The man looked at me, looked at Eugene, fallen to the floor.
His eyes roamed over my suit, stained with Eugene’s blood, but he saw no tear.
“It’s in him!” I shrieked, overestimating how high my voice could climb. “Help him!”
If he looked close, too close, he’d see the tiny gap between suit and helmet where I’d wormed my fingers in to touch Alice’s skin. Or perhaps he wouldn’t. Perhaps there was too much blood to see.
Then he got to his feet, ran to the door, stuck his head outside and roared, “Help us! Somebody help us!”
This “us” included me.
Chapter 52
East Berlin.
There are many ways to tell when you’ve crossed that now unsung line from West to East Berlin. Trees shorter, roads straighter, new buildings that much newer. All these things are the external indicators; for internal, I find nothing gives the game away quite so much as discovering yourself in a windowless concrete industrial workshop on whose walls are written the immortal words: CONFIDENT IN OUR STRENGTH.
Capitalism’s self-confidence is infinite, but never quite so vividly pronounced as that of its socialist rivals.
Running feet, running people, raised voices. Duck and cover.
A medical team, fully dressed in hazmat suits, kneeling over Eugene. The inside of my colleague’s helmet was steaming up. I cowered against the wall, dreading the moment someone asked me my half of a call sign or something as simple as my true name.
I needed to get out of this suit. I needed skin.
Vomiting wouldn’t hurt either.
I bent over double, hands around my belly, and gave the preliminary shudders of a woman about to puke. The sight of nausea is often enough to induce nausea in those who see it. People cleared out of my path as I staggered, head down, into the corridor.
They believed that I was Eugene.
Let them believe it. If I was lucky, Eugene wouldn’t wake any time soon. If I was unlucky, some bright spark would watch CCTV footage of the last thirty seconds and spot the moment when my fingers brushed against Alice’s neck, and that would be that. Either way, time was a factor.
I headed away from the cage, away from the commotion, into the bowels of the building.
It had perhaps once been a factory; heavy metal doors led off to concrete caverns where the empty pipes of extractor fans hung down like jungle vines. Most was still empty space, but some computers had been wheeled in, server racks and cooling fans in a maze of unadorned copper and silicon. Around these worked the men and women of this institution, whatever it may be, some in suits, some in ties, some in loafers. None carried guns, though one door guarded a collection of padlocked cases whose contents, I guessed, were rather more explosive than a set of disco lights. I avoided people, kept my head down, hands to my belly, a woman running for the toilet. I was having a bad day, speak to me at your peril. I’d counted seventeen strangers by the time I found the unlabelled grey door to the women’s toilet, eighteen by the time the woman in the solitary stained cubicle emerged, saw me, smiled and said, “You all right, hun?”
I scampered into the cubicle.
Never speak when you can get away with saying nothing at all.
There was something important I’d left with Alice Mair.
I got down on my hands and knees in front of the orange-flecked toilet bowel and stuck two fingers down my throat.
Anyone who says that inducing vomiting can be therapeutic lies.
It took four attempts before my body got through hot spasms and down to the more important business of throwing up. When done, I sat, sweating and wretched, my arm draped over the edge of the seat, and tried to get my breathing under control. When I could muster the will to look, there, floating among the sticky orange stomach contents from my day, including the near-digested burger I’d had on Kaufurstendam, was Spunkmaster13’s second USB stick.
Ghosts are lazy.
Not stupid.
I took off my helmet, my gloves.
Under my suit I was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of black leggings. As an outfit it wasn’t ideal, but neither was it soaked in Eugene’s blood.
I moved through the building. I smiled at strangers and nodded at those who nodded at me and kept my eyes low when I could, and when a man with a pencil tucked behind his ear stopped me with a hand on my arm to ask what was happening with Kepler, they’d heard something bad, I nearly jumped out of instinct, and said, it’s OK. It’ll all be OK. And walked on.
It took a while to find an unattended computer. I stepped into the bare grey office and wished the door had a lock. The facility felt temporary–dull flat desks in dull flat rooms, not a picture, nor a Post-it note out of place, none of the detritus of an ordinary working environment. The computers were new enough to feel clean in what they did, but old enough for the processor to whine like a puppy begging for RAM. I didn’t bother to guess a login, but shoved Johannes’ USB stick–minus the worst of the puke–into the nearest portal, waited just long enough to see lines of incomprehensible code begin to flow and started rifling the desk. The best thing to do with Spunkmaster’s technology was let it get on by itself.
The desk was, like everything else in this place, unadorned. Not a snotty tissue or half-eaten sandwich to state that this was anything other than a low-budget film set. I wondered if the walls, when kicked, wouldn’t reveal themselves to be cardboard, gleaming cameras and laughing watchers behind them
remembering the day they tried to burn me alive
Eugene kicking me because he wanted to, and where is Coyle?
Who cares where Coyle is.
The computer unlocked.
It did so without even a satisfying flashing icon or a note from Johannes stating his brilliance. A thing which had been locked now was not. Email loaded, revealing that the owner of this computer was one P. L. Trent, and of all the jobs in all the secret hidden organisations of the world, he’d managed to pick finance manager.
Even hidden organisations of specialist assassins, I supposed, needed accountants.
I copied the most recent twelve months of email straight on to Johannes’ USB stick and started downloading hard-drive files. As they transferred, my eye wandered briefly over the in-box of P. L. Trent and I found myself irritated at how many words were dedicated to arguments over travel receipts and photocopier ink. Only one name cropped up with enough regularity for me to note it–Aquarius. Aquarius contracts stipulate X amount of medical insurance; Aquarius no longer pays for meals bought while on assignment whose value exceeds five euros. Aquarius likes to kill ghosts.
Accounts are boring; accounts are important.
I pulled my USB stick from the machine and stood up to the wailing of a general alarm.
Someone, somewhere, had pressed a button or pulled a cord, or whatever it was people in this business did when they realised they were in trouble. Perhaps someone had bothered to look at the CCTV. Perhaps Eugene had opened his eyes, and he’d known what to answer to “Leontes”. And when the doctor asked him, who was the last person you saw, he’d said Alice.
Time to go.
Chapter 53
It is said that ghosts do not care for the bodies they wear. We gorge. We feast, we dine, we slouch. We spend money that is not our own, lie with man and woman, woman and man, and when we are done, and the bones are broken and the skin is torn, we move on, leaving nothing but flesh behind.
In the best of circumstances I believe myself to be better than this.