1 #15
“Please stay,” Fayed said.
“I have an appointment.”
I turned my back on Fayed, on Marlowe, on the messenger girl, and walked out into the sunlight with my face bare to the sun.
Strange to be out here without my glasses.
A surveillance drone was somewhere above me, a soft whir in the air over my head.
I kept my head down until I was clear of the shantytown, across the abandoned highway, out on the beach.
The drone followed me. Other drones were approaching now, little spheres suspended in the bright salt air.
By the water, I looked up toward the sky, to give all of them a clear view of my face.
There wasn’t much time left now, I knew that.
The State wasn’t as far gone as I’d led Fayed to believe.
But I knew the contents of my phone and computer would help break it.
There were wisps of clouds very high above, but before me was a world of dazzling blue.
Blue ocean, blue sky, a ship passing in the distance.
I thought, I will hold on to this forever.
I hoped that in the constrained and rapidly approaching future, I’d dream of this moment, of salt water around my ankles and infinite blue.
I heard sirens now, drawing closer. I didn’t want to turn my back on the ocean just yet—I didn’t expect to see it again—but I heard the vehicles driving over the sand toward me.
“Ibari Waker.” The voice crackled through loudspeakers.
I laughed aloud. The most technologically advanced society in the world, or so we were supposed to believe—I no longer believed this—and we’d yet to master a functional speaker system on police cars.
I would go, I thought, to the desert prison, and far from the ocean I would live out my days.
More vehicles were approaching, more voices squawking at me. Sunlight glittered on the waves.
I was thinking of Kareem, all of those hours drinking coffee in his kitchen, the conversations that had sustained me over decades of friendship.
I’d always come to him, for his protection more than anything else, but now I wished I’d invited him to my house, just once.
I wished he could have seen my only other companion, the portrait in my hallway at home: Olivia on Yellow Sofa, a long-dead woman gazing calmly at me through the frame.
I didn’t expect to see the image again, but no matter, it was imprinted in memory.
I was so grateful to her, grateful for her company over all these years.
She had been a presence in my life. She had steadied me.
Sea and sky had taken on a supernatural brilliance, because soon, very soon—now people were approaching behind me over the sand, and I sensed rather than heard them—I would disappear into a life of interiors.
A man said, close behind me, “You are under arrest.”
I understood now why that old sequence of passphrases had called to me, all those lines about oceans and ships: I had always been moving toward this moment.
There were seagulls diving through the air before me, and I couldn’t imagine anything more beautiful than the sunlight on their wings.
I thought, I want to dive into the ocean and keep swimming into the blue.
But instead of doing this I took a deep breath of ocean air, and turned to face the arresting officer.
11
Thirty years earlier, after I left Latika’s salon:
Only one other traveller disembarked with me at the platform in the desert, a young man who kept glancing at me in a furtive way.
I was dressed in a manner meant to communicate Service—a dark suit with a severe collar, dark glasses, no handbag—and I was aware of the impression I made, or thought I was aware of it until I caught a glimpse of my face on the reflective surface of the shuttle bus information screen.
I looked more deathly than I’d imagined.
I looked soulless. But I wore the dark glasses to hide my fear.
Even with the precautions I’d taken—a recording of my informant naming my colleague as a criminal conspirator—visiting a work camp without official reason or permission was a dangerous move.
As a senior Service officer, I was entitled to transport, so I touched my hand to a screen, entered a request, and a moment later I saw a small vehicle driving toward me through the dust, a little white bubble of a self-driving car that pulled up alongside and flashed a number on the windshield that corresponded to a number on my watch.
The man waiting on the platform stared beseechingly at me—he was either gathering his courage to set out walking or waiting endlessly for a transport bus that might or might not arrive—but I didn’t look at him.
This was no time for tenderness or distraction.
I climbed into the little car and it set off at speed across the desert.
I had been out here only once, years earlier on a different case, and the camp was much larger than I’d remembered.
This place wasn’t a prison, exactly, in the sense that the people here were technically free to leave.
