End of the Century

by Chris Roberson

  “Excuse me. Pardon me, love. Coming through. Ah, watch your drink there, friend, almost had a terrible accident. On your side, love. Ah.” He clapped his hands, smiling in triumph. “Aria Fox, as I live and breath.”

  The woman glared at Stillman from beneath her brows and took a long sip of her martini.

  “Waters. What the hell do you want?”

  “Do you know,” he said, sliding onto the seat next to hers, “Hughes asked me the very same thing, just yesterday.”

  The woman named Aria Fox looked up and regarded Alice over the rim of her martini glass. Alice regarded her right back. Aria looked to be a couple of inches taller than Alice, though it was hard to tell with her sitting down. She had a slim build, muscled like a dancer, with her dark hair worn long and pulled back into a loose knot at the back of her head. She had a dark olive complexion, her smooth skin marred only by a small L-shaped scar on her upper left cheek. She was dressed in a tight-fitting white dress that came to midthigh, her shoulders bare, with white high-heeled sandals on her feet, the straps lacing up her ankles. She definitely wasn't dressed to mix with the hoi polloi out in the mud. For Aria, it was obviously VIP or nothing.

  “Who's your friend, Waters?” She practically sneered. Even in the fading light, she wore big white-framed sunglasses over her eyes, making her expression difficult to read.

  “Aria, meet another ‘A. F.’ This is my friend, Alice Fell.”

  “Kind of young for you, isn't she? And lacking the equipment you usually prefer, I'd guess?”

  “Charming,” Stillman said, with a smile that lacked all warmth. “Now, I understand you've been a busy little girl lately, our Aria.”

  Aria's eyebrow raised behind her sunglasses, and she gave Stillman a cool look. “Something tells me that Hughes won't be getting his commission this time out.” She took another sip of her martini, draining the glass. “If he keeps it up, he won't be getting a Christmas card this year, either.”

  Stillman snapped his finger for the roving waitress. “Miss, could we have two dry martinis?” He glanced over to Alice. “Anything for you, love?”

  Alice still hadn't quite recovered from Friday, and shook her head.

  “Just the two, then, dear.” Stillman slipped her a folded bill, though Alice couldn't tell the denomination. The waitress, though, was clearly impressed as she scurried off to the cash bar to fetch their drinks.

  “I don't know how you got Hughes to talk, or what he told you…”

  “Hughes didn't tell me anything, dear, trust me. Don't take it out on the poor boy. I just happened to notice that you used your mother's shunt on the air vent alarm, and twigged right away that you were the one I wanted to speak with.”

  “Damn,” Aria cursed under her breath. “I know I should gone with the Maldanato, instead.”

  Stillman chuckled. “But that would have tripped the voltage sensors. No, Melody's shunt was the only choice to make.” He shook his head, admiringly. “A marvelous piece of work, love, just marvelous. Your mother'd be proud.”

  Aria made a dismissive hissing sound and took off her sunglasses. Her eyes were almost the color of amber. “So you working for the British Museum, is that it? Not a lot of jobs calling for out-of-work ex-spooks these days?”

  Stillman shook his head. “No, this one is strictly freelance. The authorities aren't even involved. I just want to take a look at that gem for myself.”

  Aria slid a glance Alice's way, her look bordering on contemptuous. “And is she part of your freelance crew, then?”

  “Something like that.”

  Their drinks arrived, and Aria sipped her martini before speaking again while Stillman just swirled the liquid around in the glass.

  “No.” Aria shook her head, lowering the glass. “Nothing doing. The job is done and I've been paid. I'm a professional, and I don't talk out of turn.”

  “Fair enough,” Stillman nodded, the corners of his mouth turned down. “Still, it'll be a shame if someone tipped off the FSB about who it was stole the Tsarina's diadem from the Kremlin Museum. I'm sure the boys at Lubyanka would love to get their hands on whoever pulled that one off.”

  Aria blanched, and her fingers tightened white-knuckled around the stem of her glass.

  “You wouldn't.”

