Transition. Part 10

"I give in. Where the h.e.l.l are we?" I put just a little edge into my voice.

"Set your watch forward two hours," she told me.

"Seriously," I said.

"Seriously," she said, nodding at my wrist. "Two hours."

I gave her a look but she wasn't paying attention. I left my watch alone. I checked my mobile. No reception. Not even emergency numbers. f.u.c.king marvellous.

There was a part.i.tion between us and the driver. He looked old. Worn-looking uniform, open shirt, no cap. Connie lifted up what looked like one of those very early mobile phones with a separate handset and looked at a dial on its top surface. Then she put it back on the floor of the limo and went back to the newspaper.

We sped down this weedy highway. No other traffic at all. There was what looked like a big town or a small city off to one side. We turned towards it, hurtling along a four-lane road still with no other traffic. The buildings looked pale, blocky, very Fifties or Sixties and all the same. I caught a glimpse of what might have been a helicopter, low over the horizon.

It was a bit stuffy in the car. There was a big chrome rocker switch by the window that looked like it might lower the gla.s.s. I tried pressing it. Didn't work.

"Don't bother," Connie said. She clicked another switch on her side and spoke to the driver via a grille I'd thought was for ventilation. Again, sounded like Russian. The driver's voice crackled back at her and I could see him gesticulating as he looked at us in his rear-view mirror. The car wove from side to side a bit as he did this, which would have been even more alarming than it was if there had been anything else on the road.

Connie shrugged. "The air-conditioning is not working," she told me, and went back to her paper. "The filters are okay."

"Window on your side work?"

"No," she said, not looking up from her paper.

I bent forward, studying the sun roof.

"I wouldn't bother," she said.

I looked out at the deserted city whistling past. Long tall lines of identical apartment blocks, all abandoned.

"Connie, where are we?"

She looked over the paper at me. She said nothing.

"Is this f.u.c.king Chern.o.byl?" I asked her.

"Pripyat," she said, and started reading again.

I reached over and pushed the front of her paper down. She glared at my hand holding the newspaper.

"What-eh-at?"

"Pripyat," she said. She nodded. "The city near Chern.o.byl."

"What the f.u.c.k are you doing bringing me here?" I actually felt quite angry. No wonder we couldn't open the windows to all that dusty air. The big mobile-phone whatsit would be a Geiger counter, I guessed.

"It's where my client would like to see you."

"Why?"

"They have their reasons, I'm sure," she said smoothly.

"Is it one of these f.u.c.king oligarchs or something?"

Connie appeared to think about this. "No," she said.

We came up to a big shed of a building that looked like it had been a supermarket once. A wide metal door rolled part-way up and the car drove straight in. We got out inside this brightly lit loading area that held a couple of other cars and a small military-looking truck with big wheels and lots of ground clearance. The air was cool. A couple of very large bald guys in shiny suits greeted us with nods and walked us up some steps, through a couple of those transparent plastic-curtain doorways. Between the two plastic curtains there was a bit with a big circular grating in the ceiling and another in the floor. A blast of air was roaring out of the overhead grating and down into the one beneath our feet. Then we went down a hushed, wood-panelled, soft-carpeted corridor to a door which opened with a sucking noise. There was a very big plush office inside, all bright lights and potted plants and desks and comfy leather sofas. One whole wall was a giant photo of a tropical beach with palm trees, shining sand and blue sky and ocean.

A very pretty round-faced girl with a bit too much make-up smiled from behind a desk with a couple of computer monitors and said something in Russian or whatever. Connie fired something back and we sat down on two of the plush leather couches, facing each other across a gla.s.s table covered in the sort of magazines you only seem to see in posh hotel rooms.

Before I had time to get bored there was a buzzing noise from the receptionist's desk. She said something to Connie, who nodded at the wall of beach photo. There was a door in it that had been concealed until now. It was opening, all by itself.

"Mrs Mulverhill will see you now," she told me.

(Ensemble).

