Authors: Ian Mcdonald
The Dervish House (63 page)
‘A couple of people say they remember a kid with a bird on his shoulder?’
Şekure Durukan composes herself, dries her face with a moist wipe.
‘That would be one of the forms his toy robots take. Bird, he calls it.’
‘Bird, hm, very original. It seems this bird-kid was heading up the road, north-east.’
‘Kayişdaği,’ Georgios says.
The sergeant has been taking a call on his police ceptep. He looks up at the word.
‘Kayişdaği?’
‘Kayişdaği Gas Compression Station.’
‘The station got another call from your son. He’s at Kayişdaği shopping precinct. We’re the nearest car. Come on.’
Şekure Durukan follows the police cruiser as if she is driving the Istanbul Otodrom. She pulls in at the five moribund shops that call themselves Kayişdaği Shopping Precinct. She runs into the street, waving her arms, signing frantically.
Georgios and Mustafa cross the road to the gas station.
‘Can! Are you there? Can!’
‘The boy’s functionally deaf, Mr Bağli.’
But he’s not. Can never has been deaf.
Did he ever take out his earplugs?
Mrs Durukan had said in her torrent of fearful accusations. He’s a boy on a great adventure. Of course he will have taken them out.
Did he ever take out his earplugs?
Mrs Durukan had said in her torrent of fearful accusations. He’s a boy on a great adventure. Of course he will have taken them out.
‘Can!’ Georgios calls. His voice is not made for shouting, it cracks and wavers. ‘Can!’
Mustafa stops, shakes his head, as if troubled by an itch. Then Georgios hears it too, an all-pervasive, insect hum, like a billion filigree wings.
‘Whoa!’ Mustafa exclaims. Georgios follows his eyes up. The air above the gas station warps and moils, shimmering like heat haze, then in the flick of an eye coalesces into a dust storm of swarmbots.
At oh eight thirty-three on April 16th 2027 black vans of the Financial Regulatory Authority arrive in the Levent Plaza as the Kebab Prophet is opening up his stand. Men and women in suits and yellow hi-viz tabards with
Maliye Bakanlığı
and the symbol of the Turkish Ministry of Finance between their shoulders spring from the backs of the vans and push their way, politely but authoritatively, through the throng of early-starters blearing in to the day’s work. They march into the headquarters of Ozer Gas and Commodities, brush past security with a wave of an authorization and head for the elevators, reading maps of the building off their eyewriters. At every level, in every division, they fan out through the open plan offices, authorizations held high. Most here this early are cleaners; the few workers early to their pods stand up, crane to see the snaking lines of black and yellow. Some phone out only to be cut off in mid-call. The ceptep network has shut down.
Maliye Bakanlığı
and the symbol of the Turkish Ministry of Finance between their shoulders spring from the backs of the vans and push their way, politely but authoritatively, through the throng of early-starters blearing in to the day’s work. They march into the headquarters of Ozer Gas and Commodities, brush past security with a wave of an authorization and head for the elevators, reading maps of the building off their eyewriters. At every level, in every division, they fan out through the open plan offices, authorizations held high. Most here this early are cleaners; the few workers early to their pods stand up, crane to see the snaking lines of black and yellow. Some phone out only to be cut off in mid-call. The ceptep network has shut down.
Simultaneous with the attack of the black vans, Artificial Intelligences of the Financial Regulatory Authority assault Özer’s information structure. All outgoing electronic communication is shut down; email, messaging, conferencing, online accounting, ebanking, automated trading links. Screen by screen, the brilliant leaves of the Money Tree go dark. Reinforced by quantum mainframes in Ankara, the AIs effortlessly crack the passwords to Özer’s communication network and try to shut down all external and internal telecoms. Here they first encounter resistance; a picket of trip-wire AIs summon antibody-ware that attempts to reprogramme the attackers’ operating code. Billions of copies are corrupted and erased. The AI war lasts thirty seconds before the Maliye Bakanlığı breaks the defence. That ’s long enough for Ozer suicide-AIs to put out a general Mayday to all managerial levels.
Oh eight fifty. The Ozer Tower is isolated, cut off from the financial world, a solitary spike of glass and steel, a pulled tooth. The Financial Regulatory Authority agents move through the building, sealing filing cabinets and isolating servers. Ozer is being closed down. Now the paralysis is broken and the few Ozer managers in the building remember the official end-game strategy of dead and shred. In glassed-in cubicles and corner offices, senior staff take EMP memory-killers to drives and cepteps, crush flash memories beneath heels or pour vials of nano through computer ventilation slits. Özer’s forty floors hum with the now-shrill, now-labouring shriek of shredders, like a rainforest being felled at once. Dead and shred. There’s a business legend that shredded paper is outsourced to be sorted and reassembled by African children. Up and down the Özer Tower windows open their permitted crack and shed a ticker-tape storm of shredded documents, twisting and tangling on the wind. Paper shreds snow down on the workers in the Plaza, baffled at the police lines now barricading the entrance to the building. A man with his jacket tries to run the cordon; the police lift him off his feet and throw him down hard on the marble steps.
