Flashback (The Saskia Brandt Series Book Two) (10 page)

She looked at Danny. If she tried to leave the tower with him, he would be incriminated. She didn’t know what to do. She said, ‘He’s wearing a wire.’

‘A wire?’ Danny raised his eyebrows and turned to look, down, on Wolfgang.

The hustler gunned his charm. He laughed. ‘Clever girl. I told him it wouldn’t work. You’re as smooth as your friend Saskia, aren’t you?’

‘Who?’

‘Tease,’ he shot back. His apparent good humour only emphasised his malice. ‘The police talked to you outside my apartment yesterday. They know about Saskia, the meeting at the church, and the officer she assaulted. They know that she tried to frame me. There’s
nothing
they don’t know. She bought your ticket to Milan, for Christ’s sake.’

Danny put two fingers on Wolfgang’s collarbone. ‘Step back from my sister.’

‘What do you want me to say?’ asked Jem.

Wolfgang looked beyond them. ‘
Scheisse
,’ he hissed. He frowned into the turning crowd. Jem followed his eye until she saw the smartly-dressed police officer who had stood in the rain outside Wolfgang’s apartment. He had one arm around a telescope, and it flopped skyward as he forged towards them, craning around the children and prams, skirting the hooked teenage couples, apologising to the adults.

Jem’s phone vibrated. It was a text message from Ego.

We’ve been found. I’m under attack. Leave immediately.

Before Jem could sort her thoughts – found by whom? The police? How could Ego be under attack when he was in her purse? – the officer gripped her upper arm. She yelped and the phone tumbled to the floor. ‘You,’ he said, ‘are under–’

Danny had put his hip into the punch. It landed between the policeman’s jaw and his ear. He fell against Jem. In the bubble of interest that spread from the punch to the crowd, she remembered Saskia turning in the night wind, reaching for her.

‘Take my hand.’

The policeman struggled upright. He did not release his grip on her and, for a moment, the two stood like dancers on the brink of a tango. His glasses were designer, she noted. He was furious.

‘You’re not called Nancy Drew.’

‘And?’

‘Both of you are under arrest.’

‘Good luck with that,’ said Danny. ‘You tried to attack my sister.’

‘I am an officer of the police.’

‘How the fuck should we know?’

The man twisted his neck. The cartilage clicked. He withdrew a wallet and flapped it open. ‘Karel Duczyński, Inspector,
Bundeskriminalamt –
the Federal Criminal Police Office.’

‘Your mother must be very proud. I’m Danny. This is Jem.’

Jem’s phone rang again. She looked at the inspector, who nodded.

‘Hello?’ she said.

‘Hello, Jem.’ It was Cory. ‘Good location for a meeting. Plenty of radio interference, and people.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I see you’ve met the inspector.’

Jem cupped the handset and said to Duczyński, ‘He can see us. The man you should really arrest.’

‘Who?’ He looked at her with suspicion, but there was clearly something truthful in her expression – fear, perhaps – and she was relieved when he opened the holster of his sidearm.

She turned back to the phone and said, ‘What now?’

‘I don’t know where you found an Ego-class computer, but I want you to put it on the observation deck and leave. It will have the information I want. Forget about me and Saskia. Do you understand?’

‘Perfectly.’

As she cut the call, the three men looked at her with expectant expressions, but she ignored them, looking vainly for Cory in the crowd.

‘Well?’ asked Danny.

Jem’s phone buzzed again. She looked down at it. Another text message from Ego.

I’ve thought of something.

Abruptly, a siren split the air and sprinklers opened, dropping icy water on all. Some people hunched and swore. Others shouted urgent questions about fire exits at the barman, who shouted back and waved his arms towards the stairwells. Two waiters hurried down from the restaurant and directed people into lines. Meanwhile, the water continued to fall from the sprinklers with such energy that it seemed to reflect from the floor.

Jem shaded her eyes and tried to take a breath without swallowing water. Her focus remained on the faces in the crowd. Which one was Cory? Was he even here? Intuitively, she was certain that he had been on the observation deck when he made the phone call.

‘We should go,’ shouted the inspector.

