Flashback (The Saskia Brandt Series Book Two) (9 page)

A pause. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘What
do
you know, Ego?’

‘Many things.’

She tore a roll and dressed the wound with salami. ‘When I studied computer science, you know what was the most disappointing thing? Artificial intelligence is crap. You can’t make a camera that sees like an eye, or a microphone that hears. Forget conversation. Forget language, full stop. There are no machines on Earth capable of having this conversation with me.’

‘One seems capable.’

‘Exactly my point. Am I the mark for a con?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘What model are you?’

‘I’m an Ego-class assistant, third version.’

‘Processor speed? Memory capacity? Juicy details, and quick.’

‘My processor and memory are not independent. I do not manipulate data in the manner of a serial computing machine.’

‘How, then?’

‘I operate using parallel vectors of qubits.’

‘You’ve out-geeked me there.’

‘Let me summarise. I am from the future.’

She rolled her eyes. The conversation had just jumped the shark. ‘No way are you from the future.’

The bedside phone rang. She picked it up.

‘Way,’ said a tinny voice.

‘Proves nothing.’ She put the phone down. ‘If you’re from the future, when do I die?’

‘I cannot say.’

‘Against the laws of robotics or something?’

‘Coincidentally, my reason for withholding this information does indeed conflict with Asimov’s Second Law: A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law, the First Law being: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. The First Law was later modified–’

‘Jesus, you’re boring. Fancy subjugating mankind with your silicon brethren?’

‘No, thank you.’

Jem spread some honey over her bread and chewed it.

‘All this banter just convinces me that you’re an actor and the card is no more than glorified speaker. OK, you sound like a computer, but I can feel your wit. There’s a humanity behind your words. A dash of pride; a pinch of frustration.’

‘Get me a glass of water.’

Jem swallowed and walked to the bathroom. She could not imagine what Ego would want with the water and expected the task to be a ruse that took her out of the room for a moment. When she returned, she looked at the door and the window. Nothing had changed. Likewise, the breakfast platter was untouched.

‘Here it is. Now what?’

‘Drop me in.’

‘I don’t want to void your warranty this early in our relationship.’

‘I cannot be damaged by the water.’

‘Well, here you go. Consider yourself dumped.’

Jem plopped Ego in the water. Part of her wanted to hear its voice bubbling from the surface. Instead, the card changed colour from white to black. ‘Seen that before,’ she said. ‘Unimpressed.’

The water seemed to shrink. Jem frowned and leaned forward. Its level was dropping. She lifted the glass and passed her hand underneath. No holes. When the glass was empty, she said, ‘I’m prepared to exchange my ‘unimpressed’ for a ‘wow’.’

‘My capacitor is recharged.’

‘You’re water-powered?’

‘Today.’

‘But there was more water in the glass than could fit inside you. Where did it really go?’

‘I now possess the water in a denser form.’

‘Gotcha,’ Jem said. She felt pleased to have spotted a mistake in the reasoning of the card, or whoever was controlling him. ‘That isn’t physically possible. Liquid is the densest form of water. Ice is less dense, and so is steam. Am I right?’

‘Is there a second option?’

Jem tipped her head to one side. ‘Funny.’

There was something frustratingly teacher-pupil about their exchange. She took Ego from the glass and rubbed a thumb along one side. It was dry. Her companion had an attractive, alien quality. She was conscious that it reminded her of Saskia.

‘Ego, what can you actually do for me that doesn’t involve posing as a credit card, infiltrating envelopes, and so forth?’

‘I can advise on a safe location for you to meet Danny. He will help us find Saskia.’

Jem was not prepared to hear her brother’s name. It had an unpleasant resonance, like a rhyme. The fun left her.

‘Why would we - I - do that?’

‘Saskia’s system never leaves her person. You want it, don’t you?’

She thought of the hipster jeans she had persuaded Saskia to buy. They would be charred now, torn, lost in a wasteland of wreckage.

‘What about Cory?’

‘Given that his attempt at social engineering has failed, he will be occupied with gaining entry to the secure room in Saskia’s apartment.’

‘Social engineering? You mean me?’

‘Yes.’

