by Jon Steele
“Inspector Gobet has explained this to me. The inspector has also explained that, presently, you are suffering, as it were, from a certain condition that causes you to . . . not die in your form.”
A wave of nausea burned through Harper’s form, and he tasted bile in his throat. Non mortem timemus, sed cogitationem mortis . . . We fear not death, but the thinking of it. No idea who said the words, Harper thought, but they were bloody appropriate just now.
“Till quantum mechanics kicks in.”
“Monsieur?”
Harper looked at the judge. “Punch line of a bad joke, gov. I just got it.”
The judge bowed his head, his lips trembling again. He was praying, Harper realized. Silently, profoundly. When he finished, he said, “Monsieur, you are the chosen one of the fallen. You are the reincarnation of Bernard de Saint-Martin.”
Harper read the judge’s eyes, seeing the man believed his words to be holy truth. Harper felt another blast of nausea, and he rested his head in his hands. He saw the signet ring on the little finger of the judge’s left hand. He flashed back to the night he met the judge at Brigade Criminelle, seeing the same ring; this time, Harper could make out the insignia. A conical pillar pointing to a comet. Harper raised his head, looked at Inspector Gobet.
“Right. Any more surprises?”
FIFTEEN
TGV 9261, PARIS TO LAUSANNE: 07:44 HOURS.
COACH 17, LIKE THE REST OF THE TRAIN, WAS PACKED.
Harper sat next to a snoring Chinese gentleman who was busily sleeping off the Kung Pao Chicken takeout he’d carried on board and devoured within minutes of leaving Paris. No worries. Kept him from bumping into Harper’s slinged-up arm. Across the table was a retired American couple from Boston, Massachusetts.
Taking a grand tour of the continent, the wife said. They’d done Paris and were now on their way to do Florence, then Venice. On the way they thought they’d take the waters at Leukerbad in the Alps. They’d be staying at l’Hôtel de la Source. Five stars, of course. Harper heard all about it after he’d made the mistake of saying yes when asked by the woman, “Would you happen to speak English?” The woman hadn’t stopped talking since, often returning to the subject of Harper’s unfortunate accident in Paris. (“Hit by a tour bus on the Champs-Élysées,” Harper had told her.) And each time she returned to the subject, she was reminded of yet another relative or friend dispatched in similar fashion.
“I remember my aunt Dahlia. Charming woman, though somewhat forgetful. She was walking across Madison Avenue in New York, when suddenly, last summer . . .”
Nice thing about a one-sided conversation, Harper thought, one doesn’t have to pay much attention. And serious one-siders, of which the American woman was Olympic-class, didn’t require any attention at all. Gave Harper an opportunity to take in the English-language newspapers behind which her husband hid. All the papers carried the same picture on the front page: a comet hanging in the night sky above Paris.
Herald Tribune: “Unknown Visitor Crosses Earth’s Orbit”
The Guardian: “Celestial Wonder Over Europe”
Daily Mail: “What the Hell Was That?!”
Of the three, Harper thought the Daily Mail put it best. Fact was, the comet had come and gone in a most uncometlike fashion. He’d seen that one with his own eyes, back in Astruc’s library on Rue Visconti. On top of it, rather. Just after he looked at Inspector Gobet and said, “Right. Any more surprises?”
That’s when a section of the built-in bookcases creaked open and from behind it stepped a woman in black leather clothing and boots. Took Harper half a second to clock her as Corporal Mai from the vineyards in Grandvaux. She’d swapped her Swiss Guard camouflage for heavy metal biker gear. She wore it like she was born in it. Her jacket was open and there was a Heckler & Koch MP-5 slung from her neck. Meaning Corporal Mai was as comfortable with an up-close contact kill as she was with the long-range sniper variety. She glanced at Harper, and he almost smiled as he recognized the genetic trait of her half-breed eyes.
“C’est l’heure moins quinze minutes, Inspecteur.”
