The Crying Machine

Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Copyright © Greg Chivers 2019

Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com

Cover layout design by Ellie Game © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Greg Chivers asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008308773

Ebook Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008308797

Version: 2019-02-14

Dedication

For Bea, Lucas and Charlotte

Epigraph

Nothing like this instrument is preserved elsewhere. Nothing comparable to it is known from any ancient scientific text or literary allusion. On the contrary, from all that we know of science and technology in the Hellenistic Age we should have felt that such a device could not exist.

Derek de Solla Price, ‘Gears from the Greeks: The Antikythera Mechanism’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society

Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1. Clementine

Chapter 2. Silas

Chapter 3. Levi

Chapter 4. Clementine

Chapter 5. Levi

Chapter 6. Silas

Chapter 7. Clementine

Chapter 8. Silas

Chapter 9. Clementine

Chapter 10. Silas

Chapter 11. Clementine

Chapter 12. Levi

Chapter 13. Clementine

Chapter 14. Silas

Chapter 15. Levi

Chapter 16. Silas

Chapter 17. Clementine

Chapter 18. Levi

Chapter 19. Silas

Chapter 20. Clementine

Chapter 21. Silas

Chapter 22. Clementine

Chapter 23. Levi

Chapter 24. Silas

Chapter 25. Levi

Chapter 26. Clementine

Chapter 27. Levi

Chapter 28. Clementine

Chapter 29. Silas

Chapter 30. Clementine

Chapter 31. Silas

Chapter 32. Clementine

Chapter 33. Silas

Chapter 34. Clementine

Chapter 35. Levi

Chapter 36. Clementine

Chapter 37. Silas

Chapter 38. Clementine

Chapter 39. Silas

Chapter 40. Clementine

Chapter 41. Levi

Chapter 42. Clementine

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

1.

Clementine

Men stare from shadowed doorways. She is too obviously alien here, even with the paleness of her skin concealed behind high collars and a tinted visor. The women are invisible in this part of the city. Two sparsely bearded teenagers in baggy sherwal and thawb unashamedly follow her. It does not occur to them she might feel threatened, that they should exercise any kind of restraint. A trapped bird of fear flutters in her chest. All the tacit understandings of gender from home, with all the protections they give, are absent here, replaced by a new labyrinth of unwritten rules she flouts with every step. She is the transgressor in this place.

The address she was given by the trafficker in Marseille should be somewhere close, but the streets are unmarked, the buildings unnumbered save for intermittent brass plaques which seem to follow no recognizable order. She shoves the paper under the nose of a fat man selling leafed oranges from crates. His eyes narrow as he takes in the curling lines of script, then his face relaxes and he stares into the middle distance, pretending not to see her. All the eyes here play the same game, following the pornography of her movement intently, becoming blind the moment she approaches.

A corner leads her into an alley that ends suddenly in a wall topped with curves of broken glass. The two stubbled faces lurch into view when she turns around. They’re close enough to smell – turmeric and teenage boy beneath the faint tang of Jerusalem’s dust. It’s hard to tell the ages; the Arab boys grow hair younger. Their short, compact bodies warn of muscle beneath the loose fabric of their clothes. One looks away instantly in flawless imitation of his elders, but the other smiles nervously before dropping his gaze. Perhaps he has sisters.

The shorter one touches her. His hand on her cheek is damp with sweat. Her stillness should be a warning, but he is too enraptured with the discovery of blond hairs to notice. Without meeting her eyes, he fingers the stray strands behind her neck where they’ve come loose. Her teeth clench as she suppresses the urge to bite or kick. Violence brings attention.

‘Leave me alone.’ She hears her own voice struggling around the Arabic sounds, too high, too frightened. A mistake here could ruin the city for her. There are only so many places left to run.

The boy’s eyes show he understands the words, but a hiss of excited breath is the only response as his eyes travel down her body. As he moves around her, something metal glints behind his ear, a flat circle barely bigger than an earring. A tiny filigree of dark lines betrays the presence of circuitry within. She raises a hand with fingers curled to touch him. He pulls back, wary, but stays still just long enough for her to brush against the thing. The burst of code that passes through her fingertip is benign, a harmless interrogative. It identifies the ear stud as a simple communication device, capable only of voice or lo-fi sub-vocalizations. It requires user authorization to accept incoming signals, but the firewall is laughably primitive.

A moment later he screams. His hand comes to his ear, fingers clawing uselessly at the lobe and cartilage. The pain comes from inside; a continuous pulse of ultra-high frequency bursts at the edge of human hearing, but still capable of stimulating the aural nerves. It will stop soon. The damage will heal quickly and leave no lasting mark that could betray her presence here.

