The fire exit was shut, but not locked, the alarm long since disabled to let the smokers, sniffers and shaggers out into the alley at the back. I stumbled, forgetting that I wasn’t in a dress, wasn’t in Christina’s fancy shoes. I crawled up the stairs to street level, reached for the nearest dumpster, pressed my head against the cold stinking metal and was profoundly, and gratefully, sick.
The fire door slammed shut behind me.
A voice said, “You’re dead, Schwarb.”
I lifted my head to see the fist, which collided with the hard bone beneath my eye. I fell, hands scraping along the tarmac, vision spinning, heard tinnitus break out loud in my right ear, coughed thin white bile.
The three boys had an average age of nineteen, twenty at most. They wore knock-offs of sporty brands: baggy trousers and tight T-shirts which emphasised in clinging polyester just how few muscles they had to celebrate.
They were going to kick the crap out of me, and with my head auditioning for soprano, I couldn’t precisely put my finger on why.
I tried to get up, and one of them swung his fist again, slamming it into the side of my face. My head hit the ground and that was fine, that was completely fine, because at least with most of me on the floor, there was less of me to fall. The same thought seemed to occur to one of the boys, who grabbed me by the scruff of my shirt and began to haul me upright. I caught his wrists instinctively and, as his nostrils flared and his eyes widened, I dug my fingers into his skin and switched.
Johannes in my hands, my heart in triple figures, Christ, my fingers wanted to strike, my muscles wanted to strike, every part of my body was buzzing with adrenaline and I thought–why the hell not?
I dropped Johannes and turned, putting my entire body into the blow, knees and hips, shoulders and arms, twisting and rising to deliver a punch under the chin of my nearest companion. His jaw cracked, a tooth snapping as mandible hit cranium, and as he fell back I leaped on top of him, my knees into his chest, my face against his face, and pushed him down, screaming with a voice only freshly broken. I hit him, and hit him again, and felt blood on my knuckles though I wasn’t sure where it had come from until the third boy grabbed me by the throat, yelling a name which I guessed had to be mine. As he pulled me off the bleeding mess beneath my knees, I grabbed his arm where it lay across my neck
I had an arm across the boy’s neck, but I made it better, putting my left forearm across my right to pull tighter as the boy, bewildered and confused, writhed and wheezed and wiggled in my grasp. I kicked his left knee, and as he dropped, I held on tighter, suspending him by skull alone until his eyes began to roll and his fighting grew less, at which point and at last
I let him go.
And turned, breathless, to Johannes.
He sat, blood running from a wide cut across his face, palms dirty and scratched, staring at me with mouth open, eyes wide. I looked at the two boys on the ground, and saw that they weren’t going anywhere any time soon. I looked back at Johannes. His lips were twitching from side to side, unsure of which torrent of thought they should express. When he finally found something, it was not the sentiment I had expected. “Oh my God!” he whispered. “That was incredible!”
Chapter 18
That was then.
Belgrade, the body of a man who might or might not have been Nathan Coyle.
I bought an hour of internet time in a café behind the dark-domed cathedral of St Sava, opened a packet of biscuits and a sweet fruity drink, and went online.
I needed a hacker.
Though when Johannes Schwarb went online, he did so in an altogether different guise.
Christina 636–Hi, JS.
Spunkmaster13–OMG! How are you?
Christina 636–I need a favour.
Chapter 19
More photos in the Kepler file.
Faces and memories. Places seen, people travelled.
I pulled one from the folder.
Horst Gubler, US citizen. First contact with entity Kepler, 14 November 2009.
Current residence–Dominico Hospice, Slovakia.
Good on the Slovakians.
No one else would have taken him in.
It takes twelve hours to travel by train from Belgrade to Bratislava.
By plane the journey is barely worth the taxi down the runway.
Get stuck on a plane, however, and your options are far fewer than they are on a train of several hundred diverse weary travellers. As for getting a gun through an airport–a train seemed the easier option.
I caught the 6.48 from Belgrade to Bratislava.
Notes on the train from Belgrade:
It is a mish-mash of carriages and compartments, some Serbian, some Slovakian, some Hungarian, most Czech. A surprisingly high number of seats are designed for disabled passengers, though none are to be seen. An entire carriage is assigned for passengers who have children under the age of ten on the wise assumption that twelve hours with a mewling infant in close proximity is enough to drive anyone to a criminal act. The restaurant car sells variations on a theme of sandwich, soup, tea, coffee, biscuit, cauliflower and cabbage, all carefully reheated in the microwave to your exacting desires. The train crosses three international borders, though passports are checked only once, and were it not for a slight variation in the spelling of “toilet” as you pull in and out of long platforms, you might not notice the transition at all.
I turned my
this body’s
mobile phone on as we crossed from Serbia to Hungary. There was one new message. It read: Aeolus.
Still no number.
I turned the phone off again, pulled out the battery, pushed it back to the bottom of the bag.
“Seven hundred euros,” said the traveller at the bar. “Seven hundred euros, that was my bill last time I went travelling. I thought the EU was supposed to sort that shit out. I thought they were changing things–you make a call in Europe, it’s like you make a call to home, you know? How do they let the phone companies do that? How do they let them rob you like that and pretend it’s OK? You know the worst part?”
No, what was the worst part?
“All the calls I made, I made for work. On my personal mobile because my work phone was broken. And the fuckers wouldn’t pay the bill. ‘Your fault,’ they said. ‘Your fault for not paying attention to the fine print; you can’t ask us to foot the bill for your mistake.’ Like fuck. Fuck, I say fuck. What do you call the recession? What do you call government? All we ever do is pay for other people’s greed and vanity, that’s all we’re good for, men like you and me.”
So what did you do?
“I quit my fucking job, didn’t I?!”
And how’s that going?
“Shit. Like shit. I’m going home to live with my mother. She’s eighty-seven and still thinks she’s married, stupid hag. But what’s a man to do?”
I bought another bottle of water and a packet of crisps from the restaurant-bar, wobbled my way back to my seat, and slumbered through the long Hungarian countryside as we tracked north, chasing the Danube to Slovakia.
Chapter 20
I was going to visit Horst Gubler.
Not because I liked the man, but because at some point whoever wrote the file on Kepler had also visited. If I was lucky, I might even be wearing the right face for the trip.
This is how I met Horst Gubler: