‘You may.’ From his inside pocket, he withdrew a punched card. ‘You know what this is?’
Ilse wiped her hands on a tea-towel, although they were clean.
‘It’s a Hollerith card.’
‘An impressive answer, but quite incorrect, dear beautiful Ilse. You are very beautiful, did you know that?’
She backed away, cloth held before her.
‘I’m a married woman, Herr t’Hooft.’
‘Plainly, but you haven’t identified this, not clearly.’ He held the card out to her, then gave a smile, and slipped it back inside his jacket. ‘It’s your death sentence.’
Ilse’s ears filled with a sound like rushing surf.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Erik Wolf is a Jew. His card marks him as such. Plainly.’
A sick greenish phosphorescence seemed to slide across her vision.
‘No . . .’
‘Surely you knew you were marrying a Jew.’
She shook her head.
‘For certain’ - again the flickering lick - ‘favours, it might be possible to alter incriminating information. Certain intimate favours.’
‘Incriminating? There’s nothing criminal about—’
‘Surely you follow the news. Wehrmacht tanks will be rolling along Amsterdam streets in a matter of months, and we’ve already had certain - well, private visitors - who have indicated how useful it will be to use machine searches for vermin.’
From the range, a whistle sounded, steam flowing through the kettle’s spout: a touch of domesticity amid the monstrous.
‘No.’ She let her hands drop, the tea-towel dangling to the floor. ‘Please . . . the kettle.’
‘By all means take it off the boil. But let’s not pretend it’s tea I’m interested in.’
Her hand was shaking as she reached for the kettle—
Dear God. Dear God.
—and swung it backhand, pivoting fast, smacking its weight into t’Hooft’s temple. There was a soft crunch, and scalding water splashed on her hand. She yelled, then put the kettle down.
‘Oh, no. Oh, no.’
Blood so dark it was almost purple was welling from the supine man’s head. The slick hair was splayed like wires, or the limbs of a daddy-long-legs.
‘Oh, no.’
Then she crouched down, reached inside the corpse’s jacket with her unburned hand, and extracted what she needed.
So much evil, contained in a rectangle of innocuous card.
THIRTY-FOUR
FULGOR, 2603 AD
A nightmare tipped Roger into wakefulness before dawn. Grey images of heading on a train into a city filled with danger were evaporating, scarlet banners marked with a hooked cross, and then the real world coming into focus. In seconds, he had forgotten why he woke, remembering that he had gone two days without sleep prior to last night; and his body needed more.
But he had screwed up - possibly - by taking Alisha to the Zajinet Research Institute. There was something very sharp about the Weissmann woman - that came back to him now - and he did not like the way she had looked at him.
Had he betrayed himself and his family?
‘If we ever get tripped up,’ Dad told him when he was young, ‘it will be through something trivial, something utterly harmless. So we treat each everyday action as non-routine. We focus on the moment, always. And lead better lives as a result.’
Later, when Roger was older, Dad had explained it differently: a streetwise fighter learns to put his or her attention out in the world, always aware of the current threat level - and in doing so, adopts a form of mindfulness that both mystic and psychological disciplines have aimed at for millennia.
‘It’s why Zen and killing are linked,’ he said, ‘when they ought to be opposites.’
In the context of holodramas like Roger’s favourite, Fighting Shadows, there was something exciting in such discussions. But in the reality of everyday life, the likelihood of prison sentences arising from careless words delivered when exhausted . . . it was just too stupid.
I’ve got to talk to Dad.
He had ways of establishing enciphered comms in emergency, using codes that not even Luculenti could break - or so Dad claimed. But although the signals might not be decipherable, they were detectable, and such high-encryption traffic was suspicious in itself.
Starting here on campus, he could possibly make the journey home undetected, using every trick he knew; but it would take many hours. Or he could simply call an aircab and fly home to see his parents: overt, perhaps a little unexpected, but surely nothing to raise suspicion in any watching peacekeepers.
So he washed with smartgel, and pulled on his clothing, refactoring it to jumpsuit shape, tuning it to dark blue. He could have done with breakfast, but he no longer thought he had time to waste. He used the fast route to exit his room - using the window as an extending quickglass slide that carried him to the house forecourt.
Walking clear, he summoned an aircab, and within a minute one was descending. Its interior was dark as the classic gull-wing door lifted. He slipped inside, the door came down, and as the aircab ascended he realized he had company.
The interior brightened to reveal a blond-haired man with bronze forehead studs smiling at him.
‘Who the hell are you?’
‘You don’t know me?’
‘No . . .’ Roger blinked, then reached out. ‘But I know what you are.’
His fingertips disappeared inside the man’s arm.
‘Well, part of it, at least.’
The holo changed.
‘You.’
‘Yes.’ Now the virtual man next to Roger was familiar: pale oriental features, subtle bronze wires like highlights in his hair. ‘You’re not under arrest.’
‘Superintendent Sunadomari.’
‘You remember. Good. Would you like to know why you’re not under arrest?’
There was no reason for an ordinary aircab to have ultra-res lasing capability, to project holos inside its cabin that were so realistic you needed senses other than sight to tell the difference.
‘Is this a peacekeeper vehicle?’
‘You’re fast, Roger Blackstone. That’s good.’
Mild acceleration pressed Roger back in his seat.
‘Where are we going?’
‘To your parents’ house. That’s where you want to go, isn’t it?’
‘I—’
He stopped. Sleep deprivation had fallen away, as the hormones of fear washed through his body: the ultimate stimulant.
‘You didn’t recognize this person.’ For a moment, the holo Sunadomari became the holo blond Luculentus; then it snapped back to Sunadomari’s actual appearance. ‘Did you, Mr Blackstone?’
‘No, Superintendent.’
‘That’s why you’re not under arrest, despite what you are.’
Roger tried to swallow, but it felt as if murderous thumbs had fastened on his throat.
‘Not only that,’ Sunadomari went on, ‘but you passed as ordinary human at Barleysugar Spiral, where we had new scanners in place. And I see you were well aware of that.’
All of this could be bluff, and a Luculentus peacekeeper would have enormous acuity and psych training; but the aircab was no civilian vehicle, and it could be filled with biotelemetry, scanning Roger’s entire neurophysiology, with realtime results and analyses in Sunadomari’s full awareness.
It was as close to mind-reading as you got in reality.
Dad, I’m sorry.
He got ready to transmit one last tu-ring signal, the bug-out burst that would tell his parents to flee now.
‘Don’t bother,’ said Sunadomari. ‘We’re shielded in here.’
Defeat.
Half a kilometre from the house, at altitude, a peacekeeper flyer took up position alongside the aircab; and the holo Sunadomari disappeared. Roger said nothing as both vehicles descended and touched down.
Dad was waiting in the open doorway.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Roger.