Stamping Butterflies

CHAPTER 51 Lampedusa, Tuesday 10 July [Now]

"Okay," said Petra Mayer, "I'm just going to switch this on." She flipped open a silver box about the size of a paperback and tapped its only button. Two diodes lit at the front, one red and one green. The diodes were actually something clever involving complex light-emitting polymer. Compared to the rest of the box they were almost steam driven.

"You know what it is?" Extracting an Italian cigarette from its garish packet, Professor Mayer tapped the silver box.

"A recorder," said Prisoner Zero.

The Professor and he had an agreement. He talked to her and she pretended to Colonel Borgenicht that he was still locked in silence. It seemed to Prisoner Zero that this arrangement was about to come to an end.

"Not exactly," said Petra Mayer, fishing for her lighter. "It blocks parabolic mikes and makes bugging near impossible. Everything said remains between the two of us."

"And the President."

"Yeah," agreed Petra Mayer. "Him too."

"So it's the three of us," Prisoner Zero said. He was having a numbers day. It began with a battered road sign on the way down to Calla Madonna. Without thinking, he'd divided the kilometres by eight in his head and multiplied by five to get miles. Then he did it properly, using 8.04672.

The numbers thing had gone on from there really.

Now he and Petra Mayer were on the terrace of a deserted café, staring out over a rocky headland towards the Tunisian coast. Either that, or what the Professor thought was North Africa was really a low bank of cloud spread thin across the horizon.

Professor Mayer sighed. More rested on this than just her friendship with the Newman boy, as she still found herself calling the President, albeit only in her head. She'd had calls from colleagues, calls from enemies. A New York tabloid openly accused her of consorting with traitors, although it used shorter words.

On a secure line the previous night she'd asked President Newman what he wanted and come to the nasty conclusion that he didn't know. He just wanted everything to be different. It was a very Gene Newman position. The man simply couldn't understand why Prisoner Zero wouldn't explain why he took a shot at the President, express remorse and beg for a Presidential pardon.

It obviously wasn't religion or politics, tabloids notwithstanding. Even the rump of the Republican Party was beginning to admit this. And then there was what the President now called "All that stuff with numbers written in shit." The director of the Saatchi Gallery in London had labelled its destruction the greatest act of artistic barbarism this century. New Scientist was offering a life subscription to anyone who could fill in the second half of the final line. Although Petra Mayer felt a Nobel Prize was probably more appropriate.

"You're running out of time," Professor Mayer said.

"Seventy-six hours," said Moz, watching a seagull twist for the fifth time in the same thermal. "Four thousand, five hundred and sixty minutes. Two hundred and seventy-three thousand, six hundred seconds."

Petra Mayer nodded.

Prisoner Zero was pretending to do the maths in his head. And without realizing it, he had his head twisted to one side, the way Jake always did when he was thinking, but no math was required. He had the figures ready and waiting in the way Celia kept a running total of just how much she'd eaten on any day. She could do calories by single day, individually day by day over the course of a week or any permutation of averages.

Prisoner Zero had never asked the woman how she managed it and doubted if Jake even realized it happened, but he could pretty much guarantee it wasn't by having darkness hollow out a cave in her skull and sit in one corner whispering numbers.

"Coffee?" Petra Mayer suggested.

Moz asked for an espresso without thinking and the coffee came black as night and bitter as memory. Actually, it was perfectly ordinary, if slightly chewy in that Italian way.

"Better?" said Professor Mayer.

"Than what?"

The Professor sighed.

She was the thinnest woman Prisoner Zero had ever seen. So tiny he could see either side of the back of her chrome chair at the same time. All she ever seemed to ingest was coffee and nicotine. He'd intended to ask her about the silver box but ended up nodding to her cigarette.

"Those keep you thin, right?"

"No," she said. "Being ill keeps me thin. These are just killing me. Of course," she added, "it doesn't help that I'm hopelessly addicted."

"To what?"

What have you got? The small woman waited, then shrugged. "Brando," she said, "The Wild One."

Prisoner Zero had seen it dubbed into Dutch, in a fleapit under a strip joint on Warmoesstraat. Jake had snored through the final reel, his head flopped onto Prisoner Zero's shoulder. All he could remember about the film was the smell of ammonia in a filthy lavatory, a couple of raddled queens arguing about Brando's beauty and a sullen kid in his late teens smoking badly cured schwag.

That had been him. "You do realize," said Professor Mayer, "that the Pentagon still wants you dead?"

Prisoner Zero said nothing.

"And the Secretary of Defense is determined to get his way..."

The man in front of her thought about that. "I'm not sure I care," he said.

"You don't care?"

"Not really." Prisoner Zero shook his head. "I'm freezing up."

"You're cold?" They were in the shade of a green umbrella that read "Café Lampedusa" and all around them grass was turning brown while tarmac went sticky in the heat. Beyond the headland, the sun had hammered the sea into a sheet of glistening armour.

"It's over ninety," she told Prisoner Zero, and another number twisted like a fleck of dust in front of his eyes, flickered and died.

"Inside," he said. "I'm cold inside."

Where the darkness waited and the story stood frozen, with Tris hung from her cliff and the Emperor still watching butterflies flicker and die like so many twisting numbers. Prisoner Zero had lost count of the times he'd watched that scene in his head, never quite reaching the end.

"You need another coffee." Snapping her fingers, Petra Mayer signalled to a thin man hovering in the gloom of the café.

