson was the size of a man’s torso. It shuddered as he kicked it. ‘Sisyphus, rather.’ He studied Cory for a moment. ‘But I mustn’t make fun of myself in front of a new acquaintance. I am a King’s messenger, sir. My dumb companion, here, contains crucial documents, and, no doubt, a particular brand of toilet tissue that the British ambassador in Santiago has difficulty finding locally.’

Cory laughed, but his horror ran deep. Paul Simpson was not Harkes: Simpson had no active automata, was not a recent recipient of plastic surgery, and showed no elevated skin conductance response to Cory, whom Harkes knew to be in his pursuit.

Paloma tricked me, he thought. Fuck.

‘I say, is that the Herald?’ asked Simpson.

‘No,’ Cory said, hesitating over the newspaper given to him by Jennifer. It would not do for Simpson to read the news of the next day. ‘That’s to say, it is the Herald, but it’s out of date. Last month’s.’

Miss Evans stepped between them with a caddy. She took out a brown paper bag. ‘Here, Herr Wittenbacher. With the compliments of BSAA.’

Cory opened the bag. Inside was a packet of Wrigley’s Doublemint, a bale of cotton wool, some tissues, smelling salts, and a collection of barley-sugars. He looked at her.

‘Be sure to blow your nose before we take off,’ she said. ‘You’ll need to blow it again when we land. And if you suck the barley sugar, that will help too.’

‘Cotton wool?’

‘For your ears.’

Simpson helped himself to a bag. ‘Hearing aids, Constantin. It’s the industry of the future. Mind out with the barley-sugars. Cheap American variety. If I were you, I’d put those in your ears and chew the cotton wool.’

‘It’s time to remove your cigarette,’ said Miss Evans.

‘I have no intention of smoking it, madam. It’s a ritual of comfort.’

‘I’m certain you’ll find your seatbelt a more practical safety measure. You too, Herr Wittenbacher. The captain informs me that the weather is clear to Santiago. He wishes you a pleasant flight. In the event of an emergency, please follow my instructions on his behalf. You will find the WC at the rear.’

Cory felt his seat shudder. He turned to the window. The aircraft swung left to show the BSAA building.

Work the problem.

What did he know? Harkes had bought a ticket on the Chilean Southbound route. Star Dust was the fifty-ninth BSAA flight to Chile. CS-59. What if Harkes had travelled the week before, on CS-58? Cory abandoned that line of thought. He did not know if Harkes was booked on a flight at all. Maybe he had purchased the ticket to fool Paloma. But how could he know that Cory would visit her?

He considered forcing an exit from the aircraft, but that risked the involvement of the Argentine authorities, something he could only balance against a concrete benefit.

Cory’s musings were dampened by a surge of anxiety as the aircraft bucked. His automata tuned into the cockpit voice loop once more.

‘Hello, Hilton. Flaps at fifteen degrees, please.’

‘Set, Skipper.’

‘Carb heat cold.’

‘Cold.’

‘Heading indicator.’

‘Check.’

‘Hello, Denis. Get the green from Morón tower, please.’

‘Alright.’ Pause. ‘Permission granted.’

‘Hilton, brakes off, throttle open full. Slightly more on the outboard port, please. More. Imagine it’s the Jerry’s neck.’

The engines trumpeted. Cory reached into his brown bag and withdrew a barley-sugar. It tasted lemony and sour. Sulkily, he ripped away tufts of cotton wool and put them in his ears. Within this muffled world, his thoughts moved around Dr Patrick Harkes. The quarry had primed a trap for the predator, sugared it with Paloma, and withdrawn to safety. Cory had failed.

But still he wondered why, if Harkes had identified Cory as his pursuer, there had been no attempt to finish the job in a more permanent fashion. Wasn’t that what one did with an animal caught in a trap? Kill it?

Harkes would not survive a direct encounter with me.

He crunched the unpleasant barley sugar to nothing.

Hermes, star man, emblem of BSAA: God of those who cross boundaries, and the cunning of thieves.

‘Rotation and gear up,’ said Commander Cook.

‘That wind is tricky.’

‘We’re beating it.’

If I were Harkes, Cory thought, what would I do?

Suddenly, the shaking stopped. The window brightened.

Spring the trap. Kill the animal.

‘Good rate of climb, Hilton. Retract flaps.’

‘One-sixty.’

‘That’ll do. Verify landing gear up.’

With building dread, Cory unfurled his newspaper, Jennifer’s edition of one day hence, and scanned the first page. He let his automata process the text in parallel. His eyes widened.

Harkes, you beat me.

There was a short article that referred to Star Dust by name. The aircraft, he read, would be reported missing, presumed crashed. Her last transmission would be sent at 2:41 p.m. Buenos Aires time during final descent. Cory re-read the article. He was desperate to wring more information from it, but there was none. What was the transmission?

Fuck.

The aircraft banked and he looked onto busy dockland. He felt nauseous. Paul Simpson tapped his shoulder. Cory turned to see him take the cigarette from his mouth and wipe his forehead with theatrical relief.

~

A late lunch was served within minutes. Cory, a soldier, did not let events diminish his appetite. Indeed, anticipation heightened it considerably. He had the crème de volaille to start. It came on a simple, elegant plate with a spoon that, apart from being unusually heavy, was no different to what one could expect from a good restaurant. As Cory ate, he worked through the timings reported by the newspaper. He had less than three hours until the loss of radio contact and, without doubt, the aircraft itself. How? The newspaper claimed that a transmission had been received on schedule prior to landing in Santiago. Might the oxygen cylinders explode? But Cory had seen First Officer Cook check them in the moments before take-off. Ultimately, Cory thought, the disastrous failure could take any form: an electric short, bird strike, or the snapping of a vital control cable.

All he knew for certain was the time. In less than three hours, he had to leave the aircraft. How? The smart matter was at his side: a simple cane. Some agents were dextrous enough in their control of smart matter to cast rudimentary wings or angled shapes that could slow their descent when falling through air. Cory was not one of them—not yet. His control of the smart matter was conscious, not automatic, and rudimentary, not nuanced. Through dumb luck he might conjure a shape that could slow his descent, but he did not know if he would have the strength to hold onto it.

By the time his Tournedos chasseur arrived with new peas and mashed potatoes, Cory had convinced himself that one or more parachutes had to be somewhere on board this aircraft. Not enough for the passengers. Perhaps not even enough for the crew. The parachute would be part of the emergency provisions, as well as fire extinguishers, medical equipment, and so on. He looked behind him. The rest of the passengers were eating. Harald Pagh noticed him and waved a fork. Cory smiled. He looked deeper into the tail section and saw the bulkhead that marked the Elsan toilet. There was no room for emergency equipment back there. It had to be in the cockpit.

Unless there was none, and Cory was fooling himself.

‘I can recommend the Bourgogne rouge,’ said Miss Evans, offering Cory a tumbler. She smiled as Cory nodded his approval.

The newspaper suggested a solution to one mystery, at least. Given that Harkes had the advantage of full archive data for 1947, he could have identified ‘the Englishman’ from the same publication that Cory held. From there, it would be a short step to locate the murdered prostitute. Easy to let slip the details of his predicament, including Cory’s name, and easier still to let her find a ticket. But working backwards from the cause to its effect… Cory shook his head. He could not reach a mental state where this made sense. How can you decide to load a gun if you already know that it will fire, and where? In what sense is that a decision? Cory suffered under that thought—on the verge of insight but never grasped—as he finished his meal with apple pie, coffee, and cheese and biscuits.

‘Is everything acceptable, my friend?’ called Paul Simpson.

‘Wonderful.’

Paul Simpson was clean-shaven. Cory fought against the sudden recall of his own uncle’s dead visage, dolled-up in his casket, shaved of his beard by the mortician, and with a kicking

vertigo

nausea in his stomach he knew that Simpson was dead, as dead as Lisandro and Paloma and—he swallowed—soon every passenger and crew member on board this aircraft.

The sensation of entrapment made him want to burst. He fumbled for his seat belt but did not open the clasp. Instead, he gripped it. He pictured his fear as a horse that he could rein, but the mount changed into a snorting nightmare: he had succumbed to the dead, clockwork past. His struggles to remain outside the system had failed. He was a zombie like them.

No. I can still make it out of here.

Abruptly, Miss Evans put her hand on his shoulder. He looked at her red fingernails and could not suppress the image of her amputated hand. He bit his cuff and blocked his rising lunch.

Star Girl, he thought.

Paloma: a ghost under neon light.

No. I am the Ghost.

Cory choked and felt a new thickness in his throat. His eyes ached and ran wet.

I am the fucking Ghost.

Miss Evans: dead. Mr Simpson, King’s messenger: dead. And those behind him too. And Lisandro, harmless boy. Puppets, all of them, limbs strung by time—a puppet itself, an infinite regression of meaningless forces—and here was Cory, tangled.

Paloma: kicking.

I am the–

‘No’, came a voice. It sounded like Jennifer. ‘You are a necrophile. How does that feel, soldier?’

The boy from Georgia had never learned the word. His language-processing automata set to work on it.

Necrophile: A lover of death.

Paloma.

He thought of the bench in the courtyard. That moment still existed. It could be recovered. It was real in at least one sense. He watched his memory of Jennifer’s lips. They moved, but no sound issued. He no longer needed to hear.

‘Miss Evans, I’m very sorry.’

‘Not at all,’ she said, squeezing his shoulder again. ‘Can I get you anything? More coffee? Perhaps you’d like to challenge Mr Simpson to a game of chess?’

Cory laughed. Then he stopped, hoping this created the impression that something had just occurred to him.

‘I once heard of a man who became so claustrophobic on a flight between Paris and Berlin that he forced the captain to give him a parachute. In the event, they let him jump out somewhere in the vicinity of Amsterdam.’

He laughed again. Miss Evans crinkled her eyes and smiled. It was clear to Cory that she found his comment absurd, even worrying, but she was professional enough to come back with a throwaway remark.

‘Well, nobody has ever asked to use ours. After all,’ she said, moving towards the tail, ‘it is rather chilly on the cordillera.’

Chapter Thirty-Three

Cory waited until they were well above the Andes and oxygen masks had been fastened. His stank of rubber. He thought about his plan and wondered whether the timing provided by the journalist in the newspaper article was accurate. There was a caesium-beam oscillator in his spine that helped coordinate nanoparticle activity, but he had asked Miss Evans to set his pocket watch by that of the navigator, which was a service BSAA advertised. He could be more confident that this clockwork timepiece, and its error, better reflected the chronometer of the Chilean ground controller who would report the loss of Star Dust. He wanted to bail out west of the mountains. The closer to Santiago the better. Buenos Aires would be too hot because of the crash of Star Dust and his implied role in it. His first problem was gaining access to the cockpit. He needed a pretext.

At 1:00 p.m. Buenos Aires time, which was 4:00 p.m. standard time, Miss Evans passed him a flight information card that had been written in a beautiful hand. Across the top, it read, ‘Please circulate—Captain R. Cook.’ Star Dust was thirty-two degrees, fifty minutes south; sixty-eight degrees, thirty minutes west. Height: 20,000 feet but ascending to 24,000. Speed: 194 knots. The estimated arrival time for Santiago was 5:34 p.m. standard.

So they were over Mendoza, a city in the eastern foothills of the Andes. The oncoming mountains explained the judders and creaks of the aircraft as it entered the thickening winds. In a few minutes, they would have cleared the highest peaks. Time for Cory to move. Sooner was better; he did not know how long it would take to find the parachute or to induce the crew to tell him.

Cory offered the card to Paul Simpson, who shrugged, as if say, ‘What does it matter what we know?’ He turned and gave it to Jack Gooderham, whose eyes blinked his thanks above his mask.

Miss Evans passed him on her way to the fore alcove. Behind her, the mobile oxygen cart struck the lowest stair. This was a prime opportunity to leave the main cabin, so, playing the gentleman who could not tolerate seeing her struggle, he unbuckled his belt, detached his mask, and grasped the cart by the handle at its base.

He and Miss Evans guided the cart over the threshold and into the kitchen. It was not much larger than a telephone box. Cory helped her settle the cart against the sink. Above it, a stack of dirty plates was lashed to the wall. She passed a strap around the cylinder and buckled it tight. Then slipped her mask upwards and patted her hairpins. She forced a smile of thanks to Cory—betraying an agitation that did not suit her—and motioned for him to return to his seat. It was difficult to talk in the kitchen. The engine noise was louder.

She opened the curtain that separated the cockpit from the passenger cabin and passed through, closing it behind her. Cory remained standing by the sink. It was time. Draughts worked his hair. Nervously, he put his hands into the pockets of his thin, tropical suit. The cold worried him a fraction. The chillier he became, the harder his metabolism would work. The air at 24,000 feet was rarefied but not entirely without oxygen. Cory would be able to respire rather more effectively than the crew. He had enough in reserve to snatch the parachute and escape the aircraft. But it would be close.

The cockpit was no larger than the interior of a family-sized automobile and the considered placement of flight crew made it seem even smaller. It was, however, brighter than he had anticipated. Nearest to him, the radio operator sat against a half-bulkhead of radio equipment reading Life magazine. He wore a bomber jacket, a leather helmet and an oxygen mask. Beyond him was the navigator. This man was oriented at ninety degrees to the fuselage and was holding his map table steady with an ungloved hand. At the front of the cockpit, and higher, was Commander Cook. His knees were resting in the slings of the yoke. To his right was the first officer, Hilton Cook.

Miss Evans unhooked a spare mask and pressed it to her face. With her free hand, she pinched her throat. Cory let his fingers touch the fuselage to aid his eavesdrop of the cabin loop.

‘Hello, Skipper,’ she said.

As one, the men turned. They looked from Miss Evans to Cory. He was prepared to deal with their sudden calls for his dismissal, polite or not, but he was surprised by the silence, which went on long enough for Miss Evans to turn too. Cory realised that they were calm, trained men, and they were waiting for the opinion of Commander Cook.

The time traveller and the commander looked at one another.

Cory tapped his brow in greeting. Commander Cook raised a hand. With that—nothing more—the crew visibly relaxed. They shared glances. Indeed, they could have passed comment on this German intruder safe in the knowledge that he could not hear them. They would never, after all, guess that Cory could eavesdrop on their intercom. Yet they did not. It was undoubtedly some form of English politeness, but it made Cory uneasy. Did they see a hint to their fate in his expression?

Bull, he thought. They don’t have a clue.

‘Miss Evans,’ said Commander Cook, ‘is everything alright?’

‘I’m dreadfully worried about Mrs Limpert,’ she said.

There was another pause. Commander Cook was clearly a man who considered his words.

‘Go on, Iris.’

‘She’s turning blue,’ said Miss Evans. ‘And she might have had a fit. Mr Young, who is looking after her, says her pulse is weak.’

Commander Cook looked at the first officer, Hilton Cook. ‘Right. Since we climbed to twenty-four thousand.’

‘Did you check her oxygen supply?’ asked the first officer.

‘Yes, it’s working properly.’

The captain scratched an eyelid. It was a childlike gesture, and Cory remembered his age. He could not be more than thirty. ‘Serves us right for letting a seventy-year-old woman on board.’

‘If it’s the altitude,’ said Miss Evans, ‘then let’s drop below twenty thousand.’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘But even a small descent might help.’

‘No. Any lower and we’ll be having dinner on the cordillera. Don, how long until we’re certain the Andes are behind us?’

