“Gone,” Grainger replied.
She let the picture fall into a pure white waste basket to the right of the desk, then picked up another. This man was Mexican or perhaps Puerto Rican, she didn’t really care either way. “Ortega?”
“Gone.”
It was thrown in the trash. She picked up a picture of young woman, her hair tied tight in a bun. “Harmon.”
“Gone.”
She threw that picture in the trash as well, then picked up a fourth: Peter Strauss. The same bland, half-smiling and fully awkward image that had been used on the CLF display of his KRT badge for the past few years. “So, where are you now Mister Strauss..?” she asked. To everyone and no-one. She spaced the words out a second time, musing. “Where are you now?”
“No-one knows, yet,” Grainger explained, nervously. “But we have the lab on complete lockdown, codes changed. It’s going to take some time to arrange the clear-out, perhaps a few weeks, but nothing gets in or out until we do. We have a suitable location for a rebuild, then it’s just a case of moving the equipment and replicating what we can.”
Scalise looked up over her glasses. It was not a good look. “Change them back,” she said firmly.
Grainger was confused and it showed. “The codes? But that would mean that anyone could just…”
“…get in,” she interrupted. “I agree. But not necessarily out. When they do enter we will, of course, know about it in an instant and we shall respond accordingly. However, if they never try to get in, because some idiot decided to put the place on lockdown, then we’ll never know. Will we?”
“Who would try to get in?” Grainger asked. “Strauss wouldn’t be that stupid, surely?”
“Probably not,” she mused. “But someone would.”
“Who?”
“The person you don’t believe exists,” she explained. “The person who knows exactly where he is.”
Grainger looked no less puzzled and that angered Scalise deeply. If she could see it, then why the hell couldn’t they? Everyone had the same file, for Christ’s sake. She glided a manicured red nail across the pictures as if playing ‘eeny-meeny’, ultimately settling on the corner of an almost completely hidden sheet. She pulled it out and laid it on top of the others, turning it so that Grainger could see. The full image showed a coin, shot from both sides and comp’d together. One side showed the female head of Liberty, named, along with the words ‘IN GOD WE TRVST’ and a 1922 date. The other side showed an eagle standing on a rock atop a broken sword; an olive branch in its talons. Above it the words ‘UNITED STATES OF AMERICA’ and ‘ONE DOLLAR’ were clearly visible. The word ‘PEACE’ was written across the rock and below the United States text was the Latin phrase: ‘E.PLURIBUS UNUM’ - ‘Out of many, one’. She angled the image gently from side to side to see more of the depth.
“What can you tell me about this.”
He pursed his lips and shrugged. “It’s an old coin. It was found on the floor in the lab.”
She took another deep breath, just to calm her anger. Decorum at all times, she told herself, even when they’re all fuckwits. “It’s not just an old coin,” she explained. “It is a 1922 Peace Dollar. Since the restructuring of U.S. Politics and the Corporate Senator Act, these are worth more and more by the day. If this were just an ordinary coin, it could be worth up to…” she pursed her lips, musing, “…ten thousand dollars.”
“If it were just an ordinary coin?” Grainger asked.
Scalise nodded, knowingly. “This coin is genuine, very much so, but it was minted early. 1921 to be precise, ready for the new year. I know this.” She pondered the image, speaking slowly. “There was a bit of a furore over that broken sword. See, a sword is only broken when its owner has disgraced himself, or when a battle is lost and breaking is the only alternative to surrendering. A sword is also broken when the man who wears it can no longer render allegiance to his sovereign. But America had not broken its sword in 1921 and the papers of the time kicked up a shit-storm. The New York Herald remarked that if the artist had merely sheathed the blade, or blunted it, there would be no objection. Sheathing is symbolic of peace and the blunted sword implies mercy. But a broken sword…? No, a broken sword carries with it only unpleasant associations. The paper, along with many others, demanded that the broken sword be removed from the official coin. So, before launch, it was. The Herald took full credit for the deletion in their Christmas Day issue, 1921. The first official pressing of this coin, sans broken sword, went ahead on the 29th.”
