The anomaly, p.18
The Anomaly, page 18
Blake March suddenly starts to struggle, groan, and moan, muttering something through the tape, but Blake June doesn’t remove it.
“I’m not going to make any speeches,” he says flatly into March’s ear. “You don’t understand what’s going on, and neither do I. That doesn’t matter. I’m you and you’re me. That’s one too many, there can’t be two of us. You understand that.”
He picks up a pencil and notepad, and sits down at the computer, which is on.
“All the access codes for my bank accounts have been changed. By you, obviously, because I do it every three months. Do you know the system for remembering the codes…Nod for ‘yes.’ ”
Blake March obeys. His thoughts jostle frantically, and he even wonders whether he’s having an incredibly realistic dream.
“I’m going to log on to my accounts now in front of you and dictate numbers and letters to you, you will confirm them by nodding. The first mistake you make I’ll rip off one of your fingernails, the second, I’ll crush your index finger. I don’t know who you are, but you must have the same memories as me. Do you remember the Amiens contract a couple of years ago? Nod for ‘yes.’ ”
March nods. He remembers…a typical Albanian gig, but either the client didn’t have the connections, or they frightened him too much. It was so hideous he almost didn’t take it. Shattered kneecaps, broken elbows, fingers cut off, tongue cut out, penis removed, eardrums pierced, and the best saved till last, acid in his eyes. To secure the other half of the 70,000 euros, the man had to be kept alive.
“You’d do exactly the same in my shoes,” June says. “And you are in my shoes.”
March screws up his eyes, watching him. Blake June’s smile isn’t cruel; more embarrassed. He didn’t enjoy Amiens. Too much, it was too much.
“If there are no mistakes, and I can get into all the accounts, we can talk about the future, about what we can negotiate between us. Do you understand?”
March nods, and June remembers Al Capone’s words: you can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.
“Okay then, let’s get started. Bank number one, First Caribbean Investment Trust.”
March nods. He closes his eyes, concentrates and thinks about half a dozen flamingoes flying across Europe.
“First character. Letter? Okay. Lowercase? Uppercase. Before L? No. Before T? Okay. L M N O P Q R…R? Perfect.”
Blake writes down R.
“Second character. Letter? No. Number. Yes. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.”
A nod.
“Six. Yes?”
A nod. Blake writes a 6 after the R.
Fifteen minutes later, Blake June has accessed all his accounts and changed them all again, still using the same method. One sentence for each of the three accounts, easy to transliterate. For the First Caribbean Investment Trust it was “Remember 6 pink colored birds!” which doesn’t mean much, but is written “R6pcb!” and you just have to remember six flamingoes. Then for Latvijas International Bank: “They fly through black skies from Venice to Paris.” “TftbsfVtP.” Et cetera.
He’s also found out the username and passwords for his site on the dark web, and even the code for his cellphone, which had also been changed. He’s read through his old messages, and discovered that he—well, “Joe”—had dinner several times with someone called Timothée, about whom he currently knows nothing. But June isn’t curious enough to take the tape off March’s mouth. He’s not worried that his captive will cry for help because they both know the room is soundproofed—all four walls, the floor and ceiling. But he doesn’t want to let in the tiniest doubt on his part, he doesn’t want a moment’s hesitation.
When March sees June stand up, he needs no explanation. He would obviously do the same himself. He closes his eyes, he just wants it to be quick. June walks behind him, unhurried, and injects a dose of propofol into his neck; he passes out within seconds. No pointless suffering, Blake doesn’t hate himself that much. A minute later, an injection of curare stops March’s heart. Sleep and death are twin brothers. Homer was already saying that in his day.