She walked to the window and ate the rest of her breakfast in silence.

Chapter Twelve

The
Fernsehturm
, Berlin’s TV and radio tower, rose from Alexanderplatz to a height that seemed unsupportable given its thin spire. The pavilion at the base always reminded Jem of those jagged bubbles in comics that appear when the hero punches the baddie. Pow! Up goes the tower. Almost at the top was a glittering mirror ball. Very disco. Inside the ball was an observation deck and restaurant. Above it was a thick ring of antennas and, higher still, a long shaft coloured red and white like a barber’s pole. Long ago, Danny had told her what the colours meant; what barbers had once done to people.

For a while, she waited on Gontardstrasse beneath one of the huge trees and watched people entering and leaving Alexanderplatz Station. It was cold. She had bought a scarf on the way and its edges flicked now and then as if shooing something off her shoulder. Jem shrugged inside her duffle coat. There were too many people, trams, and taxis. If someone was following her – someone like Cory – she might never know.

She approached the tower and entered the glass-walled pavilion. She added herself to the tourists queueing for the lifts. The atrium was uninspiring. It felt like a departure lounge to nowhere. That, and the connecting thought to aeroplanes, put more wood on the fire of her anxiety. Jem hugged herself. The truth of it was that Danny scared her more than Cory, more than the police, more than the half-heard revs-up, revs-down of failing jet engines on an aeroplane going down, down, down. There were so many words between her and her twin brother that needed to be unsaid. Jem needed a reversal, the mother of all undo buttons.

~

‘You see, there’s an anxiety in the background.’

The therapist has smelled something. Her blood is up.

‘Yes?’

The blood going down. The TV tower.
Danny, what did the barbers do once upon a time?

‘It’s like the hiss of a TV tuned to a dead channel.’

Oh, how analogue. (TVs don’t do that anymore. No tuning. No snow. Those snows are gone.)

The therapist leans forward. Her MiniDisc recorder spins, swallowing their words byte by byte.

‘This hiss actually comes from the music box, doesn’t it?’

Jem looks at her. The therapist thinks she has made a discovery. There, in her eye: the mote of triumph. The self-congratulation and validation.
I am a good therapist. Breathe. I am a good therapist.

Jem will hear that sentence one more time – I am a good therapist – when she confronts the woman on her doorstep, months after this conversation. ‘Is this real? Did I misremember what we said?’

‘How did you know about the music box?’

The therapist smiles. Her baggy, friendly face is close to Jem’s. Anything that Jem says will now be added to that growing edifice of certainty.

The MiniDisc recorder spins. The blood spirals down.

‘You mentioned the music box yesterday, when you were under. Do you remember the tune?’

The tune.

Ich ruf zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ.

~

Danny was waiting for her on the observation deck of the tower, unmistakable against the ashy sky. He was taller and broader than most – rowing, rugby – and dressed as if he was new money, which he was. His eyes were narrowed by habit and darkened by his pronounced brow. His blonde hair was thinning. He kept it short. As he noticed Jem and moved towards her, his long coat billowed. She felt a flush of privilege and fear as though he were a hawk coming to her arm. His swoop ended in an embrace. She pressed her cheek to his chest. He was squeezing too hard, but no less than she deserved.

‘Did you think I’d died in the crash?’ she asked.

‘I never would have believed it,’ he said. He took her chin and guided her face to his. There were tears in his eyes. ‘I’m here to rescue you, of course.’

‘How very you.’

She stepped back but kept a grip on his coat. She looked left and right. Danny followed her eyes each time. He smiled with half of his mouth.

‘If it’s legal trouble, I’m your lawyer.’

‘Family discount?’

‘Nice try.’

~

Jem walked alone to the edge of the deck. It was rotating perceptibly. A rail protected the slanted glass panels. She looked for St Mary’s Church and the Warenhaus. Traffic leaked between buildings. At her elbow, an English boy in a Manchester United T-shirt listened to his father tell the story of a wall that once cut Berlin in two.

‘Here,’ said her brother. ‘Without milk.’

Jem took the coffee. She imagined the cup falling through the glass and down the tower.

‘How many sugars did you put in this?’