Oh nine hundred. Four men in suits carrying briefcases walk down Istiklal Cadessi and enter the Muhtar Branch of the Anadolu Bank. Staff are still preparing their work spaces as the men make their way to the enquiries desk. The woman on the desk calls the manager, who takes the men one at a time through the security door to an office at the back of the bank. She takes their iris scans and two signatures, one on an authorization, one on an indemnity and in return gives each one a plastic wallet containing fifty hundred-thousand-euro bearer bonds. There is another signature here, on a receipt. Then she solemnly shakes hands. The men came together, they leave separately, each steering his own way across Istanbul.
Oh nine twenty. Senior management arrive at the same time as the press. Flittercams are first on the scene, swooping over the Levent Plaza, spiralling up around the tower in the hope of a shot of an FRA agent hauling a manager away from a shredder or a computer, diving down for an action cut of the massive titanium Ö of the Ozer logo in Levent Plaza, the umlauts kept hovering over it by a clever trick of magnetism, before themselves hovering and darting to steal snapshots of the faces and match them to the image database of Özer executives. By the time the satellite vans with the journalists arrive the FRA agents have begun porting out servers and boxes of documents on trolleys. Already the leadlines for the lunchtime bulletins are written. Ozer collapses in Turkey’s biggest corporate fraud. Bankruptcy of the Century. Over for Özer. Police escort a steady stream of junior managers and early-shifters from the building. The workers ranked outside cheer them raggedly. The cleaners receive special applause. They punch their fists in the air. The line for the Kebab Prophet’s stall reaches across the Plaza and down the boulevard. He calculates the sales and calls his nephew and niece to run out to the cash and carry. The news reporters have begun to interview the workers. Özer, bankrupt? No, they knew nothing. There was no sign. How has this happened? Ozer was a great little company. What will they do now? When are the police going to let them in, they have family photographs in the desk drawer. Where are Süleyman Pamir and Etyan Ercan and Mehmet Meral?
In the Bebek apartment, in the Kanlıca yalı, in the Mercedes pulled over at the service station on the E80 expressway, Süleyman Pamir and Etyan Ercan and Mehmet Meral each take a vial from a plastic case. They snap off the seal. Each hesitates a moment before inserting the nozzle into the preferred nostril, but only a moment. It’s not death. The greyware designer promised that. But it is not-being, of a kind. Each inhales and then settles back into his chair or sofa or car seat with a shuddering sigh and images and sounds and smells, the memories of lives they never lived, experiences they never knew, fountain up through their forebrains and they forget who they were.
Oh nine forty-five. Maliye Bakanlığı completes its control of Özer Gas and Commodities. Extra- and intra-nets are shut down, codes and passwords are in the hands of FRA investigators, online banking, trading, ecommerce, supply and logistics are closed down. Artificial Intelligences are stood down and deactivated one by one as FRA audit AIs follow the scent of money; moving out from the Levent tower to subsidiaries, clients and service providers. Automated legal systems generate injunctions against Özbek Consulting, Özer’s auditors, SarayTRC Bank and the Nabucco Pipeline Corporation. Across Anatolia compression stations fall silent as the pumps stop. The Money Tree hangs black and dead in the middle of the trading pit. Line managers gather their sections group by group across the Plaza and shout instructions to go home, come back tomorrow for further information and to empty desks and collect personal effects. Özer Gas and Commodities has ceased trading. The last of the paper snow spirals down to Levent Plaza. The Kebab Prophet has never seen such takings.