Grainger seemed impressed. “How do you know all this?”
She smiled, wryly. “Because my great-pappy Jimmy-G owned the Herald.”
Grainger leaned forward to take a better look at the printed image. “And this one still has the broken sword…”
Scalise nodded. “Indeed it does. Open market on a good day, you’re looking at upwards of three million for this. Maybe as high as five. And that tells me that somebody is going to want it back.” She picked up the image of Strauss and placed it side-by-side with the image of the coin. “Two days ago Strauss was informed of the explosion in Cardou by the dearly departed Mr. Burgess and, according to Burgess, he left the lab in one hell of a hurry. To my knowledge, nobody else has been in that lab since. I think this coin is very important to somebody and I think that somebody is Peter Strauss. If he doesn’t come back for it, then I think somebody else will and you can bet what’s left of your ass that that same somebody can be persuaded fairly easily to tell us exactly where we can find him.”
“So what do you want me to do?” Grainger asked.
Scalise threw him a distasteful look then widened her eyes as though this were the simplest thing in the world. “What I want you to do, Neil, is stop fucking up, but that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen any time soon, does it? So, in the interim, I want you to make sure that the coin, and the codes, are put right back where they were when you found them.”
* * * * *
“What makes you think Rachael is alive?” I asked.
“Because she was.” she replied, and sipped her coffee.
Victoria had finally managed to make some, after a fashion, and it had unexpectedly transpired to be some of the best coffee I had ever tasted in my life. Not expensive, or fancy, or ground, just good. I could only guess it had something to do with the water.
There were two serviceable chairs under the canopy, enough for us both to sit and enjoy the view across the trees below. The night was almost fully in, the stars increasing in intensity in the clearest of skies and the vacuum which surrounded them a rich, steadily deepening blue. The forests were quietening and there was no wind to rustle the trees or groan of traffic to break the tranquility. It was the kind of night that Rachael and I used to relish. Together.
“We all were. Once,” she added.
“But you said ‘she’s not dead’ - present tense. So you think she is alive now? Today?”
Victoria smiled gently. “When is now?” she asked. She shrugged. “When is today? If you cannot make someone alive today then you have to make today when they were alive. No?”
I narrowed my eyes and thought that one through. There was a logic, it just happened to be a completely impossible one in terms of bringing me into the realms of when Rachael had been living. We had already shared that time and I could not change it. Not one moment of it. First rule of the Sequence, apparently. You become the history, you don’t change it. So for me to go back to the days when Rachael was still alive would either screw up the rest of our time together, time we had already spent or, worse still (given that people were still fucking with this without ever really knowing one way or the other) completely destroy the universe in a blinding flash of light, leaving nothing but a ‘Park Closed’ sign floating in the endless darkness which would no doubt ensue.
“We had that time,” I said. “I don’t think I want to replay it anywhere but in here.” I tapped my head.
Victoria shuffled in her chair and looked at me. It was doleful. “
There is a world beyond the Rachael you know,” she said cryptically. “Another Rachael in another time. If you could see that Rachael… now… you would, wouldn’t you?”
“I… guess… so…?” I said. I wasn’t sure. The question had an air of ‘I’m going to tell you something but don’t get angry’ - in other words, a question you cannot answer with complete honesty until you have all the information to hand. For my part, I didn’t have all the information to hand. I had a pitifully small amount of information to hand, and that’s exactly what it felt like.
“Maybe you will,” she said. “Maybe you will.”
Silence fell for a few moments. We just sipped coffee.
“Did you love her? Really?” she asked, very bluntly. “Or, were you two just… messing?”
It was actually a genuine question, or so it seemed. Not one filled with any malice or designed to trip me up. Victoria was blunt, I was getting that. So it was just a question.