As the navigator twisted from his map, Cory pointed questioningly at the discarded oxygen mask. He knew that the commander had been briefed on Wittenbacher’s life story and, given their friendly exchange prior to his meeting with Bennett, there was a good chance that Cook would not turn down the request. To Cory’s relief, the commander turned his palm upwards at the mask. Be my guest, he seemed to say. He watched, together with Hilton Cook, as Cory shook out the straps.

‘We’ll probably be clear in half an hour or so,’ said the navigator, ‘but I’d recommend we wait until the last moment before we descend. In this visibility, I can’t accurately say when we’re clear. Denis, you’ve been over the bumps more times than anyone. What do you think?’

The man at the radio nodded. ‘No such thing as a standard crossing time, Skipper. The winds can play tricks. The watchword is caution, especially when it’s ten-tenths down there.’

‘There you have it, Iris,’ said Commander Cook. ‘Mrs Limpert will have to grin and bear it. We should be on the ground in three quarters of an hour.’

‘What about the northern route? This is a woman’s life we’re talking about.’

‘Miss Evans.’

She stiffened. There was no mistaking the commander’s tone.

‘I’ll try to make her comfortable,’ Miss Evans said, coldly. ‘Now come along, Mr Wittenbacher.’

‘Our friend can stay,’ said the Commander. ‘We have a few minutes until we get busy.’

‘Very good,’ she replied. She placed her mask on its fuselage hook and straightened her hair. As she exchanged places with Cory in the hatchway, he noticed lines of tiredness at the corners of her eyes where her make-up had cracked.

‘You know what she needs?’ said the first officer.

‘Oh, shut up, Hilton,’ said Commander Cook. ‘Don, redo the ETA. Let’s come down as soon as possible. Mrs Limpert will be alright once she’s lower. I’ve seen it a dozen times.’

‘VG, Skipper.’

‘Colonel Wittenbacher,’ said Commander Cook. His eyebrows flexed. ‘Welcome to the greenhouse. The vegetable on my right is Hilton, whose sense of humour needs no introduction. That’s Don Cheklin at the map table, and that’s Denis Harmer at the wireless. Grab the spare Irvin if you’re cold. It’s underneath Don. Watch his flask doesn’t fall out. Tea is the second most important liquid in this kite, and I wouldn’t want you to see my navigator cry.’

Cory pulled out the leather jacket, unfurled it, and passed the vacuum flask to the navigator, who jammed it between his knees. There was a parachute beneath the seat. Cory stared at it. Suddenly, this was the moment. Should he take it and run? How would he open the rear door in time? The first officer had closed it with a huge tug. Could Cory open it before one of the crew pulled him away? What about the passengers? There were capable men among them. Cory couldn’t fight them all, and still less could he leap from an aircraft before he had figured out how to attach the parachute.

While his mind hesitated, his body continued: he put on the jacket.

‘Enjoying the flight?’ asked the first officer.

‘Yes,’ Cory replied carefully. There was something of the bully about Hilton Cook.

‘Well, that warms the cockles of my heart.’ He leaned towards Cory, as though about to reveal a confidence. Cory noticed that he was not buckled in. ‘You know, I was going to observe the irony. Not three years ago you’d have had us pushing up the daisies. Now we’re smuggling you across the border so you can continue the party with the other Nazis.’

‘Steady, Hilton,’ said Commander Cook. ‘Rumour has it the war’s over.’

‘So you know about my predicament,’ said Cory, addressing the first officer. ‘I apologise, but my life is in danger. And I am not a Nazi.’

‘Benno works in mysterious ways,’ said Hilton Cook. ‘When the only thing a man flies is a mahogany Spitfire, his judgement suffers. What do you say, Skipper?’

‘Don’t be tiresome, Hilton.’

Cory felt himself detach from the situation. The forces behind Hilton Cook’s eyes, though he took them to be private, were the public forces of physical law. The inevitable, violent meeting between Hilton Cook and solid earth was founded on principles hardly dissimilar from that governing the approach of two clockwork bell-strikers as they approached to mark the hour.

‘I apologise, Captain,’ said Cory. ‘I’m disturbing your crew.’

‘Not at all, Colonel,’ said the commander. ‘The only person you’re disturbing is Hilton, and I must congratulate you, considering how disturbed he already is.’

‘Skipper,’ interrupted Don Cheklin, ‘I’ve got the new ETA. We’ll reach Santiago at 17:45, give or take.’

‘Give or take what, navigator?’

‘Two minutes either way.’

‘Hello, Denis.’

‘Yes, Skip.’

‘Please notify Santiago tower that our revised ETA is 17:45.’

‘I say, Wittenbacher,’ said the first officer. His eyes were wide with feigned excitement. ‘Could it be that you’re the Wittenbacher, the German fighter ace?’

‘Yes. Would you like an autograph?’

The first officer laughed.

‘That was funny.’ He looked at his fellow crewmen. ‘The Kraut said something funny.’ Then he turned to Cory once more. ‘You like funny stories? Here’s one. I’ve this minute remembered where I first heard your name. It wasn’t during the war, but just after, when I was babysitting some Nazi brass. One worked in the Ministry of Propaganda. He used to make up what he called ‘ghosts’—fictional people, basically, to misinform the enemy. One was a flying ace called Wittenbacher the Wittvenmacher. The widow-maker. He was particularly proud of the rhyme. Inventing people—funny idea, isn’t it?’

Cory flushed. Each man in the crew studied his reaction, the commander included. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I flew with a couple of Yanks,’ said the first officer. ‘Got to know their lingo. Sometimes your accent slips, buddy. Where are you really from? The deep sahth? What other jokes do they make down there-ah?’

But, thought Cory, panicked, in-built mechanisms select my accent, mechanisms I cannot control.

He felt as though a crack had run through his psyche.

Mechanisms I cannot control.

Those winds that Hilton Cook would call his own—the laws of physics, bedrock of his being—were, true enough, public forces as indifferent to his will as Cory was indifferent to the fear of Harkes. But those laws governed Cory too. How could he step beyond their jurisdiction? He had been travelling in time for two months. Was that long enough to become a zombie like Hilton Cook?

The amber had set.

Take the parachute.

Run.

‘Well, Colonel?’ asked the commander.

Vertigo.

Cory dropped to the floor and clawed at the parachute. His hand had almost touched the strap when Don Checklin’s boot—carefully but firmly—came down on his neck and pressed him against the deck plate.

‘Well done, Don,’ said Hilton Cook. ‘Odds-on our friend here is a Yank. Special operations. And we’re the babysitters. See, Reg? What did I tell you?’

‘Don’t get excited. We need to tie him up and radio Santiago.’

As his skull rattled between the boot and the deck, Cory waited for the homunculus of his training to wake. How must Lisandro have strained against the brutish Englishman who pressed his lungs to tiny pockets, the better to butcher?

Hilton Cook appeared before him, crouching, and punched down on his ear. As he landed a second blow, Cory took his wrist and twisted it. The wrist broke. Hilton grunted. Cory put the first officer in a head lock and brought him down. Their eyes were inches apart. For the first time since his training, Cory let the fires of his ichor fully ignite.

‘Denis,’ said Commander Cook, ‘tell Santiago tower we’ve got trouble.’

Cory dashed Hilton’s head against a stanchion. He saw the navigator reach for a fire extinguisher. The man was encumbered by bulky clothing and the stiff leash of his oxygen tube, but he brought the canister down hard enough to sting Cory’s palms as he stopped it. Before the navigator could shift his grip for a second strike, Cory trapped his hand with his own and drove the canister against the radio operator’s bulkhead. The navigator shouted as his hand came away bloody. Cory worked the extinguisher from his grip and punted his cheek with the end. The navigator collapsed across his map table. Cory ripped away his own mask and stood up. He turned the valve on the extinguisher, spun, and doused the face of Denis Harmer before the man could grab him. Harmer collapsed with his hands to his face. Cory swung the extinguisher again. He struck away the hands and the mask beneath them. The wide, boyish expression stayed Cory’s fury. He tried to reconcile the real terror of the man with the counterfeit terror of a puppet. He could not. The radio operator squeezed his eyes shut the instant before Cory swung again.

He braced his neck against the buzzing canopy and used the radio operator’s bulkhead to launch at Commander Cook, who jerked away and pressed his shoulder into the yoke. Star Dust pitched earthwards. Shadows yawned. The sun, which had been obscured in the cloud-cloaked Buenos Aires, found his eyes. Before Cory could prevent it, the pilot hooked his neck and threw him against the empty starboard seat. The seat broke and Cory struck the cargo access panel. He struggled to right himself.

Cory gripped a fuselage handle. He reached for the hose that led to the pilot’s mask, but Cook was ready. His elbow split Cory’s lip. While he blinked to clear the dizziness, a second impact wrenched his neck. He lost his grip on the handle and fell across the unconscious body of the navigator, who had slid to the front of the aircraft.

‘God damn,’ he shouted. His accent was Georgian, that of his father. He demanded his automata ramp the release of neurotransmitters, inhibit their re-uptake, and dampen monoamine oxidase activity.

A freshness blew through his mind.

Commander Cook was buckled to his chair. He could not move as Cory worked his body. He knew where to strike the man, and how. The Irvin jacket offered little protection. Cory landed his last blow with a shout that his old instructor had termed kiai, a Japanese word meaning ‘concentration of spirit’: an incongruous memory to recall in the cockpit of this doomed plane.

When it was over, each watched the other, panting. Cory saw Cook reach for his mask, but his fingers slid from the clasp. Cory helped unfasten it. The orbit of his right eye was broken.

‘Help me pull her out,’ the commander said. His words were slurred.

Cory put his hands over those of the commander. The aircraft came level.

‘Don’t hurt. The passengers. Land the plane.’

‘Can this thing fly itself?’

Commander Cook indicated a lever to his left, mounted on the fuselage beneath the oxygen hose connector. ‘Auto controls clutch. And. And altitude control.’ Cory reached across and pulled the lever until it clicked. When he looked again at the captain, he saw that Cook was unconscious.

Cory struggled to maintain his focus. The crew was dealt with. He had stopped Harmer before the Mayday could be sent. And, as far as he could tell, none of the passengers knew what had happened in the cockpit. It was possible that Miss Evans would come forward to check the cause of the dive. But Cory still had time. He had the parachute and the aircraft was flying even and true. He could still make it.

First, he removed the oxygen masks of the crew and spoiled their seals. They might still wake at this altitude, but he wanted it to take as long as possible. As he worked, he looked at the turned head of Commander Cook. ‘Don’t hurt. The passengers. Land the plane.’

Cory sank to his haunches in despair. He rubbed the bridge of his nose and told himself that this would be worth it. He was fighting a larger war here. These were innocents but their deaths would not be uncounted. They would be stars on a wall somewhere. Cory would see to it.

The fire axe struck his shoulder with enough force to make him turn, biting down on his scream, looking up at the fury of Miss Evans. She put a foot in the small of his back to help work the blade free. As it came down again—certain to kill him—Cory made a fist and raised his arm with all the strength he had left. It looked like an absurd salute, but he prayed that the bones in his forearm would hold, and they did. The axe was deflected into the deck plate.

The block would not work a second time. Cory had to get to his feet. He did so with a flip that reignited the pain in his shoulder. The pain expanded and his head was consumed with disorienting flashes of electricity and cloudbursts of deadness and when his vision cleared he saw that Miss Evans was several inches above the deck where he had pressed her into the canopy by her neck. Cory looked in horror at his shaking hands. He let go and they both collapsed to the floor. Cory bit his tongue at the pain in his shoulder and waited for his wits to return. All the while, the engines pealed.

~

His pocket watch confirmed that he had only minutes left. The murder of Miss Evans had taken him outside of himself. He was no longer the man he had once been. That man who had proposed to Catherine: gone. With this realisation, his situational awareness returned. He began to work numbers, possibilities. Only minutes left.

He stepped between the seats, over the bodies, to the altimeter. They were at 21,000 feet and holding. Their speed was 190 knots.

Think, Georgia.

Miss Evans had fallen on her side with her arms and legs splayed. She might have been running. Cory thought about Patrick Harkes and wanted revenge. There was a principle in chess that a defensive move must go beyond defence. It must also attack. The escape with his life would be his defensive move, but his attack would be the transmission of the agreed signal. Jennifer, who was waiting for it, would understand that Cory had completed his secondary mission to kill Harkes. This misinformation would be worth the trouble if Harkes also intercepted it and derived the intended meaning. He would consider himself safe. A man who considered himself safe would not exercise the same caution when making his travel arrangements.

Cory smiled.

It had to begin with STEN.

Then E.

Wait; D, not E.

D, E, C.

STENDEC.

Not so difficult. Harkes would figure it out.

He pushed Miss Evans aside and shook Denis Harmer. Harmer blinked, but did not regain consciousness. Cory took the smelling salts from his pocket and broke a capsule beneath Harmer’s nose. The man’s swollen eyes widened. He rose to his elbows and his head bobbed within the turtle shell of his flight jacket. Cory pressed himself against the half-bulkhead of radio equipment to obscure Harmer’s view of the bodies and held his neck to prevent his head turning.

‘I’m pressing a nerve between the second and third cervical vertebrae,’ Cory said. He added an electromagnetic component to his voice that would register in Harmer’s headphones. ‘If you attempt to deviate from my strict instructions, you’ll be in more pain than you can imagine. Now: I want you to send our ETA together with a letter sequence.’

‘My eyes hurt. What did you do? Some chemical?’

‘It’s stuff from the fire extinguisher. Your eyes will clear in a minute. Now, I want you to send this sequence: Sugar, Tare, Easy, Negat, Dog, Easy, Charlie.’

‘Where’s the Skipper?’

‘You’ve got five seconds. Four.’

‘Alright, alright. Let me get set up.’

Harmer felt for the transmitter on the higher of the two radio panels. He plugged two jacks into the lower bank. He tried to face Cory, but Cory squeezed his neck. Harmer moaned.

‘Do what you’re told.’

‘You sound American. Is this some OSS caper?’

‘Send it now and I’ll let go. Make the message conform to all the normal conventions. I’m listening in. If there is even a hint of the word ‘hijack’, that’s it for you.’

‘But your code alone will indicate trouble.’

‘No. At worst, enigma.’

‘So it’s a game.’

The dits and dahs stopped his thoughts as Harmer thumbed the Morse paddle left and right. Cory felt the translation of the message flash through him:

Santiago tower from CS-59. ETA 17:45. S-T-E-N-D-E-C.

Cory watched the dials on the receiver. Nothing moved.

‘Did they get it?’ he asked.

‘Give it time.’

The reply came loud and clear from Santiago tower.

Dit-dit-dah-dah-dah-dit-dit.

‘What does that mean?’ asked Cory.

‘He doesn’t understand.’

‘Send the message again.’

‘Why? What is it?’

Cory adjusted his grip. ‘I told you to send it again. Quickly.’

‘OK, OK.’

As the Morse paddle flapped again, Cory listened to the blaring engines. The sky was overcast, for the most part, and the Lancastrian kept to the line set by the rudimentary automatic pilot. Cory understood this machine. It was a workhorse. And, equally, so were the unthinking mannequins inside. The radio operator: his movements were correlated with his nervous chemistry, and the pitch of the aircraft, and his body within it. That movement itself correlated with the instant before. And that movement correlated with another movement, still earlier, until the movements described a sequence that could be reversed to the moment of his birth. And the dance partner was Time, always leading. Time the entrapper. The milonguera.

The radio man is a puppet. Watch his eyebrows gather. See his lips purse. It is an illusion worked by a grim operator. Each string leads to a bony finger. Say! Doesn’t the puppet look angry?

‘Was it worth it?’ Harmer shouted bitterly. He struggled to look at Cory. ‘All this,’ he gasped, ‘to send some bloody code-word?’

