Текст книги "Inherit the Earth"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

Twenty-three

D

amon was intending to call Interpol anyway, so the fact that his phone hood lit up like a firework display commanding him to do exactly that didn’t even make a dent in his schedule. It did worry him, though; no one got a five-star summons like that unless there was something far more important on the agenda than his ex-girlfriend’s bail bond.

Hiru Yamanaka took Damon’s incoming call personally. Interpol’s phone VE was stern and spare but more elaborate than Damon had expected. Mr. Yamanaka was reproduced in full, in an unnaturally neat suitskin uniform, sitting behind an imposing desk. The scene radiated calm, impersonal efficiency—which meant, Damon thought, that it was as inaccurate in its implications as the most blithely absurd of his own concoctions.

“What’s happened?” Damon asked without preamble.

“Thank you for calling, Mr. Hart,” the inspector said with a determined formality that only served to emphasize the falseness of his carefully contrived inscrutability. “There are several matters I’d like to discuss with you.” The inspector’s eyes were bleak, and Damon knew that things must have taken a turn for the worse—but he also knew that Yamanaka would want to work to a carefully ordered script. The inspector knew that Damon was holding out on him, and he didn’t like it.

“Go on,” Damon said, meekly enough.

“Firstly, we’ve received the medical examiner’s final report on the body discovered in the house where Miss Caisson was arrested. DNA analysis confirms that it’s the body of Surinder Nahal. The ME estimates that the time of death was at least two hours before Miss Caisson and Madoc Tamlin arrived on the scene, so we’re certain that they didn’t kill him, but it has become a matter of great urgency that we see the VE pak which your friend removed from the scene. We have reason to believe that it might contain valuable evidence as to the identity of the real killer and the motive for the crime.”

What reason? Damon wondered. “I’d be very interested to see it myself,” he countered warily. “Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to contact Madoc. I presume, then, that you’ll be releasing Diana immediately?”

“I’m afraid not,” Yamanaka told him. “The local police are still considering the possibility of charging her with illegal entry—and she was of course an accessory to the assault.”

“So charge her and bail her out.”

“I’m reluctant to do that until I’ve talked to Madoc Tamlin,” the inspector told him.

“You can’t hold her hostage, Mr. Yamanaka.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Yamanaka assured him, “but until Tamlin and the VE pak are safely in my hands, I can’t be sure of the exact extent of her culpability.” The virtual atmosphere was still heavily pregnant with some vital item of information that Yamanaka was carefully withholding.

Damon fought to suppress his annoyance, but it wasn’t easy. “You must know as well as I do that the VE pak is an ill-wrapped parcel of red herring that’s already begun to stink,” he told the inspector waspishly. “The same is probably true of its resting place.”

Yamanaka didn’t raise an eyebrow, but it seemed to Damon that the policeman’s synthesized gaze became more tightly focused. “Do you have any evidence to support the conjecture that the body is notthat of Surinder Nahal?” the inspector asked sharply.

“No, I don’t,” Damon admitted, “but the evidence that it iscould have been cooked up by a biotech team with the necessary expertise just as easily as a fake VE tape. If whoever is behind the kidnapping really is convinced for some reason that Conrad Helier faked his own death, it would be only natural for him to hire a bioengineer with a similar background to repeat the trick. Ask yourself, Inspector Yamanaka—if you were in that position, who would youhave hired to do the job?”

“I’m a policeman, Mr. Hart,” Yamanaka reminded him. “However difficult it may be, my job is to collect evidence and build cases. You, on the other hand, are a citizen. Your duty, however you might resent it, is to obey the law and give what assistance you can to my investigation. That VE pak was taken from a crime scene, which makes it evidence—and I’d be very annoyed if anyone tampered with it before handing it in.”

“If I can get the VE pak for you,” Damon said bluntly, “will you drop all the charges against Madoc and Diana?”

“That’s not my decision,” Yamanaka replied unyieldingly.

Damon gritted his teeth and paused for a few seconds, instructing himself to remain calm. “What else?” he asked. “What’s happened to heat things up?”

“We’ve found another body,” the inspector told him bleakly.

“Karol’s?” Damon asked, although he knew that was the lesser of the two probable evils.

“No—Silas Arnett’s. He was found in a body bag dumped in the middle of a road up in the Hollywood Hills. Police officers conducting a routine search of the neighborhood found a chair identical to that displayed in the first broadcast tape in a house nearby. There were bloodstains on some recently severed straps that had been used to bind a man’s wrists and ankles to the chair. There were several spy eyes in the walls of the room, all of them on short loop times. The tapes we’ve recovered show Arnett being shot in the chest while still confined. The man in the body bag died from exactly such a gunshot—without his internal technology, he had no effective defenses against such an injury.”