“I loved her more than I think I realised,” I said softly. It was true. “And I miss her like hell.” I had spoken to no-one in any great detail, save for my brief exchange with Milton, since I had been handed the news. The first thing I did, ridiculous as it sounds, was to drive to the carwash and clean the Oldmobile; the car which was now battered to hell and sitting at the bottom of a spring-water lake, probably looking the cleanest it had ever looked. There’s something hidden in that scenario that relates to priorities and acceptance but I was loathed to look too deeply for it. So I had just closed up, as I guess people do. Spending half the time feeling empty and the other half feeling hopeful that some epic mistake had been made and that she would walk through the door of my apartment at any moment. She never did. And, save for the funeral, I didn’t walk out much. I didn’t want to.
Victoria just looked out across the trees, smiling gently. She said nothing, so I carried on, even though I was now feeling more and more like she was the psychologist and I was the patient, her just letting me run my mouth to see where it might take me.
“She was very funny,” I said. “Funniest girl I ever met, and she loved life. I mean really loved it. More than that, she made me love it too and that’s what I miss most. I mean, she looked all gothic and so on, but that was just an act. A rebellion against her parents, I think. Turning to the dark side and laughing out loud while doing it. That was Rachael.” I thought a little more about all that she was and all that my life had lost. “And she was clever. So very clever. Really good with words.”
I smiled at memories. Daft memories. “Once, when we were in a meeting together, some aero stuff, we each had to read a report and comment on it. You know..? Add our notes to the page. Rachael kept pretending she was thinking, or about to write something and she kept touching the paper with the pen, back when KRT still used paper. When the report came around to me I noticed that she had surreptitiously placed dots below certain letters throughout the page. When I read them back in order, it said ‘I love you, you know’.” I smiled again, proud this time. “It became a bit of a thing. We’d send each other notes and put dots underneath spelling out something completely different to the main text. Cards and stuff.”
I shook my head at some of the complex messages she had managed to embed in the most innocuous communications. We had looked at a way of doing it digitally, in a way that others might not notice, but we never found a way. Some things still need the old techniques, I guess.
I took a deep breath and exhaled, loudly, looking around at the view. It was beautiful. Endless. Unspoilt. Unlike so much in this world. This whole area, north of the city where the forests were allowed to just carry on and do their thing was kind of ‘our place’, if we had one. It made me miss having her by my side to enjoy it more than any other place I could recall.
Looking around the clearing - sorry, the scrap yard - into which the cabin had been built, I saw an area cordoned off by tape, as though it was in some way hazardous. It was in one of the furthest corners, just in front of the wide orange/brown girth a Jeffrey pine. Despite being taped off, it seemed like a completely flat, totally innocuous patch of earth. It even had flowers growing on it. Not many, but some.
Victoria had clearly followed my eye-line.
“I’m going to do some digging,” she said, almost disinterestedly. “Find out some history of the place. But not today. Can't dig today.”
“Do you like being out here alone?” I asked.
“Love it,” she said without thinking. “Nature don't lie to you, you see. Sure, it'll try to kill you, if you fuck with it, but it won’t ever fuck with you. Not unless you prod it.”
“How do you get food?” I asked. “Do you hunt your own?”
“Always,” she said. “Sometimes out there...” she waved a hand across the valley, “sometimes down at the mini-mart. Prefer it out there, though. Costs less and I don't have to deal with the people.” I smiled. “There's a secret to good hunting, though. Want to know what that is?”
I'd never hunted in my life and had no desire to, but I was polite. “Sure.”
“Not hunting,” she said firmly. “Because folks don’t need to hunt.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Routine,” she said. “We all have it: forest has it, streams have it, animals have it. We’re all just creatures of routine. Wherever we are. You just got to learn it. Then you find your spot and you sit back, crack a cold one and wait. You don’t have to hunt. Your prey will come to you if you know its routine. We’re all the same, choose where you put us.”
“Well,” I said, looking out across the trees again, “you picked a damn fine spot.”
Without looking at me, Victoria replied: “I didn’t pick it, Mr. Strauss. You did.”
As usual I didn’t follow and, as usual, it showed. She glanced at me, then shook the comment away again, like loose snow on a jacket, laughing gently. “You’ll see. Soon enough.”
