White Death (37 page)

Patrese fired twice at the lock and kicked the French doors open.

There was a single security guard on duty at the Stata Center. Anderssen flashed his badge and asked for directions to Unzicker’s office.

‘You seen Mr Unzicker in here today?’ he asked when the guard had finished.

‘I don’t know who he is.’

‘Who’s been in here the last half-hour or so?’

‘Only one guy.’

‘Can you describe him?’

‘Er … white guy. Pretty average.’

‘Square-rimmed eyeglasses? Baby face?’

‘No. No glasses. Don’t know about baby face. Pretty regular features.’

‘OK.’ It couldn’t have been Unzicker anyway: he was in the Veritas. ‘Thanks.’

Anderssen was halfway up the first flight of stairs when he thought that maybe he could use a little back-up, the kind he’d offered to Patrese. He hadn’t brought any from the cop shop as they were low on staff, this being Thanksgiving weekend and all. Should he ask the security guard to come with him?

No, he reckoned. Security guards in places like this were one down from mall cops. To pull a stint in a deserted building when everyone else was with their families, you weren’t exactly going to be Rambo. Besides, the guy probably wasn’t allowed to leave his post except to go for a leak.

He could radio the MIT campus police and ask them. If he found something, maybe he would. But he was a veteran of going on three decades. He couldn’t handle an electronic screw-up in a science lab, he was doing the wrong job.

A lot of guys have died throughout history because they weren’t brave enough to admit they were scared.

The door to Unzicker’s office was ajar. Someone
had
been in here. Anderssen unholstered his gun and held it out in front of him. He tensed, took a deep breath, and flung himself against the door as hard as he could, his momentum taking him forward and down into the room, rolling instantly away from the door with gun held out in front of him, sighting down the barrel, looking for movement in every corner of the room.

Nothing. No one but him, feeling slightly foolish as he clambered to his feet, glad that there hadn’t been anyone around to witness this over-reaction.

A shattering crack right at the base of his skull, and an oblivion of merciless speed.

Tartu had been through all fourteen games in the recent history of
killerinstinct32
and
sequinedberg
, and he no longer had any doubt that his theory was right. Style, tactics, strategy, positioning, preference for the bishop pair when minor pieces were exchanged, unwillingness to swap queens: there were so many pointers that the evidence was overwhelming. It wasn’t only in the games, either. Tartu had found two more things away from the board that surely clinched it.

First,
sequinedberg
had only ever played against
killerinstinct32
. He’d played hundreds of games over the course of the last few months, and all of them – every single one – had been against
killerinstinct32
. Second, remembering Kwasi’s penchant for anagrams – Patrese had shown him the Rotting Husk/Knight’s Tour puzzle – Tartu had found an online anagram generator and typed in ‘sequinedberg’. One of the first answers that had come up was ‘Bridge Queens’; or, more aptly here, Queensbridge, the enormous housing project in which Kwasi had grown up.

Tartu picked up his cellphone and dialed Patrese.

Patrese felt the BlackBerry vibrate in his pocket, but whoever it was and whatever they wanted, it could hardly be more crucial than what was happening in the Veritas’ suite.

Patrese had his gun trained on Unzicker. Unzicker had his gun trained on Nursultan. Nursultan didn’t have a weapon to complete the stand-off triangle, and Patrese was glad: at least he knew that he and Unzicker knew how to fire the damn things.

‘Put it down, Thomas,’ Patrese said, for what felt at least the fifth time. ‘Put it down, and we can sort all this out.’

‘You saw me kill them, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘So I’m screwed anyway.’

‘You could plead self-defense.’

‘He came to blackmail me!’ Nursultan shouted. ‘That not self-defense! Man break into your house and you attack him, he not claim self-defense!’

Actually, Patrese thought, there were plenty of places where he probably could: but there was a time and place for the political-correctness-and-human-rights-gone-mad debate, and this wasn’t either of them.

‘Just give me the gun, Thomas,’ he said.

‘You know what I am?’ Unzicker’s eyes flitted between Patrese and Nursultan, but his gun hand was very still, no wavering or shaking. ‘I’m a genius. A solid-gold genius. I’ve invented the first proper AI in history.’ He focused on Nursultan. ‘And now you want to cheat me out of my share.’

