BZRK Reloaded (8 page)

Pia Valquist was forty-one years old. Her hair had always been
blonde. First because her DNA had dictated that color, and now
because her hairdresser made it so. Her tired eyes had luggage—
dark bags. Her feet were a source of constant pain made worse by
the snow that seemed to laugh at boasts of waterproofing for boots.

A long time ago she had been tall and moderately pretty, with the
kind of body you expect from a five-foot-eleven-inch Swedish girl.
She was still tall.
And she was a spy. A very cold spy as she tramped from the rented
Saab she had reluctantly left parked at the gate. It was a long driveway,
but no one had answered the call box, and well, she’d be damned if
she was going to stop now. It was very dark, but then this time of the
year, this far north, it was dark almost all day. The sun was nominally
visible for a few hours on either side of noon, but today’s sun had been
a distant, helpless light filtered through mist. It was long gone now.
People know that all the great powers have intelligence services,
the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese, and of course the famous
MI6 of James Bond fame.
People do not expect that a small country, a small peaceable country like Sweden that had last fought a war in the nineteenth century,
would have spies. They didn’t have many. The Militära underrättelseoch säkerhetstjänsten—the MUST—did not have a giant complex like
the CIA. They didn’t have their own array of satellites. They didn’t
blow people up with missiles fired from drones.
The KSI—Kontoret för Särskild Inhämtning—MUST’s most
secretive branch, had even fewer people, a relative handful. The
advantage of small size and a lack of current war, or likelihood of war,
meant that the KSI could tolerate individual strangeness to a degree
that one of the tight-jawed, do-or-die, save-the-world spy agencies
could not. It could, for example, allow Pia Valquist time to obsess
over the Natal Incident.
Three years earlier a very strange thing had occurred in the
northern Brazilian city of Natal. A ship’s boat had come ashore there
in the wake of a devastating hurricane. The ship’s boat belonged to a
converted, repurposed amphibious assault ship purchased through
shell corporations from the U.S. Navy. It was an older ship, Vietnam
War–era. Originally, when it had been a U.S. Navy ship, it had been
the U.S.S. Tiburon.
The boat that had come ashore showed signs of having been at sea
for a long time. Weeks, perhaps. And it showed signs of having been
occupied for that time, because there were three sets of footprints
crossing the sand away from the boat toward town.
That same day local police found a mad, filthy, bearded man
wandering the streets of Natal and picked him up for questioning. He
told them a wild, disconnected story of having been kidnapped from
a yacht sailing from South Africa. Then there was some nonsense
having to do with a two-headed man and hideous experiments and
brainwashing. The police dismissed him as mentally unbalanced.
That night the man hanged himself in his cell. With a belt that
was not his.
The second and third sets of tracks were never identified. One
matched the suicide victim, another appeared to belong to a grown
woman, and a third could have been those of a teenage boy or girl.
The only reason that Pia Valquist knew anything about the matter was that she’d been visiting a Brazilian friend who happened to
be the regional police lieutenant. He also happened to be absurdly
handsome and wonderfully romantic and quite infatuated with Pia.
The fling had gone nowhere in the end—how could it? But it had
left Pia with the kinds of memories that still brought a smile to her
face years later.
And a mystery.
For two days she had assisted her friend’s investigation into the
boat and the suicide and the unexplained footprints. The mystery had
gotten its hook into her.
When she had returned to Sweden, she’d taken another look at
maritime incidents in that time frame. She’d come across reports
of a body washed up in Madeira. And an unconfirmed report by a
freighter captain who claimed to have seen a ship foundering in the
storm. The ship matched the description of the U.S.S. Tiburon.
The best official guess was that the ship was involved in drug
running or human smuggling. But Pia had observed the questioning
of the “madman.” She thought that explanation was nonsense.
The incident was officially forgotten. But not by Pia Valquist,
because she wasn’t someone who gave up a good mystery. She was, in
the words of her boss, unique, by which he meant difficult, by which
he further meant that she was a pushy obsessive who just would not
let something go.
Valquist knew better than to go chasing every highly fragrant bit
of nonsense that crossed her desk, but she had sensed something very
wrong going on. For one thing: people who smuggled immigrants or
drugs did not own amphibious assault ships. They moved people and
drugs around in tramp steamers and rickety fishing boats.
