Ian Hocking - Flashback

Saskia’s reaction startled Jem: she stepped forward. Cory nodded, as though this confirmed his perception of her. Did he now believe that Saskia was telling the truth? And Jem too?

Jem asked, ‘Who is he?’

‘The father of Jennifer Proctor, who sent me,’ said Cory. ‘There were thirty of us in the team, and though David was never officially part of it, he was our doddery old Brit, our mascot. Our work—the work of the project—involves the manipulation of gravity. David fell into one of the spinners and died instantly. It cast a shadow across the team. A couple of weeks into the routine enquiry behind the accident, an independent investigator found evidence that David had arranged to meet someone the night he died. Jennifer, his daughter, had turned into management central since his death. The first time I met her, a couple of years before, she was already a tyrant, but the older members of the team kept telling me what a wonderful person she was, deep down. Those folks started to leave, though, and their positions were filled by people like Jennifer: driven hard-asses. When Jennifer found out that the inquiry had uncovered a potential murder, she couldn’t sleep. Literally. She downloaded illegal scripts to override the safeties on her automata. She was wide-eyed for a week. At the end of it, she took me aside. She called me their best operative, which was probably untrue. I was a greenhorn. The most naïve. She said that the inquiry had uncovered an Islamo-fascist conspiracy to undermine the Confederacy. Her father, she said, had been on the brink of exposing a mole inside the project, and had been killed as a consequence. Our specialist in entanglement, a flashy character called Patrick Harkes, was missing, and she was certain of his guilt. I don’t understand the first thing about carbon entanglement, but it was the key, according to Jennifer, to tapping energy from a nearby universe and would, in one heave, pull the Confederacy back from the brink. It would usher in a new era of cheap energy. But Harkes had stolen the one element we needed to make the focusing technology work: a large diamond, bigger than any ever found.’

‘The Cullinan Zero,’ said Saskia.

There was a rustle of simultaneous movement. All eyes in the room found all others. Cory looked at the scar on his palm. Pyrene .

‘Keep talking,’ said Danny.

‘I can’t stop thinking about my wife in the green room shortly before I made the jump. When I look back across the years to 1947, I can’t imagine another scenario in which I would have tried so hard to succeed. I searched for Harkes on three continents. I hunted him for sixty years. All the while, my goal was my wife. Even now.’ He paused, and his eyes searched the ground. ‘Jennifer was uninterested in the rebuilding of her adoptive country. She was always in the game for the knowledge, and to see what her technology could do. She wanted to join Newton and Einstein. That is, until her father was killed by Harkes. Then she wanted revenge and she reached for the nearest tool. Me. In her drive to spend every second on the project, I think Jennifer pushed herself into psychosis.’

‘Whereas,’ said Danny, ‘you’re just a charming eccentric, like Proctor.’

‘I don’t ask you to understand, Mr Shaw.’

‘If you’re going to kill us, you could at least make the effort. Come on. You’re bonkers, aren’t you?’

‘Danny,’ warned Jem.

‘When you look at us,’ asked the inspector softly, ‘do you see… marionettes?’

Cory’s eyes had narrowed.

‘Saskia,’ he said, ‘you tried to save that aircraft even when you knew it would crash. Why? What’s your secret?’

‘I’m human. It’s what we do. What’s your secret?’

Cory sighed. His breath flowed white.

Something changed in the air of the hut. Jem could not, at first, define it. Coldness, yes. Numbness. Then the details of things—the greenness of Saskia’s eyes, the slight downturn of Cory’s mouth—grew indistinct. A sudden weakness gripped her neck and her head lolled forward. This shocked her into panic. Was the room filling with gas? Was it carbon monoxide? She looked at Cory. His expression was businesslike. There was no sign that he was affected. As Jem’s sense of the world narrowed to a trickle, she watched Saskia coil for a punch that never came. Cory pushed her lightly and she fell to one knee.

‘He’s doing it,’ said Danny, coughing. ‘Use the gun. Shoot the bastard.’

The night returned.

Cory approached the fallen Óskarson first. Blood fizzed from his reopened neck wound, glistening with each heart tick. Cory licked his finger and touched the hole. It closed. Then he made a circuit of the room and checked the airway of each person. He picked up the smart matter. There was rotor noise in the air: enough to send his mind across the years to 1947, riding in good company towards the marvellous Star Dust .

‘Never shit more than you can eat. ’

He smiled.

But there was the rotor sound. A police helicopter.

Outside the hut, the snow lay in long folds. The sun was dim in a cloudy sky. Later, those clouds would snow, but for now they were curled fists in the gap of trees formed by the stream. Cory walked around the hut. A drift had buried Tolsdorf and his ingenious electromagnetic apparatus.

‘There’s a song?’

‘Dummy. Everybody knows it.’

‘I don’t know it.’

He had parked the stolen ambulance at the end of a ranger track. He climbed inside and located three bottles of oxygen. He rubbed his hands with a sterile wipe to remove the grease, then opened all three. He stepped out and closed the doors. He entered the cab, started the engine, and depressed the cigarette lighter. What he would do for a cigar. The radio handset chilled his grip. ‘Police helicopter above me, come in.’

‘Who is this? Mr Self?’

‘If you like. There will be a smoke trail for you to follow. The people you’re looking for are at its base.’

The explosion flooded the ambulance and burst its cracks. The windows darkened with soot. Minutes later, the helicopter descended. Its thumping rotors flattened the flames.

The Scharmützelsee, three weeks later

The two rivers Oder and Spree define a district in Brandenburg, eastern Germany. Within this district, one can find the Scharmützelsee, which is a narrow lake ten kilometres long. On its wooded western edge, not far from an abandoned campsite, there is a road whose concrete slabs make traffic go lub-dub , lub-dub as the driver heads south, parallel to the blue expanse. The sound is pure East Germany. Poland is less than thirty-five kilometres away. It is winter and the wind today comes from Russia.

The man is driving through the tunnels of colourless trees. Through occasional breaks in the woodland he sees the lake. He is thinking too much of Saskia Brandt. His thumb guides the steering wheel. His seat is fully pushed back. The radio, though German, plays American and English music almost exclusively, and he is singing along to a recent hit, Will Young’s Leave Right Now .