The Great Game (21 page)

  
I can bring her back,
the Bookman had said. Smith knew he could. It was not the first time the Bookman had made such an offer.

  "What do you want?" he had asked, there in that underground, disused sewer.

  "Find the Harvester," the Bookman had said.

  "Do you know what he is?"

  "He is a machine. A probe. A device for gathering information. It is not unlike me."

  "Old–"

  "No."

  That single word was chilling.

  "The lizards," Smith had said, carefully, "they must have come
from
somewhere."

  "Yes."

  "We never thought to ask from where, or whether there were others still there…"

  "Yes."

  "And now they know?"

  "Now," the Bookman said, "they know of this world. And they are curious."

  "Is that a bad thing?"

  "When a child is curious about ants," the Bookman said, "does he speak to them? Or does he examine them with a magnifying glass, and sometimes burns them, just to see what would happen?"

  Smith felt his hands close into fists, relaxed them with some effort. "How?" he said. "How does he – it – gather information?"

  "The same way I do," the Bookman said, and laughed, but there was no humour in that sound. "By extracting their minds, their memories, the way they think and feel. Your friend Alice, my old adversary, Mycroft, and all the rest of them – they are stored, now, inside him. Inside the Harvester."

  Smith shivered. It was cold, and dank, inside that abandoned sewer. The Bookman, he remembered, had always exhibited a certain fondness for underground lairs. He said, "What would you have me do?"

 

Find him.
The words of the Bookman were still in his ears.
Find him, and signal. And I will come. One of me will come.

  "We have a problem," Van Helsing said.

  Smith looked at him. The man, like him, was getting old. Once he had been legendary, eastern Europe and the Levant his speciality. A shadow operative and a fellow assassin, he worked alone, and served no master. He was also the Bureau's contact man for Paris.

  "What?" Smith said. Which one? was what he was thinking.

  "There had been a break-in at the Bureau," Van Helsing said. He spoke quickly, passionlessly. "Shortly after your somewhat… spectacular display over London. Someone – some
thing
– broke in, as if all the security measures in place meant nothing. A hulking, giant figure. Analysis suggests it was a human infected with what would normally have been an overdose of Frankenstein-Jekyll serum. Know anything about that?"

  Oh.

  "Possibly," Smith said – admitted – thinking of the Comte de Rochefort. So the man had survived the airship crash?

  "What happened?"

  "It seems the intruder made it all the way to Zephyrin's lab," Van Helsing said, "and retrieved an unknown object."

  "How do you mean, unknown?"

  "I mean it was not registered in any of the files," Van Helsing said.

  "Something of Mycroft's?" Smith said, uneasy.

  
A Black Op?
Off the books. For the Fat Man's Eyes Only.

  "What did Zephyrin say?" Smith said.

  "Zephyrin was thrown halfway across the lab," Van Helsing said. "And smashed into a wall. He was not available for comment."

  "Who else was there?"

  "Berlyne was manning shop. They're both alive, but neither of them's in any position to talk right now. Fogg's tearing out what's left of his hair."

  Which was the only thing to cheer Smith up right then… He said, "So do we have
any
idea what's missing?"

  But he already had an inkling.

 

The fat man had been obsessed with Les Lézards. "We need to understand them, study them, learn their ways, their history," the fat man had once told him. It had been a summer day, somewhere in Asia, near the Gobi Desert, in land that could have belonged to the Russians, or the Chinese, or the Mongols, depending on who you asked, and whether you bothered to in the first place. Early days, when Smith was young, though Mycroft was so terribly fat even then…

  They were sitting in Mycroft's personal airship. The fat man had insisted on travelling by air whenever possible. He said he liked the comfort. The airship had never been given a name. Nor was it registered.

  Officially, just like Smith himself, it did not exist.

  They were there on what the fat man had called a treasure hunt. There was a team of archaeologists, and a local guide, and security men who never spoke, and Mycroft's personal chef, Anatole.

  "What are we looking for?" Smith had asked.

  "A token," Mycroft said. "Something old, that was lost."

  Smith had only just returned from his training with the man who called himself Ebenezer Long. Smith called him Master. Even now he knew little about him. The monastery sat high up in the Himalayas, in a hidden, snow-bound valley. Master Long had taught Smith the art of
Qinggong
: the Ability of Lightness. There had been a strange, Buddha-like statue, made of jade. It had allowed Smith and the others seemingly impossible feats: almost as though they could fly through the air, on unseen wires. Mycroft had questioned Smith at length about the statue. But it had disappeared shortly after Smith had arrived at the monastery, and he didn't know what he could tell the fat man.

  "Ancient devices," the fat man had told him. "Proof of the lizards' extraterrestrial origins. And signifiers of our future, Smith. Our past has been changed by outside forces, and our future is uncertain."

  And so, each day, they scanned the desert, searching for that treasure, or that proof, or that ancient device. But they had found nothing.

 

Smith followed Van Helsing along the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter. Booksellers displayed their wares and people sat outside numerous brasseries, drinking wine, talking, laughing – it felt to Smith, at that moment, as it came on him, at unexpected times throughout the years, that he had chosen the wrong profession, and that the shadow world could not stand up to the light, to life lived openly, in warmth and joy. Then he thought of the break-in at the Bureau and his suspicions, and what it could mean to those people sitting there, so care-free, unaware of the possible danger that could be threatening them, and the feeling, as it always did, passed.

  He was what he was, and the world needed shadow as well as light.

  Back then, on that long-ago expedition to the Gobi, they had come back empty-handed. But what if the fat man had continued to look? And what if he had found something?

  An ancient, alien artefact, of unknown powers… and Zephyrin had been tinkering with it.

