by John Barnes
“Then Mr. Iphwin secured our release?”
“Geoffrey Iphwin and ConTech don’t swing much weight here,” the inspector said, behind me. “At least, that is, at any level of which I’m aware. You got released by direct order of His Most Catholic Majesty. And so far as I can tell the reason for that was a protest lodged by the Ambassador from the Free Republic of Diego Garcia, based on Dr. Perdita’s dual citizenship.”
I stared at him. I had never heard of the Free Republic of Diego Garcia. Helen looked more shocked than I’d ever seen her, even more shocked than in the moments after the shooting.
But getting out of jail when you’re being held for murder is not the kind of thing you turn down just because you don’t know what’s going on. We and Iphwin’s men hurried out into the night.
The heavyset guy said, “My name is McMoore. I apologize again, sir.”
“It’s quite all right,” I said, “since neither of us can figure out what is going on, anyway. Helen, what do you want to do?”
“Talk privately and then sleep, I think.” She seemed terribly distracted, but then that was hardly a surprise. “I guess we could go back to the hotel.”
“We’ll do our best to guard you this time, properly,” McMoore said. “It’s not a far walk—just a few blocks—do you want to let us just form a phalanx around you and walk there slowly? I would be pretty leery of flagging down any public transport right now, eh?”
“Absolutely agreed,” I said.
I felt like I was moving at the center of an infantry patrol in enemy territory; the ConTech men were all around us, and I had a distinct sensation that every one of them had his shooting hand close to a weapon.
Nothing happened. In the last two blocks before the Royal Saigon, we passed through a cluster of brightly lit, noisy nightclubs, all of them clamoring for attention, but Helen walked slumped over, not looking around despite all the noise and color that swirled around our phalanx of bodyguards like a chaotic wake around a ship of order. Probably jail had been much tougher on her than on me—I wasn’t the one charged with murder.
I kept turning that over in my head. How could Helen possibly have concealed so much about herself? She was apparently a spy or agent of some kind for a country that as far as I knew didn’t exist. And yet I didn’t think there had been three days of her life in the last few years that I didn’t have at least some knowledge of. For that matter, how could she have gotten all those weapons concealed in her clothing when we were both dressing in the same room, and she was wearing a form-fitting backless and sleeveless dress?
Despite all the streetlights, the street was dark, and in the thick humid air we didn’t feel like moving fast anyway. This morning I had gotten up to go interview with Iphwin, hoping to get a job and then spend a weekend in Saigon with Helen. So far that much of the plan was going perfectly, but with a bewildering array of additions and changes that made no sense to me; it was as if some exceptionally stupid maker of action movies had decided to parodize my life. Helen and I drooped along, surrounded by our armed guards, who were probably pretty angry at having been so outwitted and outfought by the enemy—whoever the enemy might be.
By the time we got back to the hotel I was stumbling, falling asleep on my feet, as the adrenaline drained out of me and the reality of how complex and difficult our situation had become set in. McMoore told me that they’d take care of posting the guard, and two of his men went into the room ahead of us and searched it, finding no bugs, no weapons, and no lurking attackers. So far as we could determine, none of our possessions had been touched. “Sleep well, then, sir,” McMoore said. “Once again—”
“You’re terribly sorry, I know,” I said. “And once again, I can’t even begin to think what you could possibly have done differently. None of us had any idea how much trouble was about to erupt. I know I’ll sleep better, knowing that you’re out here guarding us, and truly, if Iphwin gives you all trouble, I’ll be sure to speak up for you.”
“I appreciate that, sir.”
“And I’m glad you’re here too,” Helen said, the first words she had spoken since we left the police station.
McMoore nodded and left; Helen and I undressed slowly, turned out the lights, and got into bed.
After a long pause, I said, “First of all there’s a small thing I want to ask you. When and where did you ever learn to use those weapons, let alone to go so heavily armed to dinner? I didn’t even see you put them on—you must have been really quick.”
She groaned, a sound so painful that I thought for a moment that she was ill, and thumped the bed with a fist. “I don’t have the foggiest idea. I don’t know how to shoot, Lyle, I don’t, I never learned, I can’t remember even ever holding a gun. All I know is that you and I went to dinner, after getting engaged, and then I don’t remember much about dinner, except that it was some kind of Italian veal dish—I remember the attack, but the strangest part is that my impression was that she was aiming at me, and I remember getting under the table and you standing up, and some gunfire, and your body falling backwards with blood all over. I saw that my purse had fallen off the table, so I grabbed my phone and hit the emergency key—and then there I was, not under the table, but standing up, talking on the phone to the police, with a pistol in front of me on the table, a cloud of smoke all around me, and the dead body of a fat German tourist that didn’t look remotely like the tall blonde woman who had attacked us. I had no idea what the things the police were saying meant, but I could tell they were on their way, so I hung up, looked around, and saw that you were perfectly fine, the German man was perfectly dead, and it was like I had just stepped into some other life—the dress I was wearing wasn’t mine, I looked at it in the store and decided it was too expensive—and I had a bunch of heavy objects tied to me under my clothes. You can’t imagine how strange it was when the police searched me and found out that they were weapons.”