Damon was silent for a few moments, absorbing this news.

“Does the tape show the shooter?” he asked.

“Yes, but he’s unidentifiable. His suitskin had a face mask. He had a companion, similarly masked.”

“But you think they’re Eliminators—and you suspect that the VE pak left on the burned body will be a similar record of an execution.”

“The body bag was presumably placed in the road in order to draw attention to the house, and to the tape,” Yamanaka said. “That seems consonant with the hypothesis that the shooting was the work of Eliminators.”

Damon couldn’t be sure whether the careful wording was routine scrupulousness, or whether Yamanaka was laying down a red carpet for any alternative explanation Damon might have to offer. Damon had already laid the groundwork for a rival account by suggesting that the burned body Madoc had found wasn’t Nahal’s at all but merely some dummy tricked out to seemlike Nakal’s, possibly designed by Nahal himself—but Silas Arnett’s body hadn’t been burned to a crisp.

We haven’t killed anyone, the mirror man had said—but he had certainly exposed the people he had named to the danger of Eliminator attack. Now Karol’s boat had been blown up, and Silas Arnett had been shot. If Conrad Helier had faked his own death, perhaps he had faked those incidents too—but that ifwas looming larger by the minute. Nor was Silas the only one who had been exposed to possible Eliminator wrath by the mirror man’s stupid broadcasts. Damon was the only one alive who had been forthrightly condemned as an “enemy of mankind.”

There was still a possibility, Damon told himself, that this was all a game, all a matter of carefully contrived illusions piled up tit-for-tat—but if it weren’t, he could be in big trouble. The question was: what did he intend to do about it?

“Your people always seem to be one step behind, Mr. Yamanaka,” he observed, by way of making time to think.

“So it seems,” the inspector agreed. “I think it might help if you were to tell us everythingyou know, don’t you? Surely even you must see that the time has come to give us the VE pak.”

It was the “even you” that did it. Damon felt that he had troubles enough without insult being added to injury.

“I don’t have it,” he snapped. “I don’t have anythingthat you could count as evidence.”

Yamanaka’s image didn’t register any overt trace of disappointment or annoyance, but the lack of display had to be a matter of pride. Yamanaka still had one card up his sleeve, and he didn’t hesitate to play it in spite of its meager value. “Miss Caisson is veryanxious to contact you, Mr. Hart,” he said. “I’m sure she’d be grateful if you’d return her calls.”

“Thanks for your concern,” Damon said drily. “I’ll do that. Please call me if you have any more news.” He broke the connection and immediately called the number Diana had inscribed on his answering machine in letters of fire that were only a little less clamorous than Interpol’s formal demand.

The LAPD’s switchboard shunted him into a VE very different from the one Hiru Yamanaka had employed: a pseudophotographic image in which Diana was seated in a jail cell behind a wall of virtual glass. Fortunately, she seemed more relieved than angry to see him. She hadn’t forgiven him anything, but she was desperate for contact with the outside world.

“I’ve just been talking to Yamanaka,” Damon said, by way of preemptive self-protection. “I told him to charge you and bail you if he wasn’t prepared simply to release you, but he won’t do it. He’s got dead bodies piling up all over the place, and he wants Madoc badly. He’ll be forced to let you go eventually, but you’ll have to be patient.”

“This is crazy, Damon,” Diana complained. “They must know that we didn’t kill the guy. We didn’t even know the body was there.”

“They know you didn’t kill him,” Damon reassured her. “What on earth possessed youto go there? Why was Madoc fool enough to let you?”

“I was only trying to help,” Diana said defensively.

“Thanks,” Damon said, for diplomatic reasons. There was no point in contradicting her, even though it was a blatant lie. “I’m sorry you got involved in this, Di—but I’ll do my best to make sure that you get out clean.”

“If the Eliminators are after you,” she told him sharply, “I’m hardly likely to stand idly by and let them get you, am I? Just because we fell out over private matters doesn’t mean that I want you hurt.”

For the sake of eavesdroppers, Damon said: “As soon as Madoc contacts me I’ll tell him to turn himself in and hand the VE pak to Interpol. I’ll pay for his lawyer and any fine he incurs. Neither of us ever intended our investigation to overstep the limits of the law, and I’ll make certain that there are no further transgressions.”

“And what then?” she asked, presumably hoping that he might have an olive branch ready to extend to her.

“I might have to go away for a while,” he said.

“Where?” she wanted to know. She was trying hard to cling to a forgiving mood—or at least the appearance of one—but all her resentments were still bubbling away beneath the surface.

“I don’t know. I’ve been out of touch with my family for too long; it might be a good idea to rebuild some bridges. If Karol and Silas really are dead I ought to see Eveline, even if it means a trip into space. There’s just the two of us now, it seems—and I hear that one can get a very different perspective on things from L-Five. One that helps a lot of things become clear.”

