Success at first. I reach Riyadh safely, without being tracked there; but then I find out that Scouse has the routes through Europe covered. And I have to get to Washington . People must be told what I’ve discovered.
It felt right so far. What next?
Think!
Leave the package in Riyadh . Where?
That’s the missing piece. Find the package, and you’ll also find out what it’s used for.
Think!
**Back through Europe with a false passport. Meet brother in London , tell him where I’ve left it in case I don’t make it to Washington .**
**Give him the message: the missing package has been hidden** — Where?
Memories not my own, not fully accessible. They sat there on the brink of recall. My head was full up, spurting random thoughts, everything but the one I needed. Sweating in the back of the taxi, all the old wounds waking; every stitch of Sir Westcott’s delicate needlework stung and burned with a touch of nitric acid. Kidneys, testicles, right leg, rib cage, eye, ear and skull conspired to torture me, until I sat mindless, gripping the cool plastic of the seat.
I was panting and shivering like a fevered animal. My brain was overloading and the feeling terrified me. Unless I could relax, it would spill, ooze its melting grey matter out of my ears and down my neck.
I fumbled in my coat pocket and swallowed another blue tablet — to hell with any glass of water — and looked at my watch. We were approaching the British Embassy, but already twenty-five precious minutes had passed since I had left the hotel. I was banking on at most six safe hours; after that Zan and Scouse would be ready to try something else.
The embassy lay southwest of the city center, in an area that had once been the most prosperous part of the town. Now it was just a little past its peak, with the hint of genteel and decaying opulence that exactly matched the British influence in this part of the world. I had made a point of dropping in on each visit to Saudi Arabia . Usually my main contact was the Cultural Attaché, but today the Science Attaché was my best hope.
I left the taxi waiting at the main gate. The embassy grounds occupied almost ten acres of sculptured gardens, and the slow walk past the military guards and along a cool, shrub-lined pathway did me good. By the time that I was sitting in the inner lobby and accepting the ritual offer of hot tea, the world was regaining some stability.
The little red-haired man who finally wandered out to meet me looked vaguely familiar. He stood in front of me and frowned, one hand fiddling with the side of his scrubby mustache.
“I say. Aren’t you Lionel Salkind?” He shook my hand vigorously. “We didn’t know you were coming here to play this month — looks like somebody slipped up in getting the word out.”
“I’m not here for concerts.” Apparently most of the world hadn’t noticed that I had been smashed to pieces and out of circulation for six months. So much for fame.
“I’m here on other business,” I said.
“Pity. I’m Cyril Meecham. We met a year ago, when you played the Diabelli what-not, and then that thing with Parkinson. You remember it?”
That thing with Parkinson. I remembered all right, and he had put it very well.
Last year I had given a small private concert at the embassy, and the chargé-d’affaires, Parkinson, fancied himself as a violinist. I played the Beethoven Diabelli Variations, then together we tackled the Spring Sonata, Opus 24. The scherzo movement wore him out, and in the final rondo we went slower and slower, limping across the finish line, roughly together, after the longest last movement in musical memory. I remembered it all right.
“Mind you,” Meecham was saying. “I liked the concert we had with that other pianist, Schub, a lot better. Somehow seemed to be a lot more tuneful, if you know what I mean.” He sensed a possible lack of tact in his remarks, and waved an arm towards his office. “But come on in, and tell me what we can do for you. I’m surprised you’re not talking to Draper and the chaps in Culture.”
“I need some information about science.” I followed him into a panelled office with an oar hung prominently along one wall, and we settled down into creaking, leather-covered armchairs. “At least, I think it’s science. Can you tell me what introsomatic chips are?”
“Mm. See what you mean.” He stroked at his mustache again. “Can’t see you getting too much out of old Draper and his culture-vultures on that one. Introsomatic chips, eh? I could find you some papers on them, let you read all you want to. Mind you, some of that stuff’s hard going.”
“I don’t need details — just the general idea. And I’m in rather a hurry for another appointment.” I looked at my watch. One hour since I left the hotel.
He was nodding vaguely. “Of course, of course. Well, the idea’s simple enough. You know what a pacemaker is, don’t you, for heartbeat control? The introsomatic chips take it a step farther. You take a chip with a whole lot of integrated circuits on it, and you preprogram it with stored programs. Then you add a bunch of sensors to it — little ones. And you implant it into the body, bung it in wherever it’s right for that type of chip. Intro-somatic chips, see? — means it’s computing equipment inside the body. The sensors measure various physical stuff — you know, pulse, temperature, ion concentrations, things like that — then the program calculates a signal to be sent to the nervous system. Sort of an override to the natural control signal.”
“And what does it do?” I was getting ideas about the Belur Package, and why there was such interest in it.
“Well. That all depends on what the implant is programmed for.” He was looking at me as though only an idiot would ask such a question. “You see, it’s completely flexible. Any procedure can be programmed in, and so long as the sensors and the output signals are right you could in principle control any body function any way you like. That’s just the theory, you understand. In practice, they’re still fiddling around on the research. Maybe we’ll have something really useful in five or ten years.”
“What can they do with it now?”
“Oh, the easy stuff.” From the look on his face, I sensed that he was at the limits of his real knowledge. “You can get an implant that controls some of the peristaltic actions in the digestive system — for people who have trouble in the small and large intestine. And of course, the heart pacemakers are a lot better now; they respond to adrenaline and hormonal levels in the blood.”
He leaned forward. “Look here, old fellow, d’you mind if I ask why you’re so interested in all this? I mean, it’s a long way from bashing out the old Rachmaninov. What are you up to?”
I hesitated. Danger might come from unlikely places. but I just couldn’t see Cyril Meecham as the instrument of evil.
“I think somebody has made implants a lot more sophisticated than any that have been done before. He was an Indian named Belur, and I’m pretty sure he made a prototype set maybe a year or two ago.”
(The mental image of Dixie , garden fork deep in his chest, blood welling up over stained lower dentures. No signs of a death agony. “Not pain. Got implant. Bloody bastard.")
“The prototypes could be implanted to override pain signals, wherever they came from in the body. But more recently Belur made a new set of introsomatic implants, with different functions. I don’t know what the newer ones do — but my brother was trying to get them from India to America when he was killed in an accident. I’m convinced that he had to leave them here, in Riyadh . And I’m trying to find out where.”
“Hmm. Sorry about your brother.” Now he looked intrigued, and his condolences were no more than a bow to propriety. “Haven’t seen anything about these newer implants in the journals. Mind you, we’re not exactly at the center of scientific action out here. I don’t know how to help you. Do you have any idea at all where your brother was staying when he was here in Riyadh ?”