Cory looked at his own hand, holding the neck. Puppet? A better metaphor was the ventriloquist’s dummy. Cory let go.

Denis Harmer leaned around the bank of radio equipment.

Or was Harmer more like an animated cartoon? With motion comes the illusion of life. But each still frame betrays the lifelessness of the character.

~

Time did not keep pace with the acceleration of his thoughts. For Cory, time was an absolute whose minutes moved no faster than his Ramsey IV caesium oscillator. He killed Denis Harmer in 73,541,054,160 beam cycles. Eight seconds his murder. Then Cory rested the axe against the fuselage and pulled his white handkerchief from his pocket. He stilled the tremors in his fingers by twisting them through its fabric.

Though Harmer’s question needed no answer, he said, ‘Probably not.’

~

He considered the canopy. The air was opaque and depthless. There was an escape hatch directly above him, but it was not designed to be used during flight. The slipstream would toss him to the rudder fins. His only chance was through the door at the rear of the fuselage and, to get to it, he would need to deal with the passengers.

He touched his injured shoulder. The wound was deep and his left arm was weakening. Jack Gooderham, Peter Simpson and Harald Pagh were able men.

With a sigh, he took the oxygen pipe from Commander Cook’s mask and used the axe to cut a length from it. He made a V-shaped split in both ends and attached one to the spout of the fire extinguisher. He paused, reconsidered his plan, and detached it from the extinguisher. He licked his finger and pushed some spit into the canister. Then he reattached the assembly. His infallible chronometer marked fourteen seconds.

He leaned across Commander Cook and turned the cock for the passenger oxygen supply. With the flow stopped, he tore the main hose from the fuselage and pushed it into the other end of the pipe he had split with the axe. The oxygen supply was now connected to the fire extinguisher.

The toxic chemical within the extinguisher was carbon tetrachloride. The ichor in his spit would break the bonds of this molecule to release chlorine. His first option was a pair of chlorine atoms: chlorine gas. The lungs of the passengers would fill with bloody froth for a prolonged and excruciating death. No. He would not do that. His second option was chloroform: an anaesthetic. Carbon, hydrogen and chlorine. Where would he get the hydrogen? He reached behind the pilot and took the navigator’s tea flask. The lid sang as he opened it. Holding the canister between his legs, he unscrewed the base of the fire extinguisher. Then he mixed some tea with the tetrachloride and twisted the extinguisher shut.

He put his hand around the head of the extinguisher, where his spit had collected. He felt the ichor mobilise. The metal grew warm. Then hot. If he let go, the seal would pop under pressure and release the chloroform onto the flight deck. On the nano scale, I-Core particles marched to the drum of his caesium-beam oscillator and formed catalytic surfaces and micro chemical factories.

The odour of cooked tissue reached his nostrils. He released the canister and fell against the fuselage. There he gasped and frowned. He tugged a black glove from Commander Cook and slid it over his raw, burned hand.

Cory checked his pocket watch. It had passed 5:45 p.m. They were above Santiago. He recalled the conversation between Commander Cook and his boss, Don Bennett, back in Buenos Aires, when Cook had requested extra fuel. The Lancastrian should remain airborne for some time and ditch in the Pacific, never to be found.

Cory lifted the parachute. It was packed tightly as a flag and the straps were tangled. Seconds passed in confusion until Cory understood that the lemon-yellow hoop at the base was an inflatable collar. He put this over his head. The main chute hung low at his back and the reserve chute was a hard cylinder that bounced against his midriff. He fastened every buckle he could find.

Soon he would slip the bones of this legend—no more Colonel Wittenbacher—and sublimate to anonymity.

He shifted his attention to the gap between the shoulder of Commander Cook and the boxy compass atop the instrument panel. He knew that, at this elevation, the ocean should be visible. But the greyness outside was uniform. This might have been some form of limbo, infinite in all directions. Snow gathered at the corners of the panes.

Don’t spook yourself. Leave this aircraft. Let the dead die.

Cory stepped back, ready to turn, but there was a split in the cloud: a black vein. He frowned. The distant vein did not reappear. He switched his vision to the microwave band.

The clouds glassed. He saw patches of rock and steep snowfields dead ahead. The details grew from the centre like the deepest folds of a white rose: shadowed ridges and slashes of white. The flanks of the mountain expanded like widening arms.

Quietly: ‘No.’

~

As Cory blazed with chemicals that added power to his muscles, other processes enhanced his cognition. He parsed the engine sound down to individual pistons, extracted their echoes from the mountain, determined the time difference, and thus the distance

0.76 miles

between the Lancastrian and its grave.

He remembered the conversation between Cook and Bennett, where Cook had mentioned the

‘whisker off fifty-one thousand’

take-off weight. He looked at the cockpit instruments and saw the current fuel load and engine revolutions. He guessed the materials from which the Lancastrian was constructed. All these thoughts, and more, combined in an equation whose result was the sure knowledge that the Lancastrian would crash in fifteen seconds. It was possible to steer the aircraft, with feet to spare, over the southern shoulder of the mountain, but the required force on the yoke would snap the control rods.

Cory burst through the curtain that led to the alcove. His elbow struck the dishes and they tumbled to the floor, but the sound, as he entered the passenger compartment, was already behind him.

Ten seconds.

There was no time to snatch his cane, which still lay against the window. No time for anything. Cory ran through ribbons of a sweet-smelling odour. Chloroform. He fought to plant each footfall; a trip would cost him everything.

The hand of Peter Simpson rested upon his canvas sack; Sisyphus pardoned. Slumped Casis Said Atalah, his face swollen around his mask, held a rosary. Its crucifix swung against his knee. The forms of Jack Gooderham, Frau Limpert, and Peter Young were rigid and aloof. Chloroform had shut their eyes. Harald Pagh could no longer make jolly. He had fallen sideways, his head held upright by a taut oxygen tube. His time at the piano was over.

Wait, the passengers seemed to say. Fly with the stars.

Five seconds.

Cory grunted as he threw the door lever. The hatch opened onto mist and a ramp of mountainside, surging up to meet the airliner. He took a last breath and leapt into the cold. The rudder swished above his head and, for the first time since Buenos Aires, the engine sound faded. He saw the silk of his parachute spew upwards and fill with air. The harness bit his groin and armpits.

Beneath his shoes, the serrations of the mountain wrinkled. The irregular snowfields were marked with flecks of exposed rock, brown and rugged. They expanded like waiting mouths. Cory missed one outcrop and angled his legs for a bluff. Then a fresh wind swirled. It brought snow and reinvigorated his parachute. Cory banked like a child on a schoolyard swing. His course was reset and the mountain fell away from his feet. He wafted east, downward, into the darkness of a glacial valley.

Turning, he watched Star Dust pass into the grey shelf that formed the south-eastern face of the mountain. Cory thought the explosion beautiful. It might have been a glimpse through the mountain of the setting sun. Then the grotesque: he saw the snow below the explosion pucker with debris. First wings, then seats, oxygen cylinders, Penguin paperbacks, a torn canvas sack that bore the arms of an English king, the boot of an airman, a human head. Cory lost his desire to look. The phantom sound of propellers lingered. But a thunderclap punctuated the sound, bringing silence.

These poor people.

No, not people. Zombies. Things with no mind.

The air was huge and everywhere. To prove he could, he shouted, ‘Lisandro!’

Lisandro was already dead and he knew it.

His feet struck a promontory and he screamed as both Achilles tendons snapped. He tumbled, cocooned in the strings of his parachute, down a cleft little wider than his shoulders. Pain-inhibiting mechanisms were tripped before his ribs broke, each snap like a pencil in a child’s hand. There was a pit of snow at the base of the cleft. His head pierced hard, packed snow.

Silence.

Upside-down and broken, Cory heard the tick of blood in his ears. Across his vision slipped bar-charts and line graphs describing the negative trends of his life: blood oxygen saturation falling; blood acidity rising; a lung punctured; ribs sprung; a collar bone detached. The automata wished to squeeze water from his tissues, conjure oxygen, and augment his respiration. Did he object?

Do I look like I give a fuck?

He imagined the parachute folding on the soles of his shoes. A silk bag. A cocoon.

~

In the still moments of his long life to come, Cory would remember that night and its silence. The dark was blindness until his vision slid into higher frequencies. Then the mountain reappeared as great and indifferent as it had seemed on the flight deck of the Lancastrian. A star-filled sky. Away, in the miles covered by his gaze, he could see no pockets of heat: no settlement, shed, or lone shepherd. His lungs burned in the deoxygenated air. Anaerobic respiration stung his muscles. He clawed from rock to rock. Sometimes he fell. Sometimes he slid. The rugged zip on his Irvin held, but the trousers of his tropical suit tore, and his knees bled sluggishly and gathered grit.

~

After dawn, he found a half-buried object. It was blackened and smelled of carbon and aeroplane fuel. He read the words ‘olls—Royce’ on its side. When Cory grinned, his lips tore, but the blood did not leak. He touched the engine. It cooled as Cory warmed. His automata, revitalised, set about their repair work. Ice-split cells were thawed and reconstructed. His Achilles tendons were reattached. New sinews wove. Metabolic by-products were quarantined, passed into the blood, and set free by his lungs. A circle of snow melted around him. He felt the water impregnate his tissues, load them, buoy his life. He reached again and drew a finger along the flank of the engine. Cory stroked a line of soot beneath each eye and felt the distant pulse of the smart matter. Four hundred metres away, perhaps five hundred. He held out his hand and the cane—clean, perfect, undamaged—flew into his grip. He walked west.

~

By the fourth day, he had exhausted the energy inducted from the engine. He came to a valley crowded with ice columns. He passed among the frozen army without a sound. He slept at the base of one and expected to die.

On the fifth, he collapsed against a rust-red boulder on the bank of a great, milky river. He awoke when a day moon was visible in the sky. An arriero, a muleteer, was leaning forward with a canteen. He put it to Cory’s lips. Cory knew to take a sip, no more.

‘Bueno,’ said the man. ‘Mi nombre es Evaristo, el mismo nombre que la ciudad.’

The translation came as Cory watched the white-and-brown hills. He turned back to Evaristo, opened his left hand and, with a frostbitten finger, brushed the leather of the palm.

‘Tómelo,’ said Evaristo. He gave Cory a shaving of paper and a pencil with a knife-hewn nib.

In Spanish, Cory wrote, My plane crashed high on the mountain. Where am I?

‘La Vega de los Flojos.’

The meadow of the lazy? Cory smiled.

He wrote, Which country?

‘Chile, Chile.’

Cory vomited the water onto the slush. Icons slid into his vision, flashing, urgent with alerts; his body had exhausted its fuels. The automata petitioned him to kick-start repairs using the life energy of the arriero, but Cory fired back a veto.

His right hand gripped his belt. Five days before, in the lounge where he had waited with the other passengers to board Star Dust, it had been flush with his abdomen. Now it was loose. He twisted the belt to expose inset gold sovereigns. The arriero looked from the gold to Cory. His rough-skinned hand pushed away Cory’s and reset the belt. He shook his head. A stream of Spanish left his mouth.

The translation came seconds later, as though the sound had travelled miles.

‘I do not think you will live, my friend. If you die, I promise to bury you with your gold. But I am a poor man. Perhaps you will offer it a second time, when you are well.’

Cory wrote, Thank you.

The arriero nodded. He turned his head and made a puh-puh sound.

A horse took lazy steps towards them through the scree.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Regensburg

His last word, scree, left a hole in the air, a dead zone. Jem sat with her arms on her knees. She was exhausted. Saskia’s features were shadowed, and as she moved, a new light struck her eyes emerald. Wearily, Jem followed the shaft to a brightening window: dawn.

‘You should not have travelled in time,’ said Saskia. ‘You were not strong enough.’

Jem looked at her. Saskia had been dead and broken on the cot. Now she scanned the room with command in her eyes. This, Jem decided, was once more the unstoppable woman she had encountered in Berlin. She remembered the smile as they waited for the rendezvous with Wolfgang: that businesslike tug of her gloves.

Cory glanced at his broken gun. ‘It took strength to come down that mountain.’

‘You gave up to the mountain.’

‘I did not.’ His voice had a petulant edge. ‘I survived it.’

‘The mountain was not Tupungato. The mountain was Jennifer’s newspaper.’

His eyelids fluttered. ‘Look, if you–’

His words trailed off as Saskia reversed her gun and placed it on the table. At this, the inspector raised his eyebrows and looked at Jem. Hrafn and Danny exchanged a similar look of alarm. Jem reached for the weapon but stopped, unsure of Saskia’s plan.

‘Take the gun, Jem,’ said Hrafn. ‘Quickly.’

‘There is no point,’ said Saskia flatly. ‘No-one in this room is fast enough.’

‘Fuck,’ said Danny.

‘He can kill us all,’ said Saskia. ‘Though he will not.’

Danny looked at her. ‘Pleased to hear it. Why not, Cory?’

‘Honestly? I can’t think of a reason.’

‘Fuck.’

Saskia stepped towards Cory. Her eyes dared his. ‘You know that the Cullinan Zero is fiction. You feel it. And you feel my certainty.’

‘So you can control your physiological responses,’ Cory said. ‘Join the club. Perhaps I should remove all doubt by ripping the information wholesale from that little device in your head.’

‘I have safeguards that will lesion the traces before you can gain control of it.’

‘Ichor or no ichor, Saskia, it would be the end of you.’

‘I know. Think quickly.’

‘I have twenty minutes. No rush.’

‘Why twenty?’ asked Duczyński.

‘There is a police helicopter approaching from the south-west,’ said Saskia. She kept her eyes on Cory. ‘It was tipped off by an anonymous caller.’ She frowned. ‘Cory, you’re looking for doubt, but you already have it. Jennifer did not lie to me. How would I know to fabricate a story that so closely resembles yours? Think. Do you have any recollection of your wife on the day you crossed? Keep thinking. The day before? Part of you knows that she never existed. Listen to that part. You are, in some ways, a victim. If you kill us, you do so on the basis of a lie. That I will not accept.’

‘Now, you will accompany us,’ said the inspector, straightening his back, ‘to Berlin. There you will face charges of murder and attempted murder.’

Cory laughed.

~

Jem felt the quickening of her tears. She envied Duczyński the drive that rallied him against a problem, when the outcome—their deaths in this little hut—was as certain as the impact of Star Dust on Tupungato, or DFU323 against Bavarian soil. She wished she could spit cock-sure comments at Cory instead of bending her head and crying.

The sobs came silently at first, then with greater intensity. She wondered whether it made Cory think about the human cost of his plans or if it merely distracted him. But she cried and nobody spoke. She cried until a hand touched her head. Jem looked up.

‘Don’t cry, mein kleiner Schlumpf.’

As Saskia stroked her hair, Jem remembered cutting Saskia’s on a balcony in Berlin, lifetimes gone.

‘Well, you had me at ‘Guten Tag.’’

‘Take my hand.’

Saskia blinked slowly. With that, Jem wondered if the last tasks of the ichor inside her were complete. Had Saskia risen, fully now, from the dead?

‘Cory,’ Jem said, ‘I have something to say.’

Cory did not reply. He stared at her, waiting, until Jem reached into the coat Saskia wore. It was Danny’s coat. She took the Hänsel doll from the inner pocket and, under the thoughtful gaze of Cory, lay him on the floor. The doll wore Lederhosen and a velveteen hat. His cheeks were rosy and his feet were bare.

‘Listen,’ Jem said. ‘A couple of years ago–’

‘No,’ said Danny. His face was drawn tight. ‘Not now.’

