Ack-Ack Macaque (6 page)

Merovech straightened.

“Why don’t you tell me?”

Frank shook him off. He lit the cigarette.

“We believe your mother’s company has an AI imprisoned on its game servers.”

“So what?”

Frank exhaled grey smoke into the cramped space. “We are going to break in and free it.”

In the rattling semi-darkness, Merovech looked at Julie. The shadow of her hair hid part of her face. Her eyes were fixed on him.

“You haven’t got a hope,” he said. “The Céleste campus has too much security. You won’t get five metres before the security systems pick you off.”

Frank coughed on his cigarette. “Oh, you think so?”

Merovech gave him a level stare.

“I know so.”

Frank’s upper lip twitched.

“Well, we are going,
rosbif
, whether you like it or not.”

The van pulled off the main road, onto a pockmarked concrete service road running parallel with a high chain link fence. From his pocket, Frank pulled an elastic ski mask.

“And if you are going to be coming with us, you will have to be putting this on.”

CHAPTER FOUR

THE SMILING MAN

F
ROM WHERE
V
ICTORIA
stood, Paul’s image appeared to be standing in the centre of the room. He’d been thirty-two years old when he died—a man of medium height and slim build, with peroxide white hair and tattoos on his forearms. He wore a gold ear stud, a pair of rimless rectangular glasses, and a yellow and green Hawaiian shirt beneath a white doctor’s coat.

Of course, he wasn’t really there at all. The picture, drawn from the file she’d downloaded from the games console, was being projected into the visual centres of her brain via augmented reality routines built into her neural gelware.

As she watched, he looked around, and wiped a hand across his face.

“Erm...?”

Victoria’s heart clenched in her chest. She had an overwhelming urge to take him in her arms.

“Hello, Paul.”

“Vicky?” His gaze flicked past her, unseeing. “What’s going on? Where are you? Why can’t I see anything?”

His image had a translucent, nebulous quality.

“Relax,” she told him.

He knuckled his eyes. “But I’m blind!”

“No, you’re not. In fact, you’re not really Paul at all.”

Slowly, he lowered his hands. His brows creased.

“Oh no,” he said. “I’m a back-up, aren’t I?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“But if I’m the back-up, that means I’m dead, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

He frowned. “Then why can’t I remember it? The last thing I remember is—”

“You’re the second back-up. The illegal one, from the console. I’m running you as an app on my neural gelware.”

He did a double-take.

“You can do that?”

“Yes.”

“Where are we?”

“I’m standing in your flat.” Pushing her fists into the pockets of her army coat, she turned and walked toward the window. Paul’s image moved with her, maintaining its apparent position relative to her field of view.

“But if I’m the second back-up, what happened to the first? Do the police have it?”

“I’m afraid not. Look, there’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to come right out with it, okay?”

He passed a hand across his brow.

“Okay.”

Victoria swallowed hard. She let her forehead rest against the window. The glass was cold.

“You were murdered. Here in your flat. And whoever did it took your brain, soul-catcher and all.”

Paul’s hands leapt to the back of his neck. He huffed air through his cheeks.

“Jesus Christ.”

“Quite.”

Victoria touched her hair, which was still damp from the rain. Paul’s fists were clenched and his eyes were wide and desperate. He looked on the verge of freaking out.

“I’m going to give you read-only access to my sensory feed,” she said to distract him. “I’ll get an imaging program to use my eyes and ears to construct a picture of the outside world for you.”

She took a deep breath. When it came to tinkering with her own neural software, the technicians at Céleste Technologies were understandably discouraging. Getting them to give her the required passwords had taken a lot of persuasion. Now, all she had to do was concentrate on a specific phrase.

“
Licorne, archipel, Mardi
,” she whispered in French. Then, in English: “Unicorn, archipelago, Tuesday.”

In her mind’s eye, menus blossomed like flowers. She shivered. In command mode, her thoughts had a crisp clarity. She felt like a murky ocean fish pulled up gasping into the bright sunlight.

Working as swiftly as she could, she made the necessary adjustments, and dropped back into the familiar waters of her organic neurons.

