Chapter 55

There’s always something to break.

First I broke a thick branch from a low spiny tree sprouting from a concrete wall.

With my branch I broke the window of the white van parked around the corner, and as its siren wailed, I reached down and unlocked the door from the inside. Then I broke a seat while crawling into the back, where I broke into the van’s emergency kit and stole a tyre iron, flashlight and waterproof cagoule.

Then I broke the side panel of the steering column and stole the van.

My intention was not to go far.

Even if Aquarius couldn’t follow a shrieking van with a broken window, the police might rouse themselves enough to ask a few questions.

I drove until I was beyond the search radius of a running man, then ditched the van and went, tyre iron under one arm, cagoule pulled over my vest, in search of something better.

I was in a district of Berlin where one-storey industrial blocks squatted amid a grid of streets, overshadowed by glowering tower blocks and great advertising boards declaring the wonders of cheap petrol, good vacuum cleaners and locally traded plumbing parts. The buses were few and far between, and I hadn’t a cent to pay for a ride. I wandered down the middle of an empty shopping street which provided the area’s worldly goods: cheap laundry, fresh tomatoes and cans of fruit.

The laundrette was the place to begin.

I smashed at the padlock on the shutter until it gave, then smashed at the glass behind the shutter until I had carved myself an access route. An alarm began to wail, but at this hour locals would be slow to stir, and the police slower yet to answer, and even if anyone did, arrest was the very least of my problems.

I smashed open the till and was rewarded with not a cent for my troubles. In the back I rifled through plastic-sheathed clothes hanging on a rail, forgetting for a moment that I was smaller, more neatly built than Nathan Coyle, and that a cocktail dress was more my style than a tuxedo. A small red box on the highest corner of a shelf caught my eye; smashed open, it revealed thirty euros in one-euro coins and twenty-cent pieces, an emergency supply gratefully received.

I thought I heard a siren in the distance so made a quick exit, shattered glass crunching beneath my feet, Alice’s fingerprints all over the crime scene, for what little that might matter in the long run.

A cold night to be lost in a strange city.

I wanted to sleep, and so did my body.

My mouth tasted of bile, arm throbbed, ribs ached. At some point I must have hit me harder than I realised.

I turned my face towards what I guessed to be the centre of the city, navigating by the towers, and began the long walk towards morning.

Chapter 56

The coming of dawn did not so much lighten the sky as shift it from blue to grey, scored by the hissing of falling rain.

I wanted out of this skin.

Another day, another internet café.

I love the internet.

Online banking! Facebook!

I struggle now to recall my existence before these two miracles of technology, to remember precisely how–dear God but I shudder to think of it–how hard I had to labour to gather information on my body’s friends, acquaintances, past and wealth. The weeks spent shadowing a target, the long nights cataloguing people met, stories told, the eavesdropping and the subterfuges I had to engage in to crack the secrets of my skins–yet now, oh most precious now, most wonderful of wonders, Facebook! The entire life, the personality, every friend and family member catalogued and listed in perfect traceable glory, just one password away, assuming the skin even bothers to log out. Facebook! How did I ever live a life of reckless possession without you?

And glory above glories, online banking.

Miraculous, wonderful, a delight, for all I need to do is remember a name, a password, a code, and in any body, in any skin, I can sit down in front of a computer and move monies around from one place to another, send myself credit here or there without ever having to wear the same skin twice. Gone are the days when I would bury a rich man’s money beneath a secluded tree, to return to it in a poor man’s body when time came to move on; now the tree is the world, and the earth is automated.

Technology, I thank you.

The city woke, and I longed to sleep.

Beneath my stolen clothes my skin throbbed from a dozen untreated slices. I wanted to scratch, but when my fingers brushed beneath my arm I felt the lumpen protrusions of embedded glass and flinched away, repulsed by my own flesh.

I bought an hour on a computer in an all-night internet café, among the international callers trying to catch their mothers in Taiwan, the insomniac shoppers and the quiet downloaders of internet porn.

An hour on a computer netted me three hundred euros transferred to the nearest ATM.

Another euro bought a hot dog from a man with a steaming cart who gave me extra onion with a cry of, “You’re up early, ma’am. Rough night?”

“Good God,” I replied. “Is it morning?”

Two hundred and fifty euros netted me a small laptop to call my own.

I sat in the dullest corner of the darkest café I could find, fighting the urge, the need to jump bodies, forcing myself to stay still and in discomfort, and slipped in the only object that had made a switch unviable–my little stomach-stained USB stick.

What may be said of the organisation that dubs itself Aquarius?

If it was half as good at protecting its data as it was its people, I don’t think I’d stand a chance.

Emails, folders, pictures, accounts, personnel files–more documents than the eye could read in a day, in a week, ransacked by Spunkmaster13’s malicious toy.

Most of it banal.

Even secret bunkers of murderous men need to order toilet paper in bulk. Even murderers run out of rubber bands.

I tried searching for Nathan Coyle and located an email with a little red flag by it.

The message said: Compromised.

That was all.

I searched for Kepler.

It was the same file that Coyle had taken with him to Istanbul, with only one addendum. Now the first image in the document was not Josephine, but Coyle.

I tried other names.

Hecuba.

Nearly thirty pictures and names, stretching back over four and a half years. They ended in one last face, a woman in a headscarf, head turned to one side, a bullet hole in her skull and another in her throat, lying where she’d fallen on the steps of Senefelderplatz. Hecuba had jumped into her while running, and worn the body eleven seconds before the pursuit team took her down.

More names, more faces.

Kuanyin, who died wearing the body of a man who’d sacrificed his life so that the beaten rag of Eugene’s ravaged flesh might endure a little longer.

Names led to more names: code names I didn’t recognise, some I did. Marionette, poisoned in St Petersburg. Huang Li, shot in Tokyo. Charlemagne, who, realising he was pursued, fled into the body of a seven-year-old boy, proclaiming, you’ll never do it. You’ll never kill me, not a child. In a way he was right, for Aquarius took the child and strapped him down, experimented for weeks on their living subject, cutting out pieces of brain one cluster at a time in search of some miracle mechanism that might yet save the body from the ghost. He was already comatose when his heart stopped, but which mind slumbered, Aquarius did not know, and an unknown boy was buried in a field outside Seville.