Mappa Mundi (17 page)

“This is another part of your work?”

“No, just Sod's Law.” She turned and looked at the room. “The past and the future exist only in our minds. That's part of my work now. The past and the imagination and the future, fusing identity out of
experience and fantasy. Every one of us a unique product, constantly evolving along a narrative storyline that chooses us, as we once chose it, without knowing.”

“I'm sorry?”

Natalie turned. Her smile flickered, feral one moment, self-mocking the next. It was mesmerizing. Her eyes were huge and intent. He stood still as she walked up to him, took her hands out of her pockets and put them gently on either side of his face. Her fingertips were icy. The third finger of her right hand touched the scar behind his ear.

“This gesture,” she said, “is already part of my story and yours, you and me, it is one thing that we share. Third time today.” She moved closer until he could feel the heat of her body. He was fixated, staring into her grey eyes, not knowing if they were more blue or more green, unable to find a name for the colour.

“But whatever it means to you,” she said, long mouth wrapping the words before it sent them out, packaged like presents, into his consciousness, “I bet it doesn't mean the same to me. In reality, it's one thing. But we see it quite differently.”

Jude smiled slowly. “Try me.”

She stood on her toes and moved closer, until their faces were only inches apart. He felt her lean against him, her pelvis coming into firm contact with his. Her gaze never faltered and from inside its clear depths she watched for any sign of a change in him, a backslide, which he knew wasn't coming, then or ever. There was a peculiar sensation in the centre of his sternum, like something long and sharp was stuck there, vibrating.

“I'd have to tell you everything to find that out,” she said, her expression now purely one of predatory instinct. He tasted the whiskey on her breath as she teased him. “You'd have to be me, and I'd have to be you.”

“I've got a better idea,” he said, every nerve ending in his face alert
to the closeness of her. He put his hands inside her damp jacket, against the sticky fabric of her shirt. Underneath it her body was hot.

“Oh?”

He leaned back with his shoulder for the light switch. Pitch darkness enveloped them suddenly. “Want me to draw you a map?”

She felt along the scar just as she'd traced the lines on the file, careful, curious.

“Where's this?”

“Where we are,” he said.

She laughed and then the cool vice around his head tightened. She kissed him and a shock ran through to the back of his skull, like the reverse of a blow from the butt of a carbine.

White Horse opened the venetian blinds with her fingers and peered down into the street, watching the traffic prowl by in restless fits and starts: one speed, then faster, then stopping again. It reminded her of a video she'd seen once in Medical 1 at college, of red blood cells moving along in a vein, but there was no life in the road or the city that she could see or feel to match this analogy.
If it has a heart
, White Horse thought,
then where is it beating?

It disturbed her. She knew, she felt, that life's patterns moved together, the life of each individual only a part of life as a whole, but this surge and trickle wasn't the pulse of that kind of feeling. Something much more restless and unhappy impelled that endless energy that went nowhere. This was why she hated the city. It was the embodiment of the pointlessness of eternal activity, motion without purpose, purpose without feeling, feeling without a clear thought behind it, only the impenetrable leviathan of the Capitol, dead from the dollargland on down.

Washington, DC, she hated in particular. It seemed to ferment every corruption she could think of, like she imagined ancient Rome had done, crushing out the virtues of the people under the weight of its press, feeding the juice in as a wine to be drunk again—spirit death by distillation. She knew alcohol. On the res too many of her friends
thought that they'd escape through the bottom of a bottle. Washington was the production centre of their despair as she saw it.

White Horse let the slats snap closed and paced the length of the long, pale cream room once more, her bare feet never getting used to how far they sank into its luxury carpet, nor to how easily it sprang back up after she had passed. She hadn't known carpets like this existed, and it was even stranger to find one in her brother's house, one of only a thousand gadgets, trinkets, and comforts she'd never imagined before.

At first they'd delighted her, but now she loathed them all. The apartment was a show home, an empty place. The gadgets existed to make life easy, but they required a duty of service, a payment of money, they came with obligations each one, from the mixer to the shower-pump system with its twenty-setting massage unit. Their existence made her soul itch.

Jude—she found it hard to think of him under the name Mo'e'ha, Magpie, anymore, since he'd left her that time they'd argued—had only been gone a couple of days. She'd only been here one more than that. But already she could feel the FBI catching up, following her easily from Deer Ridge to this apartment where soon they'd show up in force and drag her away. She knew them and their method. They were so close she could almost smell them. But she had to wait. It was unbearable.

