Touch

by Claire North

  I scampered into the cubicle.

  Never speak when you can get away with saying nothing at all.

  There was something important I’d left with Alice Mair.

  I got down on my hands and knees in front of the orange-flecked toilet bowel and stuck two fingers down my throat.

  Anyone who says that inducing vomiting can be therapeutic lies.

  It took four attempts before my body got through hot spasms and down to the more important business of throwing up. When done, I sat, sweating and wretched, my arm draped over the edge of the seat, and tried to get my breathing under control. When I could muster the will to look, there, floating among the sticky orange stomach contents from my day, including the near-digested burger I’d had on Kaufurstendam, was Spunkmaster13’s second USB stick.

  Ghosts are lazy.

  Not stupid.

  I took off my helmet, my gloves.

  Under my suit I was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of black leggings. As an outfit it wasn’t ideal, but neither was it soaked in Eugene’s blood.

  I moved through the building. I smiled at strangers and nodded at those who nodded at me and kept my eyes low when I could, and when a man with a pencil tucked behind his ear stopped me with a hand on my arm to ask what was happening with Kepler, they’d heard something bad, I nearly jumped out of instinct, and said, it’s OK. It’ll all be OK. And walked on.

  It took a while to find an unattended computer. I stepped into the bare grey office and wished the door had a lock. The facility felt temporary – dull flat desks in dull flat rooms, not a picture, nor a Post-it note out of place, none of the detritus of an ordinary working environment. The computers were new enough to feel clean in what they did, but old enough for the processor to whine like a puppy begging for RAM. I didn’t bother to guess a login, but shoved Johannes’ USB stick – minus the worst of the puke – into the nearest portal, waited just long enough to see lines of incomprehensible code begin to flow and started rifling the desk. The best thing to do with Spunkmaster’s technology was let it get on by itself.

  The desk was, like everything else in this place, unadorned. Not a snotty tissue or half-eaten sandwich to state that this was anything other than a low-budget film set. I wondered if the walls, when kicked, wouldn’t reveal themselves to be cardboard, gleaming cameras and laughing watchers behind them

  remembering the day they tried to burn me alive

  Eugene kicking me because he wanted to, and where is Coyle?

  Who cares where Coyle is.

  The computer unlocked.

  It did so without even a satisfying flashing icon or a note from Johannes stating his brilliance. A thing which had been locked now was not. Email loaded, revealing that the owner of this computer was one P. L. Trent, and of all the jobs in all the secret hidden organisations of the world, he’d managed to pick finance manager.

  Even hidden organisations of specialist assassins, I supposed, needed accountants.

  I copied the most recent twelve months of email straight on to Johannes’ USB stick and started downloading hard-drive files. As they transferred, my eye wandered briefly over the in-box of P. L. Trent and I found myself irritated at how many words were dedicated to arguments over travel receipts and photocopier ink. Only one name cropped up with enough regularity for me to note it – Aquarius. Aquarius contracts stipulate X amount of medical insurance; Aquarius no longer pays for meals bought while on assignment whose value exceeds five euros. Aquarius likes to kill ghosts.

  Accounts are boring; accounts are important.

  I pulled my USB stick from the machine and stood up to the wailing of a general alarm.

  Someone, somewhere, had pressed a button or pulled a cord, or whatever it was people in this business did when they realised they were in trouble. Perhaps someone had bothered to look at the CCTV. Perhaps Eugene had opened his eyes, and he’d known what to answer to “Leontes”. And when the doctor asked him, who was the last person you saw, he’d said Alice.

  Time to go.

  Chapter 53

  It is said that ghosts do not care for the bodies they wear. We gorge. We feast, we dine, we slouch. We spend money that is not our own, lie with man and woman, woman and man, and when we are done, and the bones are broken and the skin is torn, we move on, leaving nothing but flesh behind.

  In the best of circumstances I believe myself to be better than this.

