Authors: Project Itoh
“Well, you certainly do know how to spin a line, Mr. Bishop!”
Except it wasn’t a line, not completely. Part of me was absolutely serious. But rather than say this, I decided to carry on playing the part.
“And what about you, Ms. Sukrova? There must be someone in your life who can read you a good bedtime story?”
“No,” Lucia replied, shaking her head. “Not anymore.”
“Not anymore?”
“If you don’t mind my saying so, Mr. Bishop, you’re in danger of straying into some rather personal territory. Do I have to remind you that you have a wife and a child?”
I opened my arms. “Forgive me. But it’s precisely because I’m happily married that I sometimes overstep the mark. After all, it’s not as if I’m going to try and seduce anyone.”
“Well, forgive me, Mr. Bishop, but being married is no guarantee these days.”
“Maybe not, these days. But I’m an old-fashioned guy with old-fashioned morals. I assure you, your virtue is quite safe with me.”
“I’ll just have to take your word on that,” Lucia said. Then, hesitantly, “It was a while ago, now. A fellow linguistics researcher.”
“At MIT?”
“Yes. Although when I say fellow researcher, he really was on another level. He was involved in a language project for the National Military Establishment.”
“I didn’t realize that the National Military Establishment funded linguistics research.”
“Well, he told me that an agency called DARPA provided the research grant. I never knew the exact details.”
This was news to me. There was nothing in John Paul’s profile that said anything about his working on a project for national defense—it had just said he was involved in a federally funded language project. It had never occurred to us that his linguistics research could have been directly involved in what came next; Williams and I had both been content to gloss over his early life as being more or less irrelevant.
“He sounds like quite a guy.”
“Yes, I met him at MIT and was going out with him for a while. But then one day he went away. Just disappeared completely. After that, I returned home to the Czech Republic and started this line of work here.”
“Couldn’t you find any work over there?”
“Oh, there was some, but it wasn’t easy. I’m a researcher at heart, so I probably should have remained with the university. I just couldn’t quite bring myself to stay …” Lucia shrugged.
I nodded sympathetically. “And did he like books too?”
“Well … he read a lot of Ballard. Have you heard of
Empire of the Sun
? It was made into a movie last century.”
“The Spielberg film, right? Sure, I love old movies.”
“Well, the movie was based on a book by an author called J. G. Ballard. The book’s even better—full of dry humor, but at the same time so wonderfully evocative of the end of the era.”
“Doesn’t sound much like the film.”
“Well, the adaptation was faithful enough to the story. But the original was much bleaker, more harsh. Ballard’s work often has themes of decay and of things coming to an end. He was a science fiction author, mainly.”
“Sorry … I’m not so up on my sci-fi.”
“That’s fine. John was always reading Ballard, though. Novels set in nuclear wastelands or on a desolate space station.”
“This John … he sounds like he sure did like a good apocalypse,” I said, trying to visualize the sort of scene that attracted John Paul. The eschatological stories favored by the man who now traveled from land to land leaving piles of corpses in his wake.
I wondered if John Paul dreamed of a world in ruins. Spaceship Mother Earth, a giant, unmanned satellite that silently orbited the sun. A world where aliens would land one day and find only the traces of civilization long destroyed, the empty husks of building after building whose inhabitants had long since disappeared.
As I imagined the scene, I realized that I was feeling a strange tranquility wash over me.
After all, how different was John Paul’s dream from my dream of the land of the dead?
6
I noticed them as soon as I left Lucia’s apartment.
There were at least two of them. Tailing me? Or staking out the building?
Given that we’d been keeping a lookout on the front of the apartment ourselves, I figured that it must have been me they were tailing.
I suppressed a grin and stepped out into the street.
I could tell that adrenaline was starting to pump through my veins, so I adjusted my internal tension to counterbalance its effects.
One step. Two steps. I could feel the ground beneath my feet clearly, so clearly. My senses were heightened so much that the mere act of walking almost tickled my feet.
I couldn’t very well just cross the road to our apartment where Williams was currently holed up. That would have been just too funny. So I wondered which way I should go now. After all, I had only used this exit to double back so that Lucia wouldn’t be able to detect our movements while we were watching her …
I wondered if my tails knew about our stakeout of Lucia’s place. Possibly. They probably knew it existed at least, even if not exactly where it was. I didn’t know if they were John Paul’s men or not, but we’d already factored in the possibility that we would come up against some sort of organized resistance, hence our precautionary measures such as entering the country at different times and avoiding all real-time wireless transmission of data from Lucia’s apartment as proof against interception.
I scratched the back of my head. My signal to Williams that I was being followed. I decided to take a stroll through the streets of Prague and discover the identity of my tails.
I arrived at a busy street, and my field of vision went into overdrive. My AR contact lenses were flooded with virtual banners.
Prague was a tourist hotspot, so its Alternative Reality databank was pretty well developed. Shop after shop, street after street, all had labels, links, a cornucopia of secrets to be revealed. On the film of my contacts, the noble city of a hundred spires was plastered with virtual neon writing and lighting, turning the elegant historic vista into a cross between a neon-soaked Hong Kong night and Ridley Scott’s Los Angeles. The type of store, hours of operation, the number of Michelin Stars a restaurant had—all kinds of landmarks were liberally annotated with virtual neon, creating an alternative reality for the benefit of travelers.
But what I needed was a plan.
I looked around for a Touchboard terminal. Prague’s roads were AR-optimized, so there were plenty of terminals scattered about the place. Groups of tourists were huddled in front of giant plastic boards, and each board was illustrated with a picture of a smaller keyboard. I went to stand in front of one of them, staring at the keyboard for three seconds until my contact lenses paired with the Touchboard. I started “typing” on the picture of the keyboard, which functioned every bit as well as a normal keyboard as long as you didn’t need the luxury of spring-loaded keys.
