The Resurrected Man

by Sean Williams

  A ball of ice rolled down his spine. “I knew?”

  “You said you did.”

  “When?” He reached out to grab her arm. “When exactly was this?”

  She pulled away. “You'd have to ask le caïd. It was a long time—”

  “No. You tell me now. If you remember what I said so well, you must have an idea when I said it.” Seeing indecision in her eyes, he pressed on. “Was it before Lindsay's funeral or after? Can you answer that?”

  “Definitely before. I remember we tried to put viruses into the KTI network as a tribute, but they didn't take. You didn't answer our calls—”

  “How long before?”

  “I don't know. The day before, perhaps.”

  The day before. In his head he constructed a timetable. Lindsay had died on April 11th, 2066, the day after Marylin had quit JRM and Lindsay had taken his mysterious d-mat trip to SciCon. The inquest had begun on the 14th, the day before Jonah had opted for Privacy and therefore the last day his movements were on record. Lindsay's funeral had been on the 18th, so Jonah must have come to Quebec on the 17th. In the days since the 15th, he must've learned something substantial in order to justify making threats to WHOLE, or else he had become desperate enough to bluff. Either way, he had gone into the bath two days later, on the 19th. And there he appeared to have stayed.

  The only real evidence that he or another version of him might have been elsewhere lay in the numerous, and anomalous, UGI matches recorded across the planet from May 2066 to May 2069, a month before his reawakening. Because the GLITCH records were in essence public domain, restricted only by Privacy and von Trojan Laws, they were difficult to fake. So the evidence was significant. He couldn't ignore it, as much as he would have liked to.

  Still, no one had actually seen him…

  “Kuei—” He went to touch her again, but she brushed his hand aside. “Sorry. Look, this must seem very strange. But—thank you. I appreciate what you've told me. You didn't have to.”

  She didn't respond, except for a look of scepticism as she stood and walked away. One of the remaining masked guards made a gesture at him, intended for her, that might have meant: “What's his problem?” She spat something venomous in Quebecois argot, and kept walking past Marylin and into the mass-freighter.

  “Learn anything?” Marylin asked via prevocals. She was standing by the open doors with her arms folded, facing in. She looked like she was waiting for something.

  “Yes. You?”

  She glanced at him, obviously considering whether or not to pursue his curt answer to her question. “Not enough. Mancheff won't believe me when I tell him that anonymous relays really are anonymous, and that if he sends the body back to KTI via one we won't be able to track him down.”

  “Won't you?”

  “Possibly not. But even if we do, he won't lose very much. This facility is obviously temporary, and portable. At most he might blow a cover or two. The freighter has to be registered with someone, after all.”

  That prompted a thought. “Any guesses what they shift with it?” he asked.

  “I'm assuming weapons, explosives and the like.”

  “Then they must have a license for that, too. Are restricted materials still restricted?”

  “Yes. That's a good thought. We can search the records when we're out in the open again. There can't be many operations with both.”

  He nodded. It was good to think about the future, to fight the past that kept pulling him back down. He had to keep moving; otherwise, he told himself, he might soon find himself unable to move at all.

  “I think we're getting somewhere,” he said.

  “You do? Why?”

  “No reason. Well, nothing I can prove. The Twinmaker's giving us clues. First me, then the note, and now the sign. They have to lead somewhere.”

  “Maybe not. They could be trophies he's collected along the way.”

  “Then we use them as clues.”

  “Only generally, to give us a window into his head.”

  He shook his head. “No, I'm thinking of something else. Or I think I'm thinking of something else. There's something not quite right about all this…”

  An ear-splitting shriek suddenly cut through his thoughts. It lasted only a split-second, but its intensity was painful. He opened his mouth and closed his eyes by reflex. His hands were halfway to his ears before he realised that the sound had come from his implants—from within his head.