The other one stares in confusion as his friend falls to his knees. She tries to mirror the surprise on his face, a second too late to be convincing, but he isn’t looking at her, eyes fixed on the twitching figure on the floor. She presses the paper with the address into his hand.

‘Where is this? Can you show me?’

A trembling hand points back down the street towards a doorway behind the orange-seller.

The fat man ignores her as she walks past. She resists the urge to brush past him or topple his crates, forcing an acknowledgement of her existence. She feels the presence of others in the room before her eyes adjust to the gloom. Faintly apple-scented shisha smoke glows in slatted light where the sun penetrates wooden shutters warped with age. Four male faces examine her, but the inspection is more human than the ruthless dissections she endured outside. Her transgression is muted within the confines of these walls. Three leather-skinned old men pass the hookah pipe between them without taking their gaze off her. The bald-headed man behind the bar is younger, on the cusp of middle age with a heavy, muscular frame only slightly turned to fat. He acknowledges her with a raise of the chin.

‘I’m looking for Levi.’

He turns away and utters a stream of Arabic too fast for her to catch the syllables. A stool scrapes on the stone floor and movement reveals another figure hunched over a small circular table in the corner covered with trinkets of some kind. Hooded eyes squint to see her and she realizes she must be standing silhouetted in the light of the door. The watcher’s face has the same look of indeterminate age as the teenagers who followed her, but his eyes are older, half-hidden by thick-skinned lids with heavy lashes. A too-big leather jacket fails to hide his youthful skinniness.

‘Are you Levi? Can we talk here?’

‘I don’t know you. This is not how I do business. Maybe I don’t want to talk to you.’

She uncurls the paper with the address and holds it out. He doesn’t look. ‘Farouz Mubarrak told me to come here. He said you could help me.’ She watches for a flicker of recognition at the name but Levi’s face shows nothing. ‘Farouz Mubarrak … from Marseille?’

‘I don’t know anyone in Marseille. He must have heard my name from someone.’

The barman’s cough doesn’t quite conceal a barked laugh. For a moment, hopelessness threatens to overwhelm Clementine. The trafficker in Marseille had promised to make her disappear. The names were part of the plan. Everything was paid for. ‘Can you help me? I can get money.’ The lie feels obvious. If she can change the dirhams in her belt she might have enough for two nights in a hostel and a few days of street food.

‘Sorry, sweetheart. In my experience, money doesn’t come in off the street like a bum looking for a free lunch.’

‘But …’

‘You’re pretty but I don’t need a girlfriend right now. You want help? Go to the Mission. I hope you like to pray.’ He bends over the table, dismissing her with silence, busy fingers teasing the tangled chains of the trinkets apart.

The barman coughs again and she realizes she’s been standing, staring, paralysed by hopelessness.

‘I don’t know what you’re looking for, but Levi … he’s maybe not the right one to help you. He’s right about the Mission though. It’s full of crazies but it’s safe. A woman like you can’t be alone here. You understand?’

For a moment, the sudden, unexpected kindness unleashes the despair she’s been holding back. She nods a silent acknowledgement to avoid saying words that might become a sob and covers her eyes with her hand before stepping outside. The orange-seller curses at the impact of her shoulder before realizing who bumped him. He’s still off-balance, looking down, when she plucks a ripe fruit from the top crate and shifts it between hands quickly so her body blocks his eyeline. By the time he looks up she’s got a five-metre head start if it comes to a chase, but the fat man grimaces in indignant silence, unaware of the theft, pretending not to watch Clementine walk away.

2.

Silas

The device defies explanation, like all the best toys. The report compiled by the senior curator ended with those killer words ‘possible religious significance’ – still the internationally recognized archaeologist’s code for ‘we don’t know’. The ignorance was a blessing really – theories beget enthusiasm, and public interest in the artefact would complicate its theft unduly.

When Silas first got the job, it was understood the title ‘Minister of Antiquities’ served as a licence to divert a certain proportion of the city’s excessive historical wealth into private hands. Now, the new breed of officials – curators, law enforcement – they weren’t looking for the money he could bring them. Something was changing in the city. After more than a century of cold turkey, Jerusalem was getting hooked on religion again, and it was bad for business.