‘A couple of years ago,’ she repeated, ‘when I was finishing my degree, I began to experience panic attacks. Until that point, life was normal. I worked at a hairdresser’s for spending money. I had a wide circle of friends. I went to the pub, did student voluntary work, and generally enjoyed myself.

‘The last, big panic attack happened on a Saturday morning in February. That was the attack that ended it all. The trigger was something banal: the redness of the fire escape door. Whether it was the colour, the shape, or what it represented… I didn’t know. But I completely flipped out. It was serious enough for friends to call an ambulance. The paramedic thought I was putting it on.

‘Eventually, Mum and Dad sent me to our GP. He had last seen me as a sixteen-year-old gobshite demanding the pill. Now I was back, staring at the floor like a little girl, while Mum explained that it was best if I saw a therapist. Mum is big on therapy. The GP agreed. I spent the next week in bed. I didn’t talk, watch the television, or shower. I hardly ate. Late at night, walking around the house, I had a third panic attack in the attic bedroom that used to belong to Danny.

‘You know, I thought the therapist would have a room lined with books, antiques, and a tropical fish-tank. But she worked from home and we talked in her kitchen. She listened to me describe the circumstances of my first panic attack. She asked me what the door reminded me of. I told her about the red door in my brother’s attic bedroom.’

‘Jem,’ said Danny. His obvious pain brought her out of the story for a moment, and she became self-conscious. What was the use of talking? Did they think she was foolish? But the faces of the men, and of Saskia, diminished her fears. Each was focused on her.

‘Over the next weeks,’ she continued, ‘I got deeper and deeper into the programme. At the therapist’s request, I wrote about the bad memories of my childhood. Five weeks into the therapy, she told me that I showed all the symptoms of an incest survivor. She directed all our discussions towards the red door. I didn’t know what it represented. I drew it, wrote stories about it, and went through word-association games designed to unlock it.

‘Finally, she began to hypnotise me. I remember the first session. It was difficult, but she congratulated me on my susceptibility to the procedure. By the second session, we had found the key that opened the door. Or so I thought.’

Danny had crouched at the wall. His head was on his knees. He looked like a child told to make himself tiny.

‘Go on,’ said Cory.

‘In the memory, I was twelve. It was a summer evening. Thundery. I went up to tell Danny that Dad had agreed to take us to a theme park that weekend. I remember crashing into Danny’s room, bursting with news. It was empty. Our house used to be a mill, and the rooms are long and low. The red door was just the entrance to the attic, which was stuffed with Dad’s old sports gear—a leather cricket bag, a bundled tennis net—and unwanted wedding gifts. There was a clearing in the middle of the attic space where Dad planned to lay down a model railway.

‘That night, a high-pitched tune was coming from behind the attic door. I opened it. Danny was sitting next to a cardboard box. He wore shorts and flip-flops: his summer outfit. He was dangling two puppets into the box as though it was a theatre. Hänsel and Gretel were dancing to the tune played by the music box of our grandmother. The tune was ‘I call to Thee, Lord Jesus Christ’—Bach? I remember how his expression changed when I closed the door. From contentment to surprise to something else. I saw… an erection in his shorts.

‘Then I awoke from the hypnosis. The therapist demanded I finish the story, but I left her house and never returned. I walked home and wrote a letter to my mother describing how Danny had systematically abused me. Then I went to his old room. Danny was at university in Durham, but there were some clothes in the wardrobe. I cut the sleeves off his shirts. You know, like a divorce. Later that night, I turned up at the house of my Uncle Barry in York. He let me stay on the proviso I called Mum. I didn’t. I left for London in the morning. I got a sweeping job in the second salon I walked into, and restarted my life.’

She looked hard at Cory.

‘And when did you suspect the memory was false?’ he asked.

‘At first, I didn’t. Perhaps because I had destroyed my family with that one letter, I almost required the memory be true. Otherwise it was pointless. I was pointless.’

‘Jem…’ said Cory.

‘In my memory of the abuse,’ she said, ‘the dolls were puppets. Marionettes, I mean: they had strings on their arms and legs. But the actual dolls we played with were not, and never had been, marionettes. Danny could never have played with them in the way I remembered that night.’

‘It took me years to find him,’ said Danny. He spoke to his shoes. ‘Mum had given our toys to a kid who lived up the road. His parents sold them in a car boot sale. Eventually, Hänsel showed up on eBay. He was one of a kind, you see.’

‘I have other memories, I realise now,’ said Jem, ‘of playing with the dolls in the field behind our house. They never had strings. But even when Danny rediscovered Hänsel… Memory is like a second person in your head; a companion who guards your experience. And jealously. Memory tells you stories.’

Jem watched the face of the killer. Her memories, even false, were still her own.

‘I remember sitting beneath an oak with my wife,’ Cory said quietly. Jem could hear the distant buzz of a helicopter. ‘We were at the edge of a cornfield. I proposed to her with a ring that had belonged to my grandmother. She was your age, Jem.’

‘Maybe that memory is true.’

‘Catherine was there on the day I crossed the bridge back to 1947. There were three of us in the prep room: me, Catherine, and Freddo. Freddo was my second. He would replace me if something went wrong, just as I had replaced Jackson. I asked him to excuse us, and he left Catherine and me facing the mirror. She told me I looked like a southern gentleman in my white suit. She told me that my mission would save people like my sister, who had died of the cholera. She told me that my mission was everything, and she understood, and she would wait.’ He shook his head. ‘God, I had to find Harkes.’ Cory looked at Saskia. ‘Three weeks before I crossed the bridge, there was an incident involving David Proctor.’

Saskia’s reaction startled Jem: she stepped forward. Cory nodded, as though this confirmed his perception of her. Did he now believe that Saskia was telling the truth? And Jem too?

Jem asked, ‘Who is he?’

‘The father of Jennifer Proctor, who sent me,’ said Cory. ‘There were thirty of us in the team, and though David was never officially part of it, he was our doddery old Brit, our mascot. Our work—the work of the project—involves the manipulation of gravity. David fell into one of the spinners and died instantly. It cast a shadow across the team. A couple of weeks into the routine enquiry behind the accident, an independent investigator found evidence that David had arranged to meet someone the night he died. Jennifer, his daughter, had turned into management central since his death. The first time I met her, a couple of years before, she was already a tyrant, but the older members of the team kept telling me what a wonderful person she was, deep down. Those folks started to leave, though, and their positions were filled by people like Jennifer: driven hard-asses. When Jennifer found out that the inquiry had uncovered a potential murder, she couldn’t sleep. Literally. She downloaded illegal scripts to override the safeties on her automata. She was wide-eyed for a week. At the end of it, she took me aside. She called me their best operative, which was probably untrue. I was a greenhorn. The most naïve. She said that the inquiry had uncovered an Islamo-fascist conspiracy to undermine the Confederacy. Her father, she said, had been on the brink of exposing a mole inside the project, and had been killed as a consequence. Our specialist in entanglement, a flashy character called Patrick Harkes, was missing, and she was certain of his guilt. I don’t understand the first thing about carbon entanglement, but it was the key, according to Jennifer, to tapping energy from a nearby universe and would, in one heave, pull the Confederacy back from the brink. It would usher in a new era of cheap energy. But Harkes had stolen the one element we needed to make the focusing technology work: a large diamond, bigger than any ever found.’

‘The Cullinan Zero,’ said Saskia.

There was a rustle of simultaneous movement. All eyes in the room found all others. Cory looked at the scar on his palm. Pyrene.

‘Keep talking,’ said Danny.

‘I can’t stop thinking about my wife in the green room shortly before I made the jump. When I look back across the years to 1947, I can’t imagine another scenario in which I would have tried so hard to succeed. I searched for Harkes on three continents. I hunted him for sixty years. All the while, my goal was my wife. Even now.’ He paused, and his eyes searched the ground. ‘Jennifer was uninterested in the rebuilding of her adoptive country. She was always in the game for the knowledge, and to see what her technology could do. She wanted to join Newton and Einstein. That is, until her father was killed by Harkes. Then she wanted revenge and she reached for the nearest tool. Me. In her drive to spend every second on the project, I think Jennifer pushed herself into psychosis.’

‘Whereas,’ said Danny, ‘you’re just a charming eccentric, like Proctor.’

‘I don’t ask you to understand, Mr Shaw.’

‘If you’re going to kill us, you could at least make the effort. Come on. You’re bonkers, aren’t you?’

‘Danny,’ warned Jem.

‘When you look at us,’ asked the inspector softly, ‘do you see… marionettes?’

Cory’s eyes had narrowed.

‘Saskia,’ he said, ‘you tried to save that aircraft even when you knew it would crash. Why? What’s your secret?’

‘I’m human. It’s what we do. What’s your secret?’

Cory sighed. His breath flowed white.

Something changed in the air of the hut. Jem could not, at first, define it. Coldness, yes. Numbness. Then the details of things—the greenness of Saskia’s eyes, the slight downturn of Cory’s mouth—grew indistinct. A sudden weakness gripped her neck and her head lolled forward. This shocked her into panic. Was the room filling with gas? Was it carbon monoxide? She looked at Cory. His expression was businesslike. There was no sign that he was affected. As Jem’s sense of the world narrowed to a trickle, she watched Saskia coil for a punch that never came. Cory pushed her lightly and she fell to one knee.

‘He’s doing it,’ said Danny, coughing. ‘Use the gun. Shoot the bastard.’

The night returned.

~

Cory approached the fallen Óskarson first. Blood fizzed from his reopened neck wound, glistening with each heart tick. Cory licked his finger and touched the hole. It closed. Then he made a circuit of the room and checked the airway of each person. He picked up the smart matter. There was rotor noise in the air: enough to send his mind across the years to 1947, riding in good company towards the marvellous Star Dust.

‘Never shit more than you can eat.’

He smiled.

But there was the rotor sound. A police helicopter.

Outside the hut, the snow lay in long folds. The sun was dim in a cloudy sky. Later, those clouds would snow, but for now they were curled fists in the gap of trees formed by the stream. Cory walked around the hut. A drift had buried Tolsdorf and his ingenious electromagnetic apparatus.

‘There’s a song?’

‘Dummy. Everybody knows it.’

‘I don’t know it.’

He had parked the stolen ambulance at the end of a ranger track. He climbed inside and located three bottles of oxygen. He rubbed his hands with a sterile wipe to remove the grease, then opened all three. He stepped out and closed the doors. He entered the cab, started the engine, and depressed the cigarette lighter. What he would do for a cigar. The radio handset chilled his grip. ‘Police helicopter above me, come in.’

‘Who is this? Mr Self?’

‘If you like. There will be a smoke trail for you to follow. The people you’re looking for are at its base.’

~

The explosion flooded the ambulance and burst its cracks. The windows darkened with soot. Minutes later, the helicopter descended. Its thumping rotors flattened the flames.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;

But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

‘Good-morning,’ and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—

And admirably schooled in every grace:

In fine, we thought that he was everything

To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.

‘Richard Cory’ (1897), by Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)

The Scharmützelsee, three weeks later

The two rivers Oder and Spree define a district in Brandenburg, eastern Germany. Within this district, one can find the Scharmützelsee, which is a narrow lake ten kilometres long. On its wooded western edge, not far from an abandoned campsite, there is a road whose concrete slabs make traffic go lub-dub, lub-dub as the driver heads south, parallel to the blue expanse. The sound is pure East Germany. Poland is less than thirty-five kilometres away. It is winter and the wind today comes from Russia.

~

The man is driving through the tunnels of colourless trees. Through occasional breaks in the woodland he sees the lake. He is thinking too much of Saskia Brandt. His thumb guides the steering wheel. His seat is fully pushed back. The radio, though German, plays American and English music almost exclusively, and he is singing along to a recent hit, Will Young’s Leave Right Now.

His long, black coat is folded on the passenger seat. On top of it, a map.

His throat is dry. He has not slept in eighteen hours. He has been driving since Calais.

~

There is still light in the sky behind him as he steps from the rental car and looks at the house, which is far back from the road. He has a hold-all. He swings it across his left shoulder and crosses the broken pavement to a high, chainwire gate. There is a postbox: once white, now peeling to steel. It has a tube underneath for newspapers. A board has been knocked out of the wooden fence, leaving a hole large enough for a child, but he has seen neither children nor adults nor life on the last stretch of this road since leaving Bad Saarow, the spa town on the northern shore of the lake.

He turns. The road is dark behind. No streetlights. Is a certain fear settling upon him, light as a bird on his shoulder? He has been alone in the car for too long. He smiles to himself. Will Young’s fault.

A yellow, laminated notice has been attached to the gate with luggage ties. It reads: ‘Betreten der Baustelle verboten! Eltern haften für ihre Kinder!’ He touches it with his knuckles, thinking that the sign is old and that it must mean ‘Keep out’.

Through the gate, he sees brown, winter-dead weeds. There is no hint of the paths that must once have crossed the garden. Some of the trees are more than thirty feet high. Their bottom halves are frondless, naked stakes. The house is boxy and pinkish. The roof is flat and the last, fading blue of the lake beyond makes him see it as a Greek villa. The thought cannot but fall, stone dead, in the freezing air. The weather is the kind that his mother would call ‘too cold for snow’. He shrugs to adjust the weight of his hold-all and wonders if this is the correct house. There are no lights. Pieces are missing from the arches of the veranda.

Then he sees a shadow cross the wall. It is a woman walking towards him. Just as he sees this, the remaining daylight fails and, suddenly, it is night. The woman has shortish hair and her steps through the weeds are deliberately placed. As he watches her, the garden seems to brighten. Part of him feels that the darkness itself has condensed to form this figure.

She stops at the gate. They look at each other through the links.

‘Saskia?’

‘Hello, Danny. Did you bring the things I asked?’

‘Yes, of course. Absolutely.’

~

The house, Saskia explained as she gave Danny the tour, used to be the dacha of a former Stasi Lieutenant-General who died in Croatia a few months prior to reunification. It was a blank space on the administrative landscape. And it was freezing. There was no electricity and no water. They spoke of nothing in particular. Saskia had erected a tent in the hallway and they entered this small, blue dome at midnight. Danny lay down first and Saskia second, behind him. She pulled a blanket across them. Her left arm rested on his shoulder.

‘Go to sleep,’ she said.

‘You are so very weird.’

He felt the silence. Was she smiling?

Then the cold tip of her nose was against his neck and the inconstant, troubled exhalations become regular and his tiredness overcame him and he slept, the pressure behind his eyes lessening, and he dreamed about her missing hand, wondering where it was right then.

~

For Saskia, the shelter of his body calmed her as though he were a cave into which she had crawled. She was transported to the night she and Jem had discussed an imminent rendezvous with Wolfgang, when Saskia had pulled on her gloves and rode all the power of her certainty. Now that certainty was cracked: when tested with a knock, its note was wrong. Saskia had wanted to tell Danny to sleep in the car, but she did not—he felt too good. She knew that something fundamental had split in the roots of her relationship with Jem. Saskia thought of the chessboard floor tiles of the dacha’s foyer and pictured the Stasi Lieutenant-General welcoming his guests one summer night. Despite this, despite her unhealed injuries, there was a wetness and engorgement within her more insistent than anything she had felt with Jem. She hated that.

Danny twitched. Her arm moved and a shiver of pain passed through her, but she took it as a cost of this intimacy, whose depth would forever be this moment. No deeper, ever.

~

The next morning, Danny found Saskia standing in a drawing room. She was a black island among icebergs of dust-sheeted furniture.

‘First things first,’ he said. ‘A diesel generator. Some lights. Blackout curtains. And food. You haven’t eaten, have you?’

