White Death

by Daniel Blake

  53

  Tuesday, November 23rd

  New Haven, CT

  There were only three people who knew Kwasi well enough to be of use to Patrese. One of them wasn’t talking to him, and another was under such heavy and overt surveillance that he wouldn’t be a model of co-operation either.

  That left Tartu. Yes, Patrese remembered that he too hadn’t been keen to help: but maybe Tartu would reconsider now that a few days had passed, now that they were a couple of corpses further down the line, and now that Patrese was running out of options.

  Patrese left the hotel and set out on the short walk toward the Beinecke Library.

  No one else in the rare books room, Tartu noticed, but him and Anna. Perfect.

  She’d brought out the Voynich Manuscript, one of the most famous items in all the Beinecke’s collections. The Voynich was … well, no one really knew what it was. It was about 240 vellum pages, though there may have originally been more pages long since lost or stolen. The Voynich’s script was unreadable, its language unknown. It had illustrations of plants, but most did not match known species. Some scholars thought it an elaborate cipher, others theorized it was automatic writing, a human channeling of spirit instructions. And there were plenty, of course, who thought it nothing but a hoax.

  ‘My God,’ Tartu whispered. ‘This is really it. I can’t believe it.’

  Anna smiled at him as though in benevolent indulgence of a child’s artwork.

  ‘Enjoy it,’ she said.

  She turned and went back to her desk on the other side of the room.

  Tartu put his hand in his jacket pocket and closed his fingers round the X-Acto. He looked around the room. Still empty. No one to see him. There were video cameras, but over the past week he’d gotten to know where they were, and while walking around the room had managed to work out their blind spots.

  He hadn’t been allowed to bring any bags into the room, of course, but he’d sneaked a few peeks behind the reference desk, and he saw that Anna and other members of staff had left a few round there. Not especially big ones, but big enough for his purpose.

  She had no idea, he thought: no idea at all. A few cuts, that was all it would need. The X-Acto was scalpel sharp. She wouldn’t even know it was happening.

  He eased the knife out of his pocket.

  Patrese pushed open the door to the Rare Books room. It was heavy, presumably for sound muffling, and it moved silently on its hinges: well oiled, as a squeaky door being opened hundreds of times a day would have driven even the calmest librarian mad.

  Tartu had his back to Patrese. He was pulling something out of his pocket.

  The briefest glinting of something metallic as the light caught it.

  Knife, Patrese saw. Knife. Tartu looking to see whether Anna had noticed. Knife. Patrese’s head swam with missing heads and shoulder stumps and skin patches cut out.

  ‘Hey!’ Patrese shouted.

  Two heads jerked toward him as though they were marionettes: Anna surprised; Tartu alarmed. Tartu dropped the X-Acto and clamped his hand to his mouth. Blood oozed between his fingers. He must have cut himself as he jumped, Patrese thought.

  Patrese covered the distance to Tartu’s desk in a few quick strides. Anna hurried over too, eyes widening as she saw the blood. ‘Don’t get it on the manuscript!’ she cried. ‘For God’s sake, keep it away from that. I’ll get you a tissue or something.’

  Patrese bent down and picked the X-Acto up from the floor. ‘That’s where the blood came from,’ he said. He turned to Tartu. ‘What the hell are you doing with this?

  Anna’s face spoke of a thousand betrayals. ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘Not you.’

  ‘You were going to kill her,’ Patrese said.

  ‘Kill her?’ Tartu said. ‘Kill her?’

  ‘No,’ Anna said. ‘He wasn’t going to kill me.’

  ‘Then what?’ Patrese asked.

  ‘There’s only one reason you’d bring a knife like that in here. He was going to cut pages out of the manuscript. Destroy a priceless work.’

