A slight intake of breath, a little drawing back. “Why Galileo?”

“As with everything to do with my kind, it’s personal.”

Someone tapped me on the shoulder. A woman’s voice, excuse me, do you know where I can find a toilet?

“Very well,” said the voice on the end of the phone. “You have made your interests clear.”

A tap again on my shoulder, the toilet, please, do you know where the toilet is?

I have already forgotten that I am a security guard, but then who asks security the way to the bathroom?

Something hot bit into my skin above my right shoulder blade. For a moment I considered ignoring it, an irritation, nothing more. Then my left knee buckled, and as I staggered forward, I felt something sharp sticking out between flesh and bone.

Damn.

I looked for skin and all I found was darkness.

Chapter 49

Drugs wearing off from my system.

The security guard I am wearing is a big man, a tough man; he can take being knocked out. The fact that he is strapped to a chair inside a glass box at a location unknown he’d be less happy about, if he were aware of the situation. Thankfully, he is not.

I underestimated Coyle’s friends.

Did they spot the switch or did they follow the amnesia?

Should have been more careful; should have jumped into someone old, or a child, or a stranger with frail knees. No one ever looks for a ghost in a body with arthritis.

I consider my cage, and my options. My cage is made of clear glass panels that run floor to ceiling. A clear glass door is set in a panel directly ahead of me. Around the glass walls, another room, larger, concrete, encases my transparent cage. A red metal door leads from this place, to location unknown. There is a fluorescent light above my head–too high to be any use. The man with the pistol by the door wears a hazmat suit. Rubber gloves, rubber suit, rubber boots, plastic visor: he’s dressed for disaster. Not an inch of bare skin anywhere, and the joins sealed up with tape. It would almost be funny in another life.

My consciousness must have been reported, for the one metal door, a grille secured over its window, opens from the outside and lets in two more hazmat-suited captors. I can give both the false names they like to lie by: Eugene, Alice.

“Can I have a glass of water?” I asked.

No one seemed in a hurry to provide. No one entered through the clear door of my clear cage, but Eugene turned left to circle, and Alice turned right.

“Kepler, isn’t it?”

Eugene’s voice. I strained my neck in time to see him leave my field of vision, circling in the passage defined by concrete walls on the left, glass walls on the right. A cheap trick. It implied a mind not entirely confident of its ability to intimidate without the added antics. That seemed unfortunate; insecurity is often the mother of aggression.

“It’s a name as good as any other.”

“Where’s Coyle?”

“No.”

“No?”

“You want Coyle; I want out. Our situation hasn’t really changed.”

“You underestimate your importance to us, Kepler,” and there he was, back in view, a wasp circling its prey. “The welfare of Nathan is of great concern–naturally–great concern, and we will do whatever it takes to protect him. But you–you are of even greater concern still, as I’m sure he would have explained, had you bothered to talk to him.”

“We talked,” I replied, shrugging against my bonds. “We talked about life, love, guns and Galileo.” The chair I sat on wasn’t secured to the floor–it creaked as I pushed against it.

“What is your interest in Galileo?”

“If I tell you, do I get a drink of water?”

He hesitated. Every good negotiator needs to understand that no matter how many cards they hold, still they must play to stay in the game. “We have no desire to see your host suffer needlessly.”

“I’m imagining that your definition of ‘needlessly’ is not like mine?”

A little sigh. Poor Eugene, the hard-pressed senior manager. I wondered what his blood pressure was like, if his shoulders ached. “Where is Nathan?”

“Handcuffed to a radiator with a gag in his mouth,” I replied. “Why did Josephine die?”

“Where is Nathan?”

“The gag is made of sock and packing tape. Josephine.”

“You seem to care a great deal for a former host.”

“She and I had a deal.”

“Yet you would permit harm to come to the body you currently wear?”

“I permit nothing,” I replied. “You make your decisions and act on them; I cannot influence that. To live I must have a host; I die when my host dies. Let’s not put the moral burden on biology.”

“Where is Nathan?”

“We could help each other, you and I.”

Eugene stopped in his circling, turned to face me. He held up the penguin-shaped USB stick I’d slipped into Alice’s pocket. “What’s this?”

“An autobiography.”

“A virus, perhaps? Something more… complicated? You program it yourself, or did you ask a friend?”

“I’m a ghost. Everyone knows we’re pig ignorant.”

“So you do have friends.”

“Or friends of friends; these things grow grey.”

“You seem to like society.”

“I do. People are easier to collect than things. Did you get yourself checked out with a rape kit?” I asked Alice, who was hovering on the edge of the cage. Her lips thinned; her face did not change. “Of course you did. My restraint wasn’t a reflection on your body. Simply that sex, in this context, would have been a monumental waste of time.”

“Kepler.” Eugene’s voice snapped my attention back to him. He held the USB stick up for me to see, then laid it on the floor and, with the heel of his boot, ground it into silicon and rubber. “You will tell me where Nathan is. That is your only purpose.”

I put my head on one side as he lifted his foot from the crushed electronics that had almost–but not quite–been Spunkmaster’s finest piece of work. “I could tell you about the time I met Kennedy,” I suggested. Eugene resumed his march round my cage. “Or the thirty seconds I spent as Churchill? Let me regale you with stories of the rich, the glamorous and the dead; or maybe you want to know how it felt, how it really felt being black, young and free beneath the podium of Martin Luther King. I heard him speak and I knew, I absolutely knew, that the suffering of my people was not a stigma, but a badge of noblest pride, and that those who had fallen were not crushed, but were Newton’s giants, bearing us steadily up. Or maybe not,” I concluded sadly. “Maybe you’re not that interested in other people’s point of view. So go on. Do whatever it is you’re going to do to… Who am I?” I tried to get a better look at my own body. A few too many beers had settled on my belly, showing as a bulge of muscle and fat competing for which was going to get the final metabolic say. “Was I carrying ID?”

“You claim to care for your hosts but you would let harm befall the body you currently inhabit?”

“Desperate times,” I replied. “You’ll hurt me regardless of who I am; perhaps the most equitable solution to this question would be if I jumped into one of you? Then you could beat, torment, torture–whatever–one of your own employees. That’s fairer, don’t you think? This… whoever I am… is just a bystander, whereas your team signed up for this job in full awareness—” I caught myself, smiled. “No, maybe not in full awareness. Maybe not that. But with some awareness at least that the precise circumstances we now find ourselves in might arise. So go on. Be the man. I’ll be right here.”

Eugene was smiling behind his visor. It was an automatic smile, hiding truth. “Everyone else can leave.”

He was the boss.

They left.

Eugene sank down on to his haunches before me, one hand pressed up against the transparency of my cage.