The inspector checked his watch, looked at the judge. The elderly gent was repacking his pipe with tobacco.
“Thank you, Corporal Mai. We need one minute.”
“Oui, Inspecteur.”
The judge was packing his pipe with Bergerac tobacco, and when finished, he patted his pocket for a light. Inspector Gobet already had a match at the ready.
“My dear judge, allow me,” the inspector said.
The judge drew the fire to his pipe.
As Harper watched the judge disappear into another cloud of head-swallowing smoke, he flashed through his timeline. All the times Inspector Gobet offered a light for one of his own fags, Harper had yet to see the Swiss copper light a bloody match. The fire was just always there, at the ready. Our kind survive in a world of dual, and sometimes opposing, realities, Harper thought, the line between them often blurred. And for a second Harper wondered which part of his own dual reality noticed the inspector’s trick with the match. Was it that eternal being from another place, knowing all physical matter could be manipulated by a mastery of gravity? Or was the dead man in his head, Captain Jay Michael Harper, manipulating his imagination to see the world for what it truly was? Doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn, Harper thought, or Captain Jay Michael Harper thought, or maybe even Bernard de fucking Saint-Martin thought. The magically appearing flame was a swell trick.
The judge’s head reappeared from the smoke.
“Thank you, Inspector. Shall we adjourn to the roof?” he said.
The two gents pushed away from the table and made a move for the exit. Harper didn’t get up.
“Wait, are we done here?”
The inspector turned back, raised an eyebrow.
“Not in the least, Mr. Harper. But as I explained earlier, we’re on something of a schedule this evening. We’ll continue with the debrief later.”
Harper stood, stepped toward him.
“Not bloody good enough, sir.”
Mutt and Jeff jumped, grabbed Harper’s shoulders at the brachial plexus, and squeezed. Harper froze, unable to move. The inspector coughed.
“Mr. Harper, we may be dealing with one more legend of our kind, or we may have been handed the key to all there is to know about our being here. I, for one, should like to know which it is. Come along, and do try to make yourself genuinely useful if called upon to do so.”
The inspector turned and walked away. Mutt and Jeff released Harper and walked after the inspector, the two of them looking back at Sergeant Gauer.
“Grab his shit and bring him along.”
“And keep an eye on him. He’s the sort that’d get himself lost in a paper bag.”
Sergeant Gauer dropped the respirator tank into a backpack, tossed it over his shoulder. He picked up Harper’s sports coat and overcoat, tossed them over his left forearm. He pointed to the passage behind the bookcase.
“Let’s go.”
“So what are you, now, my guardian angel?”
“At the moment, I’m your fucking butler. Move it, s’il vous plaît.”
Five floors up a creaky wooden stairwell and they were on the roof. It was one story higher than the surrounding buildings, and with a one-meter-tall hedge along the roof’s perimeter they were hidden from the surrounding locals. Harper saw the Eiffel Tower above the rooftops to the southwest, just as it began to glitter madly with a billion flickering lights. Maybe not that many, but no matter, he thought. The flickering lights made it the top of whichever hour it was.
Three men on the roof already.
Harper made two of them as Inspector Gobet’s boys. They had that too-smart-for-the-real-world look, and they wore the uniform. Black-framed eyeglasses, black suits, white shirts, skinny black ties under black overcoats. Same as the light mechanic who fitted Lausan
ne’s old town with Arc 9 filters; the chap with a fascination for the terminal velocity of falling cats. These boys, the ones on the roof, sat at a makeshift table, banging away at Crypto Field Terminals. For a sec, Harper wondered how he knew what the machines were called. Wondered again how he knew they were top-secret, magnesium-shelled laptops for spooks. The dead British soldier in his head must have used them in Afghanistan, he thought.