Valquist had searched every record she could find. From the
ship’s decommissioning in Norfolk, Virginia, to its purchase by a
cutout corporation, to a brief appearance off the coast of Tisno, Croatia, and Tunis, and the Ivory Coast, to an equally brief appearance off
the coast of Capetown, South Africa.
Capetown, South Africa, where two people had been reported
missing in the time frame, and where a yacht had been found floating
empty, thirty miles out, with no sign of crew or passengers.
One of those missing people looked exactly like the Natal suicide.
Had in fact been that unfortunate man.
Of the seven disappeared, the average age was seventeen. And in
precisely zero cases was there an explanation.
Here is what Valquist knew about smugglers: they didn’t go
around kidnapping Croatians or Tunisians or Ivorians or South Africans.
And then she had begun to look at mysterious disappearances
in port cities even further back in time. Two in Ireland. Three near
Southampton, U.K.
It went on.
And no, there was no way to prove that the mystery ship had been
in each of those locations. But, critically, it could have been. Given
normal sailing times it could have been in each place where the disappearances occurred.
Now, Valquist was convinced that she had at last tracked one set
of those footprints in the sand all the way from far-off Brazil to relatively nearby Finland.
The house was rather grand, very un-Finnish. It had the look of
a fort. It was large, made of a pale stone, one corner a tower, a sort of
stunted mockery of a medieval castle. The windows were narrow, as
if the person who had built it was anticipating a siege, with crossbows
and lances.
The front door was well-maintained oak, thick enough to discourage a battering arm.
To the left was a detached garage. To the right was what might
have been a small guest cottage but spoke rather of guardhouse .
This suspicion was confirmed when a man emerged carrying a rifle.
He had been interrupted in his lunch: there was soup in his beard,
already beginning to solidify as it froze.
“Stop,” he ordered.
She stopped. Automatically she turned gloved palms out: no
weapon, nothing to hide, no threat.
“What do you want?”
“To show you my identification,” she said. She held her fingers
up, pincers, ready to reach into an inner pocket and pull out her ID.
“Go ahead,” he said. His accent was not Finnish or Norwegian or
Swedish. Israeli, she thought. Well, poor man, he was a long way and
many degrees Celsius from Tel Aviv.
She pulled out her official MUST identity card and handed it to
him.
His eyes widened.
“I’m here to see your boss,” she said.
“Do you have an appointment?”
“Do you think it’s likely that I have an appointment?”
“This isn’t Sweden,” he observed.
“No. And I have no official standing here,” she admitted.
He was a small man, a good six inches shorter than her and certainly younger and more fit. And he had a gun. She waited.
He pulled out a cell phone and made a call. “There’s someone
here. She’s Swedish.” He considered his next words. “Swedish intelligence.”
There was quite a long wait then, during which Valquist and the
Israeli looked at each other.
Finally, he said, “Yes, ma’am.”
Sixty seconds later Valquist stood dripping melting snow and
offering her chilly hand to an old woman with a hard-looking face.
The woman did not speak. Instead, she stood aside as though ushering Pia forward to the more important person in the room
“You’re here about the Doll Ship,” said a dark-haired girl with
only one arm.
Pia Valquist had never heard or imagined the words, “Doll Ship.”
But she looked the strange young woman in the eye and said, “Yes. I
am.”

They were walking down lower Broadway, having been dropped
off by Caligula at a discreet distance from the safe house. If anyone
was following them, Caligula would spot the tail. And he would, as he
would have said, resent it.

“I can’t think about numbers that big. No one should have two
billion dollars.”
“You’re not going to be that way, are you?” she asked wearily.
How strange was it that this familiar city, these familiar sidewalks
seemed so alien? When had she last walked down a city street? She
wore a hat and had the collar of her jacket turned up. She might still
be recognized, but she doubted it: New Yorkers don’t look people in
the eye.
“What the hell are you doing in this stupid game, in this stupid
war?” Keats asked. “You could go anywhere.”
“And take my biots with me?”
“Yes, take your biots, yes.”
“And what about when they die of old age, or whatever it is that
kills biots?”
She could see that this was not a new thought for Keats. “We don’t
know how long they live. Maybe by then there will be some sort of
answer. You could always spend a billion figuring it out.”
“When you say ‘billion’ there’s an edge to it,” she pointed out.