‘Agreed,’ Danny called back.

Someone took Jem by the arm, but she was not sure who. All her attention was on the left archway. Cory was standing there, easy on his cane, wearing a light-grey suit and expression whose subtleties, at this distance, Jem could not make out.

‘What are you waiting for, Jem?’ said Danny. ‘Move.’

‘It’s him.’

‘What?’ said the inspector, leaning toward her.

Jem said her next words quietly: ‘I think he’s going to kill us.’ There was no panic in her tone; she had moved beyond it. Perhaps it was this sobriety that truly spoke to the inspector. He raised his gun – left hand cupping the butt, right hand gripping the handle – and his words

‘Polizei!’

barked out

‘Keine Bewegung!’

while the slow, bulky shape of Danny moved towards her – swooping like the hawk coming to her arm. And equal slowness characterised Cory’s face as he frowned.

Screaming.

Screaming from those people in the path of the inspector’s gun. Bodies twisted aside. Fathers cuffed their sons away and reached out for pushchairs. Children looked on with open mouths. Arms were flung protectively over heads. Crouching.

Cory was raising his white cane. Slowly. Slowly.

‘Get her out of here!’ shouted the inspector.

Danny collided with her and–

(But it was not a cane. It was a gun. A gun the colour of old marble.)

–Danny and Jem tumbled down, down.

Something puffed from the nozzle of Cory’s gun and at the same time the air above her head split with a sharp, hot flash. The inspector had fired.

~

Her nightmarishly slowed perception ended as Jem struck the floor and Danny rolled across her. Suddenly, she was winded, alive, and deafened. Jem saw the queues break apart as people surged into the stairwells. Some were crushed. Still the water came down and Jem brushed her slick hair aside to see what had happened to Cory. Before she could stand, she was lifted bodily towards the open lift.

‘Danny, let go of me!’

Lifts were not meant to work during a fire – this she knew – but when Danny punched the panel, the doors closed on her and she dropped, alone, filling the silence with calls for her brother.

A few metres from the ground, her phone rang.

‘Ego? Ego?’

‘Turn right when you leave the lift, Jem, and don’t look back. Hurry now.’

~

Inspector Duczyński could not move anything other than his eyes, which slid around uselessly, failing to focus in the falling water. His shoulder burned with the most terrific pain he could remember.
Did I get him? I think I got him.
He pressed down on thoughts of failure and bad luck. He redrew his next decision draft upon draft. Reach for his radio. No, turn his head. No, stanch the bleeding.

I think I got him.

God, my shoulder.

Maybe I killed him.

He spat out the water that had collected in his mouth.

Move, Duczyński. Now.

Someone seized his chest.

‘Come on.’

It was Jem’s brother, Danny.

‘Danny?’

‘Move.’

The ceiling passed through his vision as though he were flying. Fountains of water chilled him. ‘
Ist er tot?
’

‘Shut up. I think you got him, if that’s what you mean.’

‘
Habe... habe ich unseren Mann erschossen?
’

The floor slid beneath his back, tugging on his belt.

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. For fuck’s sake hold on. We’re almost at the lift.’

A second man began to shout – an official? – but was cut off by Danny.

‘Get out of my way. I’m serious. He’s injured and we’re using the lift. No question.’

Duczyński thought about the thousands who could see the TV tower from their apartment, café, or aeroplane. He considered their indifference. The rain battered his knuckles and warped his vision through his glasses.

‘
Notarzt zum Fernsehturm!
’ he shouted, sure that his police radio was at his mouth, and this was his last chance. ‘
Zwei Männer wurden angeschossen!
’

‘Easy, tiger. You’ll get a medal. Think how proud your mother will be.’

Blackness, marked by red numbers counting down.

~

To the Ghost, the four words were written in fire across the darkness:

Emergency neurotransmitter augmentation successful.

He was immobilised. No breath passed his lips. The message disappeared. Then:

I-Core has been forced to restart in safe mode. Full restart in one minute.

No
, thought the Ghost.
Restart basic
...

He died.

Then sensation grew again from his fingertips: the factor had slid home to his hand, adding enough resources to raise him above the threshold of consciousness.

