Déjà Vu: A Technothriller (39 page)

Jennifer raised her hand. It was an oddly student-like gesture. “I have a question. Why are you here?”

Hartfield nodded. “The most important question. You remember, Jennifer, that I was a young man when cancer struck me down. I offered my fortune to any person who could cure me.

The one who came forward was Fernando Orza. His treatment involved an invasion nanobots – robots smaller than blood cells – that could seek out and destroy cancer cells. I was cured. That, in sum, is the official version of the story. In the unofficial version, the nanobots killed not only cancerous cells but particular types of healthy ones too. I was left with a severe mental handicap from which it took me years to recover. I received a number of treatments, including embryonic stem-cell injections directly into the brain. We went through kilos of foetal tissue. Expensive stuff. Finally, the doctors told me that I had been left with a permanent condition. A rather heady combination of Asperger’s Syndrome – a mild form of autism – and psychopathy.

“Orza’s nano-treatment became public after 2010 or so. But that day in 1999, when I received the test results, I turned my energies towards investment in radical technologies. New World, for example, was designed – although you did not understand until later, David – to unlock the secrets of genes, using the kind of experimental approach only previously possible with creatures like fruit flies. Another example is your time travel programme, Jennifer. Not one single project was given the green light unless I thought it might take me one step further towards my treatment.

“That is why I am here now. I have with me the specifications of the correct nano-treatment. I have studied the operation of the time machine and cleared the area of personnel. I will return to the year 1999 and give Orza the correct nanobot specifications. I will be cured and my future will change. So however much you think you have gained by my confession, it will not help you. The world of 2023, this version anyway, can go to Hell.”

The arrogance of this man finally wrote an emotion on his face. Hope. He had reached a climax. Something bad (something wicked) was imminent. Should she shoot? His expression became blank. He said, “Goodbye, Saskia,” and it was too late.

Darkness fell.

David cried out, “Get him!”

Saskia felt Hartifeld brush past her. He was not as weak as he had feigned. She tried to turn but her legs were somehow immovable. So was the gun. She had become a statue like Frank.

Somewhere, Ego said, “David, I have detected the presence of another Ego-class computer. It has sent two coded radio bursts. The first instructed the central computer to deactivate the lighting throughout the centre.”

David’s voice was grim. He asked, “And the second?”

“An instruction to Saskia’s brain chip to deactivate.”

“Saskia?” he shouted. “Saskia?”

But she was in a coffin. She wanted to scream but she had no air. Nor could she open her mouth. She was two weeks old and she was dead. She smelled formaldehyde, corrupt meat and wood. Her chest itched from the coroner’s incision. Smoke reached her nostrils. With that, she felt a draught from the dark curtain that separated now from then. The light from another world found her, even as she lay inside her box, and she remembered everything, and everything was

The train station, with its tusk-like arches, emerged on her left. On her right, a department store. She stepped between them a wounded figure. Her eyes, cold under sunglasses, saw an office block with a particular atmosphere. It was still an hour’s walk away.

She reached Oppenheim Street and found a bench. The sun was low. Late summer evening. Tourists wandered by, too happy to make straight lines. She opened her shoulder bag and removed an old camera. She pretended to photograph the street, but she shot an old office block. It had a particular atmosphere. On its ground floor was a perfumery. Above that were smoked windows. Ute took another picture and moved away. She found an alley that led to the back of the block. More photographs. There was a fire escape. Underneath it was a car park. Beyond was Father Rhine, steady as the sea.

She hooked some long brown hair behind her ears and returned to the main street. On the same bench, she ate ice cream by twilight.

She paused on the way home to buy a padlock and a tube of superglue. She also had the film developed. The attendant thought she was beautiful. He lamented the waste of a good film – she had used only ten exposures – and asked her out for dinner. Ute could never have dinner with his man, though she thought he was beautiful too. Her intestines shifted like a restless snake. She hurried from the shop and vomited into a bin.

The day grew darker. She avoided eyes and hugged herself against the chill air while others relaxed in cafés and watched

Germany’s Indian summer. Ute heard them and seethed. It was not summer; it was autumn. If not that, then winter.