She paused long enough to show that she did not want to answer that question. Then, softly, she said, ‘Danny, I need you to go to Argentina. Not yet. But soon.’

He opened his mouth to laugh at this, but the laughter did not come.

‘Argent-fucking-what-now?’

‘He’s there. He wants redemption.’

Suddenly Danny was angry. ‘And what do you want, Saskia?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know what I mean.’

At length, she left the house and walked to the shore.

~

Saskia tried to think of Cory instead of Danny. Over the next three days, the house grew brighter and warmer. Danny installed a generator in the basement and gas heaters in every room. Saskia scrubbed the windows and floors as hard as her strength permitted, then sat and watched Danny paint. He wore a T-shirt, jeans, and flip-flops. He looked so English. He noticed her watching and grinned.

‘Like what you see?’

She tried to suppress her smile. Then it was raining again and she walked to the window and saw the darkening greyness of Scharmützelsee. The slow waves looked like the saw-tooth pattern on a Japanese sword. She felt, did not see, Danny’s concern. She ignored it. She thought of Cory again and wondered whether a bullet of smart matter would ding the window and put a coin-sized hole through her heart.

‘Did you call Jem?’ she asked.

Danny returned to his painting. ‘Yes.’

‘Was there a message for me?’

‘No,’ he said, and she could hear the pity in his voice like an accent.

She remembered watching from a tree top as the police helicopter took off. And the honey light of the still-burning ambulance. Thinking: there go my friends.

But.

‘It’s not over,’ said Danny.

She wanted to go to him. Cup his cheek. Instead, she rotated her shoulder until it clicked.

‘Cold in here.’

‘You should rest,’ he said. ‘They’ll arrive in a couple of hours.’

‘Do you think they’ll come?’

‘Of course. We’ve all been through the same thing—and it’s not over.’

~

Jem came shortly before dark. She parried Saskia’s kiss with a cheek and did not meet her eyes. Her frostiness passed through the room like a weather front. Saskia called her ‘Cool Britannia,’ but Jem did not laugh. She donned an apron and helped prepare the food.

By the early evening, when Danny, cheerful and loud, resolved to reattach the chandelier and leapt onto the dining table like a buccaneer, Saskia had decided to talk with Jem, but her hesitant approach was interrupted by a knock at the door.

Karel stood there holding bread and salt. Saskia took these with a curtsy. He held the back of her head as he kissed each cheek. Then he kissed Jem, who had appeared at Saskia’s elbow.

‘My dear,’ said Hrafn, following Karel. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Much better. Your neck?’

Hrafn pulled on his collar. ‘I have a fantastic scar. I can’t wait to frighten my nephew. Hello, Jem.’

‘Hi, Hrafn.’

‘I brought some cheeses. I didn’t know if, well.’

‘Perfect,’ said Saskia. ‘We’ll have them after the fondue. Why don’t you help Danny solve his engineering problem?’

‘I’m freelance now,’ said Hrafn. ‘He can’t afford my rate.’

‘Like you can afford mine,’ called Danny.

The room filled with masculine noises as Karel and Hrafn directed Danny’s attempt to hook the chandelier on its chain, and amid this distraction Saskia considered her feelings for Jem. The oil lamps on the sideboard made unfamiliar contours of her face and Saskia thumbed her fringe and asked, ‘Why so quiet, Schatzi?’

‘Why not?’

‘Talk to me.’

Jem took a huge breath. Her chest shuddered. Finally, her eyes stopped on those of Saskia. ‘Danny has you in his little spell, doesn’t he?’

‘No, he does not,’ Saskia replied. She smiled to underline the ridiculousness of the notion.

‘I thought we had something different.’

‘We do.’

‘That we were special,’ said Jem, turning away.

Saskia said, ‘We are.’

~

Inspector Karel Duczyński had been their greatest asset in the hours following the rescue from Tolsdorf’s hut. Despite suspension from his official position, he had retained the informal currency of a police officer and his colleagues had responded well to his claims—extraordinary by any standards—that the four were victims of a stranger whose name they were never told; a stranger who had hijacked and stolen an ambulance, murdered an elderly woodsman, and, unaccountably, signalled his location to the authorities so that his hypothermic captives could be rescued.

It had proven more difficult to explain to the interrogators in Munich why all four of them had travelled to the crash site. The fictions were essentially truthful: Hrafn, as Investigator-In-Charge of the DFU team, was acting on a tip provided by Duczyński. Duczyński, in the hope of clearing his name, was following a lead provided by Danny. Danny was concerned for his sister. Jem had been overcome by a compulsion to visit the crash site, where her good friend Saskia Dorfer had died, and taken refuge in the woodland hut. A wild goose chase with a tragic climax. Who was the hijacker? Nobody knew. Who was Mr Self, the man who had called in the search-and-rescue helicopter? Nobody knew. The police investigators had been frustrated, but the trail was too cold and their stories consistent.

Of Dorfer, there had been—of course—no trace, and perhaps never would. The crushing forces of the impact were tremendous, after all.

Chapter Thirty-Six

‘The ichor infests him,’ Saskia said, watching her guests eat. ‘It has become part of his body and his mind. He wants, I think, to die, but the ichor stops it.’

‘How?’ asked Hrafn.

‘Perhaps it can control his muscles,’ said Karel. ‘Just as Cory can control the factor.’

‘His magic wand is a separate issue,’ replied Hrafn. He seemed uncomfortable. Saskia knew that his scepticism had pushed him to the edge of the group. She touched her lip with a napkin. Now, she decided, was the time. She took a manila envelope, which had lain next to her empty plate since the meal began, and slid it across the table.

‘Hrafn, look at this. Read the addressee first.’

‘Just your name.’

‘OK. Open it.’

Hrafn checked Saskia’s expression, then shook a leather gauntlet free from the envelope.

Danny chuckled. To nobody in particular, he said, ‘Hand delivered, I see.’

‘Jesus, Saskia,’ said Jem. ‘If he knows we’re here, then we’re done for.’

Saskia said, ‘I don’t doubt that Cory has known, perhaps precisely, the location of each of us since the moment he rendered us unconscious and escaped the Bavarian National Forest.’ She lifted her wine and considered its colours in the light.

Karel and Danny shared a look of exasperation, and Jem stared fiercely at her plate. Only Hrafn appeared undisturbed. Saskia took a mouthful of the Chianti and smiled wetly; her raised eyebrow invited his questions.

‘You said this dacha had been abandoned,’ Hrafn said. ‘That it was untraceable.’

‘It was.’

‘And yet.’

‘Please,’ said Karel. His blue-bowed skewer lay unemployed. He turned it anticlockwise on his plate. ‘I am concerned, Saskia, that this conversation has a… layer, if you will, of half-truths. We have all made sacrifices. We deserve disclosure.’

‘Spit it out, Saskia,’ said Danny. ‘Is this the glove that Cory took from the captain of the Star Dust?’

She turned to Hrafn, who seemed to debate whether he should handle the glove. Finally, he took it. He rubbed the stitching. ‘The workmanship is similar to that of old flying gloves,’ he said. ‘The liner is silk, for example. But there’s no label.’

‘You are correct, Danny,’ said Saskia. ‘That glove was worn by Commander Cook.’

Hrafn cleared his throat.

‘Do you still doubt, Thomas?’ she asked.

‘Thomas, excuse me, was the only disciple with any sense,’ he replied. ‘I want to be sure. I can accept that some distortion of memory has occurred. We have Jem’s example of that. But I’ll believe Cory’s story when I see empirical evidence of it.’

Danny replaced his wine glass loudly. ‘What other evidence is there apart from the empirical?’

‘The logical,’ said Hrafn, looking at Saskia, challenging her. ‘That which we can derive.’

‘Oh, come on,’ said Danny. ‘You’ve been booted off the investigation and you’re grumpy. We understand that. But you’re taking your scepticism too far.’

‘Am I? Did that man Cory not strike you as a zealot, Danny? Turn on the television. Listen to the myths we weave for our terrorists. What do we have here but a fabrication? He was obsessed by a song called Stardust, composed by Hoagy Carmichael. Shall I name another of Carmichael’s compositions?’

‘What?’

‘Georgia On My Mind,’ said Hrafn. He paused to let the guests consider his words. ‘Was Cory ever Georgian? It could be bullshit, just a handful of ideas thrown together. It’s what spies call a ‘legend’, no more genuine than the Englishman Wilberforce or the German Wittenbacher.’ Hrafn stared at them all. ‘Cory left us with words, nothing more.’

No-one said anything. Hrafn had touched the heart of their anxiety: that the fictions were deeper, more fundamental than even Cory knew. The silence drew on until Hrafn lowered his eyes to the table. There was something apologetic in the tilt of his head.

Quietly, Jem said, ‘You only had words from me.’

‘And we believe you,’ said Hrafn. His face softened. ‘Absolutely.’

‘And me?’ asked Saskia. Another silence greeted this. Saskia let them wait. She was as indifferent as a teacher duty-bound to deliver a bitter lesson. ‘Your perception is correct. Cory’s identity was undoubtedly constructed by Jennifer Proctor. Who knows what half-remembered poems and songs inspired her?’

She could see that they did not know what to say. There was a moment, though brief, in which she wanted to drop a cryptic remark. Instead, she pulled open a small drawer in the table and produced a newspaper. She pushed it towards Karel.

‘This is a copy of The Buenos Aires Herald, a daily newspaper. It’s an archive duplicate from 1947.’

Karel began to thumb through the pages. His attentioned switched between the newspaper and Saskia.

‘What am I looking for?’

‘STENDEC,’ she said.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘STEN for stentor, the Latin for ‘herald’. That’s the newspaper.’

‘I see.’

‘Next, D for the fourth page of the classifieds.’

Karel turned the newspaper over and worked his way from the back page. Hrafn, on his left, leaned in.

‘OK, I’m on the fourth page.’

‘E for the fifth column.’

His finger slid across the page.

‘And C for what?’

‘C for the third entry.’

Karel lifted the newspaper.

He read, ‘To: J. Remember flowers for grave of Algie. Love, C.’

The men looked at one another. It was clear that they did not understand the reference, and their gazes eventually settled on Jem, who was half smiling.

‘It’s a book,’ she said. ‘We had to read it for school. It’s the fictional diary of a janitor called Charlie. At the beginning, he’s got a really low IQ and gets chosen for experimental surgery that turns him into a genius. At the end of the book he goes back to being a simpleton. Algernon was, I think, the name of a laboratory mouse that underwent the surgery before Charlie. The mouse died. The title of the book comes from the last line of the diary, when Charlie asks the reader to put flowers on the grave of Algie. I guess he means he’d like someone to put flowers on his grave, too, when he dies. Hence Flowers for Algernon.’

‘A hollow joke, then,’ said Karel. ‘What was Cory, if not a similar experiment?’

‘It’s not a joke,’ said Jem. ‘It’s a message telling Jennifer that Harkes is dead, that’s all. Mission accomplished.’

‘Why would he send it aboard Star Dust?’ asked Hrafn.

‘He told us,’ said Danny. ‘It was to smoke Harkes out. Make him drop his guard.’

‘Are we going to smoke Cory out too?’ said Hrafn, looking at Saskia.

She shrugged.

~

An hour of conversation passed—the apartment, the investigation of DFU323, families, spare time—before Saskia turned to Hrafn and said, ‘I wish to accept your offer of a small expedition to Mount Tupungato. I will take care of the outlay.’

‘I’d love to. Genuinely. But what do you expect me to find? Another glove?’

‘There’s something else,’ she pressed. ‘I need you to locate a man in Santiago. He has details of a shotgun suicide in December of 1947.’

Danny tugged an earlobe. ‘You think Cory tried to kill himself just a few months after the Star Dust hijack?’

‘No. I think he did kill himself.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Hrafn.

‘What do you see in my chair? A corpse or a woman?’ Saskia swallowed a fast mouthful of the Chianti. She had eaten little throughout the meal and the alcohol numbed her throat. ‘I reiterate that Cory knows exactly where we are.’

‘Let us put our hands on the table about this,’ said Karel. ‘We mean to kill him. Do we not? This is a conspiracy of murder.’

‘My hope, gentlemen and lady, is that he wishes for us to complete what he cannot.’

‘His suicide,’ said Jem. ‘Like in the poem. ‘Richard Cory went home and put a bullet in his head.’’

‘How did you come to that conclusion?’ asked Hrafn.

‘Turn over the parcel that glove came in and read the return address.’

‘I already checked. There isn’t one.’

‘There’s the name of the sender.’

‘Is there?’ Hrafn peered closer. ‘I see it. ‘Mr Juan Pájaro… Rojo.’’

‘Two weeks ago, a small Buenos Airean newspaper filed a story that described how a man called Mr Pájaro Rojo contacted an elderly widow with details of a curious bequest: a house of her choosing. The man left following the purchase. Previously, the widow lived in the neighbourhood where Cory claimed to have stayed prior to his attack on Star Dust.’

‘How old is she?’ asked Hrafn.

‘Old enough to be the mother of Lisandro, the boy Cory killed. Lisandro wanted to buy her a house, remember?’

‘She must have had him very young.’

‘I think she did.’

‘But this is a coincidence,’ pressed Hrafn. ‘You think it’s Cory settling his debts?’

‘I feel him.’

‘I took Spanish at university,’ said Karel, ‘and, of course, I now have time. I’ll interview her to confirm it. If what you say is true, it will add weight to your argument about redemption.’

‘Thank you, Karel,’ said Saskia.

‘I’ll go with him,’ Danny said, looking at her, accepting the exile.

‘The glove is the start of a trail, Hrafn,’ said Saskia, ‘and it leads to Cory. It is a challenge. An invitation.’

‘To murder?’ he asked sharply.

‘Certainly.’

‘To redeem? To avenge?’

‘Choose one.’

‘Which do you think Jennifer Proctor would have picked, given the murder of her father?’ His face had reddened. ‘How much value would she have placed upon the hundreds who died because of the chain of events she triggered?’

Saskia steepled her fingers and pointed them at him. ‘It isn’t a chain, Hrafn. Understand that at least. It’s a snake swallowing itself. It’s fucked up. No-one at this table can understand because it is not meant to be understood. You want narrative. That’s something your brain applies to unconnected facts in the absence of meaning, because you can’t bear to live in a world without it.’ She felt the sharpening edge of a migraine, but she pushed through with what she needed to say. ‘I’ve prepared a safety deposit box for Cory’s ashes. Next to them, I will place the smart matter. And perhaps a flower, for Jennifer’s Algernon. For her Huckleberry. I will then draft instructions for a legal firm that both be made available to Jennifer Proctor years from now following David Proctor’s death.’

‘Saskia,’ said Jem. ‘Your nose.’

‘Oh,’ she said, catching a blood drop on her knuckle. ‘Forget it.’

Saskia raised her glass and the other diners joined her. Hrafn’s held fruit juice; Karel’s water. She watched the chandelier through the red liquid. ‘To–’

Revenge.

‘The future,’ said Jem, interrupting her thoughts. ‘Both known and unknown.’

‘The future.’

The last of the evening unwound. Saskia whispered her goodbyes and padded through the house and fell across her bed, exhausted. Before her precise, internal chronometer marked midnight, she imagined a reversal: Star Dust reforming from the closing flower of its destruction. She saw the power to turn all evil to good by simple rewind. How close she was to being Cory. He was her Harkes. She was Cory’s Huckleberry. In her stupor, she looked at the door and smouldered with a prayer for Jem to open it, step through, and lie with her to soothe the aches and seal the cracks in her bones, the stresses of her death.

