A
BRIGHT
N
OVEMBER
afternoon in a London cemetery. Wet leaves littered the neatly-clipped lawns. Victoria Valois and Lois Lapointe sat together on a cold wooden bench. Sparrows danced on the gravel path at their feet, hoping for breadcrumbs. Around them, the dirty white gravestones seemed to leech all the heat from the air. Even the constant background sounds of the city seemed muted.
Victoria sat patiently, wrapped in her long military coat, as the other woman composed herself.
“As I said before, I used to work with your husband at the Céleste laboratories. We were on Doctor Nyguyen’s team.” She paused. The gloved fingers of her right hand worried the fur cuff of her left sleeve. Victoria watched her without speaking. As a journalist, she’d found that one of the best ways to get someone to talk was simply to sit still and say nothing. They spoke to fill the silence, and you could often learn more from listening than from asking any number of questions.
“We were working on memory retrieval,” Lois said. “Soul-catchers. Other gelware projects.” She stopped picking at her cuff and glanced at Victoria. “I was there the night they brought you in, after the helicopter crash.”
Victoria didn’t really remember anything after the helicopter ditched in the South Atlantic. Thrown off her feet as the stricken craft rolled on the swell, she’d smashed her skull into the sharp edge of an open storage locker, and hadn’t been expected to survive. She’d been stabilised by the surgeons on the aircraft carrier and flown back to France, but the prognosis hadn’t been good. She hadn’t been expected to regain consciousness, and wouldn’t have done had Céleste not performed the experimental procedure that saved her life.
Since then, she’d spent the past twelve months recovering from the crash, adjusting, and learning to use and integrate the new areas of her brain. At first, nothing had smelled right. She got words muddled up and had trouble remembering people’s names. But these were expected side-effects from the trauma and surgery, and her underlying personality seemed unaltered, as far as she or anyone else could tell.
No, she couldn’t blame the accident for her separation from Paul. She couldn’t really blame Paul either. They’d mistaken friendship for love and married in haste. The cracks had been there long before she left Paris for the Falkland Islands.
Now, sitting in the cemetery, her skull healing once again, she probed the insides of her mind, trying to locate the fuzzy boundary between the organic and the artificial.
“You were the first human we operated on. We’d never replaced large sections of a human brain. Soul-catchers, yes. But full-scale replacement of entire lobes, no. Before you, we’d been confined to rats and monkeys.” Lois looked up at the clear, blue sky. “At least, that’s the official story.”
Victoria frowned.
“There was someone else?” She felt herself stiffen, scenting a story. “I thought I was the first.”
“You were the first
official
subject. But there was someone before you.”
“Paul never said anything.”
Lois gave a bitter smile. “He wouldn’t have. None of us would. We were sworn to silence.”
“So, who was it?”
Lois sat forward. She rubbed her arms against the cold.
“The Prince.”
“Prince
Merovech
?”
“Yes. We’d been working on him for five years. Adding extra processors as he matured. Taking—” She broke off with a shudder. “When you came in, we used you as a guinea pig. We had some final techniques to test, before...”
“What techniques?”
Lois shook her head, unable to continue. Victoria gave her a tissue, then got to her feet and took a couple of steps away from the bench, scuffing her boots on the gravel path. Another plane banked overhead. A single-hulled cargo Zeppelin chugged north over Kensington, adverts shining on its flanks.
“Is she telling the truth?”
Paul took off his glasses. He wiped them on his shirt, then slid them back onto his nose. It was a habitual gesture. From her perspective, he seemed to be floating in the air above the gravestones at the edge of the path, a digital shade with his trainers ten centimetres above the cold grass.
“Yes,” he admitted. He scratched his chin. “It’s all true.”
“But all this time. Even in the hospital, you said nothing.”
“I couldn’t tell anyone.” He paused. “Are you angry?”
“Angry?” Victoria shoved her fists into the pockets of her coat.
Idiot
.
“I’ll deal with you later.”
She turned on her heel, to face Lois Lapointe, who looked at her curiously, the traces of concern flickering around the corners of her eyes.
“Who are you talking to?”