Oh nine fifty. Adnan Sarioğlu walks down Istiklal Cadessi, down through the filling streets, weaving between the electric drays and the clusters of women and the little white vans delivering fish to the market of Balık Sok. His step is bold and light. He feels as if his next footfall could carry him off the world completely. He is dizzy with the vertigo of daring. He did it. He has four million in convertible bearer bonds in his briefcase and a signed immunity from the Financial Regulatory Authority’s chief prosecutor in the left inside pocket of his jacket. In his right, a matching document from Haydar Akgün of the Art and Antiquities Division. He destroyed Özer in the corporate fall of the century. His feet can take him anywhere. For the first time in long memory there is nowhere he has to be, nothing he has to do. The tourist tram clanges past to the terminus at Tünel; a crawling, grating, gloriously impractical fancy. He can just see the top of Galata Tower over the high nineteenth-century frontages, and now the first glimpse of the Golden Horn and it is the deepest, bluest thing he has ever seen. Boats skip and chug across the water and it seems new and fresh, like when he came off the bus from Kaş, the beach-boy afraid of the water. Adnan’s heart leaps; on Yüksek Kaldırım Cadessi he breaks into a trot. He feels a million kilometres tall, capable of covering all the seven heavens in a single stride. There is the Galata Bridge, lined with fishermen, trams cruising the centre strip and on the far side of it the domes and minarets of Sultanahmet. He’s running now, dodging the traffic, which slams to an auto-brake halt, horns blaring, sending waves of disruption up and down the busy boulevards, cutting in front of trams swinging up from Müeyettzade, on to the bridge, running past the fishermen with plastic bottles of secret bait and tool boxes of hooks and lures and buckets of tiny Golden Horn fish.
Meet me on the bridge
, he had said. Over the open water. And there she is, in the middle of the wide pavement away from the rods and casts of the fishermen; frowning slightly but elegant, strong, magnificent, her hair a pyramid of black curls; looking the wrong way but then she sees him and he waves his arms like a mad penguin, a penguin in a suit and now he’s not a flightless bird, he’s a plane coming in to land, like the big white Airbus turning over the water on the approach to Istanbul; he holds his arms back like wings and runs crazy now so that the pedestrians step back and call out, watch out for the mad man in the suit. Ayşe smiles, grins, tosses her head back and shakes her black curling hair and there they meet, over the water, in the middle of the Galata Bridge.
, he had said. Over the open water. And there she is, in the middle of the wide pavement away from the rods and casts of the fishermen; frowning slightly but elegant, strong, magnificent, her hair a pyramid of black curls; looking the wrong way but then she sees him and he waves his arms like a mad penguin, a penguin in a suit and now he’s not a flightless bird, he’s a plane coming in to land, like the big white Airbus turning over the water on the approach to Istanbul; he holds his arms back like wings and runs crazy now so that the pedestrians step back and call out, watch out for the mad man in the suit. Ayşe smiles, grins, tosses her head back and shakes her black curling hair and there they meet, over the water, in the middle of the Galata Bridge.
Necdet first sees the bird as God’s Engineers unpack the truck. It swoops down from a high balcony on an apartment block that stands hard against the compression station’s perimeter wire. The peculiarity of its flight draws his attention. It is ugly and mechanical, badly timed and uncanny, like a badly animated pterodactyl he once saw in a movie. The proportions are wrong, the wings are too long, no bird’s ever had a tail like that. The head. The head . . . It turns six eyes on Necdet as it glides past, then up over the roof of the pumping station.
The engineers, laying the equipment from the back of the truck in precision rows, do not see the bird. Now that it is all in order and its proper place Necdet notices that there are four of everything. Four cardboard cartons, four plastic crates, four styrene impact cages.
The cardboard cartons contain devices Necdet cannot identify, a hybrid of domestic cleaning spray and boxing glove. One each, worn over the hand. Weapons of some kind. They take large cartridges as ammunition, six to a magazine. One magazine each. Big Hair and Big Bastard both try theirs for fit and heft. They practise aiming. They seem pleased, slapping the devices into the palms of their hand. Good. Good.
The bird swoops again, from the shops to the new housing unit. Again it looks at him. Necdet knows what it is now.
Help me
, he mouths.
Help me
, he mouths.
From the plastic crates the team take what appear to Necdet to be necklaces. They fasten them around each other’s throats with much care and great devotion. There are tears in Green Headscarf’s eyes as Big Hair clicks the fastening around her neck. They are very tight necklaces. Choking tight. Each has a jewel in the centre. Necdet remembers where he saw this jewel before. It shone from the throat of the woman on the tram. She reached up and touched it and blew her head off. She was Green Headscarf’s sister. From what Green Headscarf said, Necdet thinks that she must have had a terminal disease of some kind. These people don’t have terminal diseases and the death necklace was not a suicide device. Suicide was incidental. They are devices for explosively delivering nanoagents. God’s Engineers will not be taken. Necdet tugs again at the cable ties. Lubricated by fear sweat, the balls of his thumbs slip a little further through the loop. Big Bastard casts an eye over at Necdet. He stands meekly, back to a concrete roof pillar.
A third time the alien bird robot takes flight. It’s low, very low, dangerously low; pull up, fly right boy. It skims the razor barricade, moments later Necdet hears a click on the roof.
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