A man bursts into a book-lined room. On a chaise longue, there's an old man lying underneath a younger woman. They both look groggy and confused, lying/kneeling on the chaise. The man who has just burst in hesitates because the old man looks like the person he is supposed to kill, but he seems vacant, like a husk or something, and when the old guy's gaze meets his the man who has just broken into his private study and caught him mostly naked in flagrante with his mistress the old fellow doesn't seem outraged, ashamed or embarra.s.sed. He just stares up, blinking, at the younger man, and looks confused. The young woman straddling the older man is staring, fascinated but unconcerned, at the gun he is holding. The younger man remembers what he is supposed to be doing and shoots them both in the head, twice.

They found the woman sitting against a tree just off the hill path. She was humming and making little chains of flowers. Three of them held her while the fourth garrotted her. She offered no resistance and they knew something was wrong. There followed some debate regarding how much they ought to tell the people who had hired them.

The body washed up on the beach near Chandax was patently still smiling, despite having been nibbled by various aquatic fauna. A small crowd was gathering on the morning-cool sand. A man standing at the back looked at the expression on the body and frowned. He'd known it had been too easy, on the yacht, the night before. He thought about lying to his superiors.

The woman who'd sunk a razor-chisel between two of the Graf's vertebrae conscientiously reported that her target had stopped humming along with the aria a moment or two before she'd struck, though she was adamant that she had been so silent and so mindful as she'd entered the box of give-away drafts, not to mention careful of where her shadow might fall and her reflections might lie that he could not possibly have realised she was there.

It was agreed that the admiral had been staring ahead rather blankly in the instant before she was shot, despite the fact her lover had just been cruelly cut down in front of her. Under pressure, the team agreed that perhaps the admiral had been transitioned just before her death. Under further pressure, they agreed to consider the possibility that so had the Commandante.

The a.s.sa.s.sination teams still could find no trace of Mrs Mulverhill.

The Transitionary.

I set some chips down on a green square, changed my mind and pushed them over to blue. I sat back as the last few gamblers placed their own bets and the croupier looked expectantly, impatiently around. He announced "No more bets" and spun the wheel. It whirled, glittering, forever if ba.n.a.lly like a Ferris wheel from a funfair.

Through its whirring gilt spokes I saw the woman approaching the table. The ball inside the wheel clacked and rattled around the vertical spinning cage of spokes, battering off the blurred edges like a fly trapped in a bottle. The woman girl? moved with an easy, swinging step, almost like a dance. She was very tall and slim, dressed in flowing grey, and wore a small hat with an attached grey veil. I thought of Mrs Mulverhill immediately, though the woman was too tall and seemed to move differently. Not that that meant anything at all, of course. Veils were just about still common enough at the time for her not to look out of place wearing one, though she still attracted some looks.

It was spring here in the southern hemisphere of Calbefraques. Perhaps five years had pa.s.sed since that night in Venice when my little pirate captain had tried to talk to me and had died for it. I had been asked perhaps twice a year at first, later once a year or so by my Concern superiors if any other attempt had been made to recruit me to whatever paranoid cause Mrs Mulverhill espoused. I had been able to answer honestly that no, neither she nor anybody else had tried to do so.

I had by now become a trusted agent of the Concern, spending a slim majority of my time in other worlds, doing whatever was asked of me. It was mostly the very ba.n.a.l stuff: the delivering of objects, the couriering of people (not that I was especially good at that), the pointed conversations, the leaving of pamphlets or computer files, the tiny, usually mundane interventions made in a hundred different lives.

I had since made only one other intervention as dramatically salvationary as the one with the young doctor in the street, when the building fell down; I was sent to one of the topmost floors of a tall building in a Manhattan, to b.u.t.tonhole a young man who was about to step into a lift. He was a physicist and the world was a fairly laggard reality so engaging him in a conversation featuring an idea or two that he and anybody else there, for that matter had never heard of was not difficult. This stopped him from entering the lift, which promptly plunged twenty storeys and killed everyone aboard.

There were two other occasions when I was asked to take rather more violent action, once in a sword fight in a sort of unevenly early Victorian Greater Indonesian reality (leaping in to defend a great poet and hack off the limbs of a couple of his attackers) and once when I transitioned straight into the mind of a very brilliant, very handsome but very headstrong young chemist who had made powerful enemies in a Zimbabwean United Africa. I became him for just the few seconds required to turn, aim and fire his duelling pistol blowing his much more experienced opponent's brains out before exiting again.

