A Spy in Time Read online

  “Wait in his office, then. The second floor there. Make sure you don’t take anything. I have everything counted.”

  We went into an adjoining room, where the sheep pelts were piled into stacks higher than a man, then up the staircase. Confined rooms and half-open windows with bars in the shape of a cross. We passed Cassim’s office. His name was chalked on the door. The door was open, exposing a desk with a typewriter and a metal filing cabinet, its green drawers pulled half out. We didn’t go in. Instead, we climbed another flight of stairs, along a corridor that reeked of sawdust and dried blood, into a tiny chamber with a balcony. Shanumi Six lifted and adjusted the scarf around her head and I saw she was wearing small diamond earrings.

  At that instant, Cassim Ferhat was detained in the basement of the Rabat police station two hundred miles from Marrakesh. He had put a cash envelope in the hands of an inspector on behalf of the company, and had been on his way back when he’d avoided a string of goats in the road and run into a motorcycle. The Agency had done him no harm. It was merely saving energy, making use of a gap opened by an accident, and leaving the rest of the world as untouched as possible. That was our art form.

  Shanumi set up the camera and microphone in front of the window. She turned the dials as carefully as if she were trying to crack a safe.

  “I don’t want anything else to go wrong, Eleven. Nothing unplanned. We don’t want to be blamed for creating a multiverse, no matter how trivial the deviations.”

  “What else could go wrong?”

  When Shanumi spoke again, after finishing with the adjustments to the lens, her tone was strained. For many days afterwards I remembered it because it applied to what came next.

  “What could go wrong? The main threat, if you want to know, is ourselves. Our level of confidence is dangerous. On the one hand, we believe that an enemy exists, although we have seen neither hide nor hair of him—or her, if you believe that a woman could be so depraved. Then, on the other hand, we behave recklessly, as if this enemy were toothless. We place too much confidence in our foresight, our recordings. We see the footage beforehand and we think we know—that we have a grasp on the possibilities and probabilities, the myriad contingencies and counterfactuals, the potential for a multiverse. As you have learnt, whatever the general public has been led to believe, the three equations of historical statistics are neither unambiguous nor easy to decode. Not even the consultants can decipher their own predictions.”

  I knelt beside her and tried to help with the camera. “If the consultants don’t know, then what can I, as a junior case officer, be expected to do about it?”

  “Be quiet for five minutes, Eleven, and reflect on what I told you.”

  I didn’t think Shanumi intended to be rude, but I felt the red rising in my cheeks. In any case, she shifted her attention to the microphone, tuning it through the earpiece until she was satisfied with the sound. I could hear the buzzing in the machine rise and fall, old-fashioned parts which the Agency manufactured to the occasion.

  Some time went by. The room above Cassim’s office looked out over a narrow street adjoining the wall of another warehouse. A man with a dog on a leash was patrolling the area, his face as stern as the animal’s when he came by every six or seven minutes. I didn’t remember him from the recording. The discrepancy worried me even more than being exposed on the streets. I had been taught to rely on foreknowledge, never to drift from the dictates of the recordings. Plus, I was disappointed that I wasn’t nearly as calm as I had looked.

  Shanumi unwound her scarf and smoothed out the itinerary on her legs, running her finger carefully along the tree of events. She checked her timepiece: the inevitable railroad watch with a ridged gold face preferred by most case officers, a period piece.

  “In the version as we had it, at this exact instant, Keswyn Muller appeared in the right-hand window, his back turned to the street. But he is nowhere to be seen today as we stand here. Can you confirm for the record, Eleven?”

  “I saw Muller in the holograph, yes, but right now I cannot see him in the indicated position. Something has definitely changed. Something is badly wrong.”

  “Don’t judge. That’s up to the consultants. Simply report the facts and correlate them with the predictive matrix.”

  I tried to read the itinerary. Possibility script was as difficult to read as algebra. The letters danced this way and the other, turned inside out and roundabout in front of my eyes, until they reluctantly settled down.

  My Six had no inkling of my difficulties with every line. She waited impatiently while I passed the side of my hand down the page. The sun had crept into the room, producing thousands of motes in the air. The perfect sensation of acting just as I had seen myself act on the recording—as if I were effortlessly repeating the steps of a dance—evaporated. Instead, I was left with the unpleasant sense of sitting for an examination.

  I tried to explain the logic to myself. “Keswyn Muller, assuming he still exists, has taken a path different from the recording. That means, by the law of energy conservation over time, that some outside party has injected energy into the situation in order to change it. For that, I don’t have an explanation.”

  Shanumi put a hand on my shoulder as if to comfort me. But then she didn’t explain anything either.

  Another hour went by while we waited for Keswyn Muller. Shanumi let me keep watch while she did some calculations. I could hear her talking under her breath. In the other building, I realized, somebody was going through the rooms and closing the blinds.

  Soon after, a military truck drew up. It disgorged a dozen soldiers, men in brown shirts and trousers sporting steel helmets. They carried rifles with bayonets. The captain spoke to the man with the dog while some of the others began setting up a checkpoint.

