A Covenant of Thieves

by Christian Velguth

  Estelle shook her head. It felt like a dull weight was rattling around in there. “No. I mean, yes – he just came back from a research trip. For his latest book. He writes, history of Christianity mostly –” She caught herself. Not important right now. “But he was in Nimes. Where the Roman baths are. Not Africa or…or any of those places.”

  “Well, then, it is a case of terrible luck, I am afraid.” Dr. Bezou took a breath, her tablet clutched to her breast. “Now. We must discuss what happens next.”

  Estelle nodded. “Of course.”

  “Keeping your father in a coma remains our best option. It will allow his body to redirect as much of its energies as possible to fighting off the infection. And it will give us time to do what we can, to treat the infection and help him fight. But…Estelle, I want to be honest with you. His odds are not good. We’ve been administering the usual antimalarial treatment, but so far we’ve seen little effect.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “To be honest, neither do we. It is possible we are dealing with a new variant of the parasite, one unaffected by the medication. Or perhaps it is not malaria at all, but merely something that presents similarly --”

  “Is that possible?” Estelle knew it wasn’t technically good news, but some part of her seized upon it anyway. If it wasn’t malaria, then maybe it was something that could be more easily rectified. As if all this were a clerical error that could be made to go away by simply pointing it out.

  “It is,” Dr. Bezou said, and Estelle could tell by the tone of her voice that she was only saying it because it was what Estelle needed to hear. “And we are exploring the possibility. But the simple fact, Estelle, is that his body has been fighting for over twenty years, and it has left him –”

  “Weak,” Estelle finished, more sharply than she’d intended. She tried to swallow, but her mouth was too dry. “I know. I know he looks it, but – he’s the strongest person I’ve ever known. He’s always been, even after my mom died. He…I told myself I was moving here to look after him. But it was the other way around, I think.” She nodded to herself. “I’ve always needed his strength more than he needed mine.”

  Dr. Bezou put a gentle hand on her arm. “Then you know there is little you can do right now. I know it is hard, but I recommend you go home and get some sleep, if only for a few hours. You’ll only do yourself harm otherwise. I’ll call you immediately with any updates.”

  Estelle returned to the suite instead. The room was dark, save for the rising glow of dawn coming from the window. She moved to her chair beside the bed and took her father’s hand in both of her own. His skin felt thin and dry as paper, but it radiated an awful heat.

  Through the window, she could look out over Paris as it awoke at a leisurely pace. Lamps winked out in the streets and alleyways. The horizon still glittered with a few lights, seeming both impossibly far, and tantalizingly close. The only structure that soared above the uniform skyline was the Tour d’Unité, a monument built from the remains of the Eiffel Tower after it had been shattered by a terrorist bombing decades ago. The form of the original monument was still discernible in the spire and two wide-spread legs on the south-west side, but its girders were now supported by snow-white biomimetic architecture that stood like tree-trunks and wound around the spire like creeping vines. Though the new sections of the monument ultimately accounted for more than half of the tower, it had been designed to blend seamlessly with the wrought iron segments. It was as much a display of French resilience as it was of beauty.

  Sitting beside the window, holding her father’s frail hand, Estelle stared at the Tour d’Unité for a long while, eyes wide open, drinking in every detail. Paris was no stranger to tragedy or recovery. Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower -- icons of pride and beauty, broken by violence and mishap, only to be built up better than before. She tried to grasp that resilience, the strength of the people who had rebuilt in the wake of tragedy, and draw it into herself. To prop herself up, as the nation had propped up the ruins of its iconic monument.

  “Dad,” she began, and then stopped. What the hell was she doing? Saying goodbye? It was far too early for that. The hiss and bleep of the respirator and medical monitors confirmed what she knew: that her dad was still hanging on. He was still fighting, just as he always had. Pushing himself, despite her admonitions. Taking trips with only his medical exoframe for support, writing around the clock, cooking extravagant dinners for the two of them every week.