‘This is no way to sort things out,’ Patrese said.

Unzicker jerked his head toward Nursultan. ‘I bet it is where he comes from.’

‘Mr Nursultan,’ Patrese said, ‘you’re going to honor your word, yes?’

‘Of course.’

The same Mr Nursultan, Patrese remembered, who’d at various stages in the past few weeks made thinly veiled threats against Patrese, even more thinly veiled offers of bribes to him, and had just been prepared to let his goons loose on Unzicker. In Unzicker’s position, Patrese thought, he probably wouldn’t have believed Nursultan either.

Patrese took a step toward Unzicker. ‘Give me the gun.’

Unzicker swiveled round to aim at him. ‘No. Don’t. Back.’

Patrese could wait,
should
wait, for the cops to arrive. They’d realize sooner or later, surely: the two guys downstairs in the lobby, Anderssen when he didn’t hear from Patrese, someone in the hotel who must have heard the shots, suppressed though they’d been. And then it would be a hostage situation: they’d bring in the negotiators and talk Unzicker ragged till he gave in. That’s what they did; that’s what they were good at. It would last a few hours, it wouldn’t be fun, but they’d all get out of it alive.

All this went through Patrese’s head in a flash; and in that very same flash Nursultan lunged for Unzicker’s gun, and Unzicker must have seen him out of the corner of his eye because he whirled back toward Nursultan again, gun hand coming round and trigger finger already taking up the pressure, and Patrese had taken the shot too soon against Samantha Slinger in Pittsburgh, and he hadn’t taken the shot against the bank robber with the crazy Hollywood mask, and he’d taken the shot against the suicide bomber in Heinz Field and got that one right, and he was going to take the shot here and get that right too.

The olive-drab Glock 22 kicked twice in his hands. Double tap to the head. Unzicker couldn’t have done it better himself. His body spun round on itself with the force of the impact, crashing over the back of a chair and on to the floor.

Nursultan looked wild-eyed at Patrese.

‘You kill him!’

‘It was him or you.’ Patrese wondered briefly whether he’d taken the right option.

‘How the fuck I get Misha now? You know how much it worth?’

There’s gratitude for you, Patrese thought. Save a man’s life, and watch him bitch about all the money you might have cost him.

‘Try his office,’ Patrese said, and in the same moment remembered that Anderssen was already there. He pulled his BlackBerry out of his pocket, and it started vibrating the moment he did so.
TARTU
, said the screen. He hit the ‘answer’ button.

‘I’ll call you right back.’

‘They’re the same person,’ Tartu blurted.

‘What?’

‘
killerinstinct32
and
sequinedberg
.
They’re the same person.’

‘But that means …’

‘Yes. Kwasi’s been playing against himself, over and over.’

Playing the game. Against himself. Over and over.

The game. The Game.

Anderssen. Stata Center. Unzicker’s office. Keycard.

Patrese ended Tartu’s call and dialed Anderssen. Two rings, and then the pick-up.

‘Franco. Hello.’

Not Anderssen’s voice.

Kwasi’s.

They found Anderssen’s body in Unzicker’s office. Kwasi was long gone, of course, and with him all the Misha stuff: Nursultan confirmed that none of what they’d been working on was in Unzicker’s office anymore, or in his room in Tang Hall.

The security guard at the Stata Center was adamant that only a white man had come in this morning. Patrese thought of what Anderssen had told him about the bank robber with the mask, and remembered that the mask in question had been made by a company based out in Van Nuys. Patrese borrowed the security guard’s computer terminal – this was MIT, so if you breathed, you were online – and googled ‘Van Nuys masks’. The first result returned was the SPFX website: SPFX Masks, Silicone Masks, Movie Quality.

Patrese clicked on the list of the masks they offered. He recognized one of them, the Player, as the black guy he’d seen at the bank robbery in Cambridge.

‘There.’ The security guard was pointing. ‘That’s the guy, right there. The white guy who checked in this morning.’

Handsome Guy, the mask was called. SPFX’s idea of handsome was clearly different from Patrese’s, but if they were charging close on two grand per mask, SPFX’s bank balance was probably different from Patrese’s too.