  Two knocked fiercely on the door to our warehouse. I heard their heated conversation with the workers on the loading dock. They shouted to their colleagues down the street. The guard with the dog came rushing into the building. My dream, in which every step had been foretold, had been replaced by a nightmare where nobody knew what could happen.

  Shanumi stayed calm. She opened the window and inspected the railing on the outside. I had vertigo. I had never wanted to go up to the solar system because of my fear of heights.

  “I memorized the layout of the building and there may be a way around. You will have to follow me,” she said.

  “I really don’t have a head for heights.”

  “I understand that, Eleven. I am acquainted with the contents of your psychometrics folder. But you don’t have a choice if you want to return to civilization, if you ever want to live as a free black man again. Remember that these people kept slaves. So one step after the other, please.”

  Shanumi put her cool hand to my cheek, as if she cared for me like a lover. Then she tied the scarf around her head again and went out. She kept the backpack on one shoulder, holding on the wall as she groped her way out. The dog bayed on the staircase. I swayed back and forth, pushed myself through the window.

  On the other side, Shanumi stopped me from falling. I sensed the perspiration on her.

  “We must think like case officers. Someone had our itinerary, Eleven, and wants to prevent us from observing Muller and examining the company records. That has a number of serious implications for us, not to mention the alterations they will have to make to the equations.”

  “What can we do?”

  “The best thing you can do, right now, is not to look down.”

  I looked down. The railing was so narrow, you had to turn your feet to the side. The bars went around the corner of the building. It had never been intended to support a man and a woman. The joints strained under our weight. I watched with horror as the iron bent.

  Shanumi threw the backpack onto the roof. She knelt down in front of me.

  “Climb onto my shoulders, Eleven. Get onto the roof.”
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  “What will you do?”

  “I’ll find a way to come in. Let’s deal with you first.”

  I scrambled onto her shoulders, listening to the railing complain under our combined weight. The brackets started to pull out of the brick. I caught hold of the gutter, pulled as hard as I could with my hands, pushed against Shanumi, and got a foothold on the roof. I immediately fell flat on my face next to the backpack. My nose felt broken.

  By the time I recovered, Shanumi had moved along the railing to the corner of the building. She tried to scale the wall by force, revealing the powerful muscles in her arms and neck. But she couldn’t get a good grip. She tried to jump a few times, keeping it as quiet as she could. Then she gave up, came back along the railing, and swung herself through the open window. She put her head back through.

  “Wait until it’s settled down, not even a mouse. Then we can meet at the hotel. I need to get rid of the beacon in case somebody follows it back to our home coordinates. Or you get rid of it if you get there first.”

  “Where are you going?”

  She didn’t answer, only disappeared into the building. My heart was in my throat. I kept low and listened with all my might. The dog barked madly in the doorway, loud as a drum. A man’s angry voice came from the stairs. I heard Shanumi replying in her most reasonable tone.

  Shouted questions, and a scuffle. A man crying in pain. The dog clattering along the steps before it fell silent. More men running up the stairs. More cries of shock and pain. I couldn’t tell who had won. There was the sound of furniture being moved. To my surprise, I fell asleep on the tarpaulin.

  I woke with the sun in my eyes and turned onto my side. For some time, I lay on the roof without daring to stand up.

  There was no sign of Shanumi. No soldiers, no dog quarreling on the staircase, no trucks. Nothing made a sound. Marrakesh was a ghost city, no more than a silent oblong cut into the rock, where I had come to find people long in the grave.

  Then a dark-skinned man passed in the road below, leading a herd of goats. The animals had bells on their collars. I used the opportunity to drop down to the railing and got back into the building through the window.

  Inside were signs of a titanic struggle. Chairs lay on their backs. The desk was turned on one end, its drawers open to their lengths. Glass was scattered everywhere on the carpet.

  I went into the corridor. There was nobody to be seen. The stevedores must have been sent home. I hurried down the staircase and along the main hall, keeping out of sight. I was searching for an outside window when I heard a telephone ringing in one of the offices. I opened a door that led to a warren of small rooms and storage cupboards.

  Behind a sheet of frosted glass, I could make out the figure of a man wearing a hat, his feet up on the desk. He had a light accent, which may have been Swiss, and was talking in a merry tone into the telephone.

  “Then the dream has come true. We have one of them…Near Menara Gardens…no, it will be quite safe. The army has imposed a curfew. Not even a mouse will go in or out.”

  The conversation became indistinct. I went as close as I dared, in time to hear a burst of indignation from the receiver. Kneeling to look through the keyhole, I recognized Keswyn Muller immediately thanks to his well-tended gray beard and the slant of his features on the recording. I thought even then that he had a face built to keep secrets.

  As I watched, Muller got up and walked around the room in circles. The telephone cord followed him around like a tail. I believed he was looking directly through the door, his expression hard around the eyes.

  “Their officers are under the delusion that they can try again and again, as if they have endless energy to run an experiment with the history of humanity. They claim to hate the multiverse and yet they depend on it at every turn.” Muller listened to the voice on the other end for a minute and put the receiver down. Then he went on talking to himself. “They don’t believe anything is for real except the rewind button. They don’t have a sense of the seriousness of life. That is a crucial advantage for us. We can set a mousetrap that cannot be opened.”

