Silver ota-1

by Steven Savile

  A row of magpies sat on the guttering above the hairdresser’s. He counted them, doing the old rhyme in his head: One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver.

  He walked on two streets and stripped out of his leathers and stuffed them behind one of the dumpsters. He would collect them later. One of the bystanders was sure to remember the leather-clad biker who had come chasing the woman out of the broken window. They wouldn’t remember the gray-haired guy in the designer suit.

  He took a handkerchief from his pocket, wadded it up and dabbed at his face, using it to soak up the worst of the blood, then dumped it in a trash can. He couldn’t exactly clean himself up properly, but he looked different enough to pass a cursory inspection.

  It was all about the instantly recognizable details-that was the way the brain worked. It registered the leathers and more than likely demonized the man holding the gun. Witnesses were unreliable at the best of times. Out of the leathers and tidied up, none of them would identify him as the demon.

  “Well,” he said to himself, “time to put the theory to the test.”

  He walked back to the alley behind Fisher’s place.

  There were two policemen standing guard at the hair-dressers gate.

  He said hi as he walked past them. That was part of the trick, having the brass balls to look like you belonged there, no matter where there was. He had to keep his back turned away from them. The last thing he needed was one of them noticing the blood stains. The older of the two police lifted his radio and talked into it. He seemed to be taking a little too much interest in Ronan. He didn’t want him looking too closely.

  Ronan kept his pace regular, resisting the temptation to walk faster. He willed the policeman to look away, but he didn’t. Just look like you belong, he said to himself. Keep it natural. You live here. They have no reason to think otherwise. Just walk up to the gate and open it. He was glad he’d taken the extra few seconds to open the green gate before. Now as he reached it, he thumbed down the latch, pushed it open and walked inside. It was a lot less suspicious than boosting himself up over the glass-topped wall.

  Inside it took him less than two minutes to find what he’d been looking for.

  Beside the computer in the study there was a photo of Fisher and his two girls, and tucked into the frame was one of those little photo-booth instant snaps. The woman in the smaller picture was unmistakably Catherine Meadows. She was cheek-to-cheek and laughing with Sebastian Fisher, and it was obvious in that one photograph that they were in love.

  What could make a man burn himself ive? he asked himself, and this time he knew the answer, the only answer: to protect someone he loved.

  Sebastian Fisher had loved three people. One of them had burned alive with him-a different place, but the precise same moment in time. The other two were missing.

  He called in to Lethe again. “Found the leverage. Some-one took Fisher’s kids.” Judging by the picture and the toys in the room, he made an educated guess at their respective ages, six and eight.

  “Bollocks,” Jude Lethe said.

  “He was involved with Catherine Meadows, so it isn’t out of the question that Fisher’s kids were used to keep her in line as well. There are enough signs about the place to suggest the pair all but lived together. We aren’t talking an underwear drawer-she’s got half the closet space, half the drawers, and a bathroom cabinet full of cosmetics.”

  “Have I told you how much I hate people?” Lethe said. “What are the chances of us getting the kids back alive?”

  It wasn’t something Ronan wanted to think about. The truth of the matter was, the kids were almost certainly dead now that they’d outlived their usefulness. “Not going to happen,” Ronan said, rifling the desk drawers as he spoke. “Any joy with the surveillance cameras?”

  “Your Jane Bond didn’t come out of the tunnels through any service exit within five hundred yards of where you lost her. Sorry, man. Odds are she doubled back after you were gone and hopped on the next train out of there.” It made sense. She had been thinking at least three moves ahead of him, and that rattled Ronan Frost.

  Ronan opened the bottom drawer. Inside was a photograph album that looked as though it had seen better days. He pulled it out and opened it up. It was full of younger versions of Sebastian Fisher and Catherine Meadows mugging for the camera. He thumbed through the pages, looking at the ghosts of two happy people. On the back of the sixth side he found what he was looking for. The top of the page was marked up Masada. The entire gatefold was filled with similar images: the harsh sun, the sand and parched grass and the ruins of the hill fort. He peeled away the film and pocketed each of the photographs. The last one was a group shot of the archeology team. On the back, in neat feminine script, someone had listed the names of the people in the photo. There were thirty in the shot. He recognized almost half of them without having to look up their names.

