Stamping Butterflies
Page 36
“It is?” Gene Newman wasn’t entirely sure Paula Zarte understood how angry the First Lady could get.
In the end, a pretty Italian-looking girl came to collect their plates, brushed away the President’s grissini crumbs with a tiny metal scoop and brought them dessert menus bound in red leather.
“Don’t tell me…”
“Five languages and she can strip and reassemble a handgun faster than most of the men in this room,” Paula Zarte said. “She’ll be a section chief in five years.”
“Who’s here from the FBI or the NSA?”
“No one,” Paula said, “they’re not involved.”
“You know what you’re doing?” Gene Newman sounded genuinely concerned. There were laws governing inter-agency relationships. The President knew, he’d introduced some of them.
“You have a problem.”
President Newman looked at her. “You’re not the first person to tell me this in the last few days.”
“I know,” Paula Zarte said. “I had a call from Petra Mayer.”
That was the moment the President knew his world had finally gone pear-shaped, to use one of his daughter’s expressions. There were no circumstances under which Petra Mayer and Paula Zarte should talk to each other through anything other than attorneys. It was Professor Mayer who’d made case law by extracting her files from the archives at Langley and Paula Zarte’s predecessor who spent a large amount of the Agency’s money appealing the case.
“Do I want to know about this?” he asked.
To his surprise the woman opposite took the question seriously, disappearing behind her eyes while she considered the possible answers. In the end, she just reached down beside her chair and opened her briefcase. It contained police records, files from drug clinics, banking details from a family trust and even an old copy of NME.
Paula Zarte left all of these in the case. What she produced belonged to her daughter and came from Santa Claus. It was a child’s Etch A Sketch. Twisting the plastic knobs, Paula wrote a simple sentence, showed it to the President and then shook the toy so that its screen went grey again.
“Let me know what you want to do.”
Gene Newman didn’t even need to think about it. “I want to know how this happened.”
The woman on the other side of the table sighed. “I was afraid you’d say that.” Signalling for the bill, she paid cash and pushed back her chair. “My car’s outside,” she said, “and I’ve booked a double room at a tiny family hotel overlooking the Sound. You’ll be surprised to know that it’s opening early.”
The receptionist’s hair had faded from red to grey and her pale blue eyes watched the single car draw up with little interest. If the old woman behind the desk recognized Gene Newman she gave no hint of that fact.
“Sign here.”
“I’ll do that,” Paula Zarte said. She signed the form with a name so anonymous it had to have been chosen by computer for lack of recognition factor. The address was similarly anodyne. “They’re real,” she said, when the old Irish woman was off fetching a key.
“Don’t tell me…”
Their room was small with a shower rather than a bath and one window that looked out over grey waves lapping a shingle beach.
“What do your people think is happening?” Gene Newman turned back from the window and its view of three muscular fishermen casting weighted lines into an unpromising looking surf.
“You mean, do they think we’re really having an affair?” Paula Zarte smiled sadly. “It’s possible. But they know that’s not why I’m here. We’ve got budgets coming up and it’s known you’re not happy with Homeland Security. In fact, you’re rumoured to be looking at breaking HS up and giving everyone back some level of autonomy, subject only to an overview from your new National Security Advisor.”
“That’s your price?”
“There is no price,” Paula Zarte said. “As far as everyone out there is concerned we’re discussing budgets and the limits to this Agency’s responsibility. The reason we’re meeting like this is you can’t be seen to talk to us before talking to anyone else…You haven’t talked to anyone else, have you?”
Gene Newman shook his head. “You know,” he said, “I’m beginning to see why we couldn’t have this meeting in the Oval Office.”
Later, Paula brought up the issue of pardoning Prisoner Zero. “It’s going to play better at home if he’s American,” she said.
“I still need him to appeal to me directly.”
“You can do it without.”
“Of course I can. But some kind of public remorse and an appeal for clemency would make things a lot simpler.”
“In which case I wouldn’t hold your breath.”
President Newman looked at her.
“I’ve been reading Dr. Petrov’s file. Half the time I’m not even sure the man is aware he’s even human. Of course, Ed’s got his own ideas on how to handle this.”
Gene Newman’s Security Advisor had a theory on everything.
“Don’t tell me,” said the President. “We take Prisoner Zero down to a cellar and sweat the equations out of him.”
“Even better,” Paula said. “We kidnap Prisoner Zero and replace him with a decoy, then we execute the decoy as a matter of principle, ride out the public storm and give the original back to our North African allies to extract the information we need.”
“Yeah, right,” said Gene Newman. “Like we hadn’t thought of that.”
The sex was slow and gentle and rather a surprise to both of them. In his private study the next morning, preparing to telephone Petra Mayer, the President was unable to remember who began it but completely aware that, once started, neither Paula nor he had been in any hurry to stop.
It lacked the fire of their Paris days and when Gene reached up to wrap one arm around her naked back, supporting Paula while he rolled both of them over to put himself on top, he realized she was heavier than before and he was less strong. Fumbling the turn, Gene lost his rhythm.
“We’re getting old,” he said.