  Marylin had also reacted without thinking. Bent half-forward, she rested a hand on the wall of the mass-freighter and shook her head. Aloud she muttered, “What the—”

  Then she cut herself off. She looked at Jonah and, via prevocals, said, her voice triumphant, “It's the others! We're being pinged!”

  He shook his head. “What?”

  “They're using the balloon network or planes to sweep Quebec with high-power radio waves. The sweep pinpoints shielding, then sends a second, more specific pulse to hunt for a response from our implants. It should come soon. No shielding is perfect. They'll be listening for an automatic reply on the emergency frequency. If we're lucky—”

  Sound burst through their implants again—this time a warbling, info-dense scream rather than a brute-force shriek. He felt something in his head respond, although he couldn't describe the how of it. No doubt the supply of certain chemicals and sugars in that region of his brain had suddenly been depleted. A red light began to flash in his overseer's display indicating that an emergency message had been sent.

  “Does that mean they know where we are?” he asked.

  “They sure do. Within a few kilometres, anyway.”

  “And now what?”

  “They'll move in. How they do it depends where this shed's situated. If it's rural they could just gas the whole place and give us the antidote when they find us among the bodies. If it's urban—”

  Mancheff walked out of the mass-freighter to confront Marylin.

  “We're moving,” said the leader of WHOLE. “Now.”

  “But—”

  “No arguments. Give me the name of a reliable relay and maybe I'll send the body to you.” He raised a finger and an eyebrow in unison, daring her to force the issue. “Maybe. It depends on how quickly your friends get here. Remember, I could just send it nowhere.”

  “A relay. Okay: MadDuchess,” Marylin said as the guards moved forward to bind her hands again. “How did you know?”

  “We're not stupid,” he said.

  “Who's your contact?” Jonah asked.

  Mancheff glared at him. “There's no contact. Sensors on the roof registered a surge of some kind. And—” to Marylin “—I saw you flinch. That's enough to make me err on the side of caution.” His eyes flicked back to Jonah: “On your feet, slomeau, or we'll drag you of here.”

  Jonah tried to stand, but found that he could not. His thigh muscles were locked tight, powerless.

  “I—uh, thanks again,” he said as Kuei assisted him. This time his wrists were tied too. A heavy, thick hood went over Marylin's head an instant before one also went over his. Hands guided him out of the room, but not before he heard the clang of the mass-freighter's doors slamming shut.

  “I think he'll send the body,” Jonah said via prevocals. “It's in his best interest to do so, and he's not stupid.”

  Marylin didn't respond.

  “Marylin? Can you hear me?”

  Silence.

  His first, panicky thought was that they'd been separated—or worse, that she might be hurt. Then he heard her cough, muffled by the double thickness of the hoods but distinct. The tone brought back memories of the times they had worked together. In the field, a cough or a gesture could communicate a sentence's worth of information when speech and prevocals were impossible. Like now.

  He coughed back, relieved to know he wasn't the only one having trouble. The hoods were obviously shielded to prevent them being pinged again. He didn't know how deeply the MIU sweep could penetrate, but he doubted it would make it thro
ugh two layers. Even more remote was the chance of finding them again once they'd been moved.

  Van doors opened ahead of him. Someone guided him into the back and made sure he was seated before Marylin followed. No one spoke in English, but there was plenty of discussion. Mancheff was arguing with Kuei and another man. The argument ended only when the time came to seal the van. Kuei remained in the back while Mancheff went elsewhere. The van shifted seconds later, as though the WHOLE leader had taken a seat in the front, but Jonah couldn't be certain. The interior was soundproofed.

  He jerked sideways when the van moved forward, and he bumped into someone's shoulder.

  “Here we go again,” Marylin muttered.

  “Some tour we're getting,” he replied. “Any idea, anyone, where we're going this time?”

  “Be quiet.” Kuei's voice was soft but insistent.

  Jonah sighed and leaned against the wall of the van.

  An unknown time later, he woke with a jerk and an elbow in his ribs.