  “Oh, wouldn't I?” Stillman smiled, broadly.

  Aria tapped her foot and gripped her sunglasses in her hand so hard that a lens popped out, which she then ground underfoot, irritated.

  “Okay, okay. I'll tell you who the client was, but no more. Is that a deal?”

  Stillman considered for a moment.

  “Come on, Bowie's about to start his first set, and I'll be damned if I'm missing him again.”

  Stillman finally nodded. “Yes, I think a name should suit our needs nicely.”

  Aria sighed heavily and shook her head, frowning. “I swear to God, if this gets out, I will kill you, Waters.”

  “You're certainly welcome to try, love.”

  Aria leaned in close, looking for all the world like a woman giving her gray-haired father a kiss. Then she whispered in his ear.

  As Aria straightened up, Stillman's eyes widened.

  “You must be joking,” he said, flatly

  Aria tossed back the last of her martini and dropped the empty glass and her broken sunglasses onto the chair. “Nope. Came as a shock to me, as well, but there you have it.” She put her hands on her hips. “Now, are we done, here?”

  Stillman nodded, absently, his gaze drifting.

  “Fine. Waters, don't come looking for me again. As far as I'm concerned, we're even. Got it?” Then she turned on her heel and marched away.

  Alice slid onto the chair next to Stillman, who still sat wide-eyed, looking confused. “Hey, are you okay?”

  “Mmm?” Stillman arched an eyebrow and turned to face her. “Oh, certainly, certainly. I'm just surprised is all.”

  “Why? What did she say? Who has the gem?”

  They could hear the roar of the crowd as Bowie took the stage.

  “It's Temple,” Stillman said, and threw back the last of his martini in a single gulp. “Iain Temple.”

  It was late when they got back to the car, and neither of them felt like driving all night back to London, so Alice and Stillman decided to stay overnight in Glastonbury and drive back the next morning. They continued up the A361, and at the edge of the big hill with the King Arthur tower on top, they stopped at what looked to Alice like a big house, but that Stillman assured her was a hotel. Or a bed & breakfast, at any rate.

  There was a pair of twin beds in the room, covered in floral-print comforters, but no bathroom, only a sink. The shower and bathroom were down the hall, on the other side of the pay phone. Alice was all for room service, not having eaten since midday, but the kitchen downstairs only served breakfast hence the name, Alice decided—so they were on their own.

  It was Sunday, and fairly late at that, and one of the only restaurants they could find downtown—Alice called it “downtown,” but Stillman insisted it was the High Street—was Elaichi Tandoori, an Indian joint. Dots, not feathers. Alice had something called chicken tikka, washed down with several cans of lager.

  When they had finished eating, Alice stepped outside to smoke a couple of cigarettes while Stillman settled up with the bill, and she had a chance to get a better look at the town.

  The streets were surprisingly crowded for the lateness of the hour, filled with a strange cast of characters: aging hippies, men and women dressed up in medieval costumes, starry-eyed young people, men with shaved heads wearing the saffron robes of Buddhist monks, kids with acoustic guitars, women with wreaths of flowers over their heads and long flowing skirts. Alice walked a short ways up and down the street, looking at the names over the doors. The Isle of Avalon Foundation. The Library of Avalon. The Goddess Temple. The Maitreya Monastery.

  Alice found a pamphlet in a rack outside a darkened shop front. It was all about Glastonbury but described it more like something out of
The Lord of the Rings than the quaint English village she'd seen driving in that day, or even the crazed muddy mosh pit of the festival a few miles away. It described the town as a “temenos,” or energy field, not as a geographical place. It talked a lot about mystic vibrations and attunement. It mentioned an “Angel of Glastonbury.”

  “You all right, love?”

  Alice flapped the brochure like a flag. “What's all this about, anyway? Is this place some sort of weirdness magnet for crazies and smelly hippies?”