  Tartu had been doing it for years. Sometimes he took pages from rare books or map collections; more often, he stole the books altogether. The texture, the smell, the rarity: all these pulsed arcs of ecstasy through him. He’d stolen from libraries in London, Moscow, Mumbai, Paris, Melbourne, Chicago, Berlin, New York, Cambridge Massachusetts and Cambridge, England. He’d stolen copies of Newton’s Principia Mathematica and of Kepler’s Astronomia Nova; he’d stolen works by Galileo, Malthus, Copernicus, Huygens; he’d stolen first editions of Dostoyevsky, Mark Twain, Voltaire, Cervantes and Goethe. He’d never yet gotten a Gutenberg Bible or a Shakespeare First Folio. He’d thought there was still time for that. Perhaps not any more.

  Getting away with it had been easy. For a start, it could take libraries years to realize that anything was missing, and even when they did, they were often too embarrassed to take matters to the police. When the police did get involved, they tended not to give it too much priority: book theft was hard for the non-bibliophile to understand. Some of the books Tartu kept, the others he sold on privately. There were plenty of men in the former Soviet bloc who’d made fortunes illegitimately and now wanted to make themselves look like men of culture: how better to do that than through beautiful and rare books?

  And stealing such books didn’t diminish their provenance. If anything, it enhanced it. Pretty much every great book had been plundered at least once in its life. Henry VIII had ransacked the monasteries; Napoleon had stolen thousands of books before going into exile on Elba; Hitler had enshrined the ransacking of libraries in Nazi state law.

  Tartu didn’t tell any of this to Patrese. If need be, he’d say it was a temporary madness, something he’d never done before, and then he’d get his government to intervene and have the whole thing hushed up.

  Anna had left the room, telling Tartu she could hardly bear to look at him anymore.

  ‘You’re in big trouble, Rainer,’ Patrese said.

  ‘You have no proof.’

  That was true, Patrese knew. If he’d waited a few more seconds, he might have caught Tartu slicing out one of the manuscript’s pages red-handed. But as it was, he had no direct evidence.

  ‘I can make life very difficult for you.’

  ‘I brought the knife in by mistake. You made me jump just as I’d discovered I had it on me.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘Prove it.’

  ‘You want me to search your room? I will do. I’ll turn it inside out.’

  Patrese watched Tartu carefully as he said this, and the flicker of fear that rippled Tartu’s features was enough. Patrese had reckoned this hadn’t been Tartu’s first time – you don’t bring a cutting knife into a library on a whim, after all – and that, since Tartu had been in the States for several weeks now, he might well have done it somewhere else too. Tartu had been mainly in New York, and New York wasn’t exactly short of libraries.

  ‘Which one?’ Patrese asked. ‘Columbia?’

  Tartu looked at Patrese for long seconds.

  ‘I’ll make your room look like a whirlwind’s hit it,’ Patrese continued. ‘And I’ll make sure it goes public, too. You’re news right now, Rainer.’

  Tartu shook his head. ‘New York Public. I stole from the New York Public Library.’

  ‘You want to do this the easy way or the hard way?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I need help in catching Kwasi. One reason and another, you’re my best hope. You help me – and how much help that is, I decide, not you – and if after all of it I’m happy you’ve done what you could, I’ll forget about whatever’s in your room, and I’ll tell Anna that after a thorough investigation, multi-agency co-operation, blah de blah, we’ve concluded that you were telling the truth and that things happened exactly the way you said they did. Brought the knife in by accident, found it by chance, and so on. Your choice.’

  It wasn’t much of a choice. Patrese knew that as well as Tartu d
id.

  ‘OK,’ Tartu said. ‘I’ll help.’

  Back at the hotel, Patrese explained to Tartu what had been going on with the case these past ten days or so, and then handed him the BlackBerry so Tartu could read Kwasi’s latest message. Tartu read it through twice before speaking.

  ‘Wow,’ he said eventually. ‘He sounds like one of those hippies who timed when they’d have to drop acid so they could get maximum trippiness out of the stargate scene in 2001.’

  ‘He sure does. Anything else?’

  ‘Tell me what you’ve seen first.’

  ‘OK. That part at the end about needing people; that interests me. It’s almost like that might be why he’s killing them, through some warped desire for company. He has no friends, he’s said that before, so perhaps this is the only way he can make friends.’

  ‘By killing them?’

