Deja vu, p.2
Deja Vu, page 2
~
Awake, she witnessed each tick of the dawn. The city restarted. The empty streets gathered their people. Saskia watched them. In the bathroom, she studied her reflection. She brought cold water to her face and massaged her eyebrows and her eyes. She pressed until her vision clouded. Still pressing, she became an airborne observer of a vast necropolis. She withdrew her hands and her face re-wove in the mirror. A re-acquisition of signal. A restart.
She had solved the case.
It was 7:50 am. If the engineer was punctual, he would arrive in ten minutes.
‘Saskia,’ called the computer, ‘I have completed the image processing job.’
She returned to her desk. ‘Give me a hard copy.’
As the reconstruction of the murderer’s face appeared on her blotting paper, there was a knock at the door. Saskia folded the paper in half.
‘Computer, who is that?’
‘The Hauptkommissar. He has not requested an appointment.’
‘Is he alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Let him in.’
Beckmann, today, was as identical in dress and expression as yesterday, but a carnation had replaced the anonymous lemon-yellow flower in his buttonhole.
‘Kommissarin?’
‘Here.’
She unfolded the paper. It showed Saskia frowning in disgust over the woman she had murdered.
Chapter Three
‘Well, you have five minutes until the engineer arrives,’ said Beckmann. ‘Do you think this is a frame-up?’
Saskia took the paper and walked around the desk as she spoke.
‘No. The mechanics of the crime are consistent with the notion that the murderer is female. Mary was killed by a single stab wound below the ear. Though that requires skill, it does not require strength. I have recovered video of the murder itself, and this shows the perpetrator struggling to move the body. The murderer also wore a hat – long since destroyed. The effect of the hat was to conceal the face, and therefore the sex, of the wearer, from the cameras in my office.’
Saskia touched her forehead with her thumb. ‘Second, I remember receiving a burn yesterday morning. By afternoon, it was gone. On the assumption that I am not hallucinating at this very moment, then it must be true that I was never burned. My memory of receiving the burn cannot, therefore, be true. And that memory involved Simon, my English boyfriend. He threw a pot of pasta at me when I was recalled from London.’
‘Or did he?’
‘Precisely,’ she said, taking pride in her glacial tone. ‘This suggests a further hypothesis that at least some of my memories are false. The time at which the burn disappeared marks, I believe, the point where my false memories stop and my true memories begin. This point was my dizziness after discovering the body in the fridge. Some minutes before this, I killed Mary. Then false memories were implanted, or became activated. The key evidence is the computer’s analysis of the knife blade. If it is true - and it must be - then I have been hunting myself.’
Saskia had stopped next to the window. Across the desk, Beckmann smiled. ‘Questions remain.’
‘Such as,’ Saskia began, but she was stalled by the sudden understanding that these implanted memories might extend beyond the immediate past. She reached for a childhood, a school, her first love. She found nothing. Unstoppably, other realizations followed: she had remained in the office overnight because she had no home; she had called no friends because she had none. Even Simon (Saskia took his picture, searched his eyes) meant nothing. She was not in the picture because the two had never met. She ripped the photograph from its frame and found a yellowed advert for stationery on the reverse.
She took her revolver and aimed it at Beckmann.
‘What did you do to me?’ she whispered. This might have been the first time she looked at him. His aloofness was better termed coldness. His indifference was the abstraction of his cruelty.
‘Oh, Frau Kommissarin. You are so worried about being caught for your secretary’s murder. You think they’ll wipe your brain and send you out into the community. It’s too late. They already did.’
Saskia let the gun drop to the desk. ‘What? What?’
‘Several months ago, you were convicted of a thorough and meticulous murder. I must be vague on the details. You understand. As part of your rehabilitation, you were released into my programme. Do you know the expression,’ he briefly switched to English, ‘“Set a thief to catch a thief”? People like you, Kommissarin, have a talent to know their own kind. I want that.’