  Stillman chuckled and cadged a cigarette from her. “Nah, nothing like that. Something odd did happen here, about a millennium and a half ago, but it went away, and no one ever knew quite what it was about. Or where it came from, come to that. All this”—he waved his hand, the smoke from the cigarette trailing, indicating the New Age shop fronts, the eclectic collection of pedestrians—“is just a cultural echo of that one event.”

  Alice stuffed the brochure in her pocket and drew on her cigarette.

  “Still, that's not to say there aren't weirdness magnets, here and there, of sorts. Glastonbury just isn't one of them. There's a few hot spots in the Big Smoke, a big one in Ireland, one in the Varadeaux canton of Switzerland, one in New England, and the Texas town of Denniston, and Recondito, California…” He trailed off. “Dozens of them, all over the place, spots where the walls between the worlds are thinner, you might say. Keeps those of us in my former line of work on our toes, as you might well imagine.” He dropped his cigarette to the pavement, only half smoked, and ground it underfoot. “Come on, love, let's to bed. I'm knackered.”

  The next morning, bright and relatively early, they climbed back into the Corvette SS and headed back up the A361. The roads were jammed with traffic leaving the Glastonbury Festival, but once they got past Pilton things eased up considerably.

  Stillman outlined his plan during the early hours of the drive. He was intrigued why a billionaire like Iain Temple would hire a professional cat burglar to steal a gem from the British Museum. Aria had told him only that Temple had been the client and that she had delivered the item to him in his corporate headquarters in Canary Warf, the Glasshouse. So far as Aria knew, Temple kept a private collection of oddities there, and in all likelihood the Vanishing Gem was among them.

  Digging through the glove compartment, at Stillman's request, Alice found a dubbed cassette of Temple's early seventies release, Phoenix Rising. Stillman explained that this was the concept album that introduced Temple's hairless, sexless, opal-eyed “Visitor from a Broken Earth” persona. The album related the story, through song, of the Visitor, who came to Earth from another world to learn about humanity. The haunting “Circular Ruins,” inspired by the Jorge Luis Borges story of the same name, told how the Visitor had arrived in ages past in South America and been worshipped as a god by the natives there and how he had been forced to rebuild a new body when his old one became too worn and abused. “Wayfarer” told how the Visitor had wandered the nations of the Earth seeking out the secret of happiness and contentment, searching for the ultimate answer but finding only more questions. “Paragaea” was a haunting track about the strange, ancient world from which the Visitor came.

  Stillman was dismissive of the album's musical qualities. It clearly borrowed heavily on the sounds of Mott the Hoople, T. Rex, and the Velvet Underground, and while it was undeniably an influence on David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Bowie was clearly the more gifted musician of the two. Still, Phoenix Rising had been a considerable commercial success at the time, and the tours and subsequent albums in the years following were no less so. By the midseventies, Temple had “killed off” the Visitor persona, and taken the small fortune he'd garnered and invested it in technology concerns, especially telephony and the then-burgeoning computing industry. By the eighties, Temple had diversified his growing fortune even further, opening a retail electronics store in Piccadilly Circus followed by a chain across the UK and later Europe, the United States, and Asia. After that had come the airline, and the cable channel, and the frozen entrees and men's fragrances and designer clothing and music retail and so on. Now, Temple was said to be worth billions, though with the myriad of companies he owned, wholly or in part, it was difficult to estimate the precise value of his holdings.

  The Glasshouse was the headquarters of Temple Enterprises and home of Temple himself. Built in the heart of Canary Warf, the London business development situated where the old West India Docks once stood, the Glasshouse was a veritable fortress of glass and steel, rising hundreds of feet in the air, some thirty-five stories tall. Temple's home was at the pinnacle of the Glasshouse, occupying the top four floors, probably the highest-dollar penthouse apartment in the world, protected by cutting-edge surveillance and alarm systems and a private army of security guards.

  And this was the guy that Stillman intended to rob.

  Great plan.

  It was late afternoon, Monday. The Corvette SS was safely back in the inconspicuous garage above, and Stillman and Alice were down in the derelict Underground station, digging through antique electronics that hadn't been cutting edge since before Alice was born. And this was what Stillman wanted to use to help them break into Iain Temple's Glasshouse.