  These were not the best of circumstances.

  The alarm was a klaxon, blasting from little black speakers which might have, in a different time, encouraged the working masses to reflect upon the glory of their struggle. Now it was a cry of distress, loud enough to make bubbles pop in my ears as I moved – neither walking nor running – through the clamour. There had to be protocols for this situation, but not knowing any, I fell back on brute force.

  Rounding the corridor, I saw a man in a white shirt locking shut a heavy door as he glanced up at me and opened his mouth for what could only be the beginning of another round of code words I couldn’t respond to. I bunched my hand into a fist and drove it as hard as I could into his nose. Something cracked and he fell, blood bursting between his fingers as he cupped his face. I drove my knee between his legs, and as he crumpled forward, flecking the wall with little drops of crimson blood, I put one arm across his throat and the palm of my hand against his face and hissed, “Exit. Now. Or I’ll wear you.”

  His shoulders were broader than mine, his chest rose and swelled like the panting of a beached whale, but I dug my fingers hard into his skin and snarled, “Exit!”

  “Stairs at the end of the corridor,” he stammered. “Down three floors.”

  “What’s the security like?” When he didn’t answer, I snarled, “Tell me or I’ll walk you straight into the nearest fucking bullet!”

  “We go into twos. One watches the other, full gear.”

  “Guns? Suits?”

  He managed a nod.

  “What’s the answer to your call sign? What’s the call and response?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Tell me!”

  Still no answer; he wanted to live. The sweat seeped in dark patches beneath his armpits, his stomach deflated and his spine tensed, but he did not speak.

  I scowled, drew my hand back and drove his skull as hard as I could into the wall. Blood streaked down the concrete as he fell, and I stepped by him and ran towards the end of the corridor, my USB stick in the palm of my hand. The door ahead opened, and as the two men came through, half-dressed in rubber suits, guns in hand, I didn’t slow but raised my hand and shouted, “Circe! Circe!”

  They hesitated, the moment when doubt and fear combined, and in that moment I closed the distance, grabbed the first one by the neck

  switched

  shook Alice off as she staggered back, USB stick falling from her hand, raised my gun to my colleague and fired, point-blank range into his side, and as he fell I stepped past him and kicked the gun from his hand, turned back to Alice as she tried to regain her balance, grabbed her fingers, wrapping them round the butt of the gun and

  switched

  my fingers round the butt of the gun

  pulled the trigger.

  The man half into his suit fell, clutching at his thigh. I picked my USB stick up, felt the weight of the pistol in my fingers, and as the door slid towards its lock, rammed my foot into the gap, let myself through.

  In the stairwell the alarm was muffled but still howling. I heard voices above, footsteps below, and descended. Small square windows lined the stairwell, letting in boxes of yellow light; below, a door slammed. I raised my gun and as the first man rounded the corner, dressed now in full hazmat, I put a bullet through his belly, just below the ribcage. His body swung sideways and I twisted by, heard a gunshot, felt mortar explode behind my left ear and ducked, curling up behind the bulk of the wounded man. Another gunshot snapped at the wall above my head, sending the sound of concrete and metal singing up the stairwell. As another bullet sma
cked overhead I grabbed the back of the injured man’s suit and yanked it free from his trousers. A small inch of bare skin, I pressed my hand to it, closed my eyes and jumped.

  The pain burst like the first hot light from the morning sun. I bit my teeth, felt blood in places it should not have flowed, reminded myself that my arms could still move, that my head could turn, that I could reach behind me, grab the gun from Alice’s hands, turn again, look down, aim at the man who stood below me and fire.

  As the man below me fell, Alice kicked me from behind and I slammed up against the railing of the stairwell, blood bursting across my chest, my sight, my tongue and my mind. I tried to grab her, but my hands were in unwieldy rubber gloves. She drove her elbow into my chest and I howled, an injured dog as humanity collapsed behind the pain, then she reached by me and grabbed the gun still in my hands. I held on tight, tried to wrap one leg around her chest, pin her in place, felt her hands over mine, felt something give around the sleeve and even as she sensed the rubber come away beneath her hand, I reached up to press my wrist against her neck, fumbling for an inch of skin, and it was

  there.