‘People like me?’ Even as Saskia felt the suck of madness, her intellect pushed on. ‘So this is an interview?’
‘Yes. You passed.’
‘Who was Mary?’
‘Another one of your kind. She won’t be missed, particularly by her victims’ families.’ Beckmann leaned over the desk. ‘Do you accept my offer?’
‘What are the alternatives?’
‘You’ll be destroyed and your ashes pinched across the Spree.’
‘So why don’t I just put a bullet in you and leave for Siberia?’
Beckmann looked at the gun. ‘What bullet?’
She checked. There were no shell rims visible in the cylinder. She flicked out the cylinder and found one round in the topmost chamber. She reset the gun and pointed it at Beckmann. ‘This bullet.’
‘May I make one point? During the First World War, senior Russian officers would test the cleanliness of a junior’s revolver in a peculiar manner. Cleanliness was vitally important because a poorly maintained gun was likely to jam. So a gun was loaded with one bullet, the cylinder was spun and the weapon fired at the junior. If the gun was well maintained, the cylinder would come to rest with the bullet at the base. The pin would strike nothing. However, if the gun was poorly maintained, the bullet could stop anywhere. Beneath the firing pin, for example.’
‘Russian roulette.’
‘Kommissarin, do you know the true significance of Russian roulette?’
She gasped. A breath-stopping pain ripped along her gun arm. She felt the joints flare and her muscles tremble with effort. Despite her will, the arm began to bend.
‘Don’t fight me,’ said Beckmann. ‘The purpose of Russian roulette is edification. The question: Is there a bullet or is there not? Some officers were hanged because they did not have the courage to ask.’
Saskia strained until her teeth creaked and her chest bulged with trapped air. Her eyes, which she could move, beseeched Beckmann, but he did nothing. She dashed the cylinder across her thigh. It spun. Then she raised the revolver to her temple.
Beckmann’s eyes drank her body from toes to crown. ‘Now,’ he continued, ‘do you commit? If so, you will become my property. You will investigate federal crime as a probationary officer within the FIB. You will not be permitted to leave the EU and you will not attempt to rediscover your past. You will tell no one your true circumstances. You will accept anything I care to put in your brain. If you break any of these rules, you will be executed. Do you understand? Answer me now, or you will pull the trigger.’
She felt her jaw unlock and understood that she had been given the power to speak. ‘Yes,’ she gasped.
Beckmann waited. He looked at her grubby T-shirt and cheap flip-flops, both souvenirs of a holiday she had never taken. ‘Good.’
The spell broke. Saskia collapsed into her chair. It spun with a clicking sound that recalled the revolver’s cylinder.
‘My assistant will arrive in two minutes. She will give you a suit, some money, and the keys to an apartment. I suggest you go there and calm down. Here is your badge.’ He put a leather wallet on the table. ‘You should deal with that awful smell and…’
Beckmann stopped. Saskia was pointing the revolver at him. She pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. On the sixth click, Beckman shook his head.
‘…you’ll find live ammunition in the armoury, second floor.’
She regarded him blankly.
‘Oh, Saskia?’
‘What.’
‘Here is your first assignment.’ A sheaf of documents landed on her desk. They looked ink-based. ‘The first thief I want you to catch is an Englishman called David Proctor.’
‘English?’
‘You’re on probation. If you don’t catch him, you die, and at length. Good morning.’
Chapter Four
Met Four Research Center, Nevada, USA: The day before
A sound woke Jennifer Proctor. She raised her head from the desk, allowed an eddy of vertigo to pass, and looked about. Richardo’s chair was empty. She was alone but for party streamers and mugs of flat champagne. By her watch, it was hardly dawn. Too early for a hangover. She stepped into her clogs and prepared to call out for Richardo, but there was a man standing in the doorway.
‘Who the Christ are you?’ she asked, closing her lab-coat.
‘My name is John Hartfield.’
The moment grew long.