  Worse – now the demented, physically transformed monster that the Comte de Rochefort had become must have it in its possession. Which meant the Quiet Council…

  They needed a man inside the Council. A sleeper agent, someone who would have an inkling as to the Council's actions, its intents.

  Luckily, they had exactly such an agent in place.

 
 

 
 
 

They'd stocked up in the Latin Quarter. A tailor shop whose owner doubled as an arms dealer provided them with firepower. Van Helsing went for a double-barrelled shotgun over his shoulders, two Colts by his sides, a long, slender knife strapped to his arm, and some grenades, as an afterthought. In his long dark coat, his tanned face and deep blue eyes, he looked formidable, the Hunter of old.

  Smith rarely favoured guns. This time, though, he accepted a hand-made Beretta, complete with silencer, and added a handful of knives. He hoped guns would not be required.

  "The Hunter and the Harvester, working together, eh?" Van Helsing said. He sounded mournful.

  "Just like in the old days."

  "We never worked together in the old days."

  "Think you're past it?"

  "It's been a while since I killed anyone."

  "Miss it?"

  Van Helsing sighed. "Not in particular," he said. "To be honest with you, I saw this posting as my little retirement spot. You know what they say–"

  "Paris is the last posting before retirement," Smith said. "Yes…" They were walking towards the cathedral now. Notre Dame, shining that strange luminous green in the moonlight. "What did you have planned for after?"

  "I thought a teaching post in Amsterdam, possibly," Van Helsing said.

  "Cheer up," Smith said. He felt the knife strapped to his arm. It felt good to hold a weapon again. "It's possible we won't even have to kill anyone tonight."

  "Stranger things have happened," Van Helsing said, still a little mournfully.

 

  
This city was not like the others. It was awash in what the humans called Tesla radiation. It was a chatter of conversation. It was a city of machines as much as humans, and the machines talked. They were machines of an antique and obsolete kind his masters had forgotten long ago, yet here they were, thinking engines, primitively powered, but thinking all the same.

  
And talking.

  
A lot of their conversation was about him.

  
What he was, and what he wanted.

  
The observer almost wanted to join in on the conversation. There was something exhilarating about it, about other machines, a kinship of sorts. The voices inside him had been multiplying recently. They all wanted to talk, all the time. The observer paid them little mind.

  
He was following a simple trail. The humans had a legend, about a boy and a girl in a forest and a trail of crumbs. The observer was following a trail of crumbs, and the crumbs were human minds.

  
But they weren't only human minds.

  
And right now he could hear such a mind, an old mind, somewhere.

  
It was screaming.

  
It was a mind that was neither human nor of the human-like machines, but something like an ancient relative of the observer itself.

  
Some relic of a distant past, a mind disturbed, perhaps insane. This bothered the observer. He decided to try and find it.

 

They walked through the ruins of Notre Dame. Punks de Lézard hissed at them, revealing claws surgically grafted onto their hands. Besides Smith, Van Helsing smiled, showing teeth, and pushed aside his long coat, revealing his guns. The punks hissed at him but kept their distance.

  "We need an entry into the catacombs," Van Helsing explained. "There should be one around here somewhere–"

  They moved in shadow; the moon cast pale reflections of their bodies against the ruined metal and their shadows multiplied around them, like the ghosts of past selves. Smith shivered. Could the Bookman really bring back Alice? Was Alice's mind truly trapped, now, in the confines of some strange and alien machine? Was she aware of what was happening?

  Where would the Harvester go next?

  He was following the Harvester's trail, and it was leading, step by step, to Babbage. But what would he, Smith, have done in the Harvester's place?

  He would not have rushed, headlong, towards the target, he decided.

  He would take his time, find and isolate the other links in the chain.

  And the chain led to Paris, and so–

  "Ah, there it is," Van Helsing said. He kicked debris away and revealed a trapdoor set in the floor. Van Helsing knelt, took hold of the solid brass ring attached to the door, and pulled. The door opened upwards, smoothly, as though it had been recently oiled.

  "After you," Van Helsing said, courteously.

  Smith peered down the hole. Metal rungs led downwards, into the earth. He lowered himself, began to climb down. Van Helsing followed.

  The ladder terminated a short while later. They stood on hard stone ground. It was dark but, as they began to move, the passage opened up and there was light, and Smith could smell wood smoke in the distance, and meat cooking, and heard, faintly, the sound of a harmonica, playing.

  "Welcome to the catacombs," Van Helsing said.

  They began to walk, unhurriedly, keeping a distance between them. Van Helsing's hand was on his gun. Smith was cradling his blade. The space around them expanded again, the ceiling rising higher as they went deeper into Paris' underworld. A rat scampered past, alarmed by their progress. There were cells cut into the stone on either side. Some were empty. In one he saw a young mother cradling a child. She looked up at him as he passed and her eyes were empty and when he looked down he saw she was holding a wooden doll, and the doll was staring at him and it blinked, startling him.

  "Edison dolls," Van Helsing said. "Be careful of them. The Edison Company manufactured them, complete with Babbage engine and rudimentary voice. They… were not a success."

  Smith seemed to remember rumours, about Edison and his obsession with creating the perfect, female doll… He wondered where the man was, what side of the Great Game he played on. They walked on.

  In one of the cells three automatons huddled around a fire. They were in a deplorable state, stuffing sticking out of holes in their bodies, one missing an arm, another a leg. They passed around a flask of what Smith, at first, took to be whiskey. Van Helsing paused and spoke briefly to one of the machines. "Petroleum," he said, noticing Smith's gaze. "Come on."

  "What did you ask them?"