~

Saskia awoke when it was still dark. There was a voice in her head.

I said, can you hear me clearly? It’s Ego.

She shifted. Her wrist hurt.

I can hear you. Is this a dream?

No.

Where have you been?

On loan, so to speak. However, I note that you were sleeping. My apologies. I wanted to test this connection immediately. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Sleep well, Saskia.

She turned to her side. Jem was not in the bed.

Good night.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Buenos Aires, some weeks later

Karel Duczyński removed his Panama and fanned himself. He and Danny were looking along a colourful, hazy street. By unspoken agreement, Karel was in charge, and when he walked on, Danny fell into step. The cobblestones were shaded by jacarandas whose bluish corollas shuddered in the breeze. A boy burst from a doorway and joined the football game in the square opposite. Karel spotted an old man beneath an arch. The man nodded as Karel asked him directions. His toothless laughter made Danny turn away.

At length, they passed beneath the arch and Karel said to his friend, ‘I don’t know what to say.’

Danny gave him the sour smile of the heartbroken, which was an improvement.

~

The door opened the width of a shoe. Old, blue eyes stopped on the visitors. ‘¿Es usted policía?’

Karel cleared his throat. In his most polite Spanish, he said, ‘A very good afternoon, Mrs Cifuentes. My friend and I are from Interpol.’ He pressed his BSG identification card to the gap. ‘We are investigating the financial dealings of Mr Juan Pájaro Rojo, and we would like to talk with you.’

‘This is my apartment now.’

‘We fully understand that, señora.’

‘You know it is siesta?’

‘I’m sorry, I did not. May we come back at a more convenient time?’

The door closed. Karel looked doubtfully at Danny. Then the door opened again. The old lady wore a print dress and open sandals. Her eyes were set in deep, weathered sockets and she kept one arm behind her back for balance as she retreated into the apartment. ‘I don’t care about the siesta at my age. You will have some maté.’

‘Very kind,’ said Karel.

She turned to look at him before continuing inside. The room held a deflated-looking sofa, a couch draped with an old blanket, and some rugs. Cardboard boxes had been stacked in the corner. Karel was drawn to a watercolour above the television. It showed a smartly-dressed young woman and her family. Behind them, a crowd of wedding guests stood before a rural church. The cars next to the church dated the picture to the first half of the twentieth century. Karel glanced down at the sepia photograph that showed the same scene.

‘I used to paint,’ said the woman, returning from the kitchen. ‘Now my hands are unsteady.’

‘Are you enjoying your retirement?’

‘Tell your friend he can sit.’

‘Danny, sit down.’

‘Retirement?’ She laughed. ‘I became a mother at fourteen and a grandmother at thirty. I have so many children that I forget their names. I will be retired when they forget mine.’ She nodded, gathered her thoughts. ‘I stopped hat-making when I was 65, in the winter of 1992.’

‘Which would make you twenty years old in 1947.’

‘Twenty-one when my boy died, in the August. Little Lisandro.’

Karel passed a look of triumph to Danny, whose eyebrows were raised. The Brit had heard the name Lisandro but could not be sure of the context. Karel held out his hand and clicked his fingers. Danny passed him the article.

‘I read that your son contacted this newspaper. Is this true?’

The woman stared at the paper in a silent snarl of concentration. ‘Javier was excitable when he was a little boy and he’s excitable as an old man. I told him to stay quiet. No newspapers.’

‘Why did you tell him that?’

‘Because Mr Juan Pájaro Rojo asked me to keep this between ourselves.’

Karel nodded. ‘I would be grateful if you could tell me what happened, starting from the beginning.’

‘Very well.’ She nodded, as though she had always known there would be a reckoning. She settled on the chair by the kitchen. ‘He visited me one month ago. It was very wet. He came during the siesta, like you.’

‘Can you describe the man?’

‘Tall, white hair, faraway eyes.’ She smiled. ‘He spoke beautifully, like I haven’t heard in years.’

‘His age?’

‘Late sixties.’

‘Late sixties,’ said Karel. He looked at Danny and nodded. ‘That sounds like… Pájaro Rojo.’

‘He asked me if I had once lost a son called Lisandro, and I replied that I had.’

‘Excuse me, Mrs Cifuentes, but can we go back one step? On what basis did you admit the man to your house?’

‘I didn’t. He was already inside. When I asked him how he had entered, he said that he must have walked through the wall.’

‘Did that worry you?’

‘At the time, it made me laugh.’

‘What did he ask next?’

‘He wanted to know if I had any proof of residency. I said that I did not. But I showed him my picture of Lisandro. That was enough.’

‘How, precisely, did he respond to the picture?’

‘He was very moved. Then he told me the story of the bequest.’

‘The bequest?’

‘It’s in the newspaper. You must have read it.’

‘Mrs Cifuentes, let me repeat that we are not here to take your apartment. That’s yours, and safe.’

‘Your companion is very quiet. Why?’

‘He’s British. He only speaks when he wants to apologise. The bequest, Mrs Cifuentes?’

‘He told me that a rich businessman had once befriended my son, Lisandro, and invested some money on his behalf. The businessman had long since died, but his grandson had recently discovered documents relating to the investment, and wished to locate Lisandro or his next of kin. As part of that process, he had hired a private detective, Mr Pájaro Rojo. The bequest was very simple. I was to choose a house and it would be bought for me.’

‘Mrs Cifuentes, concerning your son, Lisandro. Do you remember the circumstances of his death?’

She lost her smile. ‘Of course. He was murdered in an alleyway not far from our home.’

‘Who was suspected?’

‘Mr Whatever-your-name-is, let me tell you something. My grandmother was in her forties when she died. She once gave me a piece of advice after I found her outside our house with a fat lip and her favourite knife at a whetstone. She told me that quick revenge is for the weak, while the strong remember until the time is right. And guess what, Mr Whatever-your-name-is?’

‘What?’

‘She was wrong.’

‘Señora, the suspect?’

‘He vanished.’

‘And what of Mr Pájaro Rojo?’

Mrs Cifuentes smiled. ‘Oh, he vanished too.’

‘Mrs Cifuentes?’

‘Yes,’ she said, and her gaze settled on the watercolour of her long-dead son. ‘Like a… like he was never here.’ She turned to the kitchen. ‘Ah, and now the water has boiled. We must wait. For good maté, it must be hot, but not too hot.’

‘Mrs Cifuentes.’

‘A moment, please.’

Danny was picking at the skin around his thumb. Karel summarised the conversation in English. Mrs Cifuentes returned with an almost spherical cup. A silver straw protruded from the small hole in the top.

‘Here,’ she said to Danny, patting his knee. ‘This will help you forget all about her.’

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Tupungato, The High Andes

The air did not satisfy Hrafn’s breath. It was emptier than the wet winds of Snæfellsjökull, the Icelandic glacier whose slopes Hrafn and his brother Ragnar had bested as teenagers. Hrafn waved down to Ragnar, who did not wave back. Their guide, Guillermo, touched his hat and smiled.

Hrafn removed his sunglasses and considered Mount Tupungato.

They were two days out from Laguna del Diamante. The Lagoon of Diamonds had been Hrafn’s first experience of air at 10,000 feet. He regarded himself as a fit fifty-year-old. He ran and swam before breakfast. But the rarified airs had slowed his movement, and Guillermo had mooted a return to Mendoza. One look was all it took: one look between Hrafn and his younger brother. The old competition returned. They grinned.

‘Onwards,’ Hrafn said.

‘And upwards,’ said Ragnar.

That first night, they had made camp in the boulders near the lagoon. The constellations were inverted. Guillermo explained that tupungato meant ‘place to observe the stars’ in the tongue of Huarpe Indians. He made hot chocolate andinista style and gave them oatmeal bars. He told them about his travels on the mountain. In return, Hrafn offered the story of an aeroplane called Star Dust. Guillermo knew it well, he said, but stopped when he saw the despair and sadness on Ragnar’s face. All eyes turned to the hot chocolate and the conservation ended with quiet bids good night.

Ragnar and Hrafn slept side by side as though decades of absence from Iceland had been spliced out and they were boys again, bored on their aunt’s farm near Akureyri, looking for trolls.

‘Why didn’t you tell him about your bogeyman, Hrafn?’

‘I’m not sure he was there.’

‘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.

Lisandro: his heart fluttering against the knife.

Cory’s knife.

Zoom out, Jennifer had said. Zoom out.

He gaped at Saskia, raging, but saw an answering stillness in her posture. And there was a true compassion in her expression. Yes, thought Cory, how different are we two? Each a bastard of the immiscible: machine and human.

‘So this,’ he said, striking the rail. ‘This–’

‘It’s the ichor. Think of the way my own device created the reality of the thornwood to protect me. The ichor repairs you after each—each–’

‘Say it. Suicide.’

‘Yes. Then it expunges the memory of the event.’

His next words came in a wail: ‘Why didn’t it expunge the desire to repeat it?’

‘On every occasion, Cory, your body vanished before an autopsy could be performed. Look at the Louisville report from 1994.’

He frowned. She had not answered his question. There was something else. Something else to know. Did he have space inside? Wasn’t he already overloaded with what it meant to be himself? Desperately, he riffled through the papers. Their edges flapped like dragonfly wings, like his thin, aged hair. He read the four pages in four blinks. ‘A pistol shot through the roof of the mouth. Body discovered by a jogger. He… I took a few hours to die.’ He swallowed. ‘Why is this one significant?’

‘They performed a CT scan. Look at the volumetrics.’

As he did, a new horror rose within him. This sensation had a physical corollary: vomit. He coughed it over the rail and rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘No. That’s impossible. That I refuse.’

‘The examining physician thought that the loss of brain matter was commensurate with a twelve-gauge shotgun. But they were certain that a small-calibre pistol accounted for the head wound at the time of your examination.’

Cory turned to an earlier report. Santiago, 1947: an unidentified male is found in a hotel room, killed by a self-inflicted shotgun blast through the roof of the mouth.

‘Dear Christ. Since 1947,’ he said, his voice weak with awe. He put a hand to his head. Even now, he found it difficult to accept that the skull cavity was, for the most part, filled with fluid. His conscious mind was a simulation running elsewhere. In his blood? In pieces, in his fucking blood? ‘It’s not fair,’ he continued. ‘The ichor should have rebuilt me. Me.’

Those fields around Atlanta. Those high times. That hope.

‘It did, in a way. I’m sorry.’

‘We were going–’ his breath shuddered—‘to call it Camelot.’

‘I really am.’

‘Saskia, I had a wife. Catherine.’

No, I didn’t.

My humanity exited my head in 1947 with the shotgun pellets. The man I was is no more than a gag reflex.

‘I’m a ghost after all. Dead these sixty years.’

‘Not dead. It’s not the right word.’

‘What do I do, Saskia? How do I checkmate the ichor? How do I step outside myself?’

‘Nobody does.’

‘I can,’ he said, and stepped towards her. ‘What are you waiting for?’

In a motion that matched his, Saskia stepped back.

Boo! he howled, his voice a wind across the steppe of her mind.

She pulled the trigger and the gun’s conducting filaments deployed. Their barbs pierced his neck and he coughed, tried to wrench them away, but the barbs were deep. The electrical charge burned him like venom. Flexing muscles ripped their sinews. His chin snapped to his chest and his arms swooped.

Red words only he could see blazed across the night:

I-Core had to shut down unexpectedly.

This, he screamed inside the copy of his mind, groping for the bounds of his consciousness with the ichor subtracted, this is what’s left of me, you fucks.

With that ember, he bullied himself over the rail. He saw Saskia’s face—blank as the moon—and fell, neck snared in the dead filaments, through the twelve long seconds down, finally alone, and calm. There was no smart matter to cup his body and unfurl great, pale wings in the facsimile of a carrion-eating bird, calling Ee-caw, ee-caw. He was alone. He remembered the grace of his wife in a waltz. He smashed his back on the observation sphere and pinwheeled away from the spire. The coming impact, he guessed, would knock his ghost from his bones and send his essence through the ground. He roared to keep his eyes wide and savoured even the last metres. Then darkness. Into the earth. Into Catherine. Into Camelot.

~

Saskia tracked his body until it shrank into Alexanderplatz. There would be a man called Eckhard driving onto the square, a local criminal, who would collect the remains in return for cash and no questions. She closed her eyes to dark crescents, rheumy and discoloured. Like Cory, she had passed the threshold of death more than once and collected macabre souvenirs, but she still called it unknown. Mission completed: and in the unconsidered calm after that storm, she felt the absence of direction and the insistence of despair.

She looked down again. Her unfocused eyes mirrored the glowing circuits of the cityscape. She remembered reaching around Jem’s waist to release the magazine from the gun that might have killed her—flicking the bullets into the sink thumb-stroke by thumb-stroke.

The taser seemed to appear and disappear in the winking navigation lamps. She put the barrel to her chest.

So. If she jumped, no true suicide could follow. Luck upon luck would conspire against her death because an event in 2023 must have an older Saskia as its cause. But the taser was still in her hand. Its charge would blow out the last dust of her mind, leaving her body to a woman whom Saskia knew only in reflections. Saskia’s memories would be erased and, with them, her being. The mountains of her life would flatten. Her love for Jem would zero out.

She squeezed the trigger.

‘You are not going to do this,’ said Jem, breathless in Saskia’s ear. The hands of the English woman passed around Saskia and gripped the gun. Saskia released the trigger and let her head rest against Jem’s cheek. The taser dropped over the gantry. It flashed like a tumbling coin, dinged the observation tower, and was gone. Saskia watched Jem’s hands slip away. She turned.

‘I told you not to come, Jem.’

The gantry was empty.

Jem was not here, or anywhere in Berlin. She was in England, of course, and had been since the day after the dinner.

Ego?

Nothing. It could not hear her this close to the pinnacle. There was too much interference.

Saskia stared at the gantry. Her hair blew across her face. She pushed it away and slipped her stump into her back pocket. Then she stepped through the tower door, alone with her visions.

Chapter Forty

Some days later

When Saskia and the clerk reached the basement, he passed her paperwork to a colleague. ‘Please remember, Frau Müller,’ he continued, ‘that the box requires two keys to unlock it. I have the master key and you have the box key. Yours has no duplicate.’ He pushed through a set of doors. ‘If you lose it, you will be charged for the services of a locksmith to replace the lock. Your rental agreement covers an initial ten-year period. Should you fail to pay rent after this period, the contents of the box will be given to the government. There can be no exceptions.’

The clerk waited for a uniformed guard to open the door of the outer vault. The clerk was clearly nervous. Perhaps something about Saskia disturbed him.

‘Frau Müller,’ he said, adopting a more friendly tone, ‘would you like me to get you a glass of water? You seem rather…’

She shook her head.

The clerk stared at her for a moment longer.

‘Finally, then, please remember that you are not permitted to store illegal or dangerous material in the box.’

He left her in a room with a low ceiling and a single table. On the table was a safe deposit box. Saskia lay her rucksack alongside it and withdrew a polypropylene biohazard container. She put this in the box. Then she took a cinerary urn and placed it next to the container. On the urn was a letter: ‘For J’.

She eased the daffodil from her buttonhole and laid it on top.

~

This city, late in the day, felt foreign for the first time. Above her, the clouds were feathers around the setting sun. The buildings made labyrinths. Airborne data were threads that she might have gathered on another idle evening, but not this one. The wind’s edge dried her lips. Snow fell, as ever. Her steps were certain. A hatted green man appeared. Saskia crossed the road. Headlights greyed the tails of her jacket. On a fleeting thought, she looked at a driver, ready to run, but he was nobody.