A while back they actually introduced technology that allowed you to type just by looking at a key—the machine scanned your eye movements—but these visual keyboards died a quick death once it became clear that they were never going to work at any real speed; it turned out that good old-fashioned touch typing was faster than anything the human eye could do.
I activated a filter that blocked out all tourist information and logged into USA.
I flicked through the data on Prague’s transportation and infrastructure. Nothing helpful. Damn, I should have done my research beforehand. On the off-chance that someone had something useful, I started a thread requesting a map of Prague with footfall data. I set it up so that I’d be messaged the instant the topic had a reply and sent the link over to Williams for good measure.
Having done all I could do at that moment, I severed my connection with the Touchboard and set off to find a lonely alleyway somewhere—a dark corner where I could turn the tables on my pursuers without fear of being disturbed.
I jumped onto a passing streetcar, reflexively stealing a glance behind me as I did. Two men and a woman had also jumped on with me at the last minute. They sat apart from each other. One of the men in particular—a rough-looking youth—was keeping his distance. Were they too far away from me to tail me effectively, or was it a double bluff? Too soon to tell. The streetcar made a few stops, and just as we were approaching central Prague I jumped off. The two men and the woman stayed on the trolley.
Just in case something was about to happen to me that meant I would never see the light of day again, I picked at a pheromone capsule embedded in one of my fingernails and let a couple of drops fall to the ground. If I vanished, Williams or someone else would be able to follow my scent using tracer dogs. Worst-case scenario, these pheromones would be my epitaph, marking my last stand.
I started winding my way through the old stone buildings of the city of a hundred spires. This was an old city, even by European standards—it had remained mostly untouched in the great wars of the twentieth century. Neither the Nazis nor the Russians had penetrated the core of the old town. This city was a survivor. And I was determined to use it to help me to survive.
The ancient, winding alleyways and the looming shadow of Kafka conspired together to transform this town into my own personal labyrinth. Not like the Latin American labyrinths of which Borges wrote, but something distinctly European—a pale, chilling entity against the backdrop of the harsh midnight-blue sky.
They were still following me.
I walked among Prague’s spires and churches, past Saint Vitus Cathedral, over her cold stone slabs. After a couple of careful feints and misdirections I managed to get a clearer picture of the people following me. The two men and the woman from the streetcar were here. There was also a youth in standard-issue, minimalist, trendy Pentagon-style gear, and a woman wearing a vintage jersey.
All of them were young. None of them could have been my age.
Some sort of youth cult that worshipped John Paul, maybe? My mind spun through the possibilities as I walked around, staking out my pursuers. I could easily have taken any one of them out, but the others were sure to converge on me as I made my move. Was discretion the better part of valor right now? I could always shake them off here, but they’d be back on my tail the next time I showed my face at Lucia’s, no doubt.
Was I going to have to take an hour-long detour to get home every time I went for my Czech conversation class?
Fuck that.
My thoughts were interrupted by a new transmission to my AR contact lenses. Someone had replied to my thread on USA. I headed for the nearest Contact Board and logged in to find that someone had uploaded a detailed, color-coded map with all traffic data for Prague during the last four months. Bingo. They’d only gone and found me an open-source map straight from the Czech Ministry of Transport, complete with mean footfall figures, recorded from an aerial blimp that observed the action from sixty thousand feet.
I scanned the map and spotted a nearby side alley that was virtually never used.
Now that John Paul had disappeared, my tails were our biggest lead. A gift, really. I started cricking my shoulders and stretching my arms—a public warm-up for the violent exercise that I was about to engage in. It was the scruffy youth from the streetcar who was following me at that moment, and he stopped for a second, bewildered by my sudden burst of energy. I guess it just didn’t occur to him that he had just gone from predator to prey.
And so it came to pass that I was able to launch a total surprise attack on this unlucky youth.
I slipped into the deserted alleyway. He scurried after me, oblivious to the fact that I was waiting and ready to deliver a sucker punch straight to the solar plexus. He went down with a pitiful gurgle. Exactly as I planned. I was almost disappointed at how easy this was.
“Surprise,” I whispered in his ear and then delivered another powerful blow. For now, my aim was to beat all resistance out of him, no more.
It was a delicate balance, hurting someone enough that they have absolutely no fight left in them without actually knocking them out cold. Easy to misjudge. This time, though, I seemed to get it right—helped by a few more well-placed punches and kicks to the face.
“Now then,” I said. “You’re going to tell me who you are.”
“I’ll never speak,” said the youth, through swollen lips. I dug the tip of my foot sharply into the prostrate youth’s kidney.
“Now then,” I said again. “You’re going to tell me who you are.”
“I’m nobody,” the youth said.
I brought my weight down on his kidney again. Oops, my foot must have missed, and I must have pressed down on his stomach instead. Warm vomit erupted from his mouth.
“Who are you? Tell me,” I said for the third time. Except this time I spoke in Czech, using the vocabulary and grammar from the lesson I just had with Lucia. An interrogative sentence or a normal one, the rules are the same in Czech: the phrase you want to emphasize comes first.
“I’m nobody. Please. Please believe me, sir. I really am nobody.”
Hmm.
It seemed that my Czech lessons weren’t destined to bear fruit so quickly. Well, enough talking. Time to find out what I needed directly from his body. I pried open his swollen eyelids and photographed his bloodshot retinas, and then pressed his fingertips onto my portable reader to get his prints. If we’d been in a better location I could have really tightened the thumbscrews and had him singing in no time, but we were still in the middle of the city, after all, so I decided to call it a day.