Flashback (The Saskia Brandt Series Book Two) (23 page)

Saskia moved her gaze from the bodies and looked for the artificial horizon on the instrument panel. At the moment, it was level. The windows were opaque with condensation. An intermittent siren bleated. The sound matched a flashing button near the pilot. It read ALT HORN CUTOUT. Saskia almost touched it, hesitated, then pressed. The siren stopped.

Beyond the dead pilots, the two yokes moved as one. Their countenance was ghostly.

Saskia was considering which pilot to remove when an itching, stinging sensation spread from her cut fingertip. She raised her hand. It was numb.

‘Fuck,’ she said.

Cory undid the lock. Now he’s undoing me.

But the defeat should not have surprised her. After all, Jennifer had warned that the aircraft would crash and, despite Saskia’s desperate hope, Jennifer could not have lied. Still, she heard herself repeat, emphatically, ‘
Fuck
.’

At the same time, the yokes drifted forward and to the left. Saskia lost her balance and fell sideways as the aircraft dived.

She felt a disturbance at her core. Rolling shutdowns passed through her mind. Death by degrees. The wetware device at the base of her brain winked out and

Whoop, whoop.

she went

‘Overspeed warning! Overspeed warning!’

offline into sleep without end.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Ute Scheslinger, last conscious many months before, awoke on the flight deck of an aeroplane. She was gripping her right hand; blood was bubbling from a cut on its index finger. Her eyes left the wound and widened on this sudden, bright cockpit. The fittings shook and the alarms sang. She was being pushed into the bulkhead by the force of acceleration. She looked at the blood running into horizontal lines across the pilots’ necks, dripping towards her. Disconnected memories returned: a girl without a passport, a cat called Ego, a new apartment in Berlin, pink sheets that foretold the future, and a rendezvous in a darkened church. She had no narrative that gave meaning to Saskia Brandt, a mind once burned onto the device that pierced the back of Ute’s brain.

Ute had woken to her death. She struggled to stand, flung back the door to the flight deck, and entered the cabin. As she moved between the seats, the passengers beseeched her with masked faces.
No. Nothing I can do.
Ute climbed the ramp-like deck. The narrative of Saskia’s last hours took shape in her mind. Ute remembered feeling excitement at the prospect of a journey to Milan with

a new lover

and irritation at a desertion, then a hurt that struck deep.

The overhead lockers had sprung their loads. Bags and clothes blocked the aisle. Extraordinarily, one man, who wore a bow tie, was reading a newspaper. He lifted it to follow a moving track of the sunlight. Another man was dead. His skull had ruptured. Jammed between his thighs was a bloody laptop computer. His neighbour stroked his hair. Others held hands. Some embraced. Puke. Plastic cups, rolling.

She trampled copies of
Die Welt
,
The Times
,
Corriere della Sera
, and found the summit of the aircraft: its tail, a dark space that struck her as fundamental, but as what and for whom, Ute could not say.

There was a girl alone in the row. No-one had attached her mask. Ute sat next to her.

‘
Komm
,’ she said, ‘
gib mir deine Hand
.’

The cabin lights stuttered; gave up. Spokes of sunlight slit the compartment and Ute felt a sense of
déjà vu
. The G-force pulled a starfield of tears upwards. Oxygen tubes swayed. She heard the faint
whoop-whoop
of a cockpit alarm, unanswered.

She squeezed the girl’s cold hand. Her last thought was triggered by a jade band around her bleeding finger, flashing in unexpected sunlight.

Jem. Her name was Jem.

~

Everything stopped.

~

For lifetimes, she was wind across an empty steppe. Then, one day, she settled as dew on the grasses and coalesced to a watery archipelago. She disappeared, trickle-clean, into the roots of trees whose branches were bald and crooked. She grew glassy and cold.

Solid.

Wake me.

Baba Yaga: the witch who moved through eastern minds. Baga Yaga: the witch who travelled in a mortar with a pestle rudder that scored the forest floor. A silver birch to sweep her track, to erase all but a sense that something had been and gone. Saskia looked at her translucent finger. Blood dripped from the tip.

Wake me.