“You want me to believe that you saw a woman come at us, and shoot at you?” I asked. “I saw the man that you saw dead, and it was definitely me he was after.”
“But it was honestly what I remember.”
“Well,” I said, “the body they showed me was Billie Beard, a woman who matches the description—very tall, blonde, muscular, in great shape but probably sixty years old. People might easily mistake her for a transvestite. Was that the woman you saw?”
“Yes, it was. Or at least your description matches.”
We lay there still in the dark, not touching each other. My arms were folded on my chest; Helen seemed to be clutching the sheet. Like the very best hotels everywhere, the room was pitch black and dead silent, and I only knew where she was from the feel of the warmth of her body and the sound of her breathing. After a long time I thought of something else that I should mention. “The strangest thing of all in some ways,” I said, “is that I believe you.”
Helen sighed. “And I saw you shot dead in front of me and here you are.”
“We seem to have a difference in our observations,” I said. “And about some pretty critical matters.” I was near crying or screaming, but Helen seemed to be worse off than I was, and she had had a much worse, scarier time. I was not going to throw a funk in front of her while I had any self-control at all. “Didn’t it seem strange how fast the Cochin-Chinese dropped the case? If anything they seemed to be suddenly extremely interested in investigating the case, and happy to get us out the door. And if Iphwin didn’t put in the fix—well, there isn’t any Free Republic of Diego Garcia, and—”
Helen wailed, a horrible sound I’d never heard come out of her before, and began to sob. “Not anymore,” she choked out. “There’s not one anymore. And I don’t know where it went.”
I’m probably not one of the world’s great lovers. If pressed, I would have to admit I’m just about the classic stereotype of the scientist who doesn’t know what to do in an emotional situation, but even I could figure this one out; I rolled over, reached out in the dark, took Helen in my arms, and he
ld her as her body pitched and bucked with sobs.
A very long time later, she whispered, “I am going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone before, nobody at all, not ever. I’m not sure what it means, if anything. I don’t know that it means anything. Maybe it only means that I’m mentally ill, but— oh, Lyle, it’s so hard to trust anyone, even you, with this.”
I hugged her close and said, “Tell me about it, or don’t. Your call. I’ll love you anyway.”
It must have been the right thing to say. Helen grabbed my hand and squeezed it, hard, and then whispered, “All right. Don’t even ask any questions till I’m done or I’ll never have the courage to tell you the whole thing, but here goes. I grew up among the first generation born on Diego Garcia, where the Pacific Fleet of the American Navy fled and established the Free Republic after the Puritan Party won the elections in 1996 and took over the country. There were no Reichs when I grew up—I don’t mean I didn’t hear about them, I mean the United States and Russia and Britain won the war, Hitler died sometime in the forties, Germany was divided among the victors, all that. In 1983 there was an atomic war between the United States and all the Communist countries—Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan—and after the war, when we were forced to give the whole northern tier of states plus New England to Canada, and Florida to Cuba, and so forth, the Puritan Party became very powerful, got elected, and made it illegal to be anything except a Puritan Christian. In the years just after that, almost two million people who fled the country made their way to where the fleet had put in, at the old naval facilities at Diego Garcia, and created a small trading nation there, kind of like Macao or Singapore, which quickly became rich. Really, that’s the world I went to high school in. I’m not making it up.
“My senior year, my class went for a class trip to New Zealand, to visit the American expat community there, and on the last day, I was phoning my mother to let her know there had been a change of schedule, and suddenly my mother was asking me who I was and why I was calling her, so I got upset and hung up and dialed again—and the operator said there was no such country code and no such place. And I looked around and my whole class was gone, there was just me at the pay phone, and my Free Republic passport was gone but my American expat one was still there ... I was so scared. I ran into a Catholic shelter for street people and stayed there for days, afraid to talk to anyone, thinking I might be locked up or given drugs or shock. I listened to the news and saw some papers, and I didn’t understand a single thing I was reading, even though I knew most of the words. It sounded as if the Germans had won World War Two, and there was no Russia anymore, and there had never been a Puritan Party or a Free Republic—I was so terrified.”
“What did you do?”
“Went to the library and speed-read history books to try to learn how to fake my way through the world.
“Then I started reading other subjects, once I realized I wasn’t going to wake up and go home any minute. Math and science were easy, they weren’t much changed, but literature was really something different.