On the smooth glass of the coffee table the neat, hand-size panel of the house's answering system was alive with messages. White Horse dared not use it and would not answer any calls. She didn't watch the TV and she didn't play music or games or use anything of the place, except the bathroom and the kitchen. Her own PocketPad was switched into collection mode only, to allow it to log calls but do no more. Last night she'd gone out shopping, come back, cooked. Now the rooms smelled more of chilli than polish, but it was all the impression she wanted to make. Her bag was ready, her boots by the door, always.

But how long should she wait? Jude had called her once, left a Pad
message, no voice and no vid option. He hadn't wanted to talk to her and she, for once, didn't blame him. He had written,
Looks like you were right. Get rid of it.

That had arrived four hours ago. White Horse had read it many times, even though once was enough to understand it entirely. She had not got rid of the ugly black machine, however. It was her only evidence now the program was in Jude's hands and there was no way she'd give it up. She wasn't even sure she trusted him a hundred percent not to turn his coat and hand it over himself. But she thought that the shortness and the routing of his note via ordinary domestic lines contained some element of wisdom. She should hide it. For the last four hours, she had thought of where she could go undetected, where it might be safe. Nowhere sprang to mind.

Scratching at the itch of her healing burns before she remembered not to, White Horse winced and cursed as the pain roared to life on her hands and arms. She went to the kitchen and took a pill for it, rubbed cream onto the skin carefully, and then she knew that there wasn't anywhere on Earth to go. The apartment was only safe as long as nobody knew she was there and that couldn't last. The doors would be watched, the AI systems governing the building's public areas alerted to look for anything odd. They were capable of sending her picture, files, and information direct to the nearest patrol car.

Then again, the FBI or whoever else was involved might find out Jude wasn't in Seattle at any time. The device itself must be fitted with some kind of tracking unit, she supposed, although if so it wasn't working. Maybe she'd broken that part of it when she fell on it back at the house. But she couldn't leave with it in case they located and destroyed it. Therefore, it must stay and she would go, to lead them away from it as fast as she could.

One thing she and Jude had in common was tidiness. It took her only a few moments of exploring to locate his tool kit in the cupboard with the cleaning equipment. Even the corners of that space were
dust-free and everything he owned set in its place, as though it was never used. She felt sorry for him, alienated even by his own house. She felt that she had been instrumental in causing him to turn so far away from his right nature. This vacant space was his payback for turning. It was a punishment too much. She didn't understand why he couldn't feel this—or if he did, why he stayed. Was he so stubborn that he couldn't put down his pride and come home? She missed him. She'd always missed him, especially during those long summers when he was away at his expensive school and with his mother. They shouldn't have parted like that. She and he were one blood. His
wasichu
half couldn't be the core of the person she knew. It couldn't win.

White Horse opened the toolbox and lifted out its trays. She took the relevant ones with her and spread them out on the smooth, heavy-snow carpet that showed no trace of time. Then she went to her bag and extracted the machine.

Beneath the modern abstract oils of his pictures, and the display of old bone jewellery that was part Navajo, part Apache, part Cherokee, part Cheyenne—silenced to a whisper against the icy background of the walls—White Horse brushed her long, synthetic dreadlocks to one side and began to pick it to pieces.

She was glad to see that the dull black casing was not a manufactured type. It had been specially made. That meant it was more difficult to open without damaging, but it would also be easier to put together again afterwards. The thing had been intended to be serviced or upgraded, and she got it open after a few deft twists of the delicate screwdrivers, without even scratching its surface.

Inside she recognized some elements that were common to most electronic devices. Taking it to bits might render the thing useless if she ever got it to trial; they could say she'd manufactured it. But that made life easier, in fact.

She undid the mounts and removed the whole lot as a piece and then went to weigh it in the kitchen. She packed the casing with an
equal weight of cardboard, cut out of a box of Cheerios, and a Pad battery. Then she replaced the switch systems and LED indicator, linking them together with the tiny battery from her own watch. When she was done the machine looked as it always had; press the switch and the light comes on … nothing happens, but then, it never did, as far as she was able to tell. It must be broken.

The machine's case went back into her bag. The contents lay on the carpet. White Horse looked around, guessing at wall cavities, false ceiling heights, the interior structure of the furniture, the likely gap size beneath the floor. Where should the device's innards go? Where could she hide them until they were needed? She moved silently through the airy rooms, touching walls, doors, cupboards, feeling the floors with the bare soles of her feet, open to guidance, waiting for a change in her feeling that would tell her she'd found it.