  Living.

  “I’ll see you soon,” she whispered, and kissed his brow.

  * * *

  Estelle wasn’t confident that she’d even be able to sleep, yet it was all she could do to stay awake on the Metró. It seemed she just barely made it back to her flat, tripping around a meowing Toulouse as she kicked off her shoes. Groggily she dumped a fresh can of food into his bowl, and then collapsed onto the sofa.

  She awoke in what felt like no time at all as her flat’s alarm kicked into motion, gently raising the lights and piping jazz through the speakers. It felt like an assault. The flat felt too hot, too stuffy, and her head was pounding. Estelle pushed Toulouse off her and stumbled to the kitchen to fill a glass with water. She gulped it down and filled it two more times before she was done.

  The first thing she did after that was call the hospital. There were no messages pending on her glasses, but it did little to dissuade her. She got a hold of Dr. Bezou almost at once who, in firm but gentle tones, informed her that there had been little change, and that Estelle would be better off getting some more rest. Estelle told her she’d be by in a couple hours.

  She sent a text to Isa next, explaining her absence in the vague terms of family emergency. Isa was as understanding as ever. Estelle messaged Tonique and Emilie, giving them some brief notes for Phase 2. It wasn’t really needed; her team was just as competent without her as they were under her direction. But she wouldn’t have felt right without doing something.

  After a shower that began perfunctory and turned excessive, Estelle brewed herself some coffee and tried to figure out what to do next. Her first instinct was to go directly to the hospital, but Dr. Bezou was right. There was nothing she could do right now, and her father would have told her the same. She still intended to spend most of the remainder of her day at his side, but not before she did something to expend her anxious energy. All she needed was a problem she could actually solve.

  * * *

  The car dropped her off right outside the apartment building. Estelle ducked inside before the sun could inflict any real pain, and took the lift up to No. 6.

  The door was still unlocked, left that way after her mad dash to the hospital last evening. The lights had been left on, too, and the corn was still soaking on the stovetop. It gave Estelle a strange feeling of disconnect, as if she were walking through a segment of time that had been cut out of reality and set aside like a pristine museum piece. It also made her father’s home feel frozen and sterile. Like a –

  Don’t say tomb.

  Tomb.

  Estelle sighed. The lights were on, but the apartment still seemed mired in shadows. It took her a moment to realize why: the curtains were drawn over the large semicircular windows that looked out on Rue de Turbigo. She tried to remember if they had been closed the last time she was here, and decided they must have been.

  Estelle drew them back, the rings rasping over the pole, letting the sunlight flood into the space. She turned and examined the living room. Motes of dust drifted lazily in the air. The large television was dark, her father’s gaming console silent. A controller and VR headset sat on the minimalist coffee table, slightly askew, looking abandoned. She realized she was looking for something. Something to do, something that might offer answers to this whole affair, might help put things right. Nothing leapt out at her. The apartment remained as unhelpful as a still-life painting.

  She moved through the rooms, turning off lights and cleaning up wherever she found little instances of things left abandoned. The
corn had begun to come apart in the pot and was unsalvageable. Estelle dumped the water down the drain and the cobs in the compost, then washed the pot by hand for good measure. The sausages she had bought were on the counter where she’d left them; Estelle put them in the fridge, not thinking about when or if they’d ever be eaten.

  She dusted the table next, then flipped the sofa cushions and put her father’s gaming gear back on their charging stands. As she knelt to straighten the Afghan rug, something glinted beneath the sofa in the warm sunlight. It turned out to be a glass that had rolled under the sofa, apparently after being dropped. It still smelled of whiskey, and -- now that she was looking -- Estelle could see a faint stain on the rug.

  Her father was a strong believer in the pragmatism of keeping alcohol in the house, but he rarely drank it by himself. Estelle stood, frowning at the glass and remembering her (last) conversation with him the previous morning. Time for a change. Had something upset him, driving him to drink alone? She couldn’t imagine what it might have been -- even the most stubborn manuscripts rarely drove him to the bottle -- except…Had he known he was growing sick?