‘Two. Looks cold down there.’

She sipped. ‘The wind comes from Russia today. It was on the radio.’

‘So you learned German.’

‘Don’t ask me to translate Nietzsche, but I’m a black belt in fruit and vegetables.’

‘Black belt, she says.’

Jem laughed, but felt the next throwaway remark die inside her. This conversation was a tipping point. Here was Danny. She only had to push and the baggage of memory would totter over this cliff and drop away, forever out of mind. Danny was here because he did not want to lose her again. So be it. She could fuse her half with his. Return to England in disgrace.

‘Jem, I brought you a pressie.’

‘Let me say something first.’

‘Wait. This is important.’ He took a doll from one of the deep pockets in his coat. It was six inches tall and wooden. It wore a Tyrollean hat. Jem remembered deciding, as a twelve-year-old girl, that all Germans wore hats like that. Tucked into its crimson band was a feather whose highlights had been brushed on by an old doll-maker in Bremen. ‘
Hänsel
,’ her father had said. ‘To rhyme with ‘pencil’.’ The doll still had its ambiguous expression.

‘Poor Hänsel. What happened to Gretel?’

‘They were separated, I suppose. I found Hänsel on eBay. He’s a collector’s item.’

In her little sister voice, she said, ‘But is he our Hänsel?’

Danny lay the doll across her palm. She inspected the elbows, the knees, and the head. Hänsel’s cheeks were expertly freckled. His eyes, however, were dead.

‘I know what you’re looking for,’ Danny said.

‘There are no holes.’

‘There were never any holes,’ he said. ‘There were never any strings.’

The half-remembered notes of a music box picked through the tower. The turning tower.

Ich ruf zu Dir.

I call to thee.

‘Danny, how can you even look at me?’

She had never told her brother, face to face, that she loved him. Not once. But, at this realisation, her eyes stopped on something that reset her thoughts.

~

A man stood at the vanishing point of the curving deck. He wore a black leather jacket, buttoned, and an English flat cap, reversed. His hips were slanted and his eyes easy. His grin was too broad; it underscored his awkwardness. Even at this distance, Jem could see the bruise beneath his right eye, and it reminded her of the steady right hand of Saskia Brandt. What was he doing here? She had last seen him half-senseless against a pew in the Trinity Church. A man propped up by his desperation. He began to walk towards them.

She whispered, ‘It’s Wolfgang.’

‘Your friend from uni?’

Wolfgang no longer seemed like the player who could cut coke with any number of household chemicals when the con work dried up. His eyes were bloodshot. On top of everything, thought Jem, he was probably going cold turkey. The three of them made a strange triangle. The twins kept their backs to the panorama while Wolfgang, his face cooled by the light, smiled with a patience that bordered on British.

‘This is Danny,’ she said.

Wolfgang shook his hand. ‘Jem talks about you all the time. Big Danny.’

‘Hello, Wolfgang. Guyliner? You shouldn’t have.’

The German chuckled, touching a hand to his bruise and said nothing more. The expectation shifted to Jem, but she could not voice her questions for Wolfgang without presenting a version of herself that she wanted to withhold from her brother. She sipped her coffee and tried to read Wolfgang’s demanding eyes. The silence was interrupted by her vibrating phone, number withheld. She mumbled an apology and took the call.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello, Jem,’ said Ego. ‘The person who has just joined you is wearing a device that transmits your conversation by radio.’

She blinked.

‘
What?
’

‘The man is wearing a ‘wire’. He is ‘bugged’.’

‘OK, OK.’

‘Say ‘who’.’

Jem switched ears and looked at the horizon. ‘Who?’

‘I would advise you and your brother to leave immediately. Now say, ‘Sorry, wrong number’.’

‘Sorry. Wrong number.’

Ego hung up. There was no dialling tone. Just emptiness. She kept the phone to her ear and tried to assemble a plan, but she was panicking. Wolfgang must have been arrested in the Trinity Church. And here he was, wearing different clothes. So the police had let him go back to the apartment to change. Had that been why she’d found the police officer waiting outside the apartment? It had to be one of those plea-bargain things. But what had Wolfgang offered the police? Saskia? Jem?