Saskia Brandt: Deja Vu Part 6

'No names. Are you going to be sick?'

'No.'

'Good, because I haven't finished. The imposition of the donor pattern must be constant. If not, the original pattern - that is, the personality and ident.i.ty extant in your brain - will resurge. If you switch off the chip, you switch off "you".'

'My...body's personality was convicted of murder.'

'Don't get distracted. You need to protect that chip. If you ever receive an electric shock, say goodnight. Likewise don't let yourself be put in a scanner that uses magnets. You could get a bracelet like mine. It says I have metal in my head from a hunting accident.'

'I can use a gun, a computer, and I know the layout of this city. Why can't I remember anything else?'

'Slow down. You're conflating episodic and procedural memory. Speech, for example. You haven't forgotten that. Walking too. That's all procedural memory. Some of those skills will come from your brain, some from the chip. If you're talking about memories of people, holidays, and your childhood, that's episodic.'

'Then why don't I have any of those memories?'

'I guess our boss didn't think you needed them.'

'But they should be part of the donor personality. Part of me.'

Klutikov shook his wrist to expose his watch. 'I have to go soon.'

'What's your story?'

'My story.'

'Why did our boss recruit you?'

He lit another cigarette and put it in her mouth. 'First, you need to understand that you're not responsible for the crimes of your...body. You - the person I'm talking to - are completely different. You're brand new. You're not answerable for the crimes of your body any more than you're responsible for the crimes of your parents. Understood?'

'No.'

'Good. That's honest.' He looked past Saskia's shoulder. 'One year ago, I discovered that I was a fraud. In my own mind, I had been working criminal cases for ten years, but, of course, the truth was that I'd been active for less than two months. Before that, I had been a real terror. When our boss told you what you were, he let you keep your memory of the event. Not in my case. He wiped mine soon after the attestation. My big wake-up call came this summer when I was on holiday in Poland.

'I was out fishing. A man walked by with his two sons. He took one look at me and literally had a heart attack. Fortunately, I had my field kit, so I could treat him. Shouldn't have bothered. When he woke up, he shouted to his sons that I was the b.a.s.t.a.r.d who killed their mother during a bank robbery the year before. I...' he shrugged. 'I buried them where I shot them, the sons and the father. By morning, I was two hundred miles away. I went straight to our boss, confronted him, and he told me everything. Since then, I've found it difficult to concentrate. So I do odd jobs.' He paused. 'Saskia, there is one more thing I must tell you. It's the answer.'

'The answer to what?'

'The question you've been asking yourself since yesterday.'

Klutikov reached for his coat. He withdrew a broadsheet newspaper and handed it to Saskia. The script was Cyrillic. The lead story was accompanied by a picture of her.

No, this body I've infected.

Her hair was much longer and the wind had blown it wide. Two police officers held her arms.

'Sorry it's in Russian. I could translate it for you.'

'Could my chip translate it?'

'Given training, yes.'

'What does this bit say?'

'"Angel of Death in Custody".'

Saskia felt the words in her belly. 'They call me the Angel of Death?'

'Yes. You were a ma.s.s murderer. You were captured at the German border.'

'No. No.' She wiped away a tear with her knuckle.

'Listen, you were a murderer. Past tense. You're a blank slate now. Look at your badge. Ex tabula rasa.'

'But surely I'm still responsible?'

'Don't get philosophical about it. Be pragmatic. Do you feel like a murderer? Could you kill someone now in cold blood?'

Saskia's eyes were fixed on the article. The Cyrillic letters seemed to warp. 'You did,' she said. 'That Polish man and his sons.'

The end of their conversation. Coffee in a cinder-grey room, murderer to murderer. Saskia put her lips to the cooling rim of her cup. Klutikov gathered his cigarettes and flung his coat about his shoulders.

'Where will you be?' she asked.

He took the newspaper. 'East of the Urals, if not west. Remember, your past is just a tabloid horror story. Give it up. If our boss finds out I told you, he'll kill us both. Just work the case he gave you.'

As he left, Saskia sent a thought to her chip.

Who am I?

Chapter Ten.

David had been given orange overalls and cuffed to the floor of a wine cellar by a short shackle, which forced him to crouch. He wore a hangman's hood. A faraway speaker blasted static. He remained still and silent. Let his captors think he was done. He daydreamed that he was poised on a starting block. He could maintain the stance. He played squash twice a week. Cycled to and from work. The room here was cold, but he had known colder.

He sterilised his thoughts through the slow recall of his third-year seminar on psychological interrogation. The physical stress of the crouch was designed to weaken him physically. The static filled his hearing; the hood removed his sight. Given time, such sensory deprivation would turn his mind upon itself, trigger an incestuous multiplication of thoughts would lead led to hallucination and breakdown.

There was a crack in his composure that McWhirter had failed probe. Bruce was dead. David had murdered him. The stain would mark David forever, but his deeper fear spoke to his daughter's reaction.

Why, Daddy?

Any answers were smothered by the sudden silence. The speaker had been turned off.

David heard flat shoes moving slowly.