  “Sit up, Jonah. You're squashing me!”

  His covered head banged against the wall behind him. “Ow! Shit.”

  “Don't kill yourself.”

  “I've been asleep?”

  “Snoring, too.” Marylin's voice was annoyed and weary. “At least one of us got some rest.”

  He went to rub his skull, but his hands were still tied. Afterimages of the dream made him edgy. He had been on his knees in a desert with a gun to the back of his neck. The barrel had pushed him down until his face was pressed against the sand, then further still until the sand had bubbled over his head and swallowed him whole. The dream had left him with the twin sensations of falling and being buried alive.

  Exactly when he'd gone to sleep, he couldn't remember. At first, he had tried to catch up on the Twinmaker files, but he had been feeling disoriented enough without studying stationary images with the decidedly nonstationary van rocking around him. And as his new overseer was neither equipped with audio translation nor in possession of an audio library, he was unable to catch up with news and music from the last three years. That had limited his options dramatically. At some point he must've closed his eyes and attempted the only one left.

  And now—

  “I need to piss,” he said.

  “That makes three of us.” Kuei's accented voice was loud in the van. Again Jonah found it hard to reconcile the sound with her face. “We'll stop soon, I'm sure.”

  The uncertainty in her voice worried him. He checked his overseer. They had been driving for several hours already, presumably without a break. “Where?”

  “A safe-house,” said the woman. “I don't know which one. The plan is to keep you a little longer, in case we need something to bargain with.”

  Jonah remembered the argument as they had left the hangar. “That's what Mancheff told you he'd do?”

  “It's what I would do, and he usually gets there in the end.” Kuei shifted in her seat. “Assuming nothing goes wrong.”

  “How do you know it hasn't?”

  “Putaine, hang on!” Something clicked and Kuei spoke into an intercom. The voice at the other end might have been Mancheff's. Jonah crossed his legs and concentrated on the babble of French, trying to pick out even one word that might be significant.

  Apart from his full bladder and the ominous dream, his shoulders and back were stiff and the air was stifling under the hood. Somebody had had the forethought to dose him up with oral hygiene agents at some point during his treatment, so at least his breath didn't smell. And still, against all logic, he wasn't hungry. All in all, he decided, things could have been a lot worse. They certainly had been on other occasions.

  “Do you remember the Banytis case?” he whispered to Marylin.

  She grunted. “All too well.”

  “Don't sound so wounded. You had it easy, remember?”

  Her reply was another grunt, which, he supposed, he deserved for bringing up that particular memory.

  Tepko Banytis, a crooked accountant from Broome, had been under 24-hour EJC surveillance for a month before an edgy client hired JRM to take a more active look at his affairs. The business front had proven a tough nut to crack, requiring multiple attempts to infiltrate a virus through increasingly resistant firewalls and into the system's core mainframe. Once there, fraud and trafficking had been easy to expose, but more than electronic data was needed to clinch the case. They'd needed to get someone inside the building to plant devices designed to catch Banytis in the act.

  Jonah himself had been the one to go in, covered in nanoware applicators containing the bare minimum of metal—so they wouldn't trigger detectors—and livewired on every possible level. Marylin had waited outside, watching both the exterior of the building and Jonah's VTC feed. As most of the equipment they were using was illegal, or at least restricted to official EJC operatives, they worked alone. The EJC wouldn't ask questions if the end results were sufficient to convict Banytis of something, but if they were caught in the act they would suffer deregistration at the very least for violating Privacy—possibly criminal charges.

  At first, everything had gone smoothly. Jonah had slipped through Banytis' security with help from software patches and had made it into the basement level of the building. From there he had planned to distribute the nanoware through the air-conditioning ducts, positioning each one by teleoperation and sticking around long enough to ensure that the devices were assembling correctly. But Banytis had returned earlier than expected, and Marylin had been distracted while providing Jonah with technical advice. By the time she had raised the alarm, Banytis had entered the building with another man, an accomplice by the name of Eli Gliem. Instead of going to his office as usual, the two of them had gone down into the basement, almost as though they had known that Jonah was there and had come to catch him in the act.

