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Chapter 2: The Man Who Knew His Name

Chapter 2: The Man Who Knew His Name

The seller should not have known who he was.

Leon had used a hardened machine, a portable relay, an account with no history and a payment identity that existed in three jurisdictions and belonged to none of them. He checked all of it twice on the flight and found nothing wrong, which was worse than finding something.

The address resolved to a property at the edge of Kaltenbruck, southern Germany. It belonged to Weiss Technical Storage GmbH, a company dissolved nineteen years ago. The taxes were still being paid through an attorney in Zurich. No employees registered. No filings since the dissolution. Power consumption on the public grid record for a building that was supposedly empty.

He called the head of his security team at four in the morning.

"I need a route to Kaltenbruck. Quietly."

A pause. "Germany?"

"How soon?"

"Now."

Helicopter off the yacht, jet out of Nice, private terminal, armoured car. His team spent the flight arguing with him and lost, and then did their jobs properly anyway, which was why he paid them.

He rang a bell at 14:54 that had no reason to work.

A camera above the door rotated toward him.

There was a silence of a length he found informative. Then the steel door unlocked with a heavy internal clunk.

"Come in, Mr Falkner."

The man inside was perhaps thirty-four. Tall enough to be noticeable and thin enough to look recently ill. Ash-brown hair fell unevenly across a pale forehead, several days of stubble covered a narrow face, and he leaned on a cane in the manner of somebody who had not owned one long enough to stop resenting it.

"Marek Akio Weiss. Marek is sufficient."

"How did you know my name?"

"No."

"Good morning to you too."

"It stopped being morning during the third security check." Marek turned and walked into the building without waiting.

"You still haven’t answered the question."

"No."

It was said so evenly that Leon nearly laughed. "You expect me to buy your machine while refusing the first thing I ask?"

"You are here because your evidence is inconclusive and because you are bored. Neither of those improves if I answer."

The hall beyond had been built for turbines.

Concrete ribs went up thirty metres into darkness. Overhead cranes still hung on their rails. Somebody had cleared a working area in the middle of it and run modern cable through original conduit, and there were four separate decades of weld visible on the shielding, which told a story about money arriving unevenly over a long time.

In the middle of it stood the capsule from the photographs.

Eleven and a half tonnes on a support skid, wrapped in improvised shielding and cooling pipe that Leon could have designed better on a bad afternoon.

And inside all of that human engineering there was something else.

Leon forgot to make a joke.

The core was about the size of a domestic refrigerator and had no seams, no fasteners, no ports, no visible interface and no reflection worth the name. Where his own outline should have been on the surface, something came back a fraction late, as though the thing were reporting a version of the room that had been checked first.

"Your shell is improvised," Leon said.

"Reconstructed."

"Your grandfather built it?"

"My grandfather built everything you can see. He built none of what you can’t."

"What is the core made of?"

"Unknown."

"Energy source?"

"Partially unknown."

"Operating principle?"

"Temporal synchronisation."

"That is a phrase, not a principle."

"It is the phrase he settled on after discarding six worse ones." Marek watched him run the inspection light along a weld. "He understood the interface. He did not understand the object."

"And you?"

"I understand the interface less well than he did." A flat delivery, no self-deprecation in it. "Understanding a machine and surviving it are separate achievements."

Leon put the light away. "Run it."

"No."

"I’ll pay for the energy, the components and the risk."

"No."

"I’ll sign whatever you like."

"No."

"Your sales technique is remarkable."

"You saw the logs," Marek said.

"Logs can be manufactured."

"The photographs."

"Manufactured."

"The core."

Leon looked at it for a while. "Is not manufactured by anyone whose factory I could visit. Which proves that somebody has an extraordinary object. It does not prove that the object does what you say it does, and it certainly does not prove that you can operate it."

"Good."

"Good?"

"If you had believed me in this room I would not have sold it to you." Marek reached into his coat.

The envelope was cream paper, heavy, sealed with wax in three places. A memory card was taped inside the flap under a second seal.

"Stay in Kaltenbruck for seven days."

"You already sent me that part."

"I sent you the instruction. This is the content." He held it out and did not move it closer when Leon failed to take it. "Seven days of events. Local and international. Times where times are available."

"You could arrange the local ones."

"Some of them. Not all."

"You could bribe players. Journalists. Officials."

"For eleven months, at this price, on the chance that a specific bored man would eventually click a specific listing." Marek’s mouth moved slightly. "A long con is still a con. Check whether that one is cheaper than the truth."

Leon took the envelope.

It was heavier than paper. "And if one prediction is wrong?"

"Then you leave, and you never contact me again, and you have lost a week in a town with three restaurants."

"And if they’re all correct?"

"Then you come back and ask better questions."

He did it properly, because doing it improperly would have made the whole exercise decorative.

A notary witnessed the outer seals before anything was opened. Two digital forensics laboratories copied the memory card on isolated hardware in two cities and confirmed that the file hashes matched the values stamped into the wax, which meant the contents had existed before Leon touched them. Four sealed copies went into four separate buildings. He kept none of them himself, and instructed that no copy be opened before its stated hour.

Then he put surveillance on the turbine hall.

The reports came back almost aggressively boring. No visitors. No unusual signal off the property. Food arriving through a locked exterior box. At 02:31 on the second night, Marek spent eleven minutes standing outside beside the door, in the cold, doing nothing at all, and then went back in.

Leon read that entry three times and could not decide what it meant.

He checked into the Hotel Kronen, took two adjoining rooms, and had the second one filled with equipment.

Then he opened the first envelope.

There were four lines on the page. The first gave a time — 15:17 — a place, and a sentence describing a street sweeper.

Leon looked at his watch.

He had nine minutes.