Blake—there’s no longer any ambiguity there—cuts the webbing straps and holds the body before it slumps to the floor. His victim is already naked, and he’s carefully folded away his clothes—they’re his size, after all. He puts the body into the bathtub, with its legs in the air and its head down, turns on the shower, slices open the body’s neck and lets it bleed out. He dips the fingers in acid to destroy the prints. Then he carefully carves up the body with the bone saw, making sure not to leave any clearly identifiable human parts, such as a hand or foot. He’s a little lacking in experience. On the back of the corpse, on his back, he sees a mole that he’s never noticed before. It’s an irregular shape—one to watch. When he cuts up the penis, his penis, he can’t suppress a shudder of disgust. Three hours later he’s filled about a hundred hermetically sealed freezer bags. All that’s left is the head.
Shit. The Band-Aid.
Blake almost forgot the dumb pony-riding head injury. He peels off the adhesive square on March’s forehead; the wound is already healing. Using a scalpel, he makes a small cut in his own skin, just enough for the future scar to be plausible, he disinfects the Band-Aid and puts it on his own forehead. Then he puts March’s head in the acid bath he’s prepared in a bowl: the skin disintegrates, giving off a wreath of nitric vapor.
It’s seven in the evening. He’ll finish this tomorrow. He cleans the bathroom, removes the plastic sheeting, which is hardly spattered with any blood, and folds it carefully—an unnecessary precaution, because, after all, if this particular blood were ever found in his apartment, it’s his anyway. He piles up the freezer bags in the bathtub. There’s less of it than he would have expected. Eight small cases, four trips.
From a burner phone, he sends a message to a secret recipient: “Eight logs, Total Clignancourt.” Instant reply: “Okay. Wednesday, 3 pm.” Day minus two, hour minus two: Francis will be in his 4x4 to meet him at the Total gas station near Porte de Clignancourt tomorrow, Monday, at 1 pm.
Then Blake goes out and locks the door. He knows he’ll notice that Quentin and Mathilde have grown, a bit. There is a life after death, particularly other people’s.
MONDAY, JUNE 28, 2021, 9:55 PM
ÉLYSÉE PALACE, PARIS
EVERYTHING’S READY, Emmanuel. Five minutes.
We have news channels, Facebook Live, and a live YouTube link. With a one-minute broadcast delay in case of problems.”
“What about Washington? I can’t have him stealing the limelight from everyone.”
“He’ll be later than us, he’s still rehearsing his speech.”
“The guy rehearses his speeches? He always looks like he’s freewheeling to me. Putin? Xi Jinping?”
“I don’t know.”
“Mister President?” a man’s voice asks.
Macron turns to Grimal, the assistant director of counterespionage, a small, bald man who’s still looking anxiously at his cellphone.
“Was that Mélois? When will he be back from the States?”
“It wasn’t him, Mister President,” says Grimal. “The ministerial plane has just taken off from McGuire base. But I do have some information.”
“Make it quick, Grimal.”
“The Airbus maintenance team noticed something strange ten days ago. When they were servicing another China Airlines Airbus in Dubai, they found a section of the airfoils with the same serial number as the ones on a plane used for an internal Chinese route from Beijing to Shenzhen. But that’s completely impossible. At first the manufacturers suspected it was a pirated copy, but our satellites picked up an air traffic anomaly on the Beijing–Shenzhen line in April: an unidentified aircraft was redirected to Huiyang military base. According to the secret services, the Chinese have also been treated to a, how shall I put this, duplicated plane…and they pulled the whole thing to pieces and recycled the parts.”
“And the passengers? The crew?”
“That’s all we know.”
“Do the Americans know about this?”
“No indication that they know anything at all.”
The two men fall silent, as the director of communications comes over to them.
“Emmanuel?” she says, “Twenty seconds.”
The president sits down, and the makeup artist corrects a sheen on his forehead.
“Ten…”
The dir comm finishes the countdown in silence. The president looks into the camera, and the autocue starts to roll.
“Men and women of France, my dear compatriots, I’m making this announcement to you now, just as the American president is now doing in Washington, the German chancellor in Berlin, the Russian president in Moscow, and many other heads of state around the world.