Restart now and establish basic life support,
he thought
.

Words only he could see scored his vision.

Welcome to Intelligent Core (I-Core™) BIOS v7.01

Water assaulted his face. There would be time to think over the failures that had led to the hot metal in his lung. Where in hell had that police officer come from? His overclocked nerves had passed notice of the bullet before it had met his flesh, but not soon enough for him to twist aside. A lucky shot. Or a good shot.

Warning: Brachiocephalic artery has lost integrity.

Warning: Systolic pressure critical.

Warning: Sinus rhythm and QRS complexes abnormal.

Warning: Lactic acidosis detected.

I-Core has begun the repair of Cory, R. 6457-1112-1111 and will remain in autonomous mode until the repair is complete. Nanochondrical base functions will not be affected. Stand by, please.

Cory’s fight to stay conscious brought back memories of swimming at his grandfather’s fishery, not far from Atlanta. He had visited the lake with his wife Catherine not two months after their wedding. At noon, they had dived down, holding hands, competing to reach the lake bed. It surprised neither of them that Cory, the soldier, had reached it first. He put a full palm to the gravel then he kicked himself upwards, twisting to see the naked silhouette of Catherine already halfway to the surface, having abandoned the attempt. Cory remembered rising towards her. The chilly strata were topped by warmer draughts; all the while a sleepy panic marked the time before he could take a life-saving breath.

Chapter Thirteen

August, 1947, Buenos Aires

As Cory crossed the city, he thought about the message he had found in the mausoleum. It had confirmed a rendezvous. His twenty-day wait was over. He could avoid the traffic-choked streets by taking
el subte
, the underground, but he wanted time to think, and the narrow, crowded pavements answered wonderfully in this regard. They forced him to drift, to slow. In truth, the underground held a certain anxiety for him. It was crowded and airless. The last time he had used the service, there had been a blind man moving through the cramped
tranvía subterráneo
selling shirt stiffeners. The passengers had jostled him, complaining in that Buenos Airean manner about their rights and the many things they had to talk about without interruption from this man. So Cory walked the streets and sometimes thought about the man, and his own father, just as he now thought about the message in the mausoleum. The streets were wet with the recent rain and smelled of tar and petrol.

He asked himself why Jennifer would take the risk of a rendezvous. There were surer methods of communication. She could send him a coded telegram or letter. The energy and risk of injecting a human through more than one hundred years of time were considerable.

However, he looked forward to the meeting. He had a growing sense that the people he met, even little Lisandro, were dancing to a tune that only he could hear. Cory, the
vagabundeo
,
was
wandering through a monument to the past perfect: past completed. These people had already lived and died. He convinced himself that these thoughts were intellectual musings in the style of a
reductio ad absurdum
. He would not voice them to Jennifer when he met her at the prearranged time. The notion sounded too much like Jackson, Cory’s predecessor, who had cracked under the strain of time travel. For Jackson, the zombies were too much. Not Cory. He would cope.

Cory reached the art deco apartment block ten minutes early. Following a reconnoitre, he waited outside a hotel. Some builders were observing the midday ritual of a street-side barbecue. Cory declined the offered meat and moved along to an intersection. Being an intersection, it was thronging with people. Two men argued about Peron and five-year plans; their discussion was punctuated by the sudden intuition and non sequitur of enthusiastic but inexpert debaters. Behind them, three ladies managing fans declared them stupid. A young woman in light, black petticoats offered Cory a flower from her stall, but he shook his head, smiling. Then he looked at his watch. It was time.

He approached the gated hallway of the apartments. Two elderly
porteros porteños
were sweeping the floor beyond the gate. They looked up at Cory but did not let him in. He pressed the buzzer for the second of the apartments. A minute passed. The taller of the
porteños
, who was looking at Cory, stopped sweeping and wiped his mouth with the edge of his neck cloth. When the gate unlocked itself, Cory stepped back. It was the first electric entry system he had seen in Buenos Aires. He passed through, whistling, and raised his hat to the sweepers. They frowned and moved into the shadows on either side of the hallway. Cory’s expensive shoes and cane reflected in the polished wooden floor.