Déjà Vu: A Technothriller by Hocking, Ian (red scrolls of magic .TXT) 📕

Darkness fell.

David cried out, “Get him!”

Saskia felt Hartifeld brush past her. He was not as weak as he had feigned. She tried to turn but her legs were somehow immovable. So was the gun. She had become a statue like Frank.

Somewhere, Ego said, “David, I have detected the presence of another Ego-class computer. It has sent two coded radio bursts. The first instructed the central computer to deactivate the lighting throughout the centre.”

David’s voice was grim. He asked, “And the second?”

“An instruction to Saskia’s brain chip to deactivate.”

“Saskia?” he shouted. “Saskia?”

But she was in a coffin. She wanted to scream but she had no air. Nor could she open her mouth. She was two weeks old and she was dead. She smelled formaldehyde, corrupt meat and wood. Her chest itched from the coroner’s incision. Smoke reached her nostrils. With that, she felt a draught from the dark curtain that separated now from then. The light from another world found her, even as she lay inside her box, and she remembered everything, and everything was

Revenge

The train station, with its tusk-like arches, emerged on her left. On her right, a department store. She stepped between them a wounded figure. Her eyes, cold under sunglasses, saw an office block with a particular atmosphere. It was still an hour’s walk away.

She reached Oppenheim Street and found a bench. The sun was low. Late summer evening. Tourists wandered by, too happy to make straight lines. She opened her shoulder bag and removed an old camera. She pretended to photograph the street, but she shot an old office block. It had a particular atmosphere. On its ground floor was a perfumery. Above that were smoked windows. Ute took another picture and moved away. She found an alley that led to the back of the block. More photographs. There was a fire escape. Underneath it was a car park. Beyond was Father Rhine, steady as the sea.

She hooked some long brown hair behind her ears and returned to the main street. On the same bench, she ate ice cream by twilight.

She paused on the way home to buy a padlock and a tube of superglue. She also had the film developed. The attendant thought she was beautiful. He lamented the waste of a good film – she had used only ten exposures – and asked her out for dinner. Ute could never have dinner with his man, though she thought he was beautiful too. Her intestines shifted like a restless snake. She hurried from the shop and vomited into a bin.

The day grew darker. She avoided eyes and hugged herself against the chill air while others relaxed in cafés and watched

Germany’s Indian summer. Ute heard them and seethed. It was not summer; it was autumn. If not that, then winter.

On the threshold of her apartment, the moment of change, she forgot who she was. Then she remembered. She was a romantic novelist. She had flexible hours. Flexible enough to allow her to take days off. She had been on holiday for a week now. She had never worked harder.

She had started work in the Kabana six nights before. Her friend Brigitte had accompanied her, and together they had scanned the crowd, looking for his face. But they had not found him. Brigitte had said, “Why would he come back? He might expect it.”

“No,” Ute said. “He would not.”

“What are you going to do if you see him, Ute, what?”

Brigitte had accompanied her the next night too, and the one after that. Then she had stopped. Ute did not blame her. The music was too loud for conversation and, as Brigitte persisted with her questions, Ute persisted in her silence.

On the third night, alone, Ute saw him. Her expression did not change. A short, moustached man. He stood in the same corner wearing the same clothes. He chatted to two women just as he had chatted to her. He lit their cigarettes with a Zippo lighter swished down then up. But her fate and theirs took different paths; they smiled indulgently at his broken German and walked away, giggling. Ute watched them leave. She debated confronting the man. She decided not to. She watched him from afar for two hours before he left. He was on foot and he walked for kilometres. He meandered, took several turns, and doubled back on himself.

Ute matched him, and better. She had lived in the city her whole life and he had not. She stopped on corners, into shadows and reversed her coat. There were few places for him to lose her. They took the underground at Ottoplatz an emerged at Reichenspergerplatz. Eventually, they came to the office block. She recognised the small door where, two weeks before, she had been bundled though, blind-folded, by two large men. This was the place. She found a phone booth to call Detective Holtz, the policeman in charge of her case, but there was no answer.

The night was warm. She walked back to her apartment via the river. It was dangerous and she did not care. Only thirteen days before, she had been raped. Fear was nothing next to her anger. Fear was for the person who crossed her path. She had a stun-gun in her bag and a five inch flick-knife under the sleeve of her right arm. She taunted every shadow.

Back at her apartment, she considered calling Brigitte. No, she decided. Brigitte should not be involved. She might interfere. So Ute did not call the woman who had visited her in hospital on the first night when she was still curled, catatonic, bleeding from her vagina and with scrapes of her attackers’ flesh under her fingernails. She did not call Detective Holtz. She did not call her publisher.

She took paper and a pencil, licked the nib, and planned.

It had come back to her on the threshold of her apartment. The moment of change. It was twilight, the brink of night. She was