  Four of the Israeli helpers were listed by first name only.

  The fifth, shirt sleeves rolled up, eyes like burned-out coals, was labeled as Akim Caspi. Even though he had only seen the one photo of the man in full military regalia, and factoring in the passage of time and unreliable memory, there was no way on God’s earth that the Akim Caspi in the picture was the same Akim Caspi that had been a lieutenant general in the Israeli Defense Force.

  Things, as Orla Nyren liked to say, were beginning to get interesting.

  7

  Going Underground

  They fought as they walked down the street. It was stupid stuff. Sarah wanted to go to Checkpoint Charlie, and he wanted a piping hot Americano and a sickly sweet pastry first. The two didn’t need to be mutually exclusive. He’d tried to reason with her. They were on vacation, and by definition that meant there was no need to rush, but Sarah was being Sarah. She had got it into her head she wanted to get to Friedrichstrasse early so they didn’t waste the rest of the day.

  She wanted to hit the Brandenburg Gate, the cathedrals in the Gendarmenmarkt, and if they could manage it, make Spandau around lunchtime. He wanted to take his time, cross over into what had been East Berlin and try to imagine what it had been like back in ’61 when the Russian tanks blocked the road. It was a crying shame they’d torn down the old Watchtower. There was nothing left of the original Checkpoint Charlie buildings, but that didn’t stop him from wanting to soak up the history of the place.

  It had become something of a pilgrimage for him-and not the usual honeymoon fare. His grandfather had died trying to come across that no-man’s land between East and West. He knew it was just going to be a street now, but that didn’t matter. It wasn’t what it was, it was what it had been. Sarah understood that. That was one of the reasons he loved her. There were plenty of those. They might fight like cats and dogs but she understood him. Hell, she loved him for his flaws, not despite them, and that was worth every stupid fight they’d ever had.

  She’d marked the route on the map, they needed to take the U2 east from Potsdamer Platz to Stadtmitte and transfer on to U6 north.

  “For God’s sake, Sarah,” he grumbled, wrestling with the weight of the backpack as he tried to follow her. She was walking too fast for him and he hated talking to the back of her head-even if it was a beautiful back of the head. “It isn’t going to kill us if we don’t get to the concentration camp by twelve. We can always catch a later train,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m hungry, I’m tired and we’re meant to be on bloody holiday!” he shouted. He couldn’t help himself.

  “Go to hell,” his wife of seven days turned and yelled at him.

  Germans turned to look at them, no doubt wondering at the tourists who lacked the good grace to keep their arguments inside.

  “Sarah!” he shouted after her, but it only made her walk faster. “Oh, for crying out loud, woman!”

  She didn’t so much as break her stride. He hiked the backpack farther up his back and tried to push his way between the unmoving Germans as they gathered around the turnstiles leadi
ng n onto the U-Bahn. He didn’t have the tickets. She did.

  “Sarah!” he shouted above the heads of the Germans. She ignored him.

  He pushed his way over to one of the ticket machines, fumbled with the coins in his pocket and fed them into the slot. It seemed to take forever to print his ticket out. He pushed his way back to the barriers. He couldn’t see Sarah, but he knew where she was going. He looked at the signs, trying to work out which platform he needed for Stadtmitte. He chased her down to the platform, arriving as the train doors shut.

  He waved at the driver and ran as best he could with the weight of the backpack slapping against his back and trying to knock him over. Sarah was in the fourth car down. He saw her looking at him through the glass. She was crying. She looked so beautiful and so sad with the tears staining her cheeks. They had only been married for a week. She wasn’t meant to be crying. Seeing her like that hurt him. He wished he’d just shut his mouth and kept up with her instead of whining about wanting a cup of coffee and a stupid, bloody muffin. He knew it was important to her that everything was just so. She needed order, and he didn’t have to be a prick about it all of the time.