“An exceptional event took place on Thursday. The rumors circulating in the press and on social media are partly accurate. These are the facts: last Thursday an airplane appeared in the sky just off the East Coast of the United States…”
The French president keeps talking for five minutes and then—very unusually—hands over to his scientific advisor. To avoid compounding the incomprehensible with the eccentric, the mathematician has pared back his mad-scientist look, swapping his unsettling purple ascot for a narrow beige silk scarf, although he couldn’t resign himself to unpinning a silver spider from the lapel of his jacket. He puts forward the hypotheses, an animated sequence is inserted for added clarification, and then he mentions the Élysée Palace website, where more detailed explanations can be found, and live chats have been organized.
In Blake’s house, as is most likely the case all over France, there is absolute silence. Although Flora does whisper a That’s nuts. That’s totally nuts.
Joe doesn’t say anything, but Flora wasn’t expecting him to comment. The president thanks his advisor and addresses the nation again.
“My dear fellow citizens, in August 1945, after the Hiroshima bombing, when the world tipped into the nuclear age and fear of annihilation, the writer Albert Camus wrote: ‘We’re being presented with a new source of anguish here, and it has every chance of being definitive. Humanity is perhaps being offered its last chance. And, yes, that could be a good pretext for a special edition. But it’s more likely to be a topic for some reflection and a great deal of silence.’ We must take inspiration from these fine words.
“And that is why, men and women of France, the days and weeks to come must be a time for thinking but also a time for finding peace. Scientists will want to interpret, they will want to understand, they will want to explain, and that is their role, but it is inside ourselves and ourselves alone that each of us will find answers.
“Thank you for listening. Vive la République, vive la France.”
“That’s nuts,” Flora says again. “Can you imagine, Joe, if there were two of you?”
A MAN WATCHES A WOMAN
MONDAY, JUNE 28, 2021
HANGAR B, McGUIRE AIR FORCE BASE
MR. VANNIER?” Jamy Pudlowski says a second time to the architect who’s standing by the one-way mirror of the control room. Lined up on the platform behind them are dozens of units, half cubes of steel and tinted glass with a single glazed door. A few meters below them is the hangar’s small multitude in all its noise and agitation.
“Do you understand the situation, Mr. Vannier?” “Insofar as that’s possible, yes.”
“Have you been shown the video with images from the cameras on both planes? The moment of divergence? And the short animated film made by the NSA putting forward the hypotheses? Have you been told that there’s another ‘you’ here in this hangar? Along with two hundred forty-two more ‘doubles,’ to be precise.”
André Vannier’s only reply is to put his hands on the guardrail and study the crowd. He thought he’d be able to spot ‘himself’ straightaway, but he’s searching in vain for his own figure. He’s even afraid that he’s seen himself without recognizing himself.
“Come with me,” says Jamy Pudlowski, and she takes him into one of the units, simply furnished with an oval table, four chairs, a camera, and a screen on the wall. The presence of windows and the ocher-and-claret colors of the walls remove a prisonlike feel from what is effectively a large cell. While Vannier sits down, Pudlowski scrolls calmly on her tablet.
“I see that your company, Vannier and Edelman, applied to be considered for the new FBI premises in Washington. Shame, the project was abandoned, lack of funding.”
“We did put together a proposal, yes. You know everything.”
“Sadly, no. For example, we didn’t know that you knew the French director of counterespionage. With a friend like that, you would never have secured that job…France is an ally, but you can’t be too careful.”
“What matters is taking part,” Vannier sighs. “Mélois and I attended the same grande école, I went into architecture, he diplomacy.”
Pudlowski moves her finger, and the screen shows a general view of the room.
“We’re filming illegally,” she says, and adds by way of an excuse, “but the circumstances are exceptional.”
Vannier looks at the camera positioned in the center of the room and realizes that she’s already recorded everything so far. Pudlowski nods, embarrassed.
“High-definition cameras and directional mics,” she says, more comfortable talking about the equipment. “The NSA have installed…quite a few. Passengers or members of the crew can get up and walk about, and the cameras are dedicated, they automatically follow them.”