Damn it, Proctor.
She licked her dry lips. ‘I’m Jennifer, sir. Jennifer Proctor, head of Project N25. Head of a subsection, rather.’
His face in darkness, he said, ‘N25? Gerald will have given the programme a more memorable name, surely.’
‘Déjà Vu.’
‘The psychological phenomenon. Well chosen.’
‘He says that what goes around comes around.’ She forced a smile. ‘Mr Hartfield, on behalf of the team, I’d like to express our gratitude for your financial support.’
Hartfield stepped into the room. His face was blank. He might have been watching Jennifer through a two-way mirror. ‘No, it is we who are grateful to you.’ He scratched a grey eyebrow. ‘I’d like to talk about the project. Perhaps we could do that in the context of a tour?’
A tour at 5:00 a.m.
‘Certainly.’
Outside, Jennifer shaded her eyes against the cavern lights. From their elevation, the bowl of the great centrifuge was visible among the power plants and workshops.
‘I wonder if you could explain the significance of the first experiment, which you described in your report.’
‘Here,’ she said, producing the savonette watch. ‘Take it.’
The chain of the timepiece poured into Hartfield’s hand. He read the words that Jennifer had written in magic marker. His thumb rubbed them.
‘It happened on Tuesday,’ she said. ‘One hour before we received presidential authority, the re-injection alarms sounded. These alarms are designed to respond to certain gravitational anomalies that correlate with the re-injection of matter. They’re automatic.’
‘But you hadn’t sent anything through time.’
‘Not at that point. The reception centrifuge began to spin up 11:52 a.m. At precisely noon, with the rotation arm at full speed, our cameras captured the materialisation of a plastic box. It struck the reception container at the perfect angle. Splashdown. Turn the watch. You see the time and date?’
‘Yes.’
‘I wrote that at 2:00 p.m., two hours after the watch materialised.’
‘What did you do after it appeared?’
‘I couldn’t believe it. I ran to the office, opened a drawer, and took it out. The same watch, that is.’ Jennifer laughed. The rush of success reddened her ears, but she knew the machine was an emphatic fuck off to all those who had questioned her youth, her worth. ‘There was…there was a moment when I held both watches. In my left hand, the original watch showed the correct time. In my right, the duplicate showed two hours’ hence. The same watch. We had done it. But we had only two hours to prep the machine.’
‘Were you tempted to not send it back?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Were you tempted to let 2:00 p.m. pass by without firing up the machine and sending the watch back to 12:00 p.m.?’
‘That would have been impossible, Mr Hartfield. The effect of the cause had already occurred. You can’t have an effect without a cause.’
‘What if you tried?’
Jennifer frowned. ‘I’m not making myself clear. The watch had already been sent; it just so happened that the sending had not yet occurred. Do you see what I mean? It’s no different from firing a gun at a target. You can, as the shooter, wish that travelling bullet should not reach the target after the gun has been fired, but the bullet doesn’t care what you think. It will always hit. Always.’
Hartfield listened to the watch. He closed his eyes. ‘It’s running fine.’
‘No, each tick is marginally slower than the last. The error was three nanoseconds per second on Tuesday. Now it’s three microseconds, an order of magnitude greater.’
‘Is that why you can’t send a living person?’
‘You’re asking Wilbur Wright if he can put a man on the moon.’ She took the watch and dealt the chain as a spiral into her palm. ‘The two things are entirely different.’
At the fence that bordered the industrial enclosure, Jennifer dug into a bin of hard hats and gave one to Hartfield.
‘Jennifer, shortly after the turn of the century, I was in Kentucky shopping for a thoroughbred. I fell unexpectedly from my mount and the diagnosis, made some days later, was that I suffered from a malignant brain tumour. In the years that followed, I underwent many treatments, from the medical to the medieval. Ultimately, I went public. I offered half of my empire to anyone who could cure me. As you would expect, I was approached by a number of con-artists and idiots. But one e-mail, from an Argentine medical student, intrigued me. He had an idea for a non-surgical procedure that I’m sure you’re familiar with.’
