“No evidence. It just…everything fell into place so neatly as soon as I asked myself whether Korchow had sent me to sell the virus or to spread it.”
“Have you told anyone else?”
He hesitated. “No.”
She doubted. He could see that she doubted. But she looked aside and let it pass.
“This changes things,” she said after a minute. “Didi needs to know about it.”
“But how do we get to him?”
“Not through Ash. Anything that goes through Ash is going to have to cross too many desks before it hits Didi’s. We need to go through someone who has a direct line to Didi and doesn’t have to go through the normal channels.”
“Gavi?”
“No!”
He thought wistfully of Safik. He dismissed the thought, knowing without having to ask what Osnat’s reaction would be to the idea of putting their trust in PalSec. Then he remembered what Safik had said about Cohen going out of his way to protect his friends.
“What about Cohen?” he asked. “Does he have a direct line to Didi?”
“As direct as anyone’s.”
“Then let’s go to Cohen. Directly. Not through Li. Let’s ask the machine to help us.”
It turned out, however, that it wasn’t so easy to get the machine.
“He’s not here,” Li said when they finally succeeded in putting a call through. She said it in a tone that implied it was all the information they were entitled to.
“Well, when will he be back?”
“How should I know? Look, who is this? Why do you have the screen blanked?”
Osnat took a steadying breath, glanced at Arkady—more for support than permission—and switched on the visual feed.
“Oh,”Li said, blinking. “Where are you? I’ll come get you.”
“I don’t think—”
“I don’t care what you think.” She glanced sideways, her eyes focused on the middle distance. “Right. Gotcha. There’s a bar two doors down from you. The Maracaibo. It has a back room. I just reserved it for a private party at seven. Meet me there at seven-twenty.”
“What if we don’t?”
“Then you can go back to whoever’s chasing you and throw yourselves on their mercy. You think I care? It’s not my fucking planet.”
“I want to speak to Cohen.”
“You arespeaking to him.”
And that was it. She was gone, signing off without so much as a good-bye or a by-your-leave.
“How did she know where we were?” Arkady breathed when the screen had fizzled through static into blackness.
“I don’t know.” Osnat bit her lip. “I’m out of my league, Arkady.”
“Should we meet her?”
“I don’t see what choice we have. But we can still take precautions. We don’t need to walk in with our eyes closed and a kick-me sign stuck to our backs.”
Arkady expected Osnat to investigate the bar when Li hung up, but instead she led him down the block to a quiet residential building. They reached the door just as a middle-aged man was leaving, and Osnat slipped in on a smile and an apology. Arkady clung to her heels all the way up the stairs and through a fire door onto a moonlit roof that had a clear view of the bar’s entrance. There he waited for almost forty minutes while Osnat prowled along the neighboring rooftops and poked and prodded at doors and windows.
“Jerusalem’s amazing this way,” she told Arkady. “You can travel halfway across the city on the rooftops. Get practically anywhere. I’m betting Li won’t know about that. Or at least that it won’t be the first thing she thinks about.”
When she’d completed her survey of the local roofways, she led Arkady back down onto the street and into the Maracaibo. She strode over to the bar, Arkady in tow, and stood on her toes to tap the bartender on the shoulder.
The man turned around, quick and wary. “What do you want?” he asked when he’d satisfied himself that she didn’t mean trouble.
“I want you to look at me.”
“I’m looking. I’m not too impressed.”
“No skin off my nose. Now look at my friend.”
“I looked at him when you walked in the door, lady. He’s bad business. And you’re bad business as long as you’re with him.”
“Think you could describe us if someone asked?”
“Depends who asks.”
“That’s just what I was hoping. This place have a back door?”
“Past the toilets. Which are for paying customers only even when they’re not broken.”
“What about a back room?”
“It’s reserved.”
“I know it. And I’m willing to pay double whatever they paid if you’ll promise to tell the guys who are about to come in here looking for us that we’re already back there.”
“And will you be?”
“How much would I have to pay for you not to care?”
Ten minutes and seventeen hundred shekels later they were across the street, on their rooftop.
Arkady started to ask Osnat how long she planned to wait, but she put a hand on his shoulder and shook her head.
He looked down, following her gaze, and saw two men emerge from the shadows.
He could feel his palms sweating in the dank air. His left ankle was twisted awkwardly beneath him, but he was afraid to move, afraid of the telltale rasp of fabric or the scrape of a shoe sole against concrete. A thick fog hung over the city, blowing on a stiff westerly wind so that it split around building fronts and streamed in coarse white threads down the narrow streets. The two men stood just under them, looking across the wet pavement at the bar’s brightly lit windows. They seemed to be talking, but they were too far below the rooftop for even Osnat to make sense of the scattered words of Hebrew that wafted up to their hiding place.
One of the men went into the Maracaibo, was gone for several minutes, then strolled out again. As he returned to his companion a third man joined them.
“Shalom.”His voice carried alarmingly through the dank air. “They’re there?”
“In the back room.”
Arkady felt Osnat’s body relax beside him. “It’s okay,” she whispered. “I know those guys. They’re straight from Didi. We’re safe, kiddo.”
She stood up and started to pull Arkady up after her.
Arkady never felt the blast. He saw its phosphorus-blue flash. He heard a sound like the tearing of a thousand sheets of paper. For a long frozen moment the street lay silent below them, with the few passersby either knocked off their feet or crouching in terror. Then sound returned to the world, and the building began to disgorge a bloody, screaming, weeping stream of people onto the street that suddenly seemed too narrow to begin to contain all of them.
Osnat pulled him back from the roof’s edge, and they were off, running down the moonlit tumble of rooftops toward the Green Line and the only refuge left to them.
ARITHMETIC OF THE SOUL
DOMIN: Robots are not people. Mechanically they are more perfect than we are; they have an enormously developed intelligence, but they have no soul.
HELENA: How do you know they have no soul?
DOMIN: Have you ever seen what a Robot looks like inside?
HELENA: No.
DOMIN: Very neat, very simple. Really a beautiful piece of work. The product of an engineer istechnically at a higher pitch of perfection than a product of Nature.
HELENA: But man is supposed to be the product of God.
DOMIN: All the worse! God hasn’t the slightest notion of modern engineering!
It was evening again when arkady and Osnat came to Yad Vashem’s iron gate.
Arkady felt an exhausted sense of déjà vu as he watched Gavi descend the hill—still with the dog playing around his legs, still with the sinking sun behind him.
“We need help,” Osnat said when Gavi was finally standing in front of them. She sounded like her gut was twisting with the effort of asking for it.