She types something quickly, and the image of the other André, the “June” one, immediately appears. Another drumming of her fingers, and the screen divides in two: Lucie is in the second half.
Vannier is enthralled. Knowing something isn’t the same as living it.
“He” and Lucie are sitting idle at a table, talking. One last tap of Pudlowski’s finger and they can be heard, and their words appear, transcribed onto the screen. “Americano?” André June asks, making a face. “A merry car, no?” the subtitles say idiotically. The system has a way to go yet, André March reassures himself…
“I’ll leave you for a moment, Mr. Vannier,” says the woman from the U.S. Army’s Special Operations Command, getting up and leaving him alone facing the screen.
Captivated, flabbergasted, he studies this other André, his wrinkles, his gray eyes like milky sapphires, his sparse hair, and his withered cheeks with the beginnings of a white beard. André looks into the mirror to shave every morning, and the two of them have ended up taming each other. Here, though, the camera is incorruptible, there’s no indulgence in its high definition, no courtesy in its angle: this is an old man he’s seeing. A tired, worn, unattractive man. He scours “his” face for the immutable seal of youthfulness that he sometimes believes he incarnates, but can’t find it. Old age is in every detail, like a straitjacket of filth. He thinks he looks bloated too, fatter. He should go on a diet. So, aging definitely doesn’t simply mean you used to love the Stones and start preferring the Beatles.
There’s an angel sitting next to this man. The light pays homage to her. It’s still the Lucie of early March, a Lucie whose hair isn’t yet short, whose eyes are still tender, a Lucie who’s still his, whom he hasn’t yet driven away. When this other André takes Lucie’s hand, he feels no jealousy; fascination overrides everything. He watches the André he was then get up and head for the coffee machine, and—because he thinks him slow and stooped—he instinctively straightens his back and clenches his fists till they hurt.
As he stands in this connected cabin where he’s being watched by the NSA, not that he cares about that at all, André can think only of Lucie and this other him, and definitely not of any practical issues. Not for a moment does he consider Vannier & Edelman, which really can’t become Vannier, Vannier & Edelman; nor does he think about his daughter Jeanne, who now has two fathers, probably two too many, but it may well have its advantages; he doesn’t worry about the apartment in Paris that he will have to share, or the house in the Drôme…
No, he’s not yet thinking of any of that. He’s running aground on the disaster laid before him by the screen. He wishes he could take his eyes off them, but it’s a giddying whirl. Here in this small room, a great weight is crushing his chest, he’s short of air. They’re not a couple, far from it, rather an attentive and anxious old man quivering with love, and a distant young woman. This André is still caught up in the wonder of the early days, still reading Lucie’s reserve as caution, her tepid responses as signs of a certain wisdom. But André March now grasps that he never stopped worrying about frightening her away, about startling this adorable swallow that had consented to fly alongside such an old crow. Fuck it, love—the real kind—can’t be a ball of fear in your heart. He was never relaxed and, of course, this anxiety held within it their demise.
The André in the hangar returns, carrying two coffees; he smiles, and it’s the smile of an abject creature, but Lucie doesn’t look up from her book. The other André watching the screen is only too familiar with this detachment, this ability she has for being absent. Look at him, fuck it, forget your damn Romain Gary collection and turn your beautiful eyes on this rather ancient man instead, give him a bit of attention and tenderness. But no, nothing. Not everyone gets the chance to witness their own downfall from afar, to pity themselves without actually feeling self-pity.
A smirk of pain twists his lips. Deep down, he feels sorry for this earlier André. He knows what the poor man still has to live through, the humiliation and frustration. Age was always a contributory factor, but no one should ever love someone who feels so little love for them. Why was it so complicated?
As he sits watching the screen, André March breaks away from Lucie, as a dead leaf breaks away from a tree, or rather as a tree might abandon a dead leaf. Ten cruel minutes of detailed observation are worth months of painful loss. Up on the platform, André—who loathes himself for still loving Lucie—is already glad that he loves her less.