Diana looked at him as if she thought he might be taunting her. In her view, the first person he ought to be seeing with a view to putting things right was her. “And thenwhat?” she said, not bothering to apply the brake to the escalation of her anger.

“I don’t know, Di,” Damon said, refusing to be drawn. “I haven’t thought any further ahead than that. Just sit tight for a while, okay? You’ll be out soon.”

As soon as she realized that he had no intention of sticking around for a row, her rising anger melted into mere anxiety. “Don’t go,” she said swiftly. “We really need to talk, Damon—to straighten things out.”

“ Thosethings are already straightened out,” he said as gently as he could. “None of this concerns you, Di. I didn’t know you’d gone to Madoc when I asked him to help me. I suppose I’d have asked him anyway, because he was the one who seemed best placed to help me out—but to be honest, Di, your involvement is a complication I could well do without. Let’s leave things as they are, shall we?”

“You ungrateful bastard!” she howled as the anger returned in full force. “After all I’ve done for—”

“I don’t have time for this, Di,” Damon said brutally—and broke the connection.

He remained silent and still in the ensuing darkness for a few moments while he collected himself, and then he returned himself to one of his own customized VEs: one which made it appear that he was imprisoned within a vast multifaceted gem. He set up his other messages on a virtual lectern and began to scroll through them tiredly, fearful of finding some Eliminator threat that would further intensify his confusion and anxiety. Mercifully, nothing of that kind seemed to be lurking among the more usual junk.

Had he been in a more conventional holding pattern Damon would have noticed the flicker earlier, but it hardly showed up against the dazzling crystalline background and its first effect was to communicate an unfocused and near-subliminal awareness that something was slightly out of kilter. He glanced around anxiously for a moment or two, wondering whether there was some kind of glitch in his code reader, before he realized what was happening—at which point he returned his attention to the lectern and tried to look as if he were engrossed in the routine business of informational triage.

Having dumped all the electronic junk and sorted the scant remainder, Damon called Karol’s base at Molokai, to ask for news of the men injured in the explosion aboard the Kite. The man summoned by the AI answerphone to take the call evidently knew who Damon was, although Damon didn’t recall seeing him on Molokai, but he seemed to have classified Damon as an outsider, if not a hostile witness. He gave a brusque rundown of the injuries sustained by crewmen Damon had never met but said that Karol hadn’t yet been found, dead or alive.

Damon put on a show of profuse apologies and deep concern, in the course of which he asked his impatient informant for permission to switch the call into one of his own VEs. When the other shrugged his shoulders Damon decanted them into a pleasantly moonlit meadow. The signal hidden within the flicker was easier to read there, but Damon carefully gave no indication that he was paying attention to anything other than the tense features of Karol’s associate.

He learned nothing of interest except that Rajuder Singh had made a full recovery from his “accidental injuries” and had joined in the search for Karol—or for Karol’s body. His informant didn’t react to the news that Silas Arnett had been found dead.

“Have you got the centipedes out of the island’s systems?” Damon asked mischievously. “It must have been very inconvenient to have the elevator out of commission.”

“Everything is under our full control once again,” the other informed him brusquely, “but we still have a great deal of work to do. I must go now.”

“I’ve a lot to do myself,” Damon assured him, having made his own decisions. “I’ll call again for further news of Karol.”

When he came out from under the hood Damon immediately went to the bathroom and took a shower. He scrubbed himself as thoroughly as he could, although he knew full well that there were bugs on the market nowadays that no amount of scrubbing could remove. He had to hope that the people who’d taken him to the foothills of Olympus and lied to him about his ability to fly hadn’t been able to see any reason for getting under his skin—or that if anything hadbeen planted under his skin his own internal technology had been able to take care of the intrusion.

He went into the bedroom to put on a fresh suitskin, but he didn’t take his beltpack or sidepouch from the bedside table where he’d laid them down. The only things he picked up were two swipecards that had been lurking at the back of a drawer let into the beside table; these he placed in a pocket in the lower element of the suitskin.

After leaving the apartment Damon stopped the elevator at street level instead of going down into the car park. He went out into the street, nodding politely to Building Security’s desk man as he passed by, and ambled along the crowded pavement, checking the reflections in a number of plate-glass windows just in case he was dealing with people who thought that the unsophisticated approach was best.

By the time he’d taken three turns he had identified the man who was following him. It seemed infinitely more likely that the tail was one of Yamanaka’s men rather than an Eliminator, but Damon knew that no one could prove that he had even considered the possibility, and he wasn’t feeling much better disposed toward the forces of law and order than he was to crazy assassins.