She arrived at Tempelhoff airport half an hour later.

Saskia did not wish to remove her lensless glasses or touch the stiff peak of her cap, though she was sweating, steaming, tickled by her itch for Jem. The arrivals board told her that Jem’s flight had been delayed. With a targeted thought, Saskia interrogated a server in Luton and waited for the answers to stack, byte by stolen byte, in a lattice before her mind’s eye. There had been a technical problem on board the flight. Take-off and landing slots had been reordered and the crew changed. She turned from the information and used the constant pain of her hunger to refocus on her physical self, to exorcise the empty virtual.

For a few hours, she dreamed across plastic seats.

~

A man called Beckmann crouches in a cemetery while rain scores the ground. He pats together a female shape from the mud. He does not gift his sculpture with a left hand. When the lying form is complete, he bestrides its shoulders and Saskia thinks, No, don’t piss on her. Instead, he slides a revolver from his jacket and points it dead centre of the muddy head. Saskia knows that the revolver has one bullet. He fires. Saskia gasps.

~

‘There you are,’ said Jem. She looked exasperated. Her hair was blue once more. Saskia noted this and approved. ‘What happened? I thought you would be looking out for me.’

Saskia made to rise but her muscles, which were tighter and tighter these days, delivered a shocking pain up and down her body. She winced as though kicked.

‘Saskia?’

‘It hurts,’ she whispered, crying.

‘Lean on me. What the hell is happening to you? Your breath is awful. When did you eat?’

~

Later, in the lakeside house on Scharmützelsee, Saskia looked at Jem and felt too old for the company of her youth. They looked at one another in the molten light of oil lamps; the electricity in the house was off and Saskia wasn’t sure how to fix it. The meal was difficult. Salmon and bread were the only foods in the house. Saskia did not eat. Throughout the silence, she understood that the unspoken words concerned the loss of her beauty, the quiet staircase down which her mood had stepped, the putrefaction she could not clean from her pores, and her refusal to eat. Her eyes, too, were overcast.

At length, Jem said, ‘So Danny told me that they caught Wolfgang in the act.’

‘Wolfgang?’ said Saskia. The jump in context had confused her. ‘Yes, I heard. They found him organising an attack on an online casino. Petty blackmail, I suppose. Karel arrested him personally. It will help him get his career back on track.’

‘What about Cory?’

‘Cory? We met.’

‘Then?’

‘I showed him the reports.’ She took Jem’s hand and placed it, with a look of apology, between her legs. ‘Will you kiss me here? While there’s still time?’

‘What you need,’ said Jem, frowning, ‘is a doctor.’

Saskia put Jem’s hand back on the table. Her reply was bitter. ‘The medicines of 2003 are not good enough, nor the physicians.’

‘What do you mean?’ replied Jem. She tried to smile. ‘You’re indestructible, right? Like Captain Scarlet? Spectrum is Green, und so weiter.’

Saskia coughed. After a moment, during which she realised the odour of wet earth was just the blood in her nose, drying, she looked at Jem.

‘Do you know what would happen if I found myself onboard another plane, about to crash? I’d find a parachute and jump.’ Saskia took the bracelet from her pocket and placed it on the table. She repeated, ‘I’d find a parachute and jump.’

Jem stopped chewing. She looked at the bracelet as though it might explode.

‘Be careful with that.’

‘I thought you said I was indestructible.’

Jem threw down her fork. ‘Didn’t that woman, Jennifer, say that the mass measurements need to be precise? Otherwise it will go wrong? For all we know, the wormhole—or whatever it was—that brought down DFU323 might still be wobbling around somewhere around the centre of the Earth, hoovering shit up.’

‘There was a documentary on the television a week ago,’ Saskia said. ‘It included footage of a city in China—can’t remember the name—from the 1950s. The Maoist government had decided that birds were eating too much corn, so they devised a plan to kill all of them. For one twenty-four hour period, every person in the city was told to go outside and beat drums, blow whistles, and scream. The birds were startled into the air and too scared to land again. Eventually, they died of exhaustion and fell in great drifts. The documentary showed laughing people sweeping the birds into piles.’

Jem shook her head. ‘What’s that got to do with the wormhole? With us?’

‘Help me.’

‘Is this why you wanted me to come? So I could hang around in the waiting room this time?’

~

The drawing room had been given an amber cast by the storm lanterns in each corner. Saskia walked around the sheeted furniture to the far wall and pulled the cover from a pier glass. Jem joined her. The rational part of Saskia’s mind knew that this was not the apartment in which she had stood, in much the same posture, talking to Jem about her shortened hair those weeks before. This mirror ran from floor to ceiling and a set of bathroom scales lay at its foot. The sheets made simple shapes of a sofa, a card table, and an upright piano. Saskia looked at Jem and the younger woman’s expression told her that this was the end and both of them knew it.

‘Undress me,’ Saskia said.

Jem put her lamp on the table and began to unbutton Saskia’s shirt. She eased it over Saskia’s shoulders and laid it next to the lamp. Then she began to remove the rest of her clothes. T-shirt, bra, jeans, knickers. With each item, Jem’s fingers trembled.

‘No,’ said Saskia, as Jem touched the bracelet on her elbow. ‘Leave that.’

There were tears in Jem’s eyes and she looked betrayed. Saskia turned to face the mirror and considered herself through those younger eyes. The starvation had subtracted the curves of her body to leave something adolescent. Her breasts had been hollowed out. The sides of her rib cage were visible. Meat had vanished from her shoulders and thighs too. Her biceps were flat and tight. The twin bones of her forearms were highlighted by a running dent between them.

‘Why haven’t you been eating?’

‘I have,’ said Saskia. ‘Salmon, occasionally. With water and coffee.’

‘Stop what you’re doing,’ Jem said quietly. ‘Don’t go. I need to tell you something. It’s about Wolfgang.’

‘Shhh. Help me.’

Jem took Saskia by the elbow and kept her balance as Saskia stepped onto the scales.

‘Come with me, honey,’ Jennifer had said. ‘I can take you back. The band is calibrated to 48.98 kilograms. How much do you weigh, exactly?’

She looked down. 49.17 kilograms.

‘Take this,’ Saskia said, removing the jade ring from her finger.

Jem took it.

48.99 kilograms.

Jem’s expression questioned her. Saskia touched the bracelet in the sequence she recalled, perfectly, from her encounter with Jennifer. Something happened to the surface of the mirror. It was the merest movement, as though the mirror itself had shuddered. Then a low sound filled the room. A ship leaving port. Saskia moved to face the mirror. Her image became grainy.

‘Goodbye,’ said Jem. The word was slurred, childlike.

Saskia was already turning to a dream of the future that held a forest, a golden enfilade, a splendid soldier performing tricks on a horse, and a little muddy village far from anywhere. One thread wove through it all: that of the witch, Baba Yaga, who moved through eastern minds. Baga Yaga: the witch who travelled in a mortar with a pestle rudder that scored the forest floor. A silver birch to sweep her track, dismiss the fallen sparrows, erase all but a sense that something had been and gone.

‘Goodbye, Jem.’

She stepped through.

~

Afterwards, Jem backed away from the mirror. She was crying aloud now. Her breaths were moans and she stuttered as she inhaled. She looked at herself in the mirror and found the woman there pathetic. She walked up to the mirror and kicked it hard. She was still wearing her boots and the pointed toe flexed into the glass with a resistance she found satisfying. She kicked it again and again.

Jem walked to the veranda. The wind was northerly and unkind. She stopped at the rail and folded her arms and lowered her head. Here she cried again looking down at the muddy snow on the edge of the lake and then up at the lights of Bad Saarow.

At midnight, she found Saskia’s wardrobe and put on two of her jumpers. Both smelled of that particular perfume from the south of France. She went into the kitchen and put some coffee on. At least the gas still worked. As Jem sipped the coffee, she decided to walk to Bad Saarow. She swallowed the last of it and walked along the hallway to the front door and looked for her coat.

It was not there.

She held her breath. Her grief was suspended beside a greater fear: Was there someone else in the house? Had Saskia come back? Slowly, she held up her lamp. The hallway was empty.

When she turned back to the hat stand, she saw that her coat had been folded neatly on the wooden floor. There was a parcel underneath it. On top was a note that read:

Jem, I listened at the church door and heard you speak to Wolfgang. I know why you chose to ask me for help that day in the café. I don’t care. I never did.

Your friend,

Saskia

P.S. Despite our—whatever you might call it—I like the look of the Italian football team, don’t you?

There were no more tears. Jem was physically out of them. She folded the paper and placed it in her pocket. The parcel comprised a piece of folded cardboard. It had been sent to a post-office box in Bad Saarow. Jem ripped it open. Inside was a book called Resources and Parsing. Jem smiled. She removed its bookmark and said, ‘Hello, shorty.’

‘Hello, Jem,’ said Ego.

~

From: twentyfourcaratbitch@hotmail.com

To: d.shaw@frobischer-ewing.co.uk

Subject: Your friend and mine

Danny,

She’s gone, babe. I got a call yesterday and she sounded bad, so I came right back to Berlin… despite everything. She wanted to go back. You know what I mean? Don’t ask me where she is now. I saw clouds, I think, and a lake. She wanted it to be the future—I hope it is.

I don’t blame you for anything. How could I?

By the way, get Mum to remortgage the house and put it all on Italy to win the World Cup—if you want to cop a metric assload of loot, that is.

I’m coming home too. Brace yourself.

End of.

Jemima

xxx

Exeter, Canterbury, UK; November 2005 to May 2011

---

Saskia Brandt returns in

THE AMBER ROOMS —Book Three

It is the night of September 5th, 1907, and the Moscow train is approaching St Petersburg. Traveling first class appears to be a young Russian princess and her fiancé. They are impostors. In the luggage carriage are the spoils of the Yerevan Square Expropriation, the greatest bank heist in history. The money is intended for Finland, and the hands of a man known to the Tsarist authorities as The Mountain Eagle—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

~

I’m an independent author and I work without an agent or publisher. If you would like to help others find Flashback, please consider leaving a review on the Kindle store.

Do you want to know when my next book will be published? Email me at ihocking@gmail.com and I’ll let you know. You will also find me on Twitter: ian_hocking.

The Story of Flashback

Acknowledgements for the First Edition

As you can see from the dates above, it’s taken me five years to write this book. Flashback would have been published in 2007 if my plans went to plan. Of course, they didn’t. The mice got at them.

I’d like to thank a few people whose help made the book possible. Steve Fitzsimmons generously helped me research the interior of the Avro Lancastrian. Ed Waters of Plane-Design.com answered my many queries about the Lancastrian’s cockpit layout and managed to dig up the RAF flight manual for the Lancaster Bomber. Other pilots and aeronautical experts—including my friend Daniel Graaskov—helped on further technical points. Thanks also to Roderick Murray-Smith, Professor of Computing Science and member of the Brain-Computer Interaction group at Glasgow University.

Ah, my fearless beta readers: Neil Ayres, @by_tor, @Chobr, Sharon Coen, Isabel Ewart, Ana Fernández, Debra Hamel, Alex Mears, Nadège, Dennis Nigbur, Paul Roberts, and Aliya Whiteley. I sweat like Tom Jones to think of the rubbish I gave you all to read. You have my solemn promise that I will not do this again. For at least a month.

Jay Rayner’s book Star Dust Falling was an invaluable guide to the circumstances surrounding the crash of BSAA flight CS-59.

I refer to several poems in this book, sometimes explicitly, but sometimes not. (I’m using the term ‘refer’ in the sense that Elgin intended when he ‘referred’ a collection of classical Greek marble sculptures to the British Museum.) These poems include Because I could not stop for Death, by Emily Dickinson, Ballad of the Ladies of Times Past, by Francois Villon, and Richard Cory, by Edwin Arlington Robinson.

Pia Guerra very kindly allowed me to include her illustration of Saskia Brandt at the beginning of the book.

My partner, Britta, has been supportive in the countless ways that only she can be.

The author, May 2011; Canterbury, UK

The Magic 50,000

An excerpt from my blog, 30th December, 2005. Read the original.

One of Stephen King’s classic novels, The Stand, took me about six months to read. It’s a tale about post-apocalyptic America, where the survivors of a devastating plague form two antagonistic groups for a final battle between good and evil. The book is staggeringly long. Really, really long. Length is, I would guess, one of those things first-time authors find most daunting about writing a novel. In his preface to second—uncut—edition, King replied to fans who asked him how he could write such long novels. ‘One word at a time, man,’ he wrote. ‘The Great Wall of China was built one brick at a time and you can see that fucker from the moon.’

Though I’m past the point where I’m daunted by the blank pages ahead of me, I admit to feeling relief when I pass a particular word count. The fact is that, if you’ve managed to write half a book, there’s a good chance that your choice of characterisation, situation and theme have worked out. I write without a synopsis, so I never really know whether the story is going to ‘work’. On the other hand, because I make it up as I go along, I’m closer in my perspective to that of a reader; like the reader, I’m experiencing the story for the first time, and it makes decisions about pacing, toning, and overall story arc more straightforward. I’m not forced to write duff set-up scenes. I write the scenes I think will be fun and, in the second draft, I cut the ones I don’t need.

This morning, I passed the 50,000 word mark on my new science fiction novel, a sequel to Déjà Vu. According to my excellent novel-management software Copywright, I began the manuscript on November 3rd, 2005. I’ve spent 290 hours writing it. All just numbers, of course. Is there something special about the figure 50,000?

For those of you more used to page counts than word counts, 50,000 words is, roughly, just over half the length of the average novel (as a rule of thumb, Terry Pratchett regularly comes in under 100,000 words, Stephen King regularly over). I can now regard the half-written novel as reasonably successful. Though I do not yet have an ending, I’m well into the second of three acts, and the narrative has its own energy—in other words, the characters are driving the story through their own motivations. This is something that a creative writing teacher will tell you explicitly: character-driven stories are generally more effective than plot driven stories. Where the finale of a story is considered by the reader to be the inexorable conclusion given the prerequisites of character and situation at the start of the novel, you know you’ve got a tight story. Whether or not it’s a good story…that’s another matter, and will depend on readers’ individual reactions to characters.

What else goes through a novelist’s mind at this stage? Somewhat surprisingly, I’m thinking a lot about the title. I write ‘surprisingly’ because, in one sense, the title is tiny proportion of the overall work that a writer has to plough through per book. But the title is also bound up with something crucial about the novel: its identity. It will become the name of the project, and if it’s a good name, it can even be inspiring. The genre of my current project is ‘thriller’ (sub-grenre: technothriller)—though I consider it to be science fiction (I’ll hold these thoughts about genre for another post).

Here are some of the titles I’ve come up with: The Magic Bullet, Keystone, Black Box, Game Over, Femme Fatale (God, that one’s awful), The Rosetta Division, Freefall, Firebrand, Thin Air, The War of the Ghosts, Meridian, Guardian Angel, Contact Lost, The [insert word here] Trace, Final Transmission, Afterimage, Flashback, Thin Air, Black Box, Wake Vortex, and Memoriam.

Of these, my current favourite is ‘Flashback’. Not only does it have a hint of time travel about it, it also foreshadows the narrative structure of the book, and it’s nicely dramatic. It’s also the name of a brilliant old Commodore Amiga game that I spent hours playing with my mate Edward. As a point of little interest, I named a character in Déjà Vu Jobanique, following our teenage mispronunciation of Jobanque, a character who was the boss of time agent Falcon in the excellent Falcon gamebook series (note to lawyers: I only took the name! Everything else I made up.)