The terminals were connected to four twenty-seven-inch monitors displaying numbers, graphs, elliptical patterns overlaying elliptical patterns, and a shitload of chemical analysis data. No clue what the information meant. Next to the table were two parabolic antennae units pointing to the southwest sky, right over the top of the Eiffel Tower. The dead soldier in Harper’s head identified the gear as AEHF; Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellite uplinks and downlinks. Meaning whatever Inspector Gobet’s computer geeks were up to, it couldn’t be tracked, hacked, or jammed.
A third man stood behind the computer geeks. Midthirties, clean-shaven mug. He wore a Barbour coat over a cable-knit sweater and corduroy trousers; there was a pair of Steiner 10x50 binoculars hanging from his neck. He was bouncing on his heels, brown eyes wide, brown hair standing at perpendicular angles from his head. No way this chap was one of the inspector’s boys, Harper told himself. This chap was jazzed to the gills. Like a plane spotter just receiving word Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra had been spotted after eighty years and was making its final approach at Le Bourget. Not even noticing the crowd of suits, muscle, and guns coming onto the roof to gather behind him. The man in the Barbour coat kept his eyes locked on the monitors, gasping at regular intervals, “Holy crap, holy fucking crap.” His accent was British.
Harper checked the sky as the billion blinking lights on the Eiffel Tower switched off, meaning it was now five minutes after whichever hour it was. No sign of Amelia. Looked like the sky on any night, minus one moon. Given the light pollution of central Paris, it was a night sky minus most of the stars. The judge tapped the giddy man in the Barbour jacket on the shoulder. He turned around, shook his head with disbelief.
“I mean . . . holy fucking shit. How did you know this would happen?”
The judge took his pipe from his mouth.
“Know what, exactly, young man?”
The man pointed to the monitors. “That! If this is real and not a hoax, then we’re on the verge of a celestial event of unimaginable proportions.”
Inspector Gobet joined in the conversation. “May I ask why?”
The man looked at the cop in the cashmere coat.
“Who are you?”
“I am Inspector Jacques Gobet of the Swiss Police. I have provided the technical equipment and support staff for tonight’s operation.”
“You? You’re the one hacking into Blue Brain?”
“My dear fellow . . . By the way, what is your name?”
“Leo.”
“Leo what?”
“Mates, Dr. Leo Mates. But you can call me Leo.”
“Unfortunately, my position requires me to keep things on a more formal level, Dr. Mates. But let me assure you, everything being done here is completely aboveboard. No one is hacking into Blue Brain. We are merely monitoring the activity of two individuals who are.”
“Who are they?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because they’re brilliant, whoever they are.”
“I’m afraid information as to their identities is classified. Suffice it to say, you are participating in a joint police operation between Brigade Criminelle of France and the Special Unit Task Force of the Swiss Police.”
Given his clothes still reeked of death and vomit, Harper kept himself well in the shadows and downwind of the conversing men, but he could hear their words. As usual, when the cop in the cashmere coat was speaking, most of the words didn’t make sense. Adding the pipe-puffing judge into the equation yielded a quotient of confusion-squared. Harper looked back at Sergeant Gauer.
“The inspector is talking about Astruc and the kid. They’re the hackers, yeah?”
“Good guess.”
Harper thought about it.
“So what the hell is Blue Brain?”
“Supercomputer at EPFL.”
“The research center outside Lausanne.”
“Affirmative.”
“What’s it used for?”
“Mapping a single synapse of the human brain. Something along the lines of mapping the human genome, only a billion times more complicated.”
“One of the inspector’s toys, is it?”
“Do pigs fly?”
“In the inspector’s case, all the time.”
“Et voilà.”
Harper thought about it some more.
“Sorry, but what does mapping the human synapse have to do with Paris?”
Sergeant Gauer looked at Harper.
“Je ne sais pas. I’ve been underground for three fucking days trying to dig out your sorry arse, haven’t I?”