Damon took another turn down a service alley cluttered with recycling bins that had been richly fed with the litter of a dozen stores and businesses. He had plenty of time to duck out of sight behind the second bin before his pursuer turned the corner.

The man who moved furtively into the alley, anxiously craning his neck for some sign of his target’s passage, was at least five centimeters taller than Damon and eight or ten kilos heavier. Damon knew that if he werea cop he’d also have taken lessons in the art of self-defense—but Damon had a much more extensive education in the art of attack. When his follower reached the dump bin Damon went for him without delay, aiming his first kick at the inside of the man’s knee and the first upward sweep of his hand at the Adam’s apple.

Damon didn’t pause when his opponent went down. He kicked again and again, as hard as he could. He knew that the man’s IT would take care of the damage, but that didn’t figure in his calculations. He was glad of the opportunity to hit back at his persecutors, knowing that this time there would be no gas grenades to interrupt him.

Until he had laid the man unconscious, Damon had not known how much anger and frustration had been pent up in him, but the exhilaration of the whirlwind action had hardly begun the work of purging it. He felt a perverse stab of disappointment when no one else appeared in the alley’s mouth to provide a further challenge.

He knelt down beside his victim and checked the pouches in the man’s beltpack. There was nothing to identify him; like Damon, he was carrying no identifiers save for a gnomic set of unmarked swipecards. Damon picked these up by the edges, wondering whether it might be worth keeping the swipecards to see what might be retrieved electronically therefrom. He knew, though, that if the man werea policeman it wouldn’t be a good idea to be found in possession of stolen goods. In the end, he replaced the cards in the pouch.

Before Damon went on he landed one last gratuitous kick on the side of the stricken man’s head, just in case he deserved it: one which would leave an ugly and very noticeable bruise.

As soon as he had put a safe distance between himself and the alley, Damon went into a clothing store. He bought a new suitskin off the peg and left his own behind in the fitting room, transferring nothing to the new garment except the two swipecards. After leaving the store he booked into a public gym and took another shower, just in case his hair or skin had picked up any stray nanomachines while he had been getting rid of the inconvenient follower. Madoc had always advised him that the cleverest bugs were the ones that infected you afteryou figured that you’d purged them all.

As soon as he was finished in the gym Damon moved away from the busier streets toward ones which were less well-equipped with eyes and ears, taking shortcuts whenever they became available and changing direction five times to make any attempted analysis of his movements virtually impossible. Then he called into a bar so that he could look up Lenny Garon’s address on the customers’ directory terminal.

He thought it best to move once more before getting down to the serious business of the day, so he slipped out into the street again and wandered into a run-down mall which had a row of terminal booths. All of them were empty.

Damon slotted one of the swipecards and immediately set to work, his fingers flying over the keyplate. He knew that he had less than two minutes in which to make his mark, and that he wouldn’t be able to do much more than five minutes’ worth of sabotage—but the evening traffic was already building up and five minutes would be enough to store up a wealth of trouble.

When he emerged from the mall again every traffic signal for at least a kilometer in all directions was on green, and the jams were building up at every intersection.

He’d estimated that five minutes of downtime ought to be enough to snarl up at least twenty thousand vehicles, creating a jam so tight that it would take at least an hour to clear. The pavements were jamming up almost as badly as the gridlocked vehicles, and tempers were soaring in the late afternoon heat with amazing rapidity.

Damon kept on ducking and dodging until he was certain that he was free and clear of all humanly possible pursuit, and then he began the painstaking business of making his way across town to his destination—the destination that had been coded into the flicker affecting his domestic VEs.

That flicker had used a code which he and Madoc Tamlin had worked out seven years before, so that they might exchange information while under observation, using their fingers or any object with which a man might reasonably fidget. It was a crude code, but Damon still remembered every letter of the alphabet.

L-E-N-N-Y, the flicker had spelled out.

There was only one Lenny the signal could possibly refer to, and only one reason why Madoc might want him to visit the Lenny in question. Whether Madoc was with him or not, Lenny Garon had to have the VE pak which Madoc had stolen from under the noses of the LAPD—the one piece of the mirror man’s carefully constructed puzzle which had been prematurely swept from the field of play.

Damon didn’t imagine for a moment that whatever the VE tape had to show him would be any more reliable than the VE tapes of Silas Arnett’s bogus confessions, but just for once he wanted to be a step ahead of all the people who were trying to push him around. Just for once, he wanted to be able to do things hisway—whatever his way turned out to be, when he’d had time to think and time to make a plan.

Damon knew that he had to advise Madoc to turn himself in, but he had told Diana the truth when he said that he might have to go away, perhaps even to rebuild bridges linking him to his estranged family. Everything depended on what Madoc had found out about Silas’s kidnappers and about what had reallyhappened to Surinder Nahal.