“The nuns at the shelter were very nice, they thought I must have amnesia or something and they took care of me and tried to help me recover my memory. The thing was, my memory was actually what was causing all the problem, you know. Once I was sure enough of my ability to fake being from this world I’d fallen into, I claimed to recover my memory, and I caught a boat to a small town where I thought they wouldn’t check up, told them I’d dropped out of school but I wanted to take my equivalency exam.
“They let me, I did well, then I enlisted to have a job, put in my four years for Her Majesty—as a clerk, mind you, and no one ever even showed me a weapon—and then was in a position to go to school. Naturally I majored in history—there was so much I needed to know if I wasn’t to be carted off to some loony bin—and I found I liked it, stuck with it, and here I am. And I still miss my mother horribly, and for eighteen years I’ve had a very hard time believing in the world I live in. I love you, Lyle, but I wish I could wake up and find that I’m still eighteen and this is all a dream.”
“Perfectly understandable,” I said, and gave her a little kiss on the cheek.
“You believe me?”
“I believe you’re telling the truth as you know it. And I believe that your story is entirely possible. I just don’t understand how or why. Have you checked your handbag? Do you have a Free Republic of Diego Garcia passport?”
She switched on the light and stared at me, wide-eyed. “Lyle, I’m so afraid to look. What if I do? What if... what if the Free Republic is there again? I could ... Mummy would only be fifty-eight, she’d surely still be alive, she must have been so worried— what if I don’t have it?”
I kissed her on the forehead. “Shall I look?”
“Would you, please?”
I got out her handbag and looked inside; there were not the usual two passports, US Government in Exile plus Kingdom of New Zealand. There were four. I pulled them all out. The two expected ones were there, as was one from the Free Republic. “One from Diego,” I said, and handed it to her.
“When I was growing up we called it Free Deejy,” she said, absently, sitting up in bed to look through it. “But the flag was different from this, and the capital was on board a beached aircraft carrier, not in some place called New Washington.”
“Could they have built it since you left?”
“I don’t know where. It’s a pretty small place.” She flipped to the back, where the visa stamps go. “Oh, look. I’ve been to the Free Republic of Hawaii, Korea—which doesn’t seem as if it is part of Japan—and a dozen or so times to the Indonesian Soviet Socialist Commonwealth, wherever that might be. What’s the fourth passport?”
I looked down at it and sighed. “It’s the only one that isn’t for Helen Perdita, and it’s a spare Enzy one. With an 015 code.”
“What’s an 015?”
“I guess you really were just a clerk in the Navy, love.” I sighed and sat down on the floor. “I was an officer and had to learn that anyone with an 015 gets absolutely everything he or she asks for, right now. It’s a code stamped in the upper right corner that indicates that you’re a high-level secret agent, a spy or maybe an assassin. At least now we know where you got the gun training.”
“What does it all mean?” she asked.
“It means we’re right out of any possibility of figuring it out tonight,” I said, “and it means I believe, absolutely, everything you’ve told me. Every damned word, my love. Now let’s get under the covers, turn out the light, hold each other, and see what we can learn in the morning. I love you very much, and I am so sorry that you were separated from your mother so suddenly.”
I’m not sure if that was a right or wrong thing to say; she burst into tears and cried for a good half hour before she could finally get to sleep. When I was sure she was sound asleep, I slipped out of bed, sat down on the floor, and had a good cry, myself.
* * * *
The next morning we had just gotten up and had room service breakfast in. We had ordered a pot of coffee and a cup for McMoore’s man outside the door, which I figured was a wise investment, and I noted with some amusement that no one from the hotel found it even slightly unusual; the Royal Saigon probably dealt with bodyguards all the time. We were dressed and wondering what to do; not having been guarded before, we weren’t sure what it was ethical to ask people to do in the way of guarding us out on the street; could we just go out like any tourists, did we need to consult? This was outside both our usual experiences.
We had settled on the plan of having the man at the door call his supervisor in for a conference, when the phone rang. I picked it up. “Mr. Lyle Peripart, I’m afraid I have very bad news concerning your house.” It was the voice of my house-sitting company, which monitors the house’s brain, and that was already bad news—because they only call you if the brain can’t. At the least it means a couple of months’ pay to replace a damaged brain. And usually if the brain
is damaged, the house is too.
“How bad is it?”
The robot’s voice was implacable; it’s not supposed to get emotionally involved. “Mr. Peripart, the house was a complete loss, sir. I have recordings up to three minutes before the alarm was turned in to the police. That usually indicates a brain that was killed instantly. The building itself was destroyed, sir.”
I sighed. Well, this is what one keeps insurance current for; it was going to be a nuisance, and I would probably come out of it poorer than I went into it, but there wasn’t much else to do. I had never been one, really, to get attached to things, and the house had always seemed to be simply my personal machine for living. Now I would need a new machine.
“Is there anything else you need to know at this time, sir?”