A woman said, 'I can get you out if you come with me and ask no questions.'

'Deal.'

The hood was pulled away by a woman whose seriousness reminded him of Jennifer, but whose eyes were bottle green. She was dressed in black. Both crouching in this wine cellar, he looked at her and smiled as her power-cutters sighed through his chain. She did not smile back. Instead, she took his hand and touched the sound system. Its speakers roared with static once more. Rapids, thought David. Deep breath. Hold it.

'Quickly.'

They ran through a corridor into a kitchen - mortuary-clean, prepped for new day - and into a pantry, and through chambers where old washing machines had once laundered great and good clothing, and down spiralled, wobbling stairs into darkness, and then she turned and said, 'They've realised. Faster.'

David still wore his work shoes. They had no laces and he slipped against the dusty brick work. 'Slow down.'

'Nearly there,' she said. The door ahead was haloed. She barged it and they were outside the hotel, in a yard. Recycling bins lined a low wall.

'It's daytime,' said David.

'Quiet.'

She pulled him into the gap between a bin and the wall. There was a police motorbike on its lay stand. Its white panniers gleamed in the nodding shadows.

'Get behind me,' she said, swinging herself across the seat.

'Don't we need helmets?'

'Come on.'

David heard a shout pa.s.s through the firs upwind of them. He settled behind her. Oddly intimate. Her long hair smelled of coconut.

She touched the ignition. A windscreen rose from the fascia and fairing grew out around their legs.

'Are you the woman who burned my house down?'

'Yeah.'

They erupted from the hotel. The wind recalled the interrogation static as they erupted from the hotel. David put his cheek to her ear, trapping her whip-like hair. His trouser cuffs buzzed. He looked up. They left the grounds and a tunnel of trees closed over them. The woman downshifted. The bike shuddered. She cut left, though an open gate, and rooster-tailed through a slush of mud and leaves. Then the bike found its grip once more. They rode uphill.

'You're right,' he shouted. 'We are lucky.'

'Opened the gate myself,' she called back.

The bike shimmied briefly and David, unbalanced, dropped his grip to her hips. The flush of impropriety warmed his core. But she turned to him, smiling.

They kept to the incline. Ahead, panicked sheep had clotted in a corner. The woman swerved across them and abandoned the field through another open gate. She downshifted again and shouted, 'Lean with me.' They made a deep turn that sc.r.a.ped the fairing. The corner opened to reveal a dozen more sheep. Escaping too, David thought. Go.

'Hold tight,' she called, slaloming through the animals.

'A helicopter,' David said.

'Where?'

He pointed.

'They can join the queue,' she said.

David waited for a straight section of road before he turned. Behind them, a marked police car canted on its suspension as it emerged from the bend. Blue lights flickered on its roof.

The next few minutes were disposed in a tiring series of accelerations and decelerations. They took the bends hard and roared along the straights. The road steepened. Soon, David could see the valley floor. It was bluish with distance. Above them, the helicopter remained fixed, thudding.

'Hold on,' she shouted, and David tucked himself into her shape. The lane lost its hedges. She swerved onto the stony, gra.s.s-splattered shelf that overlooked the valley, hundreds of feet below. She wove around the rock piles. David struggled to look back. The police car had parked and its doors were open. Black-vested officers, their arms open for balance, teetered through the uneven rocks in pursuit.

She stopped.

'Get off the bike and run.'

He hopped sideways. His legs smouldered with camp. 'Where?'

She nodded at the house-sized tor in the near distance. Then she pulled away towards the cliff edge. David glanced at the policemen. They had slowed to a walk. It was no challenge to understand their complacency. With the helicopter, David could not hide from surveillance, and the foot officers had him trapped against the sheer drop.

He looked for the woman, but the motorbike had disappeared, sight and sound. Gasping, he loped towards the tor. His posh shoes slipped on the stones and the wind cut through the fabric of his orange overalls. Finally, he rounded the granite slabs and settled in their lee. He hugged himself and considered the lip of gra.s.s only twenty feet away, and the valley floor so far below that. He was in greater trouble than ever. His house was destroyed; his career was over. Bruce was dead. He would never see his daughter again.

David lowered his face to his knees.

When the woman lifted his head in both hands, he was surprised by a tear in her eye. She brought his lips to hers like he was a cup. There was no desire in the kiss. Only a relief.

'I am so glad to see you, David.'

He studied her face. 'Who you are?'

She placed a gloved finger to his mouth. 'Put this on.'

The rucksack was no larger than an archer's quiver. It had loops for his shoulders. As he struggled into it, he saw that the woman wore a similar pack.

'Wow, it's heavy.'

'See this, David?'

She was holding a piece of paper in front of him. High, like ID. The pink paper had lost its corners, and the fold lines had almost torn, but David recognised it as the only personal item he had rescued from the burning house in Oxford that morning.

'Who gave you that?'

'Never mind. Look at the number.' She tapped the corner of the drawing. In ball point pen, someone had written TS4415. 'I need you to remember this code.'

'Why?'

She glanced at the helicopter. 'Just do it.'