My handlers were most impressed. I got the impression that ever since the affair in the Venetian bar they had had me marked out as a natural thug. I did ask not to have to do too much of that kind of blood-sport stuff in future, but I was also quietly proud to have acquitted myself so well. Still, every now and again I was asked, and I obliged.

Meanwhile, I had been learning. I knew more about the history and organisation of the Concern now and had studied it the way it studied other worlds.

Mrs Mulverhill, I'd learned through rumour rather than any official channel was the latest of the very small number of Concern officers who had gone bad, mad or native over the centuries. She had somehow evaded the network of spotters and trackers and foreseers who were supposed to guard against this sort of thing and might even have had her own supply of septus, the transitioning drug, though this probably just indicated that she had access to a stockpile she'd somehow built up while still in the fold, as it were, rather than a way of making it from scratch.

She was regarded as a strange, remote, almost mythical figure, and given her patent irrelevance and powerlessness one to be pitied rather than reviled, though of course one was supposed to report immediately any contact with anybody who might be operating in a manner similar to that of l'Expedience but who was doing so outwith its control and oversight, and that would certainly cover her and her behaviour. I was, in any case, still not sure my little pirate captain really had been her.

The woman in grey in the Flesse casino came up to the table and stood watching the play. The ball clicked and clacked inside the slowing wheel and settled into its trap when the wheel finally swung to a stop. Gold. I comforted myself that my first instinct putting the chips on green had been no more prescient than my later change of mind favouring blue.

The game went on. She refused a seat when one came free. I tried to see her face but the grey veil hid it effectively. She turned and left ten minutes later, disappearing into the crowd.

I lost fairly steadily, then won moderately and finished a fraction down over the evening.

I tested the air in the outside bar, on the terrace under the trees by the side of the river, the town centre a buzz of music and traffic under the lights on the far side. It was warm enough under the hissing table heaters. I had met some people I knew and sat with them for a drink. The grey-veiled woman was standing by the stone wall a couple of tables away, looking out over the river.

At one point, I was fairly sure, she turned and looked at me as I talked with my friends. Then she turned slowly away again.

I excused myself and went up to her. "Excuse me," I said.

She looked at me. She put the veil up over the front of the little hat. It was a pleasant, unremarkable face. "Sir?"

"Temudjin Oh," I said. "Pleased to meet you." I put out my hand. She took it in one grey-gloved hand.

"And I am pleased to meet you."

I hesitated, waiting on a name, then said, "Would you care to join me and my friends?"

She looked over at our table. "Thank you."

Much talk, all very congenial. She said her name was Joll and that she was a civilian, not part of the Concern, an architect making a submission to the local authorities in the town in a couple of days.

The evening drifted on, people drifted away.

Finally only we two were left. We had got on terribly well and shared a bottle of wine. I invited her to see the town from my house on the ridge and she accepted with a smile.

She stood on the terrace of the house, gazing at the lights. I put my hand on the smooth grey surface covering the small of her back and she turned to me, setting her drink down on the bal.u.s.trade and removing her hat and veil entirely.

We repaired to bed, with the lights out at her request. We had f.u.c.ked once and she was still holding me in her arms and inside her when she took me.

Suddenly, I was sitting at the corner of another gaming table in a different casino. She was in the next chair, just round the corner of the table from me so that we could talk easily. The game was under way; the wheel in this version was horizontal, sunk into the table's surface. It was spun by what looked like the top of a giant golden tap. The only colours on the table appeared to be red and black, though the baize was green.