“Never mind. It doesn’t matter. What I want to know is why you’re here, now, telling me all this?”
The other woman stopped hugging herself. She raised her chin.
“Because I think they’re going to kill me. Just like they killed your husband, and every other member of Nguyen’s team.”
“Who’s going to kill you?”
Lois glanced from left to right. She lowered her voice.
“Céleste.”
“Because of what you did to Merovech?”
“No, because of what we did to the King.”
A tall man stepped through the stone gate at the entrance to the cemetery. He wore a black coat and a matching wide-brimmed fedora, and carried lilies in the crook of his arm, the ends of their stems wrapped in newspaper. He had his head down, and Victoria couldn’t see his face. Her heart tapped in her chest. Had her plan worked? Was this the man who’d attacked her? Had she drawn him out?
She swallowed, feeling suddenly vulnerable. At Paul’s flat, the Smiling Man had moved with startling speed and terrifying ruthlessness. She reached into her pocket and touched the mobile phone that the Commodore had pushed into her hands as she left his cabin.
“I’ll have an armed guard standing by,” he’d promised. “If you get into trouble, you call me. Punch the first number on the speed dial and we’ll be with you in minutes.”
She thumbed the keyboard, sending the signal. Better to do so now, while she still could.
I’m being paranoid
, she thought,
but am I being paranoid enough?
Triggered by her elevated pulse rate, the gelware in her head displayed a list of options, ranging from mild sedation to immediate flight. She cancelled it all with a blink, and took a deep breath. “Come on,” she said to Lois. “Let’s walk.”
They set off across the grass, between the monuments. Victoria held Lois by the elbow, almost pushing her along.
“Tell me about the King,” she said.
Lois looked around with wide eyes. “What is it? Who are we running from?”
Victoria jerked her arm, encouraging her to keep walking. A quick glance over her shoulder revealed the skinny black figure still pacing in their direction.
“Never mind. Keep talking. You say they’re going to kill you. I need to know why.”
Lois stumbled, her feet unsteady in her high-heeled boots.
“They brought the King to us, after the rocket attack in Paris.” She was panting with fear and exertion. “He’d been injured and we were told to retrieve his soul-catcher.”
Victoria’s free hand rose to the plastic collar at her throat. She looked back. The man still followed, pigeons flapping around his feet, long strides eating up the distance between them.
“Go on,” she said.
Lois slowed. “We didn’t need to do it.”
Victoria pulled her forwards, between a pair of matched mausoleums.
“What do you mean?”
“He wasn’t that badly injured. He had some cuts and bruises. There was blood, but—”
They came out into a double row of gravestones, and onto another gravel path. Other people were around. An old man on a bench. A young woman with a pushchair.
“You took it out anyway?”
Lois let her head drop.
“We did as we were told.”
In the corner of Victoria’s eye, Paul’s image folded itself into a crouch. His arms were over his head, as if trying to block out the world.
Lois Lapointe began to cry.
“Who told you to do it?”
Lois sniffled. “The order came from the top.”
Victoria looked back. The man was now only a couple of dozen paces behind them, and still advancing. As she watched, he raised his head, and she saw the dead eyes and thin smile.
As she met his gaze, the lilies fell from his grip. One-by-one, they dropped onto the lawn, revealing in their place the squat black barrels of a sawn-off shotgun.
Victoria’s neural prostheses tagged the weapon as a threat and fired her adrenal glands up to maximum production. Time seemed to slow. The noise of the traffic on Brompton Road became a drawn-out growl. Her heart tripped like a hammer in her chest. She became aware of the cold air on her cheeks, the roughness of her clothes against her skin, and the throbbing wound at the back of her neck. Her calves tensed. Her fingers curled.
“Miss Valois, how disappointing to see you alive.” In the sunlight, the Smiling Man’s skin looked like parchment stretched across the frame of his face. “And Miss Lapointe. So nice to finally meet you in person.”
To Victoria’s heightened awareness, the pigeons flapping up from the man’s feet moved as if pulling themselves through resin. She gave Lois a shove, sending them both in opposite directions, and reached into her coat for her quarterstaff.