To keep things tidy, this device would have to disappear in a way that didn’t connect to him. Today’s inspection would lay the groundwork. The strangely hirsute curator fiddles with the keys to the glass case, droning on about some peculiarity in the engravings on the pottery recovered from the seabed near this Antikythera thing. The device itself bears a few scratches which could be interpreted as a kind of cuneiform similar to Sanskrit, but the pottery is marked with what looks like words in a largely incomprehensible ancient script called Linear B. Despite the discrepancy, the curators have convinced themselves both items (and other less notable finds) were cargo from the same wrecked ship. The slightly flimsy reasoning for this conclusion is that one of the pottery tablets bears what could be the latter half of the word ‘Antikythera’ as rendered in Linear B.

Silas lets the words wash over him. Knowing about these objects is how the curators define themselves – denying them these little moments of superiority would cause pointless upset. This one, Boutros, can be touchy about ‘his’ things, which makes today’s performance all the more necessary. As the dreary monologue ends, the case opens and Silas pounces, hefting the device from where it rests on a little rectangle of cheap black velvet, producing an audible gasp from the beard next to him. Waggling the fingers of his free hand silences the protest on the keeper’s lips. The mandatory white gloves prevent supposedly catastrophic contamination by grease or microbes.

It doesn’t look like much, a lump of greyish-green rock that you might pick up in a construction site or the ruins of an old factory, but that ‘rock’ was two millennia of accretions from the seabed. You could see the outline of a cross-spoked circle, marked with illegible ancient symbols. Patches of vivid aquamarine glitter in the stone like little pools of the sea this thing had come from. The finely worked metal parts within are invisible, but their existence has been inferred from traces of oxidization on the rock-like exterior. Analysis of a tiny sample seemed to show the device was cast from an alloy mankind would not learn to work until centuries after this thing was made. Therein lay the true mystery of the Antikythera Mechanism, but mysteries concern Silas less than the price they fetch.

His buyers had done their own research on it and decided it met their needs. They didn’t tell him what they’d found out, but he didn’t need to know. The only thing Silas needed to know was how badly they wanted it, which, as it turned out, was very badly indeed. The profit from this job would be enough to check out of the game for good, but quitting while you’re ahead is the coward’s choice. No, this money was going to be the start of something far greater. In Jerusalem’s broken democracy, it would be enough to buy power.

The curator’s silent glare warns him he’s allowed the Antikythera Mechanism to stray into contact with a patch of microbe-ridden skin, distracted by the daydream. The money has to come first, which means engaging with the here and now. Silas adjusts his face to assume the air of mock solemnity the museum staff deem appropriate for handling relics. The man seizes the Mechanism from his hands with visible relief and lays it on its velvet cushion in a peculiar motion of obeisance. He’s twiddling through several chained key rings, preparing to seal the transparent security case when Silas holds up a single finger. ‘I want you to put the replica on display …’ He forestalls the inevitable objection before it can be uttered. ‘Nobody will know or care, and I’ve had a warning of an attempt to steal the Antikythera Mechanism, so I want it out of public view and moved into category B storage.’ The curator emits a barely intelligible syllable before Silas speaks over him. ‘Category A storage is an obvious target; it would be effectively less secure than public display. In these circumstances Category B offers the best balance of security and concealment.’ Silas’s stare invites the man to challenge his statement, but makes it silently clear any discussion will be neither pleasant nor profitable.

The full heat of the noon sun hits the instant he steps out of the museum’s discreet side entrance. The flash of blindness inflicted by its sudden light brings with it a moment of instinctive terror that subsides only as his vision adjusts. For pragmatic reasons, Silas sticks to the tenebrous edges of alleys split in two by the sun as he walks. A human eye adjusted to the dark can still perceive what passes in the light.

A water-seller nods imperceptibly as he passes. One of the perks of office was the ability to employ others to cover his tracks. If he is observed, he will know. Even so, he takes an apparently haphazard route to the Old City, taking in the sights – the ersatz, misplaced carbuncles vanishing numbers of true believers refer to as the Dome of the Rock and the Holy Sepulchre. They were crap. Everything that mattered in Jerusalem had been reduced to glass and rubble more than a century ago, but the tourists still came for the stories, and if they wanted a sniff of something real they came to the museum.

The only place you can still feel the history is in the deep Old City, but the sightseers seldom stray down here. In the last war, this walled warren of streets served as its own citadel; the buildings around its perimeter shielded the ones within from the wave of pressurized air that levelled the proud temples of the old faiths. Now, the dust-caked ruins at the edges stand as a slowly crumbling bulwark against the post-war contagion of grim utilitarian box-buildings spreading through the rest of Jerusalem.