  I snatched the gun from the man’s hands and staggered off him, climbing breathless to my feet, heart rushing from Alice’s adrenaline. Beneath me the injured man wailed, a long, low sound that hummed off the metal railings. I grabbed my USB stick once again, and half-ran, half-fell down the stairs.

  How much easier all this would be if I weren’t carrying something physical with me.

  The door at the bottom was locked, an electronic panel whose code I did not know. Above I could hear shouting, see the slow drip-drip of blood spilling down the side of the stairwell. My mouth tasted sharp and vile. The nearest window was barely wide enough for a child to worm through and high above the stair, but there was street light outside and nothing better in here, so I levelled my gun at it and emptied the magazine. Glass crumpled, cracked and on the final shot shattered, falling like sleet. As footsteps thundered towards me I hauled myself up by my skinny arms, slithered forward, tearing skin on glassy teeth, blood slicing from my bare hands, my belly, my chest, and as the first gunshot snapped behind me I wriggled through the ruined window and flopped, head first, into the world outside.

  A concrete car park framed by a concrete wall. I landed on my palms, felt something crack, pain shoot up through my right arm, then tingling numbness in my elbow. Tried to get up, fell, tried again. I wiggled the fingers of my right arm, and every bone and muscle, every tiny connection shrieked, and I did not move them again. A muzzle flash behind my left shoulder and a smack of bullet into concrete propelled me up, and, cradling my arm, cradling any part where the pressure of finger against skin might outweigh the shock still reverberating through my body, I ran.

  Chapter 54

  Alice Mair.

  Nice body, shame about the use I was making of it.

  I ran through the night, a bleeding woman underdressed for the weather, out on to an alien street in a place I did not know.

  Let no one tell you that fear is fun or exhilarating. Their fear is the fear of the funfair ride where reason tells you the seat belt will keep you safe.

  True fear is the fear of doubt; it is the mind that will not sleep, the open space at your back where the murderer stands with the axe. It is the gasp of a shadow passed whose cause you cannot see, the laughter of a stranger whose laugh, you know, laughs at you. It is the jumping of the heart when a car backfires in the street; it is the shaking hands that shake and shake as your thoughts do, until you laugh at it because you cannot comprehend that it is a thing for which you should weep. It is the flash of the snake’s head as it turns in the forest, the startled jump of a deer, the furious flapping of a sparrow’s wings and yes, I am human

  I run.

  And I am afraid.

  Once upon a time

  a long time ago

  Hecuba came to me in the body of a man with great sideburns and an ivory cane, and said, “I’ve found them.”

  I was Victoria Whitten. Her parents had named her for a queen, and left her the wealth of a princess, and her husband had beaten her until I’d lost patience and stepped into Victoria’s skin and beaten my husband. He now lived in Norwich, I in London, and once a month he wrote to me to assure me that he was well, and I did not reply.

  We sat in my drawing room sipping tea as Hecuba said,

  “A whole nest, right under our noses. They call themselves a brotherhood.”

  “Would you like a macaroon?”

  He leaned forward, the end of his pink nose quivering, and said, “I’ve found them. Will you come with me?”

  “To do what?”

  “To stop them.”

  “Are we talking explosives?”

  “Whatever it takes.”

  “I don’t like knives,” I explained, rolling a tiny macaroon between my well-tended fingertips. “I try not to shoot people unless necessary.”

  He sat back, one leg folding over another in a way which suggested that not so long ago Hecuba had been wearing skirts and was, at this moment, forgetting the nature of his own sex. “They kill us,” he snapped. “They are beyond the law. Does that not interest you?”