“No,” said Paula Zarte. “You are. I’m just not as young as I was.”
Afterwards Gene Newman pillowed his head on one breast and listened to the slowing of her heart. And then when he could put it off no longer, he showered, dressed and came back to sit on the chair next to their bed. The problem seemed like something he should discuss while wearing his clothes.
“You want to tell me how this happened?”
“What’s to tell?” Paula shrugged. “We got it wrong. Prisoner Zero’s real name is Marzaq al-Turq, he’s part German and wholly a genius. It looks like Jake Razor really died in that fire in Amsterdam.”
“So,” said President Newman, “Prisoner Zero stole his identity.”
“What would you do?” Paula said. “You’re penniless, drug-addicted, surviving on small sums paid into an account by a family who refuses even to see your only friend and suddenly that friend dies. Prisoner Zero didn’t steal Jake’s identity. He just kept cashing the cheques.”
“Who knows this?”
“Me,” said Paula, “you, Petra Mayer and Prisoner Zero.” She managed to say the Professor’s name without making it sound like a swear word. “That’s all, so far.”
“What about Jake’s family?”
“So far as they know it was Marzaq al-Turq who died in the fire. The flat in Paris was their way of getting Jake away from Amsterdam. Off the record, they even accept that Prisoner Zero is Jake, no matter what they’ve been saying to the press.”
“What are the chances we can keep them believing that?”
Paula Zarte thought about it. “You want my suggestion?”
The President nodded.
“Leave it to me,” she said. It would take a certain amount of juggling of records and a couple of fingerprint swaps, but nothing that hadn’t been done before.
“You can do it?”
“Oh yes,” she said, “we’re the CIA. We can do anything.”
; CHAPTER 49
Northern Mountains, CTzu 53/Year 20
As Tris and Luca headed towards the end of their bridge, Zaq sat under his willow in the walled garden, holding a peach and watching butterflies flicker in and out of sight, not yet warmed enough by the sun to do more than make small hops from one flower to another, wings beating lazily.
“Almost time,” Zaq said.
Inside his head a boy stood over the broken body of a girl and Zaq knew, beyond doubt, that the boy had just died there in the dusty graveyard and the man who walked away was never more than a ghost. It was unfair, unjust and, for all Zaq knew, destined to produce only failure, but he still let it happen.
Sometimes the Chuang Tzu surprised even himself with his ability to make others cry. Wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, Zaq stared round at the mulberry bushes fat with purple fruit.
“Wait,” he told a butterfly.
The way it was meant to work was that the Chuang Tzu would reach out his hand and the butterfly would alight, bringing its message. After delivering the message the butterfly would die. As would anyone else in the garden unwise enough to reach for a butterfly without being the Chuang Tzu.
Only the reborn could communicate in this fashion with the Library and live. Since Zaq refused to reach out and welcome the hovering butterfly it fluttered at the edge of his vision, puzzled but willing to wait.
It was a very small butterfly, presumably to reassure Zaq that the Librarian’s question was not really that important, a mere trifle that Zaq could make disappear simply by answering.
If Zaq didn’t reach out his hand soon the butterfly would die anyway and another would take its place. The creatures had very short life-spans. A point he was meant to ponder as all emperors had pondered before him; except that Zaq was busy refusing to be emperor, he was being Zaq.
Which was the cause of his original war against the Library. And maybe this was his last chance to be himself before everything changed.
The peach Zaq held was fresh, perfect in its plumpness and the bloom of its unmarked skin, so perfect, in fact, that it reminded him of the servitor girl whose name he’d now forgotten. There were a dozen peaches like it on a small tree so close to the willow that he could almost reach for fruit without moving and a dozen trees within easy walk if that tree would not do.
The garden held a strange place in the affections of the Library; Zaq could think of no other way to put it. Maybe it was because of the link between gardens and perfection, gardens and heaven, gardens and the afterlife. Actually, there was no maybe about it. Zaq knew this was true because he’d asked the Librarian.
When the Library first talked with Major Commissar Chuang Tzu, who was obviously not the original Chuang Tzu, merely the original for the purposes of the Library who’d never met Homo sapiens before and had not realized the universe was still inhabited, its creators having moved.
When it first trawled though the young Chinese officer’s deepest memories it had noticed the single-minded importance put on a vegetable garden and the wild grasses growing on a hillside above a waterfall. A search through the AI and the memories of the cold eternals aboard the SZ Loyal Prince revealed that most faith systems on the world from which the ship originated bound heaven and gardens together.
So the darkness (as it then was) gave the Chinese officer the garden he’d known only in the abstract. A place of butterflies, messages and memories. Zaq didn’t need to hear the message and he already knew what it would say, some riff on what General Ch’ao Kai had said yesterday.
He had time to change his mind. The situation was not irreversible. The best way to make peace with the Library was accept his role as Emperor and reinstate the imperial guard.
Let them kill this assassin.
All General Ch’ao Kai needed was permission to mobilize his troops.
Nothing Zaq hadn’t already heard. And, more to the point, nothing he hadn’t already refused to contemplate. Zaq wanted an end to this and his orders stood. He was to be regarded as invisible. All of those living within the Forbidden City were to go about their everyday business as if he had never been. He would remain in the garden and wait for his assassin.