Patrese rang the number on the website. No answer. Thanksgiving vacation. Back Monday. Thanks for your enquiry. Please e-mail your order. Not that it would do anything other than confirm what they already knew: Kwasi had ordered one of these masks, and he’d used it while going out killing in the Boston area. There’d never been two killers. There’d only been one: Kwasi, playing against himself.

He’d left two things by Anderssen’s body. One of them Patrese had expected: the Chariot card. Whether the Tarot meant anything any more, Patrese had no idea. Perhaps Kwasi had gotten the idea off of Anna, when he’d been going out with Inessa. Perhaps he’d gotten it off of Unzicker, who’d made a tarot costume for MIThenge, and just used it to throw Patrese off the scent, add another layer of obfuscation.

The second was a copy of
The Royal Game
, a novella by Stefan Zweig.

Inessa had told Patrese about this, he remembered. Zweig had been an Austrian writer who’d achieved the height of his fame during the interwar years, and
The Royal Game
– only published after his suicide – was about a man, Dr B, who’d been jailed or something like that, with only a book of grandmaster chess games for company.

He’d read this book so often, and memorized all the games so thoroughly, that in the end he’d become consumed by chess and, still kept in total isolation, had begun to play against himself. But chess is a game of perfect information, so to play it properly, White cannot know for sure what Black is thinking, and vice versa. Wanting to play chess against yourself is a paradox, like jumping over your own shadow.

So to do this properly, Dr B had been forced to split his psyche into two personas, White and Black. To take this to its logical absurdity, he had to literally switch his brain on and off. So Dr B had at once known everything and known nothing: he’d been totally his White personality while thinking as White, but the moment White had moved, he’d switched to his Black personality, as thoroughly and immediately as though he’d pressed a chess clock. Move, switch. Move, switch. Move, switch.

And he’d studied the board anew after every single move, looking for traps or pitfalls that he himself had set in a psyche now totally forgotten for the next few minutes, and yet totally recalled when the move was made and he switched back. Inevitably, he’d had a breakdown, hovering over the abyss: and after every game, whichever half of his self had been defeated instantly wanted revenge against the other half.

So too, it seemed, with Kwasi. When he donned the mask, he put on with it the persona of the White killer: organized, methodical, calculating, in the way that on the chessboard White plays to press home the advantage of the first move. And at other times he was Black: vicious, frenzied, forever complicating things to negate the advantage of that first move.

But Kwasi wasn’t only playing against himself. He was playing against Patrese too. And Patrese prided himself on always getting his man.

‘Play the endgame like a machine.’

Rudolf Spielmann

It’s not hard to preserve human skin.

First you soak it in water to clean and soften it. Then you take a sharp knife or hacksaw blade and scrape all the crap off the inside, all the flesh and fat and that. Next you put it back in liquid – not water this time, but piss. Leave it here for a bit. That loosens all the hair fibers. Human skin isn’t as hairy as animal skin, obviously, but if you want it to look good, you can’t have stray follicles everywhere. Once you take it out of the piss, you can remove the loose hairs one by one with tweezers.

Now you’ve got to dry it out. Cover it all over in salt, about three-quarters of an inch thick, and leave it for sixteen hours. Salt blots up the moisture like a motherfucker. When you come to take it off, the salt’ll be all damp, but the skin’ll be dry as a bone.

Think you’re finished here? Not even close. You’re only just getting started. ’Cos here’s where the tanning starts. Not tanning as in suntanning, fool people lying on UV beds or sizzling their honky skin in the sun – next stop skin cancer, doesn’t really seem worth it, no? – but tanning, as in curing and preparing skin, the way they’ve done it for centuries with animal skins.

And before you get all squeamish, what’s human skin except animal skin? You see these things about the Nazis making lampshades out of human skin, or some Wild West outlaw who’s now a pair of shoes, or books bound with the skin of slaves back in the day, and you know what? I don’t see no difference between that and the shoes on your feet, the purse you’re carrying, the belt round your waist, the seats of your car, you know? It’s all the same thing. It’s all just skin. You don’t have no use for it after you’re dead.