Tham Cheng-E - Surrogate Protocol

“Programming a tag,” she answers.

“Whose tag?”

She looks up and smiles. “Yours, darling.”

Whiteout. Marco rushes at Casey but she slips easily beyond his reach and out of the car. He lunges but the constriction in his chest has begun, and the shock of it washes over him like a shroud of death. Seconds later a debilitating stab of pain infuses his heart. He crouches, his arms wrapped tightly around his torso as if he is about to defecate. Then as a dying vessel he keels over to his side.

A car pulls up behind them without its headlights on. A man emerges, his hair waxed and combed sideways, his sharp, studious gaze bearing down coldly upon the thrashing body, and with the same unassuming poise he had exuded when a Chronomorph named Anton Lock had singled him out to a pair of constables for stealing a dead man’s omnicron.

He was at once the dapper young man who had led Hoo to Aldred, the freshman down at Rookie Row who had dropped John the warning of Marco’s imminent arrival.

And through his ailing sight Marco remembers the headlock…

Julian .

Their gazes meet, if only for an instant. Julian doesn’t speak to Marco, but continues watching him with chilling apathy. “Tag type?” he asks Casey.

“It’s old.” She checks her pad. “Nineteen-fifties—the time when they made him Agent, thereabouts. Works through the blood, delivered via the standard tongue-and-lip micro-cuts.”

“You have the source?”

Casey flips the pad over to reveal Hannah’s pensive monochromatic portrait—the same one John had discovered in Marco’s computer. “Alpine-One.”

Marco, his back arched and fingers curled, now convulses in a pool of his own vomit. He defecates in his underwear. His face bloats. He starts weeping blood from his eyes and ears. “Fabian…” He croaks into his shirt collar.

Aversion develops in Julian’s gaze. “Sure the Chronie’s clean now?” he asks. “I don’t want any glitches when we do the pickup.”

“Positive.” She slaps Marco’s omnicron in his hand. “We got his guy an hour ago.”

“Fabian…” Khun strains a whisper, his good eye darting madly about.

“We’re all part of the same system, Marco. Tracker to Tracker.” Julian finally speaks, tucking his hands thoughtfully into his pockets. “Nothing personal.”

The dying centenarian is helpless to respond. That arch in his back has crushed a few vertebrae and the pain has stalled even the muscles in his jaws. Drool spills over his lips, and then a crimson foam follows. Julian turns around and saunters back to his car.

“Check his vitals, note time of death.” Marco discerns Julian’s voice above the whine of the engine. “And call the Morgue. You know the rest.”

What is a century in eternity? Not even a microsecond in a minute.

Thunder still rumbles even though the rain has ceased. Landon drifts along the roadway; insensate and soulless. He is walking away from the racetrack, away from a past forever lost. Everything feels unreal, as if entombed in the ashes of a powerful and malignant secret the world would be better off without.

Another road takes him towards the giant observation wheel, now closed but still illuminated in a ring of blue light. A street-sweeping vehicle closes in from behind, its circular bristles scrubbing away at the kerb gutters, and Landon imagines someone leaping off it and slitting his throat. Farther on a car turns into view, and its headlights blind him.

It does a turnaround and pulls up beside him. The rear window rolls down and he prepares for a fatal shot. Instead, Julian’s face appears. “Mr Lock,” he calls out.

Landon walks sullenly on.

“I was hoping you’d come with us, if John meant anything to you.”

The words hit home. Landon halts and the rear door swings open.

Julian taps the seat beside him and Landon enters. The airconditioned interior is dreadfully cold and Landon’s damp clothes worsen the chill. There are two others in the car: the driver and a passenger in front.

After riding in silence for a while Julian asks to be dropped off at the Fullerton Hotel. Before he leaves the car he offers a hand and Landon, still in a state of considerable shock, takes it absently. “I wouldn’t worry about Marco,” he says. “We’ve been tracking him for years before we gathered enough grub to take care of him. He’s been spinning tales and getting elimination orders to serve his interests. This guy’s got many enemies. You’re just one of them.”

Landon listens with a drab expression and makes nothing of it.

Julian eyes him searchingly. “That day at your home wasn’t the first time we met.”

Landon looks up at him, his sights finally drawing focus.

“Day of the sepoy mutiny,” Julian smiles. “You were driving a donkey cart then.”

“I was?”

He taps Landon on the shoulder. “You’ll remember.”

The door shuts and the car cruises on. Landon watches the tinted windows and in his own wretched reflection he sees the face of a wimp. He despises himself for his weakness, for his failure to even weep and mourn for Amal, for John.

For Hannah.

Now there is nothing in him but an insidious void that threatens to grow and dominate his entire existence. It quenches all emotions and puts him in a state of unnerving quietude. It turns him placid, and allows him to discover the source of his fatalistic apathy.

He is preparing himself for his turn.

“I hope you’re mourning for John,” says the man in the front passenger seat. He looks over his shoulder and Landon finds his olive-shaped face familiar, along with his long snowy sideburns and sprigs of hair sprouting from the top of his ears. “He was a dear friend of mine.”

“His daughter…” Landon says softly. “Is she ill?”

“Her name’s Fanny. Diagnosed with terminal neuroblastoma.”

Landon, unspeaking, turns his eyes back to the window.

“I’m Thaddeus, by the way,” says the man. “I don’t suppose you remember me.”

“Where are you taking me?”

Thaddeus faces front. “Someplace safe.”

When the car passes a landmark at a traffic junction Landon knows they are heading for Labrador Reserve down at the southwestern coast of the island. A straight and narrow road takes them to a car park where they alight. They follow a mouldering brick path that winds into the forest. Thaddeus leads the way with a penlight and Landon can tell they are now trudging uphill. The ground transitions from brick to asphalt and then to concrete, and he finds himself in an old bunker. Just ahead he makes out the glint of metal and the barrel of a large gun emplacement.

Thaddeus fishes out something and speaks into it. He does not rush the phrase, but articulates it with precision. “Iftahya simsim.”

“What is it?” says Landon.

“Arabic.”

“What does it say?”

In the darkness he hears Thaddeus chuckle. “Open sesame.”

There is the grinding of stone and the moan of metal, and Landon blinks hard against the gloom to clear his sight. The massive gun is swivelling impossibly on its base, as if it has suddenly become operational after a century of disuse. A ring of light pours through a gap in the floor as the gun detaches itself from its base, rises to a mechanical whine and reveals a cylindrical elevator and its shaft.

“I’m surprised you didn’t blindfold me on the way up,” says Landon.

“Open sesame and a secret hideout?” Thaddeus ushers him into the lift. “Try telling that to the authorities.”

“Won’t anyone else see this?”

“This park has more eyes than you know.”

The elevator descends upon magnetic rails, slowly at first, then accelerates for a few seconds before slowing down to the cushioning of an opposing magnetic field. Its metallic walls revolve to reveal a circular room cladded in some kind of ceramic material. Landon sees a few pods set against a wall punctuated by tunnels just large enough for the passage of a grown man.