Déjà Vu

Chapter Twenty-Six

It was sunrise before Saskia would speak to him. Proctor dozed in driving seat of the rental car, slightly reclined. His personal computer was in a dashboard cup holder. The Ego unit had instructions to deactivate Saskia’s chip if she did anything other than sit and wait. So she watched the dawn blaze on the landscape, flat as a page. Las Vegas was a ten-hour drive on I-70, but their counter-surveillance precautions would slow them. She saw a billboard slide by. It advertised Iowa sushi. She frowned. She felt empty. The flesh of her memory had been picked clean from her bones. Ahead, a truck’s indicator blinked. Beckmann had said something about epaulettes. She raised her fist and looked at the hurting, swollen knuckles. She wondered if her unarmed combat skills were intended for the use of harder, more robust hands than those she had grave-robbed.

Klutikov? He had large, good hands.

The traffic thickened. The car slowed into the human speed band, and its braking tipped Proctor forward. He widened his eyes, stretched his eyebrows, noted Ego still on watch.

‘Morning,’ he said.

‘Professor.’

‘I told you to call me David. Where are we?’

‘Crossing into Nebraska.’

‘We’ve made good time.’

‘I’ve ordered another rental car to rendezvous with us at the truckstop in six miles. Our current car will follow us for a few miles.’ She looked at his white stubble. ‘As a double bluff.’

‘All this expertise comes with your new chip, does it?’

‘You’re talking to the chip right now. It’s not something separate.’

David looked as though he had said something rude. ‘What did you do with the guard’s uniform?’

‘It’s in the boot. Safer if I wear my suit instead. It fits.’

‘Saskia, I’m sorry.’ He touched her shoulder. ‘As soon as I find my daughter, you will be free to leave. I promise.’

She batted his hand away. ‘Do you want me to feel grateful? You give me up to a future where I will be hunted like you. To fail my first assignment is to die. My employer told me so.’

‘I’m doing what I’m doing for the best reasons.’

‘As they seem to you.’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t even know where you’re heading.’

‘The plane ticket said Las Vegas, so that’s where. For now.’ David touched his forehead. ‘Of course. The paper from locker J371. It said, “Sounds like a car-parking attendant belongs to the finest.” What do you make of that? It could be phrased like a cryptic crossword clue. They often have part of the answer in the question. One of the words may be an anagram of the answer.’

Saskia closed her eyes and pictured the letters. She thought, What are the anagrams? An instant later, she knew that ‘attendant’ had no rearrangements that made sense, while ‘finest’ could make ‘feints’ or ‘infest’.

‘I cannot find any likely anagrams.’

‘Wait. What’s another word for a car-parking attendant?’

‘You are the English speaker, not me.’

‘Ah, but you fake it so well. Another word…would be “traffic warden”, or “attendant”. No, we have that. Come on, Saskia.’

‘I’m thinking.’

‘It could be an American word. We’re in America. Valet.’

‘What’s a valet?’

‘Somebody who parks your car for you. Could it mean the best example of a valet, like a super-valet?’

‘What’s a super-valet?’

‘Like Superman, only cleaner.’

‘What?’

David sighed. ‘Never mind.’

‘Let’s stay with ‘valet’,’ said Saskia. ‘As for finest, in some online indexes of English word usage, it refers to a city’s emergency services. Usually the police, but sometimes the fire service.’ She felt his interest. ‘My chip can connect to the telecommunications network.’

‘Wow. Consciously, unconsciously? Can you see a webspace right now?’

Saskia closed her eyes. Her thoughts fluttered, trapped. She knew that the chip was background processing the relationships between ‘valet’, ‘fire service’ and Las Vegas, just as the semantic parser of the UK police had tracked Proctor’s emails.

She opened her eyes.

‘The clue must refer to the Valley of Fire National Park, on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Your daughter is there.’

Proctor laughed. ‘Well done that woman.’

