A cold night to be lost in a strange city.
I wanted to sleep, and so did my body.
My mouth tasted of bile, arm throbbed, ribs ached. At some point I must have hit me harder than I realised.
I turned my face towards what I guessed to be the centre of the city, navigating by the towers, and began the long walk towards morning.
Chapter 56
The coming of dawn did not so much lighten the sky as shift it from blue to grey, scored by the hissing of falling rain.
I wanted out of this skin.
Another day, another internet café.
I love the internet.
Online banking! Facebook!
I struggle now to recall my existence before these two miracles of technology, to remember precisely how–dear God but I shudder to think of it–how hard I had to labour to gather information on my body’s friends, acquaintances, past and wealth. The weeks spent shadowing a target, the long nights cataloguing people met, stories told, the eavesdropping and the subterfuges I had to engage in to crack the secrets of my skins–yet now, oh most precious now, most wonderful of wonders, Facebook! The entire life, the personality, every friend and family member catalogued and listed in perfect traceable glory, just one password away, assuming the skin even bothers to log out. Facebook! How did I ever live a life of reckless possession without you?
And glory above glories, online banking.
Miraculous, wonderful, a delight, for all I need to do is remember a name, a password, a code, and in any body, in any skin, I can sit down in front of a computer and move monies around from one place to another, send myself credit here or there without ever having to wear the same skin twice. Gone are the days when I would bury a rich man’s money beneath a secluded tree, to return to it in a poor man’s body when time came to move on; now the tree is the world, and the earth is automated.
Technology, I thank you.
The city woke, and I longed to sleep.
Beneath my stolen clothes my skin throbbed from a dozen untreated slices. I wanted to scratch, but when my fingers brushed beneath my arm I felt the lumpen protrusions of embedded glass and flinched away, repulsed by my own flesh.
I bought an hour on a computer in an all-night internet café, among the international callers trying to catch their mothers in Taiwan, the insomniac shoppers and the quiet downloaders of internet porn.
An hour on a computer netted me three hundred euros transferred to the nearest ATM.
Another euro bought a hot dog from a man with a steaming cart who gave me extra onion with a cry of, “You’re up early, ma’am. Rough night?”
“Good God,” I replied. “Is it morning?”
Two hundred and fifty euros netted me a small laptop to call my own.
I sat in the dullest corner of the darkest café I could find, fighting the urge, the need to jump bodies, forcing myself to stay still and in discomfort, and slipped in the only object that had made a switch unviable–my little stomach-stained USB stick.
What may be said of the organisation that dubs itself Aquarius?
If it was half as good at protecting its data as it was its people, I don’t think I’d stand a chance.
Emails, folders, pictures, accounts, personnel files–more documents than the eye could read in a day, in a week, ransacked by Spunkmaster13’s malicious toy.
Most of it banal.
Even secret bunkers of murderous men need to order toilet paper in bulk. Even murderers run out of rubber bands.
I tried searching for Nathan Coyle and located an email with a little red flag by it.
The message said: Compromised.
That was all.
I searched for Kepler.
It was the same file that Coyle had taken with him to Istanbul, with only one addendum. Now the first image in the document was not Josephine, but Coyle.
I tried other names.
Hecuba.
Nearly thirty pictures and names, stretching back over four and a half years. They ended in one last face, a woman in a headscarf, head turned to one side, a bullet hole in her skull and another in her throat, lying where she’d fallen on the steps of Senefelderplatz. Hecuba had jumped into her while running, and worn the body eleven seconds before the pursuit team took her down.
More names, more faces.
Kuanyin, who died wearing the body of a man who’d sacrificed his life so that the beaten rag of Eugene’s ravaged flesh might endure a little longer.
Names led to more names: code names I didn’t recognise, some I did. Marionette, poisoned in St Petersburg. Huang Li, shot in Tokyo. Charlemagne, who, realising he was pursued, fled into the body of a seven-year-old boy, proclaiming, you’ll never do it. You’ll never kill me, not a child. In a way he was right, for Aquarius took the child and strapped him down, experimented for weeks on their living subject, cutting out pieces of brain one cluster at a time in search of some miracle mechanism that might yet save the body from the ghost. He was already comatose when his heart stopped, but which mind slumbered, Aquarius did not know, and an unknown boy was buried in a field outside Seville.
Aquarius were not afraid of experimenting on ghosts.
Or their hosts.
Perhaps Hecuba had been right when he refused my macaroons all those years ago.
Janus.
The file was thick but patchy. It began in 1993, speculating on Janus’ prior activities, largely incorrectly. It missed 2001–4 but caught up again with Janus as she moved into a long-term body in Barcelona. The skin had terminal lymphoma, and I was surprised at how long Janus stuck around in the dying flesh.
The newest picture showed a middle-aged Japanese woman in a Parisian café, her hat pulled low, her scarf high against the wind. The newspaper on the table before her was three weeks ago.
Galileo.
Fascination overwhelmed caution; I opened the file.
Pictures, snippets.
A face from 2002, another from 1984. A note suggesting Galileo boarded such a plane at such a time, but switched to another passenger during the flight. A face half-turned towards the photographer, a shadow on a window, a receipt from a meal, a copy of a bank statement as the account was drained. Edinburgh, 1983. Someone had tipped off the men who would become Aquarius and they’d nearly got him. Nearly was not good enough.
A picture of Coyle in hospital, tubes and bandages. Corpses laid on the dockside, at their back, the stern of a ship, Santa Rosa in black and a policeman trying hard not to vomit.
These were the fragments, the rare glimpses of Galileo’s life that had been compiled, and as I flicked through them with increasing astonishment, the certainty grew upon me that almost every single piece of it, barring a few noble exceptions, was wrong.
Only one more task remained.
I searched for Josephine Cebula.
Chapter 57
Three euros bought me a ride to Zehlendorf.
School children slushed through the growing rain, kicking dark water in growing puddles. Pedestrians ran for cover as vans swished by, ducking the spray.
Back to a quiet house in a quiet street where no harm could possibly befall any man.
Back to Coyle.
The house was silent as I let myself in, lights off, rooms empty.
Nathan Coyle lay where I’d left him, handcuffed to a stone-cold radiator, his head on one side, asleep.
I walked towards him slowly, tiny laptop tucked under one arm. The floor creaked beneath my feet, and his body jerked, eyes flying open, hand tugging against the handcuff. The gag was still–miraculously–in place, and as he blinked himself to full awareness, his eyes fell on me and widened first in surprise then rage.