  She shook her head. It didn’t make sense. He would’ve just gone to the hospital. Pride had never kept Martin Kingston from doing what was necessary.

  After washing the glass, Estelle went to the bathroom and drained the tub. Her father’s Champion-10 Medical Mobility Exoframe stood dutifully in one corner like a suit of armor awaiting its knight, matte-blue metal and black synthetic muscle linked by a scaffold of carbon-fiber support frames and powered by a vertical stack of capacitors mounted along the spine. He must have climbed out of it and all but fallen into the tub; he couldn’t get around without it, thanks to his chronic condition. Estelle activated the Home protocol, and the exoframe walked stiffly back to its charging station in the bedroom.

  After that, there didn’t seem to be anything else to do. The thought threatened to paralyze her, and so she moved just to move. Her steps brought her to the study. Here were bookshelves groaning with tomes, including a few copies of her father’s own books. Most of them had been written before her time, yet she recognized their spines from childhood. Histories of the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages, ancient Egypt, Sumer, Persia, the Crusades. There had always been paper books in the Kingston household, even when most people of Estelle’s generation hadn’t touched one outside of school.

  Two desks occupied what little open space there was, one a handsome piece of sculpted mahogany, the other a sleek modern drafting table. That had been her mother’s. Martin Kingston had never been able to bring himself to be rid of it, after she passed. Both had been transplanted from their home in the States. Estelle could remember how big they had seemed when she was a child. Hiding beneath her father’s desk, it had been easy to imagine she was in a deep cave, or a submarine, or a spaceship…

  The memory made her heart twinge painfully, and all at once she was crying, not the silent tears that had persisted through the night but open sobs that wracked her entire body. Estelle leaned against the doorjamb and wept, letting all her anguish and frustration and fear finally come pouring out.

  Through her tears she had blindly sat at her father’s desk. The chair creaked beneath her, the leather soft and worn and warm. Estelle drew a deep, shuddering breath, and slumped lower. She kicked her feet, spinning the chair in a lazy circle. It was tempting to think of all this as unfair, but she knew that was a child’s reaction to the realities of life. The truth was, she’d been staring down the barrel of this day since she was old enough to understand her father’s medical condition.

  When she came back to face the desk, she noticed there were papers on it. Mail, by the looks of it. Bills and advertisements. Her father was probably the last person in Paris who still received snail-mail. It’s more satisfying, he had insisted. Privately, she knew, he didn’t trust digital copies of important documents without also having a hard copy.

  Estelle leaned forward, lifting an envelope of sturdier paper from beneath credit card offers. It wasn’t an envelope, she saw, but a…boarding pass. The second half of a round trip, the return date less than two weeks ago. The same day her father had come back from Nimes. Except he had taken the train, not the plane. And there were several connecting flights along the way, with a final destination of…

  “Alula Aba Nega Airport.” Estelle read it aloud, slowly, as if they weren’t quite words. “Ethiopia.”

  Africa.

  She stared at the boarding pass until the letters seemed to blur and swim. Ethiopia. Africa. Her father, who couldn’t get around his own home without the use of a medical exoframe, had flown into a climate change-ravaged, war-torn, mosquito-infested country. That, somehow, was easier to accept than the realization that followed on its heels:

  He had lied to her. He’d never gone to Nimes at all.

  Why? Was it so she wouldn’t worry? Wouldn’t try to talk him out of it? That didn’t feel right. Martin Kingston’s insistence upon regular travel had been a focal point of their verbal sparring for years, but always with the understanding between both of them that nothing she could say would talk him out of it, and none of his assurances would keep her from worrying. Admittedly, Africa would have been a little different, would have warranted a little more resistance on her part, compared to his usual jaunts around Europe. But still…Her dad had never lied to her before. Estelle knew it was a naïve conviction to hold about one’s parent, especially at her age. But she also knew it was true.