Before her, Paul blinked.

“Hey, I can see!” He turned his head back and forth, frowning. “Why can’t I look around?”

“You’re seeing though my eyes,” she told him. “You see whatever I see.” She panned her gaze across the river, and the buildings on the far shore. Then, without wanting to, she glanced down at rust-coloured smears on the wooden floor. Her vision swam with tears.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Why, what’s—”

“I’m just sorry, okay?”

She turned and walked back towards the door. She wanted to leave. She stopped halfway.

“Remember when we met, three years ago?” He had been a memory retrieval expert for Céleste Technologies, working to extract memories from damaged soul-catchers. This was in London, before the company moved him to Paris. She’d interviewed him for a story, and somehow they’d clicked. They’d fallen in love. Or at least, she’d thought they had.

Life, it seemed, was seldom as simple.

First came the helicopter accident, then six months of tests and recuperation; and finally, last Christmas, their separation.

Since the breakup of their marriage she’d been living on board the
Tereshkova
, an elderly skyliner under the command of her godfather, an eccentric Russian billionaire with a penchant for cavalry uniforms and fine vodka. At the moment, the
Tereshkova
loomed over Heathrow, taking on cargo and passengers for the long trans-Atlantic haul to Mexico and the Southern United States. When she was done here, she’d rejoin it.

Until then...

“You looked after me,” she said. “After the accident. You got me into the Céleste programme. Now it’s my turn to do the same for you.”

Paul looked down at himself. He ran his hands over his shirt.

“But I... I’m dead.”

Victoria ran her tongue over her dry lips. “Maybe I can’t save you. But I can find out who did this. I can do that, at least.”

“But, what about me?”

Victoria felt the tears rise again. She sniffed them back.

“I’ll keep your file in storage, so I can reboot you if I have any questions. Until then, I guess this is goodbye.” She opened a mental menu, ready to terminate the simulation.

“No!”

She paused, irritated by the interruption. She didn’t want this to be any harder than it was already.

“What?”

“Please don’t switch me off.” He sounded like a little boy. “I know I’m just a recording. I know that. But I’m all that’s left. If you switch me off, I’ll be gone. Just gone.”

Victoria rubbed her face with both hands. “So, what am I supposed to do with you? Leave you running in my head?”

Paul gave a cautious thumbs-up.

“Please?”

Victoria heard the downstairs front door slam. She said, “But how long will you last?” Back-ups lacked a missing ingredient, everybody knew that. They could only persist for so long before their thoughts became muddled and their awareness died.

Paul stuck out his chin.

“Long enough. Come on, Vicky. You’re not the only one in need of answers.”

He had that pleading look.

“Okay.” Her voice was gruff. “I’ll think about it.”

Something crashed on the stairs.

Paul cocked his head. “What was that?”

“I don’t know.”

Victoria walked to the front door and looked out, into the stairwell. Detective Constable Malhotra lay sprawled at the foot of the stairs. His throat had been cut. A man stood over him. Tall and skeletally thin, he had a long black coat and a gleaming bald pate. Bloody fingers gripped a matt black knife. Slickness glistened on the blade. He looked up at her with eyes as dead as a snake’s.

“Ah, Victoria,” he said. His features were twisted in a permanent thin-lipped smile. He stepped over Malhotra and put a foot on the first step. “I’ve been waiting for you...” He reached out long fingers and curled them around the banister rail.

“Run,” Paul said in her head. “Get out of here.”

She took a step back. She couldn’t run: he blocked her only exit; she had nowhere to go. Instead, her hand flew to the pocket of her coat and came up holding the retractable staff.

“Stay back.” She gave a flick of her wrist and the staff sprang out to its full length. The man’s smile didn’t falter.

“I’ve been waiting for you, Victoria. I knew you’d come.” He came up the stairs towards her, scraping the tip of his black knife against the wall. The scratching noise set her nerves on edge. She stepped back into the flat and took up a defensive stance in the hallway. There was no point locking the door when she knew he would be able to open it with a kick. Her only hope was to fight. Her perception of time slowed as the adrenalin in her blood triggered the fight-or-flight protocols in her gelware. She felt her muscles tense as targets and escape routes were evaluated. Felt her fingers tighten on the carbon fibre staff.