A forest grew and night fell upon it, moonless and still. Saskia felt her body sublimate. With this, she understood that the forest was a fiction. It had been cut from her memories like a string of dancing silhouettes. Now it folded and halved, folded and halved again, folded and vanished.

This way.

Wake me.

This way comes.

‘Something wicked,’ she said at last.

‘Don’t try to talk. I put a tube in your throat. In the army, I was a medic.’

‘Who are you?’ she asked the darkness.

On the wall.

‘You fell from the sky. I wrote down what the mirror said.’

‘What did the mirror say?’

Mirror. Mirror.

‘I wrote down what the mirror said.’

‘There was a girl next to me.’

‘Don’t try to talk. There is a tube in your throat and I had to pin your tongue to your cheek.’

‘Help the girl. There may be time.’

‘I have what the mirror asked me to buy.’

‘What did it ask you to buy?’

Stars moved in the darkness. Her constellations. The shadow. The heroine. The villain. Beer bottles and ball bearings. She remembered a child’s game that used a tray and a cloth.

‘Memory,’ she said.

On the wall.

‘Really, don’t try to talk. The mirror told me about the Ghost. I won’t ever let him find you. Don’t be scared. My name is Tolsdorf.’

‘Where am I? I don’t understand.’

‘
Sssh
,’ he said. ‘
Sssssh
.’

Over time, Saskia came to know that she lay on a cot, the type with a sprung mesh. Her wetware chip had rebooted since Cory’s attack and she felt whole. The chip blocked her pain and conducted unspoken information as certainties: she was smashed; she should not move – soon her tissues would swell. She had to let Tolsdorf take care of her. On and on the fiction wove. The husk on the device – the afterglow of her mind’s heat – had drawn upon the paranoia of this man, probed his needs and promised to fill them, and in return the man had taken Saskia to this anteroom in this hut and assembled the pieces of a desperate defence against someone called... what... yes, Cory, who was chasing something not easily destroyed.

An idea.

Jennifer’s Huckleberry.

Chapter Thirty

To Jem, Cory seemed older. His eyes were shadowed and bloodshot. His breath twirled white. ‘You were waiting for me.’

‘We were waiting for you,’ said Saskia. ‘Tolsdorf and I.’

The woman stood braced, as though leaning into a wind. The truncated wrist was behind her. She was covered by the jacket that Danny had slipped across her shoulders halfway through the story. Danny, like all of them, was in thrall to Saskia. He leaned against the table with his arms folded. Hrafn stood next to him. His bony face was thin and bloodless. He had jammed the gauze between his neck and his shoulder, and Jem might have mistaken him for a man on the phone. The inspector, for his part, sat at the table with his hands pressed between his knees. His mouth was open.

‘Well, Cory?’ asked Saskia, her love.

~

He watched snow crystals stir in the draught beneath the door. Questions burned. Was this fiction? If so, was it designed to misdirect him? Why would Saskia want him to give up the idea of the diamond? He considered the advantage this might lend her. If she was also in pursuit of it, then the advantage was considerable. It would leave her free to obtain it. But Cory did not view Saskia as a competitor. She was a bystander, or a player late to the game. And she was from the past. She had travelled in time fifty years before him. Had she lost her will too? Like Jackson?

Think, Georgia. Is she telling the truth?

Cory shifted his grip on the gun.
If she is telling the truth...
He would not permit that thought to complete. Its implication might undo him.

‘What now?’ asked Danny.

‘You know what,’ said Saskia.

‘He’s going to kill us?’

‘According to him, we’re already dead.’

Cory smiled. ‘You’re getting with the programme, finally.’

‘The paradox,’ said Saskia, straightening her back. ‘Test it.’

Cory drank the data from her body. She was serious. He switched his gun from Jem to Saskia. The answer to his unspoken question – can Saskia be killed? – came in the utter calm of her expression and the absence of any physiological changes that should have accompanied the threat of the gun. Yet he paused. If he killed Saskia with a bullet to the head, would the ichor he had donated be sufficient to rebuild her? He didn’t think so. He pointed at her head. And if this did not kill her, what then? Did that mean her entire story was correct? Was Cory a patsy? The impact of the truth of her words was too much.

He cut off his thoughts by squeezing the trigger.

The weapon did not discharge. Instead, it flexed like a muscle and jumped from his hand. Cory felt the psychic frisson of the smart matter’s software as it crashed. The mishandled kinetic energy split the device in two and its spinning halves clattered to the floor.

So she is connected to Jennifer. So she really is the second time traveller. What would she care about the Cullinan Zero?

Saskia grinned. Her remaining teeth were cracked, bloody.

‘Well, what now?’ she asked.

The wooden floor amplified her footsteps – heel-toe, heel-toe – until Saskia stood within the reach of his fist. The uncertainty churned within him. But he did not strike. Saskia raised her gun. Still he did nothing.

‘I can shoot most of what matters out of your skull,’ she said. ‘Maybe you’ll be rebuilt by your nanomachines, but it won’t be you.’

‘I’ll know your intention before you do. You aren’t fast enough.’

‘Begin at the beginning. Think. Jennifer sent you back to recapture an item, but the item was not her prize. She wanted Harkes. She wanted revenge. Think back, whoever you are.’

He looked at the men and considered their murders once more. Then he looked at the broken factor.

‘When I was young,’ he began, ‘my father called me ‘the Ghost’. He was blind, and I crept around the house because I was scared of him. Kind of funny, because I became a spook. My father was right. I spent my life elsewhere. My physical body is here, at the turn of the century, but my soul could not cross the bridge.’

Chapter Thirty-One

August, 1947, Buenos Aires

Cory walked to the airport at Morón. Once, an intellectual called Jurado had taken him through the difficulties of selecting the correct verb for travelling on foot through The Great Village, as he called Buenos Aires.
Callejear
must be rejected. That was clear.
Pasear
would not do. Never in life. One must plump for
vagar
, to wander. One wanders the labyrinth. One considers the changing street names as the retelling of Argentine history. These are golden threads to be plucked as strings to the past.

Cory,
vagabundeo
, arrived at the drab industrial estate just as the early afternoon sky was darkening. The offices of the British South American Airways Corporation was an unremarkable block with a striking emblem: an art deco star man. It reminded Cory of Hermes. Ancient Greek god of boundaries and those who cross them. Of the orator, the poet, and the shepherd. Of the core of thieves: their cunning.

He removed his hat and touched his forehead with a handkerchief. On the forecourt, a glorious, cream-coloured Packard was being washed by a chauffeur. Cory used his best Rioplatense Spanish to compliment the Packard. The two spoke for five minutes, during which Cory discovered that the Packard would be parked here until the early evening, and thus perfectly placed for hijack.

He raised his hat to the man and walked into the offices. He felt alive and happy. His grip was about to close on Harkes. The crushing sensation would be sweetness itself.

~

The waiting room outside the office of Air Vice-Marshal Bennett was empty. Cory sat in a low leather chair with his hat on his knee. He looked at the wall opposite. There was a painting of a tiny
gaucho
riding across a stylised representation of the South American continent. An aircraft-shaped shadow had fallen across him. He had turned his face upwards. The strapline read: ‘In South America To-Morrow!’

The window was north-facing and dull. To his right, in the office, two men were talking. Cory was looking at his knees, but he was listening to the men.

The younger man said, ‘About this weather, sir. We’re clear out to Mendoza, but it’ll be no fun over the bumps. The visibility is zero.’

The older man replied, ‘You’ve got the top seat. Tell me what you need.’

‘I should like to up the fuel load. Thirteen-hundred gallons would give us a cushion.’

‘Very well. What will that make your weight?’

‘A whisker off fifty-one thousand.’

‘Tell Pilkington I gave the word. Then tell him he can even put some fuel in the aircraft, instead of peeing it halfway across the hangar floor. But Reggo?’

‘Sir?’

‘This isn’t BOAC. Keep that juice for a rainy day.’

‘Sir.’

The door opened and the younger man emerged. He was no older than thirty and had a lightness in his movement. He wore a captain’s uniform and carried a clipboard. In an instant, Cory read all he could from the topmost sheet. The information was not useful. Just some figures and statistics associated with the flight plan. It was not, crucially, the passenger manifest.