  “Interest – yes. Is that interest sufficient to motivate me into infiltrating, if you’ll excuse my framing it so, a den, a lair even, one might go so far, a lair of individuals dedicated to my destruction, in order to kill them one at a time? No. I fear it is not.”

  “You’ve lost hosts,” he retorted sharply. “Everyone’s lost someone. Maybe not to these ones, maybe not to this new ‘brotherhood’, but down the years, people we’ve worn, they’ve gone to the fire, or the gallows, or the wall…”

  “Because we drew attention to ourselves,” I replied, putting my cup down. “We switched a little too much, or perhaps not enough, and we left too many stories behind. The pre-emptive mass murder of individuals set upon our destruction is, if you don’t mind me saying so, a sure way to be noticed.”

  Hecuba’s scowl deepened. There is a face which I have rarely seen since the 1880s. It was the face of that age, when sideburns erupted from the side of the head like whiskers on a water rat; when the moustache was an explosion of curling wax and could scowl something extraordinary. I have sometimes looked for that face, and found it only glaring out from the crabbed old men who squat in the shade of overcooked equatorial countries, or corrupted technocrats glowering through their insufficient pensions.

  Hecuba scowled; his soul scowled with him.

  “I had expected more from you, Ms Whitten,” he said. “I had understood that you were an estate agent.”

  “I have been known to work as the same,” I replied cordially. “And go to some considerable lengths to ensure that the products I procure are neither traceable nor provoke much remark when their circumstances change. And you are correct: I have lost hosts to men such as those you describe. They wore different clothes, had a different name, and yet the motives have always been the same. Fear. Ignorance. The usual motives for the predictable cloud of nebulous prejudice that dogs human history. I cannot say my experiences have made me wiser, or kinder, or bequeathed me a moral plinth from which I may preach my message to the crowd, but I have learned this: that the massed letting of blood never, but never, solves the problem. Naturally, should you pursue those who would pursue me, I would be a hypocrite to offer anything but my grateful thanks. Yet my thanks would be, I think, premature. For there is a near-infinity of men and women who are fearful and wish me harm, but only ever one of me, standing in the dark with knife in hand.”

  Hecuba grunted, rose to his feet. “I’ll thank you for the tea, if no more.”

  I rose too, politely nodding in reply, and followed him to the door. He put his hand on the latch, then hesitated, half-turned.

  “I am not some fool,” he said at last, “that I do not see the reason in what you say. But I have one question of you, which is this: those that would hurt us are many; we are few. You are unique, a sum of e
xperience beyond any other. Why do you give so much credit to the survival of men who are, next to you, common as muck, mindful as stones?”

  I considered his question for a long moment, standing in the cold hall with its high ceiling. “I heard a story once. It was the story of a man called al-Mu’allim. One day a jinn came from the desert and possessed al-Mu’allim, and banished his senior wives but stayed and loved the youngest, who was beautiful and clever, a woman out of her time. They had a child, but the wife died, and the jinn fled. This is the story I have heard, from a long time ago. And do you know what it is to me?”

  A shrug from Hecuba, who neither knew nor sensed he would much care.

  “A story. That is all that the lives of other men ever are – a tale told about another. Including mine. It is the only trace we leave behind, quickly reported with the details blurred, soon forgotten.”

  Hecuba thought about this, then tutted.

  “If that’s all you think you are, then perhaps you’re not worth the effort of saving. Goodbye, Ms Whitten.”

  “Goodbye,” I replied. “Good luck.”

  Four days later the London Gazette reported on the killing of eleven men and three women in a warehouse near Silver Wharf. Two witnesses had survived. One claimed that the occupants of the wharf turned on each other, butchering their neighbours one after another, as though they were possessed by a demon.

  The other survivor, who was far slower to speak, having had both eyes carefully gouged from their sockets, said no, that wasn’t it at all.

  It wasn’t one demon.

  It was two.