He didn’t answer. In fact, he didn’t look at her.
Plath sighed.
“It’s ridiculous,” Keats said at last. “You and me. What would I
be? Your butler? It’s Downton Abbey and you’re the duchess or whatever, and I’m the footman.”
“Keats, don’t do this, okay?”
“It’s why you could talk to them that way. With that whole I-getwhat-I-want, tone of voice. It’s the voice your class are born with.”
She stopped, and after a couple of steps, he stopped, too. “Listen,
Keats, I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to have to defend myself
from you. I have more than enough to deal with.”
“Yeah, well, saving your pennies so you can afford to take a girl to
the movies isn’t one of them.”
He looked genuinely angry, and that fact made Plath genuinely
angry. “Hey: I’m not responsible for you being poor. Or working class.
Or whatever you call it.”
“I didn’t say you were,” he muttered. “We should keep walking.
Caligula is certainly watching this. From somewhere.”
“I don’t care what he’s watching,” she snapped. “He killed Ophelia.”
They walked for a block in silence. Then he said, “We could just
go, Sadie. If you don’t mind being with a footman, we could just go.
Just go. Get on a plane to …to …Africa.”
She didn’t answer at first. They dodged around street vendors
selling cheap copies of designer bags, and vendors selling cheap copies of designer watches, and tourists buying same.
“Costa Rica,” Plath said at last. “The Pacific Coast. I could learn
to surf.”
It was his turn to fall silent now, brooding.
“Or Africa,” she said. “What is it?”
“What?”
“Your name.”
“Noah.”
“No? Why not, do you think it really matters?” she snapped.
“Not ‘no.’ Noah. Like the old Hebrew with the big boat full of
animals.”
“Oh. Noah,” she said. “That’s a strange name for a footman.”
He sighed.
“The thing is . . .” he began, then cut himself off.
“The thing is what?” she demanded.
“The thing is, sometimes I get myself through something with a
story. You know, a fantasy.”
“Yes?”
“A fantasy. Imagination.”
“Yes, I know what a fantasy is,” she said, irritated again. “What’s
yours?”
He made a bitter laugh. “I haven’t worked out the details, but
somehow you and I end up together. And not in a mental ward, but
like, together. Like I say: I haven’t worked out the details. There’s a
house. Nothing grand. You know. Just a place.”
“You’ve moved straight to marriage? You’ve only known me a
couple of weeks.”
“Fantasies don’t have to make any sense,” he snapped. “That’s
what makes them fantasies. They aren’t meant to be logical, they’re
meant to keep you from losing your mind or panicking or wanting
to kill yourself.” He noticed the way she was looking at him and said,
“No, for God’s sake, I’m not bloody suicidal. And I’m not proposing,
either. Forget I said anything.”
They were walking slower now. Both had decided they wanted to
extend this time, not cut it short.
“I have a fantasy, too,” she said. “It’s that this is all an elaborate
dream and I wake up and I’m only seeing through one pair of eyes
and I’m not noticing that it’s time to move away from that lymphocyte.”
A bike messenger barely missed running them down. They were
both city kids, London and New York, so neither missed a step.
“So, all a dream, eh?” Keats asked.
“A dream. Yeah. Everything goes back to normal.”
“And I’m not there.”
She stopped. He stopped.
“Oh my God: you are there.” She made no effort to hide the
surprise in her voice. It was true and it startled her: even when she
imagined everything going back, no Vincent, no Caligula, no biots
or Armstrong Twins, no terrible plane crash killing her father and
brother, Keats was still there.
“I assume I’m your footman.”
“You’re the guy who saves up his pennies to take me to a movie,”
she said, shaking her head as the truth of it came home to her. “I buy
the popcorn. Large, of course, because I’m rich.”
They moved close together. He put his arms around her waist and
drew her closer still.
“In this vision I’m ridiculously attractive? Incredibly sexy?” he said.
“Not at all,” she said, deadpan. “You look just like you do now.”
He laughed a bit crookedly at that, and she found herself needing
to touch his face. “We’re in this together.”
“But not in love,” he pressed.
She hesitated. She couldn’t say it, didn’t want to even think it,
knew it was nonsense.
“Together,” she said at last.
She glanced at a clock scrolling by on a neon marquee. She had an
hour. It would be tight, but Stern would wait.