Mary Delaney had an audience with Guskov scheduled for three that afternoon. Dix never dealt direct with contractors. Instead, she had a team of negotiators that she shared with the Defense Directorate. Mary didn't come into that category, but after her job inside the FBI was over and Mappa Mundi was in the bag she hoped for advancement into their ranks. Hence she'd persuaded Dix to let her act more closely on the project this time, to keep an eye on it from both ends. As a reward or a punishment, Dix had decided to test her and give her the chance to act on her behalf. The authority was something Mary wasn't about to waste.

She pulled the appointment forwards half an hour, just to see what he'd do. They'd already met many times, and although she'd once or twice left feeling that she'd scored there wasn't any doubt in her mind that Guskov was always going to take the Grand Slam unless she was better than her best.

With winning in mind there was nothing left to chance. Mary wore her finest suit, had her hair, nails, feet, legs, and face seen to by a flotilla of experts, shod herself in perfect antique Blahniks, and when
she checked herself in the office's private ready-room even she had to admit that it was unlikely the Russian was going to beat her at Best in Show. Brains, on the other hand … exact amounts of guarana, vitamins, and ginkgo were the maximum she was prepared to use in training. She slugged back her personalized mixture of three drops in a half-glass of water and checked again in the Ladies' Room mirror for traces of visible panty line. Beneath the silk lingerie she could feel her body trying to sweat, but under the control of the response inhibitor that functioned for her instead of an ordinary antiperspirant it wasn't making it. She grinned into the mirror. Time to go.

At exactly two-thirty Mikhail Guskov was shown in and they shook hands and made eye contact with matched firmness and determination, each registering the other's approval and engagement in the tussle with perfect understanding and the most subtle of shifts around the eyes. Mary loved meetings with Mikhail. They tested her to the limit.

“I'm sure that your contacts have already told you why this meeting has been called,” she said, once greetings were over. They sat together in high-backed leather comfort chairs; hers with firmer cushions, but despite that he was as tall, as imposing, at ease. If he noticed the difference he affected not to. His blue eyes were amused and guarded, indicating readiness to fight, in that look that was more charged than any glance of sexual lust could ever be. Mary had long preferred it.

He gave a slight nod in concession to her guess. They both knew the contacts she meant; men and women working in the Russian mafia's network who owed him loyalty for old debts.

“I was shocked to discover that a decision had been taken here that would allow such a test to take place,” he said, his American English almost perfect except for a haunting trace of Russian taints here and there; a style Mary was sure was deliberate. It made her think of wild Siberian winters, fur collars, log fires, and stone-built dachas deep in the forest. Nothing about him was not chosen. He was self-made in every detail. As she had, he had learned to abandon anything of himself
that did not serve his purpose. But she checked herself in case he saw this admiration leaking out of her.

“It was a political ploy,” Mary replied calmly. “A lever to test the mettle of the government. We should be grateful they chose CONTOUR. Less destructive than some other projects that are under way. Its effects are contained.”

“Yes.” Guskov let his head rest on the chair's support, easing his shoulders with a slow, sensuous motion. “And it served to prove that Mappaware is still far too unstable for any kind of real-world use.” His face split slowly with a knowing grin at her, a sustained eye contact that he dared her to break in denial.

She realized that he knew about the Pentagon and CIA use of basic NervePath technology in the field. That was a surprise, and no doubt he'd seen the involuntary iris response to it as he looked into her eyes so keenly.

“The latest refinements on very limited and basic applications of Mappaware have worked much better than the test on Deer Ridge would suggest,” she said. “Whoever constructed the programs used in CONTOUR…”

”
Kozyol
!” Guskov snorted, giving his opinion on that excuse for a person. “Yes, an idiot of the highest calibre. It astonishes me how so many of them appear to be employed in your most sensitive posts.” His blue gaze suddenly became commanding and cold although his voice didn't change. “You must find them.”

“We will.” She opened the palm of her hand where it rested on the chair's arm, smoothing off a patch of imaginary dust, wiping them off the face of the Earth. His interruption had given her a mild case of annoyance, but she let it sink down again. He seemed to notice nonetheless.

“But this is not your worry,” he prompted her. “So, the information leakage is as bad as I predicted it would be. But we haven't yet reached Stage Three. One or two more tiny slips will be all it takes for all our efforts to be wasted, given away to the world market. I thought
you people claimed you had control.” He was no longer amused. “This is no way to run a business, Ms. Delaney.”