The gun fired. She saw smoke bloom from the left barrel, aimed at the spot where she’d just been standing. Her neural settings were running way beyond the safety limits proscribed by Céleste’s technicians. She’d hacked her own head, and they’d have a fit when they saw the readouts. She dipped her shoulder, tucked in her chin, and fell into a roll, coming up with the staff held in front of her. A flick of the wrist, and it leapt out to its full length.
Okay,
she thought,
this time I’m ready for you
.
The Smiling Man’s eyes swivelled in her direction, white with surprise. She saw his arm twitch and, with glacial slowness, the gun turned towards her. She leapt across the gravel path. Two quick, crouching steps. The second barrel fired, the shot ripping through the air above her head. Her staff whirled. She knocked the shotgun aside and drove the tip into his chest. He fell back and Victoria dropped with him, using her weight to accelerate his fall. As he hit the ground, she drove her knee into his stomach, trying to crush the breath from him. A knife appeared in his right hand. In slow motion, she saw it spring into his palm from the sleeve of his coat. He swiped it at her midriff but she leant back and, as the black blade crawled past her stomach, reached out with both hands and broke his wrist. He cried out, and she rose to her feet, standing astride him, the end of the quarterstaff poised to deliver a killing blow to his still-smiling face. Her heart flailed against her ribs. She could feel the blood pulse in her temples and neck.
“Don’t you move,” she said. “Don’t you fucking move.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
HILLS LIKE WHALE BACKS
J
ULIE’S UNCLE KEPT
an elderly Citroën HY in a barn behind the house. The keys were on a nail by the barn door. At dusk, Julie took them and passed them to Merovech.
“You’ll have to drive,” she said.
The van had corrugated steel sides and a protruding snout. The seats were worn and the cab smelled of petrol. In the back, hessian sacks covered the floor.
The Citroën HY had been the workhorse of the United Kingdoms for over a century, used by couriers, builders and every farm and small business that needed to shift materials from one place to another. Produced in huge numbers between the end of the war and the start of the nineteen-nineties, they’d seen off the challenge of the American Ford Transit to become a symbol of European enterprise. Even now, half a century on, you still found them all across France, Belgium, Norway and the Netherlands. They had acquired a retro chic. They were old but reliable and, in a rural setting like this, utterly unremarkable. Merovech took the wheel and coaxed the engine into life.
“Come on,” he said.
Julie climbed in beside him, and the monkey slithered over the seat, into the back. They’d found him some clothes in the upstairs wardrobe: a pair of blue denim jeans, which he wore turned up at the ankles, and an old raincoat. With the hood up, he could almost pass for a human teenager. At a distance. To a blind man with no sense of smell.
In his hands, the monkey held Julie’s SincPad. The blue screen illuminated his leathery face. Julie had shown him how to access the Internet, and now he pawed the keypad, finding out as much as he could about the fictional game world Céleste had built around him.
Merovech released the brake and eased the van forward, towards the main road. The track was rough, with deep ruts. Every time they hit a pothole, the monkey swore.
After a minute or two, they reached the road. A string of orange lights stretched away in either direction. Merovech crunched the three-speed gearbox. He pressed the accelerator and hauled left on the wheel. The van wallowed out onto the tarmac. On both sides, beyond the puddles of light cast by the streetlights, the ploughed fields of the French countryside seemed as smooth and level as a dark sea, distant hills looming like whale backs against the horizon.
Julie touched her forehead to the glass.
“I wonder if the police have found Frank yet?”
Merovech shrugged. He didn’t care about Frank. He had the hood of his top pulled forward and the brim of his baseball cap yanked down almost to the bridge of his nose, shadowing his face. He kept his eyes focused on the little cone of light thrown by the van’s headlamps, while a single question whirled around inside his head.
Who am I?
He’d been born in London and educated at a number of specially selected schools, including Eton. His life had been classrooms and dormitories until the age of eighteen, when he’d left school to complete a year’s tour in the Royal Marines, before starting his degree in Politics at the Sorbonne University. He’d been the dutiful Prince, and his life had been mapped for him, his every move governed by the dictates of tradition and protocol.