  Stillman hooked up a computer the size of a car motor to an electrical outlet, and then balanced an ancient monitor on top, the white plastic of the casing gone sickly yellow with age. Fishing a loop of phone cabling from a filing cabinet drawer, he plugged one end into a modem the size of a typewriter and spliced the other into a thick bunch of cabling that snaked along the wall.

  There was more than just antique electronics in the storage tunnel. While Stillman swore beneath his breath, trying to bring the ancient computer back to life, Alice picked around through the confusion of odds and ends piled haphazardly all around, idly.

  There was what looked like a rifle, but at the end of the barrel was a kind of dish, like a satellite receiver, and from the stock hung a cord connected to a bulky metal box, with straps so it could be worn like a backpack.

  “Enfield Sonica,” Stillman said, when Alice held it up for inspection. “Sound weapon. Fires concentrated bursts of sonic vibration.”

  Alice returned the contraption to the pile. The next thing she picked up looked like a flare gun, a big bulky pistol, but had rammed into the barrel what looked to be a miniature collapsed umbrella with its fabric missing.

  “Ah, harpoon pistol.” Stillman nodded. “Fix a line and it can be used for grappling. Hang on to that, will you, love? Might come in handy.”

  Alice shrugged and tucked it into the pocket of her leather jacket, handle first. Next she picked up a silver disk. It was about two feet in diameter, a couple of inches thick, and surprisingly lightweight. It shone like silver, untarnished and unmarred. On the back was a loop of the same material, evidently a handle of some kind, though a bit wide for Alice to hold comfortably.

  “Don't know what that one is, actually,” Stillman said, mopping beads of sweat from his brow. “Back in ’67, they were rebuilding Mark Lane Station—they called it Tower Hill by then—and put about that they'd destroyed the last remains of the old Tower of London Station. Which, as you can see”—he waved his arm, indicating the tunnel—“wasn't exactly the case. More like the old station was more heavily fortified and wired up to the new communications grids.” He bashed the thick bunch of cables on the wall with a wrench. “The Tower of London itself stands on top of a hill, White Mount, and there's been people hereabouts for thousands of years, back to the Roman times and before. Anyway, when they were doing the tunneling, they dug up some old bits of Roman pottery, some stuff that dated back to the time of Boudica, and that disk you're holding. The MI8 boffins never were able to work out who'd made it or when, out of what materials, or for what purpose. Their best guess was that it's some sort of data storage device with limited broadcast capabilities. Hard as bugger, though, and couldn't be cut by diamond or laser. Odd that, mmm?”

 
; Alice shrugged and tossed the disk over her shoulder, to land clattering on the pile behind her. “You about finished with this stuff, yet, or what?”

  Stillman grinned. “As a matter of fact…”

  He stabbed a rocker switch on the front of the monitor, and the screen buzzed noisily to life, green letters dimly visible on the gray-black background.

  “Now,” Stillman said, cracking his knuckles like a concert pianist. “Let's see what we can find out about this Glasshouse, shall we?”

  Stillman had managed to gain access to secured government and commerical servers, using all sorts of cracks and hacks, displaying far more computer savvy than Alice'd figured a guy his age would have. Either the age he appeared to be, or the age he claimed to be. Even so, the proof was in the pudding, whatever that meant. Stillman was tabbing through the internal database of the architectural firm that had been employed by Temple Enterprises to construct Glasshouse. After a short search, he turned up a host of 2D and 3D CAD drawings of the structure, detailed blueprints, elevations, and architectural drawings. The results quickly outpaced the ability of the fat green phosphor dots to handle, and Stillman was forced to lug the color television in from the living room in the other tunnel, patching into the computer's video output.

  “You're pretty good at this stuff, you know?” Alice lit a cigarette and nodded appreciatively.

  “Why, thank you for noticing, love,” Stillman said, a sarcastic undercurrent in his words. “I've lived this long just waiting to hear your resounding approval.”