  Muller came through to the room I was in and I walked backwards, as carefully as I could, through the door, hoping I wouldn’t bump into anything. He had almost reached me when I slid my entire body behind the door. I caught my breath. He was so near, the hairs on my arms tingled.

  Up to that point in my life, I had never been so close to an albino man with power over me. I watched him stride through the hall, and thought I had learnt enough about Keswyn Muller to enlighten the consultants. I would make my way to the hotel to collect the beacon. Then I would have to find Menara Gardens and rescue my Six. I wasn’t going to be caught in anybody’s mousetrap and I wasn’t going to let it happen to Shanumi either.

  I waited until I heard Muller leave the building. Finding a small window on the ground floor, I forced my way through it onto the street.

  By the time I got out, the evening had descended. Queues of French cars darted along the streets, hooting at one another around the traffic circles, their headlights orange circles in the dusk.

  Women in cloaks hurried in groups along the pavement, shopping bags over their arms. They weren’t interested in my existence. I had the feeling of being concealed in plain view. In the near dark, flocks of birds flew in the direction of the mountains. Shopkeepers were pulling down the grilles in front of their premises, although here and there, attended by chains of outdoor lights, small restaurants were opening.

  The city was receiving its complement of mourners for the seven saints whose tombs were situated on its circumference. Tomorrow there would be Berber acrobats and snake-charmers, fortune-tellers, cardsharps, and dentists on the squares, but for now there was a hush.

  At the Grand Marrakesh Hotel, cabs were arriving from the train station, their drivers arguing as they halted around the semicircle at the entrance. I went through the marble archway, past the carp pond, and waited for a minute inside the door in case anybody had followed me. Nobody was watching, as far as I could tell—except the jeweler behind his desk, who looked as if there were something in my appearance that troubled him. Suitcases without owners, bearing various city stickers, were lined up at reception. The bellhop took me to my room and immediately went back down to help the new arrivals.

  I went over to Shanumi’s room and unlocked the door with a coin. I laid the backpack on the bed and took the beacon out of the safe. I placed it on the bedside table and closed the curtains. Outside, I could hear men and women laughing on the rim of the swimming pool.

  It took several minutes to tune in on the dials. I was nervous about any sound in the corridor, and my hands kept slipping on the controls.

  I waited some time for a computer consultant to come on. It had the eerie manner of the librarians I had discovered in the library of the past and the future.

  “I have been waiting anxiously for your report, Enver Eleven.”

  “We appeared here in the middle of the air, almost died on the way in.”

  “The systems are down here at the Agency. You won’t understand until you come back in. Describe the situation in Marrakesh exactly from start to finish.”

  “Shanumi Six, the senior case officer, has been abducted. I have good reason to believe that she is being held by Keswyn Muller rather than the Moroccan government.”

  “We have some inkling of this. From the beginning, if you please, so everything can take its proper place on the recording.”

  I sat on the side of the bed, bending into the microphone, and tried to remember everything relevant to the case. The consultant on the other end listened and asked some follow-up questions. She sounded worried the more she heard from me, calling in one of her colleagues and then another. They ran some calculations in possibility script.

  I imagined the three brass skulls bowed in unison above the microphone, muttering under their breaths or
lying back in a bath of electrostatic fluid. In the middle of my report, the three of them went offline for a few minutes to create a new itinerary and requisition the necessary energy. They would be making a new picture of the situation.

  I wouldn’t have understood a thing even if I were in the room with them. The times I had looked at the diagrams the consultants generated, they’d resembled trees branching and bending endlessly. I was supposed to understand the basics of reverse causation—creating an effect by patiently assembling its causes, putting the heap of history together stick by stick. In practice, it was as much an art as a science, one at which automatic intelligences excelled, given their ability to consider infinite worlds.

  When the consultant came back, her manner was bright but the news she had to deliver was grim.

  “You’re going to have to dismantle the beacon. You know the protocol.”

  “I do.”

  “Nothing remains intact except for the targeting crystal. That comes with you because it contains reserved technology, inappropriate to the time period.”

  “I know that also.”

  “Let me go over some of the fine details. There have been a few updates to the mechanism since you passed your examination.”

  I didn’t need the lecture. I might have difficulty reading certain characters but, thanks to my father, I could take apart a piece of machinery in pitch dark. As the consultant was talking, I spun a lever on its axis to open the device, turned two gears in the counterclockwise direction, and pulled the panels apart, like solving a Rubik’s Cube. The outer parts dissolved into a silver haze. The cogs and rods broke into splinters, then into nothing more than sand.

  In the end, I was left with the crystal and several hundred grams of dust which the fan would blow into the atmosphere.

  I didn’t allow the implications of dismantling the beacon to enter my mind until the consultant said it out loud.

  “You have the two capsules?”

  “Of course.”

  I put a hand to the locket around my neck. Nobody went on an assignment without the two capsules. They were part of our ritual, dreadful to consider. One was blue, lit from inside by tiny neon tendrils. It pulsed as slowly as a heartbeat when you placed it on your palm and inspected it. The other was black, and inert, absorbing the light in your eyes when you glanced in its direction.