Harper returned his attention to the conversation on the other side of the roof where Dr. Leo Mates was laying out his CV for the benefit of Inspector Gobet. Astrophysicist from Oxford with three PhD’s under his belt. Has his own television program on the BBC explaining the wonders of the universe to the great unwashed. World’s leading expert on the composition of ice crystals in the Oort cloud (a theoretical spherical body parked a light-year from the sun, he explained; to which the inspector replied, “Fascinating”). In town to read his latest scientific paper at l’Académie des sciences tomorrow evening (revealing new mathematical models to prove beyond a doubt that the oceans of planet Earth were formed by a bombardment of frozen water comets and asteroids 4.5 billion years ago; to which the inspector replied, “Most impressive”). Arriving at Gare du Nord this evening, he was stopped by members of the French Police and advised his presence was requested by one Monsieur Bruno Silvestre, special investigating judge of Brigade Criminelle, to consult on a matter of great urgency. That being a comet that would appear in the constellation Draco at 03:05:00 hours for a period of sixty seconds exactly. Dr. Mates did have plans to have an early dinner with friends and then retire to his hotel, but considering he was presented with this predictive information at 19:15:17 hours, the eminent astrophysicist was intrigued. He’d spent all night on the roof with Inspector Gobet’s computer geeks, taking in the numbers and graphs and ellipses and chemical analysis data. He’d worked himself into such a state, he made a kid waiting for Christmas look bored. Which explained the wild hair, Harper thought, watching Dr. Mates pull at it with disbelief.
“I mean holy crap!”
Raised a question in Harper’s head: Why was Leo the Astrophysicist being let into a world locals were never meant to know of? Just then one of the geeks at the Crypto Field Terminals spoke up.
“Pardonnez-moi, Inspecteur. According to the data, we will have visibility emanating from constellation Ursa Major in three minutes, thirty seconds.”
“Merci,” the inspector replied, continuing his conversation with Dr. Mates. “So, in fact, would you describe what we are about to witness as a comet?”
“If you’re asking me if the data says that what’s supposed to appear is made of ice and has a cone-shaped tail, then yes, it’s a comet. But it isn’t possible.”
“For what reason?”
Dr. Mates pointed to the sky.
“Comets don’t appear from thin air, they come from somewhere. I don’t understand how the science community couldn’t have picked this up, not with the array of radio telescopes we have around the world.”
“Perhaps,” the judge said, “no one had their telescope pointed in the right direction. And if I am not incorrect, the annual Draconid meteor shower has been known to offer a surprise now and again. Perhaps this is just a stray meteor.”
Dr. Mates shook his head.
“A white what?” asked the inspector.
Dr. Mates waved his hand dismissively.
“It’s very complicated stuff for laymen. Point is, it’s impossible one of those telescopes wouldn’t have picked up this kind of activity. It’s just impossible.”
The judge puffed at his pipe a moment.
“As you continually remind us, Doctor,” he said. “But you must agree, a meteor shower is not like a Swiss watch.”
The inspector enjoyed that line and chortled his approval. “I should say not.”
Dr. Mates stared at the policeman with disbelief.
“For heaven’s sake, the Draconids aren’t the point!”
“No? Then what is the point?”
“Look, the Draconids are made up of Giacobini-Zinner.”
There was a pause for Dr. Mates to consider no one knew what he was talking about, or at least pretended not to know. Harper would lay odds on the latter. He knew it to be a sure bet when he caught the tone in the inspector’s next line.
“Could you elaborate, please, Dr. Mates? After all, I’m only a lowly Swiss policeman involved in a criminal investigation.”
“Okay. Let me try to explain it. Giacobini-Zinner is the parental comet of the Draconids. But I’m telling you, the Draconids and this aren’t connected.”
“Again, why not?”
Dr. Mates pointed to the monitors. “For one, the data says this is a different comet from a different part of the galaxy. Two, it just can’t happen. It’s impossible.”
The two police considered the doctor’s argument with blank expressions.
“Nevertheless, the Draconids meteor shower is imminent,” the judge said after four-point-two seconds.
“So fucking what?”