And still he came, smiling all the way.

“Who are you?”

The man didn’t answer. He didn’t even pause in the doorway. With a flap of his black coat, he sprang at her. Warning icons flashed in her mind. She swung. He feinted to the side. The tip missed his head and hit the wall, jarring her. She pulled back for another swing, but he moved too fast. A bony arm flicked out like the head of a striking viper. A hand closed around her neck. She felt herself slammed backwards, into the unyielding hardwood of the kitchen door. The air huffed out of her. The staff clattered to the floor.

She couldn’t breathe.

She kicked her feet but his arms were too long: she couldn’t get her knee up to his groin. Darkness hustled the edges of her vision. Paul’s image grew faint. She thrashed but the fingers wrapped her throat like steel cables.

No, not like this!

Without releasing his grip, the smiling man turned her sideways, pressing her cheek against the smooth paintwork of the kitchen door. Her lungs burned. Her throat muscles scrabbled desperately for breath that wouldn’t come.

Please...

Sensing her pain, the gelware came online, interpreting her suffocation as evidence of major physical trauma. Adrenalin poured into her system, but it was already too late.

As she tipped forwards into a spreading black pool of unconsciousness, the last thing she felt was the blade of his knife carving into the flesh at the back of her neck.

CHAPTER FIVE

CLIMBING TREES AND KILLING NAZIS

A
COUPLE OF
hours after the ninja attack at the aerodrome, Ack-Ack Macaque took to the skies again, this time at the controls of a twin-engine de Havilland troop carrier, with Mindy Morris, the new Scottish recruit, perched in the co-pilot’s chair. Both wore combat fatigues and camouflage paint. Behind them, fifteen paratroopers sat strapped into webbing in the plane’s main cabin.

Night fell as they crossed the Channel. He kept the plane low, to avoid enemy radar, and skimmed across the Normandy coast at treetop height. Their objective lay ahead, in the wooded grounds of the picturesque Chateau du Molay, where intelligence reports indicated that the German army were building launch facilities for their V2 rockets.

As they approached the Chateau’s estate, Ack-Ack Macaque unfastened his straps and pulled his aviator goggles down over his eyes.

“We’re nearly over the target,” he said to Mindy. “Haul ass as soon as we’re clear. They’ll scramble everything they have to intercept you, so get low and stay fast.”

Morris flipped a salute. He returned it with a hairy hand, then moved through the connecting door, into the rear compartment.

The paratroopers sat in two ranks, facing each other down the length of the plane. As one, their heads snapped in his direction. He pulled a cigar from the pocket of his flying jacket and lit up.

“Okay, dumbasses, listen here.” He had to shout over the noise of the de Havilland’s engines. “We’re a minute from the target. Get yourselves unstrapped and line up at the hatch. I go first. The rest of you follow at two second intervals.”

He scampered along the gangway to the hatch. The troops had submachine guns strapped across their chests. He had his revolvers, and a shoulder bag filled with grenades. He hooked the static line from his parachute to the rail above. When he jumped, it would pull open his ’chute as he left the plane.

“Get ready,” he said.

The lights went out, and he popped the hatch.

“Geronimo!”

The air roared around him, snatching at his clothes. His cigar burned like an angry red star. He felt the snap and jolt of the ’chute opening. Then trees rushed up at him out of the darkness. He crashed through their upper branches, arms thrown up to shield his face. For a few seconds, his world became a storm of splintering twigs. Then his harness snagged on something, jerking him so hard his teeth snapped together, biting through the end of his cigar.

When his vision cleared, he found himself swinging above a darkened forest floor. The soles of his boots dangled twenty feet above the shadowed moss and leaves. He had no idea where the rest of his squad had come down. Leaves rustled in the midnight breeze. He kicked his boots off and let them fall away. He cut his way out of his harness and slithered up the canvas straps into the branches above, bayonet clamped in his teeth. If he knew anything—aside from aerial combat—it was climbing trees.

Climbing trees and killing Nazis.