‘Orza’s nano-treatment,’ she replied, gesturing to the door in the fence. They passed through.
‘In its initial runs, non-cancerous cells were also attacked, particularly neurons associated with higher brain function. In that respect, it was as blunt an instrument as chemotherapy. But I took the treatment with only weeks to live and, as you see, twenty years later I’m not yet dead.’
They walked on. Jennifer gestured to the smaller centrifuge that had been built at the edge of the larger one and explained how the two formed a transmitter-receiver arrangement. Hartfield nodded, but his eyes were elsewhere, and he touched her elbow to interrupt her explanation.
‘Jennifer, I made Orza a famous man. One day, you too will be renowned. People will want your money and your time. Are you prepared?’
‘I’ll get used to it.’
‘How old was Einstein when he published his Special Theory of Relativity?’
‘Twenty-six.’
‘And Newton his advances in physics?’
‘Not forgetting mathematics and optics. Twenty-two.’
‘And you your time machine, Jennifer?’
She felt the tension that gathered in her muscles when people probed her background, tried to divine her wellspring. ‘Twenty-one.’
Hartfield stared. ‘You’ve beaten them both.’
Jennifer met his gaze. ‘But I had Einstein, and Einstein had Newton.’
‘And you had your father. We should not forget him. Did you know that he once worked for me?’
Jennifer could not conceal her surprise. ‘You ran the West Lothian Centre?’
‘I owned it, and others. These were investments I was happy to make. I owe my life to science.’
‘But you owed nothing to my father. I remember the problems he had when I was growing up. Doors closing, friends not returning his calls. Was that your doing? Because of the bombing?’
‘Your father returned to academia, eventually. He recovered his career.’
‘And my mother?’
Hartfield rested against a wall-like baffle. Behind it, an electrical plant hummed.
‘Jennifer, I do hope I haven’t offended you. I came here to offer congratulations. And, because your father and I were once friends, I need you to warn him. He is in danger.’
‘What kind of danger?’
‘I can’t be certain. Talk to him.’
‘You talk to him.’
‘He wouldn’t listen.’
Jennifer looked at this man: his blank, closed face; his unnatural body language; his clumsy threat. ‘What should I say?’
‘Tell him to stay in Oxford.’
‘Oxford.’
‘Every…’
‘Every what?’
‘Every effect has a cause,’ he said.
Jennifer folded her arms. ‘What goes around comes around.’
‘That too. Thank you, Jennifer. I’m glad we met. Congratulations once more. I will study your reports carefully. Goodbye.’
The frown did not leave her face until Hartfield had closed the cage on the elevator. The radial arm of the centrifuge began to move. With each revolution, Jennifer felt her headache throb. The last of her drunkenness had gone.
West Lothian, Scotland
Professor David Proctor forced himself to breathe with tidal ease, to wax air, to wane. He counted the blown specks on the taxi’s windscreen and gave his widow’s peak a quick brush. The hotel watched him. Twenty years ago, David had worked beneath its foundations in a research centre whose entrances were now capped and dead. He thought about the cut plumbing, the emptied kitchens, the barge-long conference tables splintered, the coffee pots emptied and the conversation silenced. He thought about it all.
He pocketed the brush.
Now or never, Proctor.
He opened the door and, without emerging, breathed the Scottish air. Nodding firs. A cloud-shot sky. For a moment, he was inside his memories of twenty years before.
‘Professor,’ whispered a voice in his ear, ‘you have a call.’
‘I’m supposed to be stealthed, Ego.’
‘It is your daughter.’
David looked at his flat shoe on the gravel. Now or never. He withdrew his leg and closed the door. He took Ego, a metallic computer the size of a credit card, from his wallet. ‘Go on, Ego.’
‘I am having difficulty. Might it be encrypted?’