So I too shook it off. Most of what she said made no real sense anyway. Except to her, I guess.
“Rachael and I used to come out this way a lot.” I said, smiling gently and looking in the general direction of the Sequoia National Forest, perhaps some fifty miles or so north. Victoria said nothing, so I continued. “On our days off, if they tallied. Just to, y’know… get away. To be us. We’d walk, talk, eat and drink. We’d write daft messages on paper boats to people we’d never meet and then throw them in the streams. Some days we’d just climb as high as we could instead and soak in the view. It was awesome.” I looked around in admiration. “It still is. We’d visit the sequoias and she’d just marvel at just how long they might have been around; marvel at how short our time on earth is by comparison and remind me how we should all live every day for today. After today, I really don’t know how many days I have left, but the fact that - however many it may or may not be - I will always be able to do the math without a calculator is really quite scary. The last time Rachael and I came out here I could have counted her days on my fingers and still have had two left to stick up at the world. I wish I’d known that. Back then.”
My tone sank. “Nothing is forever, is it?”
I looked to Victoria and found that, rather than looking sad or full of forced condolence as I had somehow unreasonably expected, she was smiling. Almost knowingly. It was the smile of a psychiatrist who had just sat back quietly and let me talk, knowing that I would get somewhere all on my own. I got the feeling she had simply allowed my mouth to run and it had run me right to the place she had always wanted me to be.
“Diamonds are,” she said. Then, without pausing, she started singing the song ‘Diamonds are Forever’ softly and under her breath. She sounded more removed from the world than ever, especially when she emphasised the trail words: forever… forever…
I smiled. “So they say.”
She turned and looked right at me. Sternly. “Time to have a chat about Diamond then,” she said. She paused, just for a moment. “About, maybe, why you chose to carve him up..?”
I stared
back at her, presumably looking shocked. I didn’t care how many clippings, notes or photos she might have pinned to her walls relating to me, to Rachael or to the whole Sequence mess, this was Diamond. And there was no way on earth she could have possibly known about that.
TWELVE
Tuesday, October 25, 1644.
Arques, Perpignan, France.
Unlike Hercule, her husband, Béatrice de Montmorency hated this war. She had nothing to prove and nothing much she wanted to gain, save for her dream of a comfortable life in which she, Hercule and their children - which would soon number three - could live safe, happy and long lives. But she also understood that it was just that - a dream. This world seemed to have no intention of allowing the peace she craved for her husband’s heart to come to pass. If there was one thing she knew for sure, it was that one day - and hopefully not too soon - her husband’s desire to regain some power and reinstate his family name would, like his father before him, get him killed. Like he, she hated the Spanish, but there were days when she wondered if she hated them any more or any less than she hated her own king and his cardinals. They could all go to hell, and take France with them, just so long as they left her family alone.
Sadly, that was not going to happen.
In 1210, during the Albigensian Crusade, Simon de Montfort plundered Arques and gave lordship of the area to one of his cousins, Eric, as a reward. In 1280 Eric’s son Gilles began construction of the castle, known as Le Château d’Arques, with his own son Gilles II completing the building in 1310. The square tower, measuring eleven metres square and standing an impressive twenty-five metres high, was still virtually intact and was a masterpiece of gothic art in military architecture. Adorned with five arrowslits per side and a further five per turret, it stood in the centre of an enclosure of smaller outbuildings and consisted of four levels; each set with vaulted arches. When the de Montforts vacated, the castle was sold to the king as national property. It had suffered some damage over the years but, when Cardinal Richelieu had looked for somewhere to all-but banish the bastard child of Henri, it had become home; their home. It might not, in Hercule’s eyes, be of the grandeur he felt his family deserved, but it was set in some of the most beautiful countryside that the long shadows of the French Pyrenees had to offer and, more importantly, it was also set about as far from the pain and cries of war in the north as one could ever hope to achieve. It was just what she had always wanted for her husband and her family: the perfect retreat.
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