  ‘They don’t have a choice that way. Maybe that’s why he keeps their heads. To talk to them.’

  Tartu winced. ‘That’s sick.’

  ‘He sure is. But there’s something about that which bothers me. That theory would work better for Ivory, for White, for Unzicker or whoever it is. He takes the victims away before he kills them. He’s organized. He gets to spend some time with them. Kwasi, though, he’s just Crazy Kwasi: kill them on the spot, frenzy and violence.’

  ‘Not a great way to make friends.’

  ‘Not a great way to make friends, indeed.’

  ‘But it gives a hint to where it all started, no? The fallout with his mother? When he says that sometimes even she didn’t have his best interests at heart.’

  ‘I noticed that too. But how will we find out exactly what it was, until we find him?’

  Tartu shrugged. ‘No idea. But look. Here’s something. He says he plays online. Someone like Kwasi, he can’t live without chess, and he can’t always play against machines. If we can find where he plays online, which site he uses – or which sites – maybe we can, I don’t know, get in touch with him. You can send messages on those sites. You can even chat to your opponent during games.’

  ‘And,’ said Patrese, pretty much thinking aloud, ‘if you were monitoring someone’s e-mails, it wouldn’t show up there.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘These servers: they store everything, right?’

  ‘Games, sure. Comments, I don’t know. As in, whenever I’ve played, sometimes you chat to your opponent in the dialogue box beneath the board, but when the game’s over, you can’t get those comments back once you’ve closed the window or logged out. The games are always there, but what you’ve said during them, no.’

  ‘In other words, a perfect way to communicate with someone without anyone else knowing. Even if they otherwise had you under surveillance. Where do we start?’

  ‘With the biggest. Also the first. The guys who pretty much invented real time online chess. The Internet Chess Club.’

  54

  If Kwasi was using the Internet Chess Club, the ICC, he wasn’t doing so under his own name. The ICC has more than thirty thousand members, and most of them use a handle of some kind – TheFourHorsemen, Chessticles, Wrecker12006, that kind of thing. Not that this was a problem. A quick search of the player database revealed that the same handle, killerinstinct32, headed all three time-control lists (standard, blitz and bullet). A ‘killer instinct’ handle and Kwasi’s own preternatural skills: it could only be him, surely?

  The ICC, based in Pittsburgh, wasn’t saying. Only three pieces of information were publicly visible for each player: username, rating, country – killerinstinct32 was indeed American. As Tartu had suspected, the ICC didn’t log tell-type communication – chat dialogue – between two users. The ICC’s admin staff couldn’t even listen in on such conversations, let alone save them, unless one member made a complaint about the other’s behavior.

  Each user was tracked while online, of course. A permanent log was kept of every session by every player: time of connection and disconnection, name of interface, IP number of the connection, and machine ID of the computer. These details were kept secret, as were the real names, e-mail addresses, physical locations or credit-card details of their clients. Patrese would need to get a subpoena to force them to comply with this. He appealed to their sense of responsibility toward a multiple homicide investigation. When that failed, he appealed to their sense of solidarity with a Pittsburgh boy. When that failed, he slammed the phone down and told the receiver to go fuck itself.

  Patrese hated having to apply for subpoenas. The moment you got bureaucracy involved, everything took ten times as long as it needed to. You had to fill in a form that demanded more information than anyone could possibly ever need, and then e-mail it to the Bureau department responsible, which would assess, scrutinize, and pick their asses for as long as they felt like. Sometimes it took them two weeks to issue one, though they proudly boasted that a few – a few! – had been turned round in as little as three days. There was no point marking your request ‘urgent’. Everyone did that. The subpoena guys were wise to that now (assuming they’d given a damn to start with).

  Still, there was no other way, so Patrese filled in the form with laborious thoroughness, treble-checked it – these guys had no bigger thrill in life than sending back a form because it was incomplete, and requesting even more useless information, all the while reminding you that the clock on your request didn’t start running until it had been completed to their satisfaction – and e-mailed it.