On the threshold of her apartment, the moment of change, she forgot who she was. Then she remembered. She was a romantic novelist. She had flexible hours. Flexible enough to allow her to take days off. She had been on holiday for a week now. She had never worked harder.

She had started work in the Kabana six nights before. Her friend Brigitte had accompanied her, and together they had scanned the crowd, looking for his face. But they had not found him. Brigitte had said, “Why would he come back? He might expect it.”

“No,” Ute said. “He would not.”

“What are you going to do if you see him, Ute, what?”

Brigitte had accompanied her the next night too, and the one after that. Then she had stopped. Ute did not blame her. The music was too loud for conversation and, as Brigitte persisted with her questions, Ute persisted in her silence.

On the third night, alone, Ute saw him. Her expression did not change. A short, moustached man. He stood in the same corner wearing the same clothes. He chatted to two women just as he had chatted to her. He lit their cigarettes with a Zippo lighter swished down then up. But her fate and theirs took different paths; they smiled indulgently at his broken German and walked away, giggling. Ute watched them leave. She debated confronting the man. She decided not to. She watched him from afar for two hours before he left. He was on foot and he walked for kilometres. He meandered, took several turns, and doubled back on himself.

Ute matched him, and better. She had lived in the city her whole life and he had not. She stopped on corners, into shadows and reversed her coat. There were few places for him to lose her. They took the underground at Ottoplatz an emerged at Reichenspergerplatz. Eventually, they came to the office block. She recognised the small door where, two weeks before, she had been bundled though, blind-folded, by two large men. This was the place. She found a phone booth to call Detective Holtz, the policeman in charge of her case, but there was no answer.

The night was warm. She walked back to her apartment via the river. It was dangerous and she did not care. Only thirteen days before, she had been raped. Fear was nothing next to her anger. Fear was for the person who crossed her path. She had a stun-gun in her bag and a five inch flick-knife under the sleeve of her right arm. She taunted every shadow.

Back at her apartment, she considered calling Brigitte. No, she decided. Brigitte should not be involved. She might interfere. So Ute did not call the woman who had visited her in hospital on the first night when she was still curled, catatonic, bleeding from her vagina and with scrapes of her attackers’ flesh under her fingernails. She did not call Detective Holtz. She did not call her publisher.

She took paper and a pencil, licked the nib, and planned.

It had come back to her on the threshold of her apartment. The moment of change. It was twilight, the brink of night. She was a writer. She wrote romantic fiction. On the afternoon of her last visit to the Kabana, she had been reading a book. She took it to the sofa. She sat there, jacket on, door wide, and opened the book at its marker. There was a picture of three old women sitting around a spinning wheel. The caption read:

Clotho, she spins the thread of life. Lachesis, she determines its length. Atropos, she cuts it.

She knew she was stronger than Brigitte. Her friend would have been damaged for life. Not Ute. She was made of stronger stuff. She had no fragile belief in right or wrong, or natural order, or of her own invulnerability to life’s traumas. She had no creator to blame.

She had nothing.

She fell. Her house computer asked her if she needed assistance. She tasted the varnish of her floorboards. “I need…” she began, but did not know how to finish.

She never did know. Her prosecutor had some ideas. “You needed revenge, didn’t you, Ms Schmidt? You needed blood, you needed punishment, you needed to kill. In short, you needed to commit murder. Isn’t that so?”

Spin, measure.

Snip.

“No.”

The next day she collected her developed photographs. She returned to her apartment and spent the day thinking, reading, smoking. She even tried to finish her novel. The romance wouldn’t come. She did not eat and, that night, she slept fitfully. At 3:00 a.m., she had a glass of water. She left the apartment.

She arrived back at 7:00 a.m. and left again at 8:00 a.m. The next time she saw the kitchen, living-room and bedroom would be in the photographs at her trial. She waited five minutes for the train. A part of her knew she should call Detective Holtz, tell him that she had found the office block and let him arrest the suspects. A nurse had collected sperm. It could be matched with the five men. All of them.