  As the train pulled away from the station he tried to pantomime that he was sorry. She stopped looking at him. It wasn’t that she was angry-he could live with that, anger came and went-it was that she looked so sad sitting there alone.

  He tried his cell phone but there was no reception.

  He dropped his shoulder and shrugged out of the pack. The next train wasn’t due into the station for seven minutes. He dragged it over the wall and slumped down against it, using the backpack as a backrest. He wanted a cigarette, but the entire U-Bahn was no smoking, so he resigned himself to suffer in silence. He’d light up as soon as he left Friedrichstrasse, and then he’d set about finding Sarah and making it up to her.

  The platform didn’t take long to fill again.

  A woman sat down beside him and asked him if he had made his peace with God. He looked at her. She didn’t look like a crazy subway evangelist. She was cute in a Japanese-high-school-girl sort of way with her Heidi-pigtails and knee-length, white cotton socks. She could have been anywhere between 13 and 23 years old, given the bright blue eye shadow and lavender lip gloss. It was impossible to tell. She had a bag slung over her shoulder. There was one of those stylized Japanese cartoons painted on the side of it. He couldn’t remember what they were called. It didn’t really matter. She was the least likely evangelist he’d ever seen.

  She reached into her bag for something. He assumed she was going to read him something from her Bible.

  She wasn’t.

  She pulled a small aluminum thermos flask from the shoulder bag and uncapped it. She up-ended it. A small amount of liquid dribbled out. It wasn’t water. It was a tiny amount of liquid sarin. Curls of almost smoky gas evaporated away from the puddle. The thermos hadn’t been keeping the liquid cold, it had been keeping the gas just warm enough to maintain its state. The dribble of liquid was all that had cooled enough to condense. Liquid sarin would kill a dozen people, maybe, if they came into contact with it. As a gas anyone who ingested it was dead. On a busy subway system that could mean thousands of people.

  “In a moment your nose is going to run. You’ll feel a tightness in your chest, and your skin will feel as though it is shriveling around your body, becoming too tight for the flesh it contains. Then you’ll begin to lose your sight. Don’t be frightened, it will all happen very quickly,” she said, in the most soothing, sympathetic and psychotic voice he had ever heard. She was right, he could feel the snot running out of his nose already. “You’ll hardly know it is happening. A few moments of agony and then it will be over. I am going to die with you. I’ll hold your hand as we go, if that helps?”

  He looked at her. She wasn’t mad. She wasn’t some raving fanatic. She reached out to hold his hand. He pulled away from her.

  “What have you done to me?” he demanded. It hurt to talk. He felt the first flush of pins and needles creeping through his skin and down into his bones. She was right. It was happening quickly. He shivered once, painfully. He felt his gorge rise and leaned over, sure he was going to vomit. “What have you done to me?” he pleaded.

  She ignored him. “In a few seconds you’re going to find it very difficult to breathe. It will feel like your entire body is shutting down. You’ll lose control of your body.” Her breath was coming harder now. She was gasping between words. “You will throw up. You will lose control of your muscles. In seconds you will soil yourself. There is nothing you’ll be able to do about it. It is death. Every nerve will cry out, and finally your flesh won’t be able to cope. You will twitch and jerk, wracked by spasms. The fit will be brief. As you go blind, you will suffocate. There is nothing you can do about it. You are already dead. We all are. Everyone down here is dead.”

  He looked along the platform. The people were blurs, dark smudges leaning against the walls and each other for support. He could hear them coughing and gasping. Someone cried out, a woman, “Ich kann nicht sehen! Hilf mir, mein Gott, ich bin blind!”

  He only understood the last word. He didn’t need to know any more to understand what was happening along the platform from him.

  It had only taken seconds to spread.