  In the meantime, Tartu started studying all killer-instinct32’s games. He’d be able to tell from their style whether they were Kwasi’s or not, he said. A strange kind of voyeurism, Patrese thought, spying on someone and trying to work out their identity by the way they moved pieces – rather, electronic avatars of pieces – round a chessboard; but perhaps no stranger than anything else about this case.

  55

  Wednesday, November 24th

  Cambridge, MA

  The Stata Center was emptying fast: the annual Thanksgiving exodus across the nation for turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, gravy, yams, mash, hominy, green bean casserole, cornbread, sweet potato pie, pumpkin pie, family arguments and indigestion. Unzicker didn’t notice. Nursultan had been up to Cambridge yesterday to read Unzicker the riot act, demanding results and threatening funding cuts and worse if Unzicker didn’t come up with something pretty damn quick. Unzicker hadn’t pointed out that his mind had been on other things lately, and Nursultan hadn’t mentioned it, save for an oblique reference about how Unzicker might have turned down Nursultan’s lawyer, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to turn down the man himself. If need be, Nursultan would sit here, in this office, until Unzicker made the breakthrough.

  Truth was, Unzicker knew, he’d needed the kick up the ass, and he never worked better than when up against it. There was a purity in his approach now – just him and Misha, Frankenstein and the monster, and Unzicker worked with a purpose that would only be sated when Misha gave up its secrets. And when that happened, Misha would stop being an ‘it’ and become a ‘he’, because Unzicker would have given life to this program, made something inanimate into something human.

  When Kasparov had played Deep Blue twice in the late nineties, winning the first match but losing the second, people had talked about it being a shared triumph: 1–1 between man and machine. But for Unzicker, man had won both times: the first as a performer, the second as a toolmaker. He would win now, as the toolmaker, but after that, no one knew.

  He made minuscule adjustments to Misha’s chip, he ran diagnostics, he went back and forth on microscopic highways known only to him and the burgeoning intelligence he hoped, thought, prayed was inside Misha. When he was satisfied, he logged on to the ICC. Misha had its own dedicated account, declared as a computer – that was ICC rules – though of course for secrecy’s sake Unzicker hadn’t registered it as Misha. Its handle was a suitably nondescript repino, named after the birthplace of Misha’s inspiration, Mikhail Botvinnik.

  The I
CC welcome screen unrolled, and with it a message. Your arrival was noted by---> killerinstinct32.

  Observe killerinstinct 32, typed Unzicker.

  killerinstinct32 is not playing or examining a game.

  Among the icons across the top of the screen was that of a fencer: this was the avatar to challenge an opponent. Unzicker tapped on it, typed killerinstinct32, and sent it.

  A few seconds later, the opening board flashed up: Kwasi as white, Misha as black.

  They started playing. Ruy Lopez, one of the most popular openings. After a few moves, Unzicker clicked on another icon, this time a handful of faces: Show observers.

  {Game 1452 (killerinstinct32 vs. repino) Game started}.

  Observing 1452 [(killerinstinct32 vs. repino]: JDoss solidly chessdennis iloveicc pirahna frankandbeans rodent ndogbosok01 RTE Ditton66 ekmel NapaMD greatowl carlosh99 trule Winsome vova Tellus megchess JohnnyBallgame KnightRider12 CamaroSS: 22 people.

  Round about move 15, Unzicker realized something he knew Kwasi would have clocked long before: this was the same game that they’d played through in Kwasi’s apartment in Bleecker Street not long before Kwasi had gone on the run, which in turn had been the same game Kwasi and Misha had played through in February. Misha had lost both those games on move 20, when it had played bishop to c5 rather than b4.

  Unzicker hadn’t directly programmed Misha to change that move. If Misha moved to b4 this time, therefore, it would prove it was thinking for itself: it would have corrected an error without external input.

  Unzicker sat closer to the screen, willing Kwasi to play the same moves as before.

  Move 20. Kwasi moved. Misha thought. No, not thought: calculated. Brains thought: silicon circuits calculated. Five minutes. Ten. Go on, thought Unzicker. If it had been going to play bishop to c5, the wrong move, surely it would have done so?