Five men. The train arrived and she got on. Her thoughts were lost in the crowd, in the pictures sweeping by, by her fingertips on the stun gun.

There was a little boy on the train. He was about ten years old. He was on his way to school alone. His cheeks were chubby. He was nervous. He saw Saskia and smiled. She might have reached for his eyes, but a pensioner shuffled between them and the moment passed.

She alighted one stop from her destination.

She emptied the tube into the lock. She put the tube in her pocket and left the alley. On the street, she cut right into the perfumery. The air was conditioned to a chill. It was precisely 9 a.m. The perfumery had no customers. Ute walked to the back of the shop and stood near a staff-only door. She pretended to inspect a moisturizing soap. When an attendant walked by, Ute clutched the woman’s arm. “Excuse me, please, but could I have a glass of water?”

The woman’s bright smile faded. “Of course.”

She disappeared through the staff door and returned with a tiny paper cone. “I’ll have the cup back when you’re finished,” she said.

Ute took two deep breaths, drank the water, and let the cone drop. She swayed. “I’m sorry…”

“Are you feeling alright?” asked the assistant.

“Perhaps some more water…” Ute said. She fell into the woman’s arms, leaving her no choice but to take her into the back room. Ute saw linoleum and cleaning buckets. She smelled fresh coffee. The woman placed her on a chair in a small kitchen. Ute heard the running of a tap, and it was then that she looked up and withdrew her stun gun.

The woman turned. She had a mug of fresh water in each hand. When she saw the gun and Ute’s cold eyes, she let the mugs drop. They bounced on the tiles. “You own the shop?” Ute asked.

“Yes,” the woman said. She was tearful but her anger kept her alert. “What do you want? The takings? We have only been open for a few minutes, foolish girl.”

Ute put a finger to her lips. “What I have to do today has nothing to do with you or your shop. I need to get into those offices.” She pointed at the ceiling. “How?”

The woman relaxed. Ute noticed the blond highlights in her brown hair, her tan, her blue pearl necklace, and the red bandana that was tucked fashionably into the collar of her blouse. Her badge read, ‘Sabine Schlesinger’. “The fire escape.”

“No,” Ute said. She pictured her journey that morning, before sunrise, when she had stolen up those iron steps in bare feet, attached the padlock, felt it click home.

“There is another way. Out of here, turn left. There’s an interior fire door that opens onto a corridor. Then there are stairs. You realise I must call the police.”

“Of course,” Ute said. She did not lower the stun gun. “Please do not follow me. This is for your own safety. Evacuate the shop.”

“What’s going to happen to my shop?”

“Nothing,” Ute said.

She walked backwards from the room. In the tiny corridor, there was nobody. She checked on Sabine. Still there.

Ute turned and ran through the fire door. She stepped through and closed it behind her. The corridor was empty. At one end was the door with the lock that she had superglued before entering the shop. She checked its handle. Immovable.

Her one problem was the connecting door with the perfume shop. It had a push-down bar on both sides. She had to act quickly.

She removed her shoes and walked up the stairs.

“A thorough and meticulous murder,” Jobanique would tell her, three weeks later.

There was an interior door on the first landing. She put the stun gun in her shoulder bag. Ute knew that the average police response time was four minutes, plus or minus one minute. Sabine, she guessed, would not follow her.

The handle turned. It was cheap door with a cardboard filling; it did not have the presence to squeak. It could not be barricaded.

For a second time, she stepped inside.

The empty office space was huge. Its walls were glass. The air was stuffy with sunlight. There were sheets of paper, old mugs, filing cabinets, chairs and sheets of plastic.

In the centre were the mannequins. They hadn’t moved.

Immediately on her left was a small walled office. It had no windows but an open doorway. Nearby was the fire-escape that she had padlocked earlier that morning. She came closer. She felt dust on her bare feet. She heard snores.

Inside, it was dull and hot. She counted six sleeping men. They were lying, mostly naked, overlapping by foot and hand. Ute had once been scared by these men. Now she was disgusted. There was a camping toilet in one corner. In another, a television and a computer games console. There was a large duvet in the centre. The stench of sweat and semen was overpowering.