The owner was nervous for a good reason. Nervous, cross and totally unable to do anything to change the situation in which he'd been placed. Professor Mayer wanted to borrow his café. Colonel Borgenicht had explained this to his local liaison officers, who'd explained it to the patron.

Their coffee came in unwashed cups, Prisoner Zero's thumbprint clearly visible on one side of an absurdly small handle. The patron reused dirty cups to make his protest. He was alone inside the café, minus his usual staff. The tourists were already missing and even his wife had been told to go home. So it was just him, his espresso machine and whatever food his wife had prepared already.

US jeeps locked off the coast road at both ends. Half a dozen marines stood next to each vehicle, the marines flanked by a dozen unhappy-looking carabinieri. Their commander, a colonel on loan from Rome, had tried to claim control of the operation. He'd lost.

"You see that flash?"

A flare of sunlight reflected from a headland to one side of them.

"Telescopic sights," said Prisoner Zero, sipping his coffee. He'd seen the snipers with their long rifles on his way to the café. A couple of them had stood by a hastily thrown up roadblock, waiting for orders.

Their job was to stop anyone shooting at Prisoner Zero, that was what Colonel Borgenicht had told Petra Mayer. Maybe the marines didn't do irony. The Colonel certainly seemed to find nothing odd in throwing up a cordon to protect the life of someone his men were scheduled to kill in seventy-five and a half hours.

Four thousand, five hundred and thirty minutes.

Two hundred and seventy-one thousand, eight hundred... The prisoner tried to blink away the darkness and got freefall, except he was roped to a cliff and it was this safety line which brought him up short, spilling numbers from his mouth.

"Shit," said Petra Mayer, looking at the pile of vomit. "That's all we need."

Very carefully, the owner put a glass of water on the table in front of the prisoner and retreated to the safety of inside. Maybe he just wanted to be out of the afternoon sun.

"Sip it slowly," Professor Mayer instructed. "But wash your mouth out first."

Spitting water into the dust, Prisoner Zero swilled out his mouth and spat again. He drank half of what remained in a single gulp, overflow escaping from the sides of his mouth to roll down his chin and splash onto his combats.

"Slowly," said Petra Mayer.

Colonel Borgenicht had him dressed in desert casuals and canvas combat boots. So many subtexts were backed up behind this decision that Prisoner Zero hadn't even tried to shuffle his way through them. He was leaving that to Petra Mayer.

She'd been the one doing all the talking since she had Prisoner Zero dug out of his cell, dressed at gunpoint and loaded into a jeep. Only then did she mention that they were going for a picnic. Mostly she'd been talking about the guilt Prisoner Zero must feel for Malika's death. Quite how the woman had the gall to imagine she knew, Prisoner Zero was uncertain. Only the more he listened, the more certain he was that she did.

It was a weird feeling.

"Those flashes," Petra Mayer said, watching another spark from a peak of the headland. "They're camera lenses."

The prisoner thought about this and decided it made as much sense as anything else. "There must be a lot."

"Six," said Petra Mayer. And Prisoner Zero remembered how keen she was that he took the other chair.

"How do you know?" Prisoner Zero demanded.

When Professor Mayer smiled her face crumpled into a map. "Because that's how many I told the Italian police to let in."

"They didn't mind you--?"

Petra Mayer's laugh was not entirely kind. "I gave them names."

She might pretend to dislike the marines, but in the end the Professor, Dr. Petrov and the marines were all on the same side. It was, Prisoner Zero reminded himself, as well to remember this.

"What do you want?"

"No," said Petra Mayer, "that's not the question." Picking up a paper napkin, she tore off the strip that read "Café Lampedusa" and twisted it into a tiny rope which she placed neatly beside her saucer. "Displacement," she added, when she saw Prisoner Zero watching. "Something you seem to have turned into a life's work."

He was meant to ask, All right then, what is the question? Prisoner Zero understood that but he just couldn't be bothered. And anyway, she was going to tell him, it was obvious from her face.

"Do you regret trying to shoot the President?"

"I'm not sure," Prisoner Zero said with a shrug. "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

Petra Mayer sighed. "The correct answer is ‘Yes, deeply’... We have a problem. And the problem is that the world doesn't want you dead."

Prisoner Zero looked at the small woman who sat opposite, chain-smoking her way through a packet of Italian cigarettes.

She appeared to be entirely serious.

"Don't you get it?" said Professor Mayer. "It would be like shooting Einstein. World opinion won't let Gene do it, that's his first problem. The second is, he can't afford simply to pardon you."

Prisoner Zero smiled.

"What's funny?" There was irritation in Petra Mayer's voice. And a low-level fear that she might have missed something important.

"Who said I wanted pardoning?" asked Prisoner Zero. "You know what I see when I look at you?"

"Malika?"

"I see cliffs. Impossibly tall cliffs. And you know where they are?"

The Professor didn't.

"Etched onto the inside of my eyes. Make sense of that if you can." Reaching out, Prisoner Zero drained the last of his glass of water. "You know what I see if I keep my eyes shut?"

There was no way she could know, but Prisoner Zero asked anyway because he was talking to himself; which was all anyone ever did, it seemed to him, talk to themselves while half meanings and misunderstandings fed into the minds of those who thought they were listening.

"I see ice and darkness," said Prisoner Zero.

Professor Mayer lit the last of her cigarettes. "Really," she said. "So what does the darkness see?"