Ian Hocking - Flashback

‘Not well enough.’

‘Expatiate.’

‘You let the boy follow you to the cemetery. He compromised the dead-drop.’

Cory did not know what to say. There was embarrassment, yes, at this failure of tradecraft. But he had contained the situation. He wanted Jennifer to know that he had exercised his professional judgement. He closed his mouth and tried to relax. He was, he realised, crushing his hat. He relaxed his grip and smoothed the rim.

‘If you gave me more information about this time,’ he said, ‘I’d be in a better position to operate effectively. I need day-to-day intelligence on organised crime, developing black market routes, safe houses, and full access to the news media archive.’

‘Oh, no particulars, Cory,’ she said. Her voice had assumed a didactic tone. This annoyed Cory. She had no right to consider herself the equal of his instructor, Blake. ‘You only need generalities. Drifts. Particulars give you information log-jam. You know what happened to your predecessor.’

‘I can handle it. Jackson had psychological problems.’

‘And you are immune? No stirrings of madness yet, Cory?’

‘When I stop asking to come home to my wife, you’ll know I’m mad.’

‘No. It’ll prove you’re sane, trying to act mad to escape an insane situation.’

‘ Catch-22 ?’

Jennifer tipped her head to one side. ‘Let me tell you something. Heller wanted to call the book Catch-18 , but another author was about to release a war novel called Mila 18 . So he changed it to Catch-22 .’

‘I didn’t know you read novels.’

‘Why would I? Dad told me.’

‘What’s the moral?’

‘ Catch-22 means something, Catch-18 means nothing. All because of an accident. Things start random, then they… congeal.’

‘In that case,’ said Cory, ‘things cannot be random to start with—that randomness is only the solidified product of the apparent randomness before.’

‘Result?’

‘It’s randomness all the way down.’

The smile again: tutorish, distant.

‘You scared yet, Cory?’

‘Always.’

‘So you’re sane for now.’

‘Jackson was the first time traveller,’ Cory said, ‘and we learned from his mistakes.’

‘You’re wrong. Jackson wasn’t the first.’

Cory raised his eyebrows. There was a brotherly grin on his lips. It told her that he wasn’t about to fall for the joke. But Jennifer nodded slowly.

‘Jackson was the third,’ she said. ‘The first didn’t survive the trip. The second did more than survive.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The second washed up in 2003. Marooned. But she has a part to play yet. We have evidence that she’ll be alive in the year 2023, aged forty or so.’

Cory knew that he resented the bump from second place to fourth. He had gone from being a Buzz Aldrin to… whoever was fourth on the moon. ‘At least she has a telecommunications network to interact with. What have I got? Paper cups and strings.’ Cory waited for his angry thoughts, like winds, to blow themselves out. Still waiting, he changed the subject to Lisandro. ‘Forget the boy. He’s nothing to do with us. I took him back to his mother’s apartment.’

‘You always were an idiot.’

‘What now?’

‘Don’t come the southern farm-boy with me.’ She opened her handbag and produced a rolled newspaper. It was the Buenos Aires Herald. ‘This is tomorrow’s newspaper. Let me show you what the Lady Saint Maria has in store for Lisandro. Here.’ She passed it to him. ‘Read it out loud.’

Cory looked at the newspaper and gasped. He pictured himself astride a horse—a trick inherited from Blake at Base Albany—and reined his heart to a trot. He became stony and controlled.

STREET BOY BUTCHERED, ENGLISHMAN SUSPECTED

‘I have to kill him?’

‘That dead drop has other functions. If Lisandro tells anyone about it, several operations will be compromised. He has to go.’

‘This changes things. They’ll be looking for me. I need a new identity.’

‘Of course you will. Ready?’

In their mental connection was a touch of the numinous. It rendered quaint the narrowband contact of fingers, or his lips on hers, or the first slide of intercourse. Cory knew the mundanities: a wireless handshake between his ichor and that of Jennifer; a wide-band burst of procedural and episodic memory; a fake personality violating the closed universe of his mind. It hurt.

Slowly, she eased out of him.

The new identity was that of a German flying ace who, Cory was amused to learn, had never existed beyond the sensational pamphlets of a junior clerk at the State Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. The Nazi phantom was known as Wittenbacher, der Vitvenmacher . Wittenbacher the widow-maker. Cory felt the man like a corpse laid out in the parlour of his mind.

She turned his chin with a fingertip. Her eyes, at last, were soft. ‘Cory, the boy has always been dead. He was dead before he was born and he was dead after he died. His life is just a blip on a line: a two-dimensional irregularity on the forever one-dimensional. Here’s the secret: That blip gets smaller when you zoom out.’

‘You want me to think like that?’

‘I want you to face the fact that you’re going to kill him.’

‘You sound like Jackson.’

Quietly, she said, ‘My poor, dumb Charlie. Your body made the small step, but your mind couldn’t make the giant leap.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘What’s new, soldier?’

Berlin

Cory stumbled against some bins. It hurt to breathe. He pawed at the lids. Locked. He had spent the day asleep beneath a disused bandstand not far from the TV tower. Automated systems in his immortal blood were weaving new tissue, conjuring life, but it would not be enough.

‘Move it, Georgia,’ he growled, using the nickname given to him by his old Gunnery Sergeant. The rain drummed his shoulders. ‘Elbows and assholes.’

Another step. The Ghost felt old beyond his eighty-eight years. The very clockwork at the centre of his cells had unwound. He was far beyond the help of contemporary medicine.

He followed a green line visible to him alone. One hand kept him steady against the closed shopfronts. His feet sucked at the standing water. Some passersby slowed with horror. Others saw nothing. For them, he had taken on the invisibility of a man to look through. There was a litter bin on the corner. Cory found half a kebab in it and took two bites.

The green line went on. The ground swayed and the Ghost recalled a young fisherman, Gomez, who had taken him out on a moonless Christmas Eve in 1949. The jewelled string of Montevideo had lain behind them. As Gomez and Cory dealt the nets, they stopped in wonder at the glowing green channel that crossed the ocean ahead of them. It was clear to Cory that this was phosphorescent algae churned up by the screws of the US Navy frigate that had cut through the bay an hour before, but Gomez was spooked by the colour. The sea’s dead are marching , he said, crossing himself. He would not listen to the reassurances of Cory. They gathered the nets and went home. Cory left South America before the next winter.

One hundred metres on, the Ghost took a right turn. This, he knew, was the last turn he could take on this night. His muscles burned with the acids of prolonged labour. His eyelids trembled. He walked down an alley and fell against a painted wooden door. A sign read, Jesus hört dir zu . It flickered in his eye: his bodily repairs were taking priority over the translation. Then the meaning broke through: Speak and Jesus will listen .