A good title can help motivate you when times are hard (i.e. when a scene is just plain shit, or you’re ill (as I am now)) and give you an overall feeling of what the book may look like. Having a sense of its final form can help with decisions about chapter length, pace, and tone.

One final, crucial thing is the jacket blurb. The word ‘blurb’ is used to refer to different things: sometimes snippets of review that grace the cover of your book, sometimes the hooky summary on the back (or inner flap) that entices you to buy the book. In this instance, I’m referring to the summary on the back. Terry Pratchett, no less, has claimed that he writes a jacket blurb before he begins the manuscript. This might seem a little narcissistic, but it’s a another good way of entering the world of your book. One sad fact is that, unlike Mr Pratchett, if you can’t come up with a good blurb for your book, the chances of getting your complete manuscript to an agent or publisher will drop. They don’t read manuscripts routinely; they need to be hooked.

Well, I’ve had a stab at the jacket blurb for ‘Flashback’. It does not even begin to describe the story, and needs better ‘topping’ and ‘tailing’, but it’s a start. Just posting it on this blog has forced a little rewrite, and this can only be a good thing.

A fifty-year-old mystery is about to be solved.

September, 1947: Converted Lancaster bomber ‘Stardust’ reports a successful trans-Andean flight from Buenos Aires to Santiago, and signals its intention to land. Four minutes prior to touchdown, it sends the letter sequence ‘S-T-E-N-D-E-C’. Queried by puzzled ground controllers, the young ex-RAF operator aboard the Stardust rapidly keys ‘STENDEC, STENDEC’. Then silence. The Stardust vanishes along with all passengers and crew.

October, 2003: German Air flight A628 impacts vertically with the Bavarian National Forest. The only clue to its fate is the co-pilot’s final transmission, spoken against the roar of failing engines: ‘Stendec.’

Within hours, air safety investigators have been dispatched to the crash site. Investigator-in-charge Hrafn Óskarson has more questions than answers. Who erased the flight data recorders? What is the true identity of passenger Saskia Dorfer, whose documents have proved fake? Who torched her Berlin apartment? Why did Saskia’s English friend Nina Shaw refuse to board the flight?

The mystery of German Air flight A628 will be solved by a startling conspiracy that reaches twenty years into our future—and fifty years into our past, to the final moments of the Avro-Lancastrian ‘Stardust’.

So there we go. Now all I have to do is work out what the bloody mystery is. It had better be good.

PS: There really was a Avro-Lancastrian called ‘Stardust’ that crashed in the Andes in 1947. You can read all about it here.

Final Words

An excerpt from my blog, 16th May, 2007. Read the original.

It’s a slow old business, is writing. The stretches of time involved are so staggering that I wonder how I manage to keep the story on the rails. Well, it’s reaching that happy time when a book is finished. This is ‘finished’ in the comedy sense employed by all writers, of course, which is usually defined as ‘wait till you get the editor’s report, Sonny Jim’.

I speak of none other than Flashback. It’s been a year and a half since I had an idea about a character from my first book, Saskia, who had travelled back in time to the year 2003 (with a chip in her brain that provides her personality, and so on and so forth). Saskia knows that, in the year 2023, she will be around to save someone’s life. So her death would represent a time paradox. Result: She cannot be killed. She is as indestructible as Cap’m Scarlet—SIG. But, I thought, death isn’t the only way a person can be in jeopardy (as I thought this, I dry-washed my hands evilly and stroked a gerbil).

Then I had another idea. Let’s say you’re a time traveller. You’re stuck in the past. You know that the ‘present’ (‘when’ you come from) will eventually pass in its exact form, otherwise ‘you’ won’t be ‘you’. You’d be someone else. It’s akin to shuffling your genes; that would make you your brother or you sister. Anywho, if you spend long enough in the past, you might come to think that all these people are zombies acting out a scripted existence with no free will. But, of course, you have free will because you’re from the present, aren’t you? But if the state of the universe at a given point is fixed, you must be fixed as well. Meet paradox number two.

I think most people would be driven slightly bonkers by this. Not Saskia, though. She’s made of sterner stuff. But the second time traveller—whom would be the ‘villain’ of this piece—has been shanghaied in the past for sixty years, and he is loop da loop.

Mixed up with my favourite quote from William James (‘I will act as though what I do makes a difference’), and the mystery of a certain aeroplane crash, I decided to write a book.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been getting some feedback from readers (on the first couple of chapters at least). Feedback is a tricky process. Some people are better at giving it than others; some can identify what needs to be done to correct the manuscript, whereas others have no idea; but all feedback is useful. It allows you to get inside the head of a reader somewhat.

The shortcomings of Flashback are two-fold right now. First, my prose style in the first couple of chapters—where I’m obviously trying very hard—has become so hardboiled that, unless the reader is working out the implications of every scrap of dialogue, they can’t know what’s going on and feel stupid. I put this down to ‘high standards’ (the quote marks are to signal to the irony, since the product doesn’t seem to achieve this) and reading Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Harris. After The Road, I don’t think I’ll be able to write the same way again. But poetic prose doesn’t have to be obscure; you don’t need to write cryptically to write well. After all, McCarthy has been writing for years. I need to weed out the self-conscious metaphors, and put in about forty years more writing practice. One of my reviewers wrote, ‘If you publish this, you’ll be the first person since Virgil to write a thriller in poetic verse!’ I thought that was wonderful.

The second shortcoming follows closely on the heels of the first: obscurity. Because I’m a fan of McCarthy and Raymond Chandler and others for whom the style is equal to, and occasionally outguns, the plot, I’m quite used to narratives where the reader is not party to the motivations or specific driving factors of the character until later in the story. Now, this is obviously a dangerous game to play, and you’ve got to get the balance right. Readers won’t follow characters they don’t identify with in some sense. So… the lack of information has got to be an interesting lack. When you read about a mystery like the loss of the Star Dust, the absence of an accepted explanation isn’t actually irritating; it’s a positive force that makes you want to know more, and makes you interested in the story itself. You feel like you are about to discover something. This kind of anticipation can make twists (i.e. re-configurations of a story’s identity) quite powerful, and I used it a great deal in Déjà Vu. It’s something I need to get right in Flashback, and the solution will be to go slightly easier on the reader. I want to avoid the fatal pitfall of, with apologies to his fans, Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore.

So these are just some random thoughts about the editing process. Back to work.

Snakes and Ladders

An excerpt from my blog, 26th January, 2006. Read the original.

Well, I must confess to a couple of shitty days, work-wise.

First up, I noticed that some joker—no, I won’t provide the effing link—has placed Déjà Vu in his top five worst books of 2005. At that point, I wasn’t having a bad day. It was just middlin’. Next, I get one of those standard ‘Sorry, try again,’ emails from MacMillan New Writing; I’d sent them my comedy novel ‘Proper Job’, which an agent recently wrote was ‘fresh, lean, original and inventive’ (though, to be fair, that same agent did go on to say that humour is virtually impossible to sell, and I should give up immediately). By then, I would describe my mood as ‘mildly piqued’. Gumblings: Hah! What do they know? I’ll show ’em. Etc.

Then, to round off the day, I get a call from the agent who is currently considering Déjà Vu. You might remember from a previous post that Scott Pack, chief buyer for Waterstone’s, saw this blog and asked for a copy of my book. He read it and enjoyed it. Amongst other things, he said, ‘the thriller element would hold its own with most of the books we sell in quantity…the characterisation was very strong…the ending left me impressed as I put the book down’. Scott then contacted some literary agents, one of whom contacted me. We chatted on the phone and I sent him a copy of Déjà Vu.

So away. The agent called me back yesterday with the ‘thanks but no thanks’ speech. Very polite, and refreshingly honest. He got half way through the book and decided that he would not be able to champion it at meetings.

Arf. Mood meter drops somewhat.

I’m appropriately jaundiced about this industry. I mean, it’s getting on for eleven years since I sold my first short story as a teenager, and in that time I’ve written four-and-a-half novels. I’ve read a number of good books and a number of crap ones. I’m aware that publishing is a lottery, and I’m aware that a writer is, essentially, a foolish person who works—often for years—in the face of long odds. The writer doesn’t expect the reward of fame, or fortune. Like a carpenter or any other manual worker, he only wants people to buy his stuff so he can afford food while he’s making the next thing.

Me: ‘Can I interest you in this lovely mahogany number? I made it myself. Took me five years, and the sideboard-critics love it.’

Customer: ‘No, thanks. We just bought a sideboard from Ikea.’

Me: ‘Why? They’re flat-packed. They’re mass-produced and lack heart. Look, I’ve carved little mice into the legs. They’re practically scampering. Here, micey -’

Customer: ‘But our sideboard has a vaguely sexual Swedish name. It’s called Smegsmog. And everyone’s talking about it. The Stockwells at number five just bought one, for Christ’s sake.’

Me: ‘But what about the sideboards of tomorrow? What if they only came from Ikea?’

Customer: ‘Good-bye. You might shift more units if you served meatballs.’

Anyway, reasons to be cheerful: (1) If Déjà Vu attracted one agent, it might attract another; (2) Wonderful girlfriend, who seems to believe in me despite these constant messages replies of ‘not good enough’ from publishers and agents; (3) Good health; (4) Blog on which I can moan.

Arf.

Long Distance Running

An excerpt from my blog, 25th February, 2006. Read the original.

Well, as promised, the Saturday post will be less of a navel-gazing enterprise than usual. Below I include the usual word gauge for progress on current novel Flashback, and it appears that I’ve only written four thousand words in the past week. This is a poor show quantity wise (fortunately, I don’t have a deadline). I can trace the problem to a complete lack of research.

OK; not a complete lack. I spent most of last summer reading about aviation, and now my knowledge of aircraft safety and the principles of lift are second to none (I’m using ‘none’ in the special sense that means ‘Practically everybody’). Regrettably, not much of a novel comprises technical asides on power-to-mass ratios. Everything is seen through the lens of character. This means lengthy diversions into, for example, the size of an Avro Lancastrian cockpit; how much a passenger might see and hear if he stood at the rear of the flight deck. Halfway through a sentence I realize I’m talking bollocks and, grabbing my surfboard, run into the cool water of the Information Superhighway and come across a site like this—solid gold! This guy will certainly get a big thank-you in the acknowledgments when Flashback sees the light of day. It inhibits the word count somewhat but results in some excellent material that will place the reader precisely inside my imagination.

Flashback Completed

An excerpt from my blog, 25th February, 2006. Read the original.

Well, today I wrote the final words of my current book, a technothriller called Flashback. (The final words? ‘Like a ghost.’) The first draft comes in at 125,410 words, which is shade over the word count I aimed for when I started the manuscript in November. It’s only the first draft, but there’s not just the satisfaction of having written the book—there is also the knowledge that the story works. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that the story worked as well as it could; for that, it will take some months of editing. But the story did grip me as I wrote it (there were no moments of writer’s block, whatever that is) and if it doesn’t work on the page in its present form, that probably means some superficial rearrangement is necessary. I say ‘superficial’ rather lightly, of course. Superficial changes like ‘make this scene less intense’, ‘improve this character’s motivation’ and so on will seem progressively unsuperficial as the editing process bites.

I’ve noticed some posts over on John Barlow’s blog and Grumpy’s about the amount of time some novelists spend writing a book. In some senses, the question is a little like ‘How long does it take to build a house?’ Depends on the amount of land, your materials, and what you want to end up with. But since I’ve just finished the first draft, it might be apposite to consider how the writing process went.

Flashback began as a loose collection of ideas at the beginning of last year (around May, when I was coming to the end of Proper Job). I knew I wanted to write more about a character called Saskia Brandt, from my first novel, Déjà Vu. Spoiler alert: Saskia has traveled backwards in time to the year 2002. She has already seen herself as a middle-aged woman in the year 2023 (still following?), so she knows that, at least until the year 2023, she cannot be killed. I wondered how this would make Saskia feel. Fearless, because she can’t die? Trapped, because she understands that all her actions have been predetermined? Anyway, I had an image of Saskia climbing aboard a aircraft to ensure—for a some reason—that it would not crash. In its final form in the book, the idea is a little different, but the spirit of the idea remains. I had other flashes of ideas: Saskia is German, and I wanted to incorporate the connection that Germans feel with the forest; I wanted to have an English character lost in Germany too, perhaps to serve as a proxy of the disconnection that Saskia must feel, since she is stranded in our time.

Following a ‘research’ trip to the Bavarian National Forest in July of 2005, I read up on aircrash investigation, re-read the Grimm fairytales, and stared out of windows a great deal. Towards the end of my research, I came across an interesting aircrash in the Andes (the crash of the Star Dust). This wasn’t the first time I’d heard about that crash, having seen the excellent Horizon documentary a few years ago, but it fit perfectly into the revenge backstory. I knew, immediately, the fate of the Star Dust was—in my fictional world—connected to the crash of Saskia’s plane in 2002. That was the point I knew I had a book’s worth of story.

There were a couple of surprises along the way. The finished book didn’t turn out anything like the rough synopsis I had when I started (summarisable in a sentence). Another surprise came in the form of the nature of the book; I thought it would be a sequel to Déjà Vu, but the book is basically standalone. It actually took a little longer to write than I thought, too. I started writing on Friday 21st October 2005. Aim: Write 1000 words per day, seven days a week. My work rate was 820 a day, so I missed the target. But some days were research intensive, and I was careful to avoid those ‘brain warming up’ paragraphs that would eventually need to be removed during editing, and I treated the prose like I was writing a short story: tight, to the point, and entertaining.

So, the process of writing Flashback has been a positive one. Some of the days were long, some were dark, but there were no times when the story got hard to write; the characters were always engaging and it was never difficult to ‘fall through the hole in the paper’, to use a Stephen King phrase. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I will adjourn for a beer.

Flashback

An excerpt from my blog, 22nd May, 2011. Read the original.

It’s been five years coming, but my novel Flashback, sequel to Déjà Vu, is now available in the Kindle store. The price is £2.13 in the UK and something approximating that in the US. To be honest, this is a little more expensive than I intended. I was—and still am—aiming for something closer to £1.80 or £1.70 and it is probably muppetry on my part that the price has come out higher. If I can figure it out, the price will probably drop a few pence over the coming week.

There are many people to thank. Beta readers, those who helped me with research into air crash investigation and aeronautics, my editor Clare Christian and cover designer Emma Barnes of Snowbooks all get major, major props.

How do I feel? I feel fine.

About the Author

Photograph by Mimika Cooney

During his fifteen-year writing career, Ian Hocking’s fiction has been published extensively, both online and in print. He graduated with a degree in experimental psychology from the University of Exeter and now lectures in psycholinguistics, philosophy and research methods at Canterbury Christ Church University and the Open University.

‘A new voice in Brit SF that we should all be taking an interest in.’

Joe Gordon, Forbidden Planet International

Also by Ian Hocking

In the Saskia Brandt Series

Déjà Vu: A Technothriller (Book 1)

Comedy

Proper Job: A Romantic Comedy

Literary Short Fiction

A Moment in Berlin and Other Stories

Copyright

Copyright © 2011 by Ian Hocking

http://ianhocking.com

http://twitter.com/ian_hocking

Unless otherwise stated, this story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.

Ian Hocking has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

Edited by Clare Christian.

Cover designed by Emma Barnes of Snowbooks.

Published by Writer as a Stranger

Version 2822367

Content

Ian Hocking
FLASHBACK

Author’s Note

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

---

The Story of Flashback

Acknowledgements for the First Edition

The Magic 50,000

Final Words

Snakes and Ladders

Long Distance Running

Flashback Completed

Flashback

About the Author

Also by Ian Hocking

Copyright