"So," said the suit, "you didn't know in Paris. You didn't know when you wrote your second draft." He placed heavy emphasis on the word as if using the term somehow carried extra meaning. "What changed?"
Somewhere in the Twenty-third Precinct on the Upper West Side Jim was being asked identical questions. Bill knew that. He'd been told to which precinct his partner had been taken but not the actual location. Bill was meant to read something into this, only it was hard to know what. Apart from the fact they had him locked in an interview room on the Lower West while his long-term lover and ex-work colleague was being held on the Upper West.
And the thing that got Bill Hagsteen was not that Agent Wharton was furious, it was that the man was embarrassed.
Not found, blew...
Bill could feel the book deal turning into a miniseries. Other journalists might have been more worried but he'd been through the riots in Cleveland and marched against the second Gulf War. Besides his name was splashed across newspapers all over the world. In America there was no defence against mistreatment stronger than the threat of bad publicity.
"I got a call," Bill said. "That was the first thing."
Agent Wharton waited.
"Someone in London tipped me off about Celia Vere's piece for the Sunday Times. I still wasn't sure but I figured if Jake's ex-manager was going to put her name to it--"
"And the second thing?"
"His watch," Bill said.
The agent looked up from his file.
"Which watch?"
"He was wearing an Omega in Paris," Bill said, "gold with a white face, check the shots."
"Pretty odd for a tramp," said Agent Wharton.
"Pretty odd about describes him." Bill had taken to leaning forward, as if trying to include the agent in his story. "Jim enhanced the picture quality and matched the watch to one in the shots from Razor's last interview. He swears the watch is identical, right down to damage on the face. And then... you know... there were those photographs..."
Bill meant the ones splashed across the front of most of the papers, the shots the new Italian government had released without first alerting Washington. Agent Wharton knew more than he wanted to about them.
"He looked more like Jake in those. Kind of battered and sunburnt but the sneer was right and the way he stood, one foot forward and his arms folded. Maybe you had to know him to recognize it."
"Yeah," said the man with the suit. "And you did, didn't you? You spend a week with this man in Paris and the next thing that happens is he takes a crack at the President... What?" Agent Wharton demanded, glaring at the door as if he could see straight through it and kill whoever knocked on the other side with a single glance.
"You need to turn on your cell phone."
"What?"
The Sergeant who peered round the door looked the suit up and down, too battle-scarred and too old to give a damn for anyone who wasn't her boss or an immediate colleague. "That's what the message said, turn on your mobile."
She shut the door with a bang.
"Agent Wharton," said the suit into his phone. "What? You're shitting me..." Michael Wharton never swore and certainly not in front of uniforms from the NYPD. So he stared the Hispanic out for a few brief seconds, as if daring him to smirk, and went back to his call.
"Where?"
"Both of them?"
"Me?"
"Yeah."
Snapping shut his cell phone, Agent Wharton took a look at the printouts, the photographs and the mess of papers and prepared to walk away from the lot. "Wrap him up," he told the older of the two officers. "He's off to see the President."
CHAPTER 31
Zigin Chéng, CTzu 53/Year 20 [The Future]
The Emperor flinched at the sound of a lash, then flinched again and again until daylight pulled open his eyes and he woke to find himself in the Pavilion of Celestial Dreams, the smell of a distant city on his skin and ruined flesh burned into his memory.
He was exhausted by the effort of holding the dreams in his head.
"Saw two shooting stars last night."
Zaq looked around him for the source of the words. And miles above the Forbidden City particulate matter fell softly through the upper atmosphere. All that remained from a Casimir coil dumped by a racing yacht which had been stolen once to order and once again on something stronger than a whim.
All Tomorrow's Parties shed the first coil because that was what it always did at the halfway point of any race, once the vector was in sight and pit craft were waiting to cocoon it back into health. It took the decision on its own, based on precedent and extrapolation of all available data, which was rather less than it would have liked. The second coil it dumped because Tris told it to and she was holding a gun to its memory.
Where every emperor since the original Chuang Tzu had slept on a bed of solid oak, his head resting on a wooden pillow, Zaq bedded down in a corner of his room, wrapped in an old blanket and nightmares. He did this because it annoyed the Library and he had no need to tell the Library about the nightmares because it already knew.
They were the price Zaq paid for refusing to be Chuang Tzu. At least Zaq imagined they were. The war between Zaq and the Library was quiet and understated, but they both knew it was moving into a new and dangerous phase.
These days the darkness signed itself Rapture Library, the rapture bit being an old and bad joke at the expense of Holy Ghost Guides Us, a converted freighter fleeing from the world of the first Chuang Tzu, which stumbled through space and into the still-forming 2023 worlds.
Landing in the hills behind the embryo city, its crew imagined the world in which they found themselves to be deserted and it was only when a breakaway sect of fundamental polygamists began cutting down mulberry trees to the north of the Forbidden City that the Library disabused them.
The Boy Emperor had been forced to hide in his palace as thunder crashed hard enough to crack glass and lightning destroyed the tents of the polygamists with improbable accuracy.
Of course, Major Commissar Chuang Tzu was not really a boy, whatever the legends said, although all of those who followed after had been children, almost all adapting happily to their new name and lives. The fact the Library had begun to refer to Zaq by his pre-manifestation name was worrying because it seemed to suggest that what Zaq feared was true.
And the Emperor knew how problematic a thought that was, how wrapped around with doubt, and this worried Zaq also... The Chuang Tzu was required to be solid in his certainty, representative of intelligence, knowledge and wisdom. He was, to quote the Librarian, the spiritual health of the 2023 worlds made manifest.
It seemed doubtful to Zaq that the Library had ever intended this to be the lesson learnt from its banishment of the polygamists. A short and rather frightening conversation between Zaq and the Librarian revealed that it had been the destruction of the mulberry gardens which angered it.
"Although anger's probably the wrong word... It is, isn't it?"
Assent came from inside Zaq's own skull. A place both suffocatingly close and infinite in its distance.
Applying human emotions to an entity already ancient before amino acids tripped into life half a galaxy away was not helpful. Although this didn't stop the amino acid's descendant from so doing. And it seemed, from a throwaway afterthought, that what really troubled the Library was not the physical destruction of the mulberry bushes or the threat this implied to the silkworms which gave the orchard its reason for existing.
The Library had been scared that the orchard's destruction might upset the fragile happiness of the young Chinese navigator, who was only just coming to terms with his own progression from ice to Emperor.