Inside, the sun doesn’t reach the streets for most of the year. The stench of refuse ripening tells you it still belongs to the Arabs and the poor. The faces change; you can see flashes of pale skin on the European hookers plying their trade, but poverty always stinks. A fat fruit-seller smiles obsequiously as Silas passes, a cheap, occasionally useful informant who’s always keen to impress. That is the truly marvellous thing about the poor; tiny sums of money suffice to purchase so much goodwill.

A rainbow-beaded curtain in a doorway offers an entrance to his destination. The strands brush the sides of his face and sway noisily as he passes. This place is a dump, but it serves a purpose. This is where to find the skinny Jew boy who likes to hide among the Arabs, as if that wasn’t the most obvious thing in the world. Silas waits, presumably being subjected to some form of scrutiny, before the bulky man behind the bar nods him over to a dark corner where he can just now discern movement.

Levi Peres strikes a match and holds it to the tip of a thin, straggly cigarette. The flash of orange match-light reveals a man of no more than twenty-one with a scant beard that lends its wearer none of the intended gravitas. The shadowed figure leans back in its seat with exaggerated ease. Bravado is a wonderful thing – so useful.

‘You know who I am. Can we talk somewhere privately?’

Levi gestures around expansively. ‘This is my office. We can talk here.’

One of the trio of old men sitting on leather pouffes at the other end of the room takes a deep drag on the shisha pipe and coughs. The bulky barman stands silent, unashamedly listening.

‘All right, that’s up to you. The thing you have to understand is that listening to this job description connotes acceptance. There are obligations and liabilities that go with that and they’ll apply to your hefty friend if he’s in.’

The youngster gives a little jerk of the head and the big man purses his lips, then shrugs and drifts to the other side of the bar, out of earshot.

‘Yusuf’s a good guy. If he’s not around I get nervous. Tell me a big number to make me feel better.’

‘Fifty thousand shekels. One fifth now to cover expenses and make life more enjoyable. The rest on completion.’ Silas watches for a reaction but this Levi character has at least got front. Fifty thousand would be maybe two and a half years’ labour for an honest working man. It represents a little under half a per cent of what Silas ultimately stands to make on this deal.

Levi plucks a fibre of unburnt tobacco from his tongue. ‘Two hundred thousand. Forty up front. If I don’t know what I’m getting into, I need to know it’s worth it.’

Small-time. A few seconds feigned agonizing serves to avoid making the victory look too easy. ‘OK, two hundred, but twenty’s as much as I can do up front.’ Any more than that and young Levi Peres will disappear from Jerusalem for good. So would anyone. The youngster performs his own little act of silent mental arithmetic before nodding. ‘There is an artefact I wish to have removed from the city. I have a buyer, but the item is sufficiently high profile that its loss will be noticed sooner or later. Later is better. It is currently in the museum’s storage facility. I have taken steps to withdraw it from public view and reduce the security surrounding it, but you will have to effect its removal.’

Levi’s expression darkens and his hands spread in denial. ‘No way. You want a break-in, you find yourself a thief. Who do you think I am?’

He smells the trap, but he can’t see it. ‘I know exactly who you are, Levi Peres. I know who you owe money to, how much, and what they’ll do to you if you don’t pay, and I know you’re just about smart enough to pull this off. Besides …’ His voice softens; no need to puncture that useful bravado yet. ‘You’re not a foot soldier on this job. There’s enough in that pot for you to get help.’

The thin cigarette in Levi’s hand twitches and half-burnt ash tumbles onto his loose-checked keffiyeh. ‘You should have said up front if you wanted a crew.’

Too late for remorse, boy, and you know it. ‘The money told you that. Or were we not having the same conversation?’ Silas’s fingers glide against the silk of his European-style jacket, pull out two solid blocks of pre-counted money and slide them across the table. He stands with slightly stagey formality. ‘One of my people will be in touch with details.’

Habit, more than any genuine fear of being followed, steers him through a skewed dogleg route back to his office. A light breeze carries the odour of the Old City away to the east. There is always a sense of relief that comes with the moment of putting a plan into action, as if the ideas had carried weight from the moment of their conception. Not that there’s any guarantee of success, not at all, but the omens are good. Levi Peres is perfect. Of course, there are better smugglers and better thieves in Jerusalem, but the best ones have a certain traction in the city – they could make things difficult if they chose. No, he didn’t need the best. Levi Peres was good enough, and entirely disposable.

3.

Levi

‘Shouldn’t you be working on your masterplan?’

Yusuf turns a chair around the wrong way and sits. The curved wicker frame creaks under the weight of those bear arms folded across the backrest. He leans in too close, like a man who wants to hear a secret.