"Hmm," I said. My companion was looking much more glamorous and more heavily made-up than she had been, though the face was not dissimilar. Better cheekbones, maybe. Her hair was blonde where she had been auburn. She wore a lot of jewellery. I appeared to be heavier than I was used to being. Nice black suit, though. I went to smooth my hair down and discovered I didn't have any. There was a polished cigarette case lying by my ice-filled drinks gla.s.s, and an ashtray. That would account for the gurgling feeling in my chest when I breathed, and the slight but insistent craving for tobacco. I looked at myself in the reflective metal of the cigarette case. Not a prepossessing figure of a man. My languages were French, Arabic, English, German, Hindi, Portuguese and Latin. A smattering of Greek. "This is, ah, interesting," I told her.

"Best I could do," she said.

"You did say you were a civilian," I reminded her, a little reproachfully.

She flashed me a look. "So: a lie, then."

The last time somebody else had couriered me, taking me on a transition I was not controlling, had been back in UPT, when I was still being trained. That had been over ten years earlier. What she had just done was impolite at least, though I suspected this was beside the point.

"Have we met before?" I asked. It was time to place bets. We had some plastic chips in front of us; she had more than me. We both chose nearby numbers.

"Most recently, here," she said quietly. "This world, or as good as. Venezia, Italia. Five years ago. We discussed restrictions on power and the penalties a.s.sociated with trying to evade them."

"Ah. Yes. That didn't end too well for you, really, did it?"

"Have you been shot yet, Tem?"

I looked at her. "Yet?"

"Hurts," she said. "The way the shock of it spreads through your body from the point of impact. Waves in a fluid. Fascinating." Her eyes narrowed fractionally as she watched the horizontal wheel spin, its centre glittering. "But painful."

I looked round some more. The casino was gaudy, over-lit, expensively tasteless and full of mostly slim and beautiful women accompanying mostly fat and ugly men. The fragre was not so much of too much money as of too intense a degree of concentration of it in too few places. It's not uncommon. I'd thought I'd recognised it.

"Can you remember your very last words?" I asked. "From that earlier occasion?"

"What?" she said, brows furrowing attractively. "You want to check it's really me?"

"Really who?"

"I never said."

"So say now."

She leaned right in to me, as though sharing some intimacy. Her perfume was intense, musk-like. "Unless I'm much mistaken, I said, 'Some other time, Tem.' Or, 'Another time, Tem'; something like that."

"You're not sure?"

She frowned. "I was in the process of dying in your arms at the time. Perhaps you didn't notice? Anyway, hence I was a little distracted. However, the interception team might have heard me use those words. More to the point, before my violent but dashing end, I used the term 'emprise.' Only you heard that."

Which was true, I recalled, though I had told the debriefing team from the Questionary Office this fact as well, so that didn't really prove anything either.

"And so you are...?"

"Mrs Mulverhill." She nodded forward as we were asked to bet again. I hadn't even noticed we'd lost the last gamble. "Good to see you again," she added. "Had you guessed?"

"Soon as I saw you coming."

"Really? How sweet." She glanced at a thin, glittering watch on her honey-tanned wrist. "Anyway, we don't have for ever. You must be wondering why I'm so keen to talk to you again."

"Not just the s.e.x, then."

"Wonderful though it was, obviously."

"Uh-huh. Consider any latent male insecurity dealt with. Carry on."

"Briefly, Madame Theodora d'Ortolan is a threat to more than just the good name and reputation of the Concern. She, with her several accomplices on the Central Council of the Transitionary Office, will lead us all to disaster and ruin. She is a threat to the very existence of l'Expedience, or, even worse, if she is not, and instead represents all that it most truly stands for, proves beyond any doubt, reasonable or otherwise, by her past actions and present intentions that l'Expedience itself is a force for evil that must be resisted, contended with, brought down and, if it's possible, replaced. But in any case reduced, entirely levelled, regardless of what may or may not come after it. In addition, there may well be a secret agenda known only to the Central Council, and perhaps not even to all on it, which we or, at least, you and your colleagues, given that I am not one of you any longer are unwittingly helping to carry out. This secret agenda has to stay secret because it is something that people would reject utterly, perhaps violently, if they knew about it."

I thought about this. "Is that all?"

"It's enough to be going on with, wouldn't you say?"

"I was being sarcastic."

"I know. I was seeing your sarcasm and raising you deadpan literalness." She nodded forward. "Time to bet again." We both placed more chips.