  “What the hell was in Africa?” she muttered. “Why didn’t you tell…”

  A sick weight settled into her gut. Estelle clutched the boarding pass in her hand and raised her voice. “Sophia…how many medical alerts were registered over the last two weeks?”

  “Zero,” the smart assistant replied promptly.

  That couldn’t be. Malaria was progressive, it didn’t come on all at once. If he had gotten it in Ethiopia – and Estelle could think of no better explanation – then he had been carrying the parasite for two weeks. It didn’t matter if Dr. Bezou couldn’t find the damn thing and kill it; Sophia, linked to her father’s medical tag, had to have detected something irregular in his vitals. Only, last night, when she’d found Martin Kingston in the tub, Sophia had been unable to get any data at all from his tag.

  “Sophia – are you still linked to Martin Kingston’s medical tag?”

  “Hmm. I don’t see any medical tags registered with Martin Kingston.”

  Estelle stood sharply. “Sophia, check again.”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t see any registered medical devices. Would you like to register one now?”

  She ignored the question, instead opening the smart assistant’s app in her glasses. The frames keyed off eye movements, allowing her to navigate to Sophia’s activity log hands-free. It didn’t stretch as far back as two weeks, but she was able to look at what the assistant had done or been ordered to do over the last three days. There were no logged errors, and no command to de-register her father’s medical tag. If it had been purposefully de-registered – if it wasn’t just an accident – then it had somehow happened beyond the scope of Sophia’s log.

  There was a confluence of facts taking shape in her head, and she didn’t like the way they were trending. A smart assistant like Sophia was virtually infallible; likewise, medical monitoring devices like her father’s tag experienced a failure rate of about one in every billion devices manufactured, making it a near-statistical impossibility. Someone had to have purposefully de-registered the tag.

  That left the who and the why.

  Who could only have been her father. No one else had access to it. Both smart assistants and medical devices were hardened against even military-grade hacks. Social hacking might prove more productive, but Martin Kingston was no fool. He’d grown up during the Wild West days of the internet; he knew the value of keeping your credentials to yourself, and he could recognize a phishing scam from a mile away.

  “So why did y
ou do it?” she wondered aloud. Her father had never been a slave to his illness, but he knew full well its severity and understood the need for constant monitoring. Especially if he wanted his independence.

  Again she recalled the last time they had spoken. Their brief conversation…could it really have been only yesterday morning? A change of pace. After that last trip…

  Africa. Something had happened in Africa. The same place where he had gotten sick, on the same trip that, for whatever reason, he had lied to her about.

  She fell into a deep, dark thoughtfulness, growing lost in the maze of her own exhausted mind.

  Estelle nearly leapt from the chair as her glasses buzzed. The contact displayed on her lenses filled her mouth with a sudden bile. She answered immediately.

  “What?”

  Dr. Bezou sounded breathless. “You need to be here. Right now.”

  Seven

  Chicago

  Illinois, The Third Coast

  Located on West Roosevelt, the Chicago Field Office stood as a testament to the aesthetic shortcomings of the federal government. Ten stories of steel and glass towered over a lawn and parking lot hemmed in by a sturdy iron fence. The windows were polished to a mirror finish, so that they always reflected the color and disposition of the sky. In Chicago, that usually meant a dull, moody grey, but occasionally they shone a blue so clear and vivid it was almost hard to look at. In either case, however, the effect was that of a building that disappeared almost entirely into the background, the eyes of the observer sliding over it with almost fatal disinterest. Only the framework of metal between the windows remained solid-looking. This, in Booker’s opinion, meant that on most days the Field Office looked like nothing so much as a giant bird cage.

  The psychological implications of this were not lost on him, and he’d even brought it up in one of his annual psych evals. In response, the psychoanalyst had suggested he put in for a desk near a window. Booker explained that that was literally impossible.