There were no fences of any kind. But to leave this place without completing one’s sentence was to become a ghost. The people here were in limbo.
They were sentenced to camp labour for low-level or first-time offences—one might spend five years here for criticizing the State, for example—and only by serving that time could they reenter society.
The residents lived in barracks, arrayed like spokes radiating outward from a central complex of factories.
At the edge of the camp, there was an orphanage.
When parents were sent here, their children were sent to the orphanage, and the only possible way to see those children was to serve out one’s sentence in the camp.
It all made for a haunted atmosphere. There was deep sadness here.
The car sped rapidly down a row of cement barracks, past an empty swimming pool, and into a cracked parking lot in front of the central administrative offices, and here the doors of the car released with a hydraulic whoosh. I stepped out into the dry air.
There was no one in sight, but I heard the dull rumble and whirr of the factories.
The main entrance was locked. I put my hand to a scanner and then stared into a camera for a moment until someone buzzed me in.
I entered into a wide corridor, which in memory was an antiseptic, hospital-nightmare white, but now it was dingy, dust gathering in the corners.
A faded sign directed me to Visitor Processing, a dull green door at the end of the corridor.
I passed through into a waiting area, where a tired-looking woman behind a high desk peered down and blinked at me.
“Hello,” she said. “I didn’t realize you’d arrived already.”
“How did you not realize that? You sent the car, didn’t you?
” I was more curious than anything, but she flinched as if I’d shouted at her.
She adjusted her hair, and I saw the old tattoo on the back of her hand.
It was a line drawing of a chrysanthemum, a symbol of the old pro-democracy protests twenty years ago. She was a resident on work duty.
“The systems are weird,” she said. “We get these blank spots sometimes, like it’ll go out for two minutes. I probably shouldn’t have told you that.”
“Probably not,” I agreed pleasantly. “I could be anyone.”
“You’re Service,” she said. “Ibari Waker. I saw it on the transport request.”
“But you didn’t know the transport had arrived.”
“Exactly,” she said. “See?” She rotated a monitor so I could see it. I saw a little dot that must have been the car I’d just taken, blinking on the surface of a map. From her screen, it looked like the car had stalled out in the desert.
“Is it a problem with the car, or with the system?”
“Who knows,” she said. “Who are you here to see?”
“I need a private room for a phone call,” I said, “and then I need to see Kareem Fayed.”
“You have an identifier number?”
“No.”
She sighed, and tapped the name into her system. “Karim with an I?”
“Kareem with two E’s. Middle name unknown. Last name Fayed. His place of birth and home address might be missing.”
“Right,” she said. “Okay. I have him here.” She entered something into the computer, and waited a moment. “He has no identifier,” she said. “I’ve never seen that before. I don’t know how he’s getting fed.”
“Well, hopefully he hasn’t starved to death,” I said. “Where can I make a phone call?”
“Go through those double doors and make a left,” she said, pointing, and a moment later I was in a very small room with a bolt on the inside of the door and a single plastic chair, no other furniture.
I bolted myself in and sat for just a moment in the windowless quiet.
I didn’t want to be a monster, that was the thing I was thinking as I transmitted the recording from the hair salon to David Grissom, but of course it was too late for that.
I appended a message—Call me—and he did, a moment later.
“I don’t understand,” he said. Fear in his voice. “Why is Latika saying I was involved in the exit visa crime? Why’s she setting me up like this?”
“David,” I said, “I can make this go away, in exchange for a story.”
There was a long silence.
“What’s the story,” he said finally. I felt his contempt. He knew I was corrupt, and could do nothing about it.
“Today you went with me to Camp Five,” I said. “Together, we visited a resident, Kareem Fayed. We left together, you and I, while the resident returned to work.”
“Why were we visiting him?”
“Because he came up in relation to the exit visa case,” I said. “Someone mentioned him at a meeting. We were just following a lead.”
“Did the lead go anywhere?”
“Nowhere,” I said.