Zaq smiled and a billion people wept at his sadness.
A moment or two later he changed his mind.
“Oh, come on then.”
Holding out his hand, Zaq watched the butterfly make its short journey from mulberry leaf to Zaq’s wrist, dying in a tiny flash of electricity.
“Back yourself up.” The order was stark, except it wasn’t an order. The Council of Ambassadors couldn’t give orders, they could merely make suggestions. Ones that the Emperor was entirely free to ignore. Of all the suggestions they’d relayed to the Librarian, this was certainly the shortest.
“No,” said Zaq, “I don’t think so.”
Backing himself up meant returning to Baohe Dian, the Hall of Preserving Harmony, to be examined by the imperial doctors. After which he would sign orders making General Ch’ao Kai regent for the eight minutes it would take Zaq to be read, found adequate and recorded. Maybe the Library had a host already prepared, a second Zaq blissfully sleeping away his non-life in a glass tank somewhere.
Zaq had in mind the pods originally found on the SZ Loyal Prince, which he’d visited. This was rare among emperors, who mostly sat quietly in the Butterfly Garden or retired to the silence of the Library to practice calligraphy, draw endless misty mountains or note down their carefully composed words of wisdom.
Of course, for them the SZ Loyal Prince was historical abstraction, not somewhere they’d called home for the first seven years of their lives. Zaq was aware that as Chuang Tzu he had been less than impressive. Rapture still existed and the 2023 worlds were healthy, true enough, their peoples no more bored or less happy than under the putative rule of any of the other, earlier emperors.
Only he’d intended to be so much more and would have been if he’d had the courage of the assassin who struggled so hard through the snow and storms Zaq sent against her. This small, cropped-haired figure wrapped in a cheap jacket and torn trousers, who talked to the air, slept oblivious and alone on a storm-tossed bridge and rose the next morning, equally oblivious as to why the storm now stilled. Zaq was exhausted from trying to live up to the assassin’s expectations.
“Oh well,” he said, climbing to his feet. Turning, Zaq hurled the peach he held against the grey up-stroke of a willow. It was a perfect shot and the fruit burst as it exploded against pale bark, staining the willow’s trunk with a smear of darkness.
Zaq would have given anything for the peach to contain a maggot, to be bruised or rotten at the stone, but that would never happen. Perfection was required for the Emperor, even in the Butterfly Garden, and the Library was there to ensure perfection was what he got.
The maggot, the bruising and the rot were inside Zaq’s head. He didn’t think anyone had much doubt about that.
“Go back,” Tris suggested.
The words popped out of her mouth in that way words sometimes do. A fleeting thought suddenly translated into speech with no filter betwen original thought and open mouth.
“Go…?” Luca looked amused, tired and almost dead on his feet, but very definitely amused. “Go where?” he asked.
“Home?” Tris didn’t intend a question, that just happened to be the way it inflected. “You should go back,” she added, more decisively. “You’re exhausted. I can manage from here.”
“Manage?” His smile became a sad grin. “Of course you can manage,” Luca said. “I’m not here to help you.”
“You’re not?” demanded Tris.
Luca shook his head. “You’re helping me,” he said. And in that moment he sounded like an adult talking to a very small child. An intelligent, well-loved child, but a child all the same.
Moving Tris gently to one side, Luca stepped off the bridge and onto solid rock. “There’s no way I could have escaped the village before you arrived.”
“Why not?”
“Why not?”
“The storms, the plateau, the ravine, the bridge…They’re linked, you know.” He glanced at her. “You do know that, don’t you? That everything on Rapture is tied to everything else and all of it tied to the happiness of the Emperor.”
“Really?” Tris said.
“At all levels,” said Luca. It was obvious that this was news to Tris. “Didn’t anyone ever explain quantum interdependence?”
Helping Tris onto the rock, Luca brushed snow from her blue jacket and peeled frost from her eyebrows. He did this without thinking, the way a father might do it for a daughter and Luca knew, at a theoretical level, that treating Tris this way made for problems because he’d already bedded her, creating the template for an entirely different if less complex relationship.
Luca knew this only at a theoretical level because he’d met very few people from the 2023 worlds. In fact, to be honest, the only person with whom he’d talked closely was Tris and he questioned whether she really represented that culture at all.
The girl certainly didn’t fit his image of a hyper-educated, sexually sophisticated, slightly blasé member of the richest society yet existing, which was how the Always Knowledgeable and Correct Empire of the 2023 worlds sold itself, mostly to itself.
“Which world do you come from?” Luca was sure he’d asked Tris this question before and had memories of not understanding her answer.
A second snow-covered plateau extended for at least a day and maybe longer beyond the bridge. Because there were few hills and no actual valleys, the snow had spread evenly across the undulating surface and the flakes were so dry they barely stuck to Tris’s and Luca’s shoes, although this dryness meant the plateau’s surface was forever sifted by the wind.
And yet even the wind seemed to be in their favour, shifting to the west to blow gently against their backs and coax them on their way.