  He clutched at the woman beside him, trying to pull her toward him. His lips twitched, but the words wouldn’t come.

  The world around him lost its shape, the blurred shapes of the damned spreading across his eyes until all he saw was black.

  He heard the next train roll into the station, the doors hiss and the screams as people stumbled toward it as though it could bear them away to safety. He couldn’t see any of it. He couldn’t see the faces of the condemned pressed up against the glass. He couldn’t see them clawing at the platform, shivering and twisting as they tried to crawl another precious inch forward. He couldn’t see the fear on the passengers’ faces as they disembarked. It had been more than half a century since a train last rattled through Berlin carrying so many doomed souls. These passengers were just as dead, and just as unwitting.

  He fell sideways, face hitting the floor as another wretched spasm wracked his body, and all he could think as he fought for that last breath was that their stupid argument had saved Sarah’s life.

  And for that he was grateful.

  8

  Sorrow’s Bride

  Konstantin Khavin walked through a city in mourning.

  The first reports of the horror on the U-Bahn had reached the surface. People stood around in shock, not really knowing if they were supposed to run or go about their everyday routines. Five stations had been hit, and if what he was hearing was to be believed, two of the S-Bahns as well as the city’s bus terminus. At least six busses had carried punctured sarin gas bags, dispersing the nerve gas all over the city. It was a brutal way to die.

  A radio in an open window played “My Funny Valentine.” The vocal strain drifted across the narrow street, transforming it into something out of a Wim Wenders movie. A girl on the street corner sat making Chinese cranes out of scraps of paper. She lined them up along the gutter. There were hundreds of them. She looked up at him, eyes wide with sorrow, and said, “Dies, damit Gott sie nicht vergisst.” He knew what she meant: they are so God doesn’t forget them. It was a surreal and sad moment, this little girl mourning hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people she had never met. That was the power of a tragedy on such a huge scale. It hurt everyone. The suffering was collective. The mourning public, loud and heartbreaking.

  The “other shoe” had dropped in the middle of the early morning rush hour when hundreds of thousands of people were on their way into work across the city, and every level of the public transport system had been hit.

  Everything about it made Konstantin angry-he wanted to lash out, hit something, someone-but it was an entirely impotent rage. There was nothing he could do for anyone here, and there was cold comfort in knowing that they were right, that Berlin had been one of the pr
imary targets. It had been a long time since he had left Mother Russia-so long in truth he found it difficult to bring back memories of her streets and her dizzying architecture. Now all he remembered were her crimes.

  The world had changed around him in that time. There had been an ethic to terror once, it protected normal people going about their normal lives. They were shielded by some sort of covenant between the oppressor and the oppressed. Strikes were made against legitimate targets: military bases, intelligence operations, weapons stores, and with more localized terror campaigns like Northern Ireland the Provo targets were policemen, political movers and shakers, journalists and the like. They weren’t kids on the way to school. They weren’t mothers pushing baby buggies and balancing groceries. They weren’t the city’s financial wiz-kids, with their heads full of long-term futures. They weren’t the baristas and the store clerks and the bus drivers and the road sweepers that made day-to-day living so much more pleasant than it might have been. The face of terror had changed.

  It was more Russian in nature.

  Konstantin shivered at the thought.

  He felt for these people even though he did not know them.

  The old man was right: it was all about the spectacle. This fear was Russian. It dug deep into the psyche of the people. It hurt them where they felt safest-in their everyday life. It was like the KGB arrest squads that battered down the door at four a.m.-it was disorientating, frightening. They came in making noise, shouting, screaming, threatening violence while the suspect, naked and vulnerable, woke to the chaos of their forced entry. If they fought back, they were beaten. If they resisted, they were beaten. If they didn’t fall to their knees, beg, confess, they were beaten. If they weren’t alone, their wives, girlfriends or lovers were beaten to make them beg and plead. At four a.m. fear broke strong men. That was the Russian way.

  He knew that because, once upon a nightmare, he had been one of those four o’clock men.