  That wasn't what happened at all, but it was the first thing Jonah thought upon hearing their footsteps descending towards him. He had barely enough time to take cover under the stairs. As Banytis and Gliem walked into view, heading directly for his hiding place, he thought for certain he'd been found—and almost called Marylin to go for help before realising that something was wrong.

  Banytis was holding a gun on his old friend, and Gliem himself wasn't looking too good. When they reached a point right in front of Jonah, Banytis said, “Here's as good as anywhere,” and raised the gun. The gun went off and Gliem fell to the floor with a bullet through the back of the head. Banytis waited a second, then rolled the body further under the stairs to a point where it was actually touching Jonah's foot.

  Then Banytis had hurried off, out of the building and back to his car. It turned out later that he had chartered a private jet under a false name to Borneo, where he'd planned to disappear. Indeed, he might have made it had he not somehow completely failed to see Jonah watching in the shadows. Jonah had, of course, recorded the murder and instructed Marylin to forward the footage to the EJC. A squad of LEOs picked Banytis up a kilometre from the airport.

  That would have been the end of it but for Banytis' reactivation of the security system as he left the building. Not wanting to alert him to the presence of an intruder, Jonah had been forced to remain under the stairs for ten minutes while Marylin overrode security. In that time, he had become acutely conscious of Gliem's body at his feet. Not just because it was a rapidly cooling corpse but because, like most corpses, its sphincter muscles had relaxed and the resulting odour was almost painfully strong…

  “If you're going to suggest that Banytis might be behind all this,” Marylin said after a moment, “forget it. He was executed a year ago.”

  Jonah nodded to himself. He hadn't consciously been thinking along those lines, but his unconscious might have. Revenge was a possibility he'd not considered before. As far as he knew, there were few people he'd offended deeply enough to warrant this sort of vendetta, and none with the right kind of know-how or connections. But it was worth bearing in mind. No possibility could be ignored until
the case was closed.

  “There's somewhere we can stop not far from here,” Kuei said in English. “Can you hang on another ten minutes?”

  “We'll have to,” Marylin said. “A drink would be good, and some fresh air, too.”

  “Don't push your luck.”

  Jonah smiled under the hood. It sounded like captive and captor had been annoying each other during his extended nap. If anyone was going to push for fair treatment, it would be Marylin, a stickler for form and process. He, on the other hand, could see both sides. Kuei wasn't going to take any chances, not when capture could well mean the death penalty. If that meant Marylin and him suffering slightly in order to live another day, then so be it; he could indeed live with that.

  It had been the same three years ago. Marylin had hated the irregularity of private practice, even while she revelled in its freedoms. The Banytis case had finished her. She hadn't liked the blatant illegality of the entire enterprise, and had used the fact that ordinary implants had been enough, in the end, to prove the case to hammer home her point. He, on the other hand, had argued that if they hadn't taken a chance and broken the law in the first place, they would've missed the act entirely and Banytis could have escaped.

  She had refused to back down. And neither had he. The argument—far from their first—had raged throughout the night after Banytis had been committed to trial. They should have been celebrating—had indeed started out that way. Looking back on it now, he realised how complacent he'd become about their affair. The argument that resulted in the end of everything had begun in bed and ended with her leaving.

  She had delivered her decision at the office the next day, cool and businesslike. Her resignation was effective immediately; he could deposit the overtime he owed her in her usual account, minus a reasonable percentage for the inconvenience. And as for them, she had been thinking for some time about devoting more of her time and energy to Luiz, the man who was supposed to be her full-time partner. She owed him something, she thought, after the extra hours she had pulled just recently. Maybe a holiday, or just some time together. She was sure Jonah would understand when she said it was nothing personal…