‘This is the truckstop,’ she said coldly. ‘We have to change cars. Pull in.’

‘Computer, give me control.’

The car said, ‘You have control in five seconds, four, three, two, one. You have control.’

Saskia waited beneath a sign that warned of the dangers of hydrogen. She watched David enter the glass-fronted store and lost him in the reflected scrubland. Carefully, she lifted the handset and dialled. The British ringing tone made her think of Simon. Somewhere, perhaps in a zinc tray, a phone played ‘Scotland the Brave’.

‘Hello?’ asked a woman.

Saskia tucked her hair behind her ear. ‘May I please speak to Detective Jago?’

‘I’m afraid that’s not possible,’ she said. Her accent was British. Not Scottish, but English.

Saskia almost hung up. Then she said, ‘To whom am I speaking?’

‘I’m his daughter.’

Jago had only one child and he was called Jeremy. Saskia swapped ears.

‘My name is Sabrina,’ Saskia said. ‘I heard that your father had been taken ill. Could you please tell me how he is?’

‘He’s under observation.’

‘I see,’ said Saskia. She pursed her lips.

‘Are you still there?’

‘When he wakes up, tell him I’m sorry. Can you do that?’

‘…Wait.’

Saskia listened as the phone was handled.

‘There is something else,’ continued the woman. ‘Dad said that Saskia might call. He had a message for her. Is that you?’

Saskia considered the isolation of the gas station and the anonymity of the phone. The surrounding land was flat and empty. She looked into the heights of sky, and thought about the cold stare of a satellite, and the colder eyes of Beckmann.

‘Yes.’

‘He told me that your former boss has sent a man to find you. Dad was visited by him last night.’

‘I see.’

‘Saskia? All’s well.’

She frowned at the horizon and her reply was spoken before she could think. ‘That ends well.’

Shakespeare.

‘Wait,’ said Saskia, but the woman hung up. Saskia called back but the phone rang without answer. She lowered the handset gently, though she wanted to smash it. The muscles in her face gathered like a fist. Someone whistled and she looked up. David was sitting at a picnic table on the opposite side of the lot. She collected her tear-diluted mascara on a knuckle and walked the windy gap between them and felt like a gargoyle as she perched on the furthest edge of the bench, waiting for the next rental car.

David studied her.

‘What are you staring at?’ she asked.

‘I’m debating if I should tell you something.’

‘Let me know whether the motion is passed.’

‘On board the aeroplane, when my computer brought the presence of your chip to my attention, I took a gamble and claimed that I could deactivate it. The truth is that I can’t. My computer doesn’t even recognise the communication protocol. It’s encrypted. You’re perfectly safe.’

Saskia turned to face him. ‘But you knew my name, my badge number.’

‘Just a skin of metadata wrapped around the unencrypted hellos and goodbyes your chip sends all the time.’

‘Sends where?’

‘The Internet.’

‘Maybe it’s my location. Did you think of that?’

‘I did, but consider the possibilities. If compressed, it could send the data of your senses across the Internet.’

Saskia took his coffee and sipped. ‘What is the taste of coffee, expressed as a number?’

‘Now you’re getting it.’

‘David, do you think I’m even here? Am I lying in a coma in a hospital in Berlin, or London, or Rio—relaying my soul chip-to-chip like…’ she looked across the forecourt ‘…a conversation?’

‘Easy to find out. We’ll get you a foil hat and see if you drop dead.’

She remembered the man in the foil hat from Heathrow. ‘No, thanks.’

‘I note that you aren’t calling for help.’

‘Perhaps I just did,’ she said, indicating the gas station.

‘The phone call? Yes, I noticed that. But Ego doesn’t think it’s something I need to worry about. He heard the whole thing. Sorry about your partner.’

‘Never mind that. Tell me about the woman who rescued you from the West Lothian Centre. Did she sound British?’

He stared at her thoughtfully. ‘Did she sound British, Saskia?’