According to the consolidated Sentinel dossier on Basson, he had no criminal record, was still comfortably creditworthy despite the near-insolvency. He subscribed to Stanton Times, Farmer’s Weekly and Men’s Choice. He held loyalty stamp books at Homepride supermarket and Builder’s Mart. He was unmarried but had lived with a woman called Naomi Reiffel, now deceased. He was a registered member of our ruling party. So far, so clean – but if I needed to, I was sure, I could find something to compromise him. But later; there wasn’t time now.
I cross-referenced Blank Slate’s other dealings, and noted that six other farms in the valley, along with a timber yard further into the hinterland and two industrial supply factories over in Racino, had been exclusively contracted for supplies to Blank Slate, although only two of the companies showed an active income stream, decreasing substantially from the previous year’s figures. I tried to call up Blank Slate’s company ownership structure but was referred to a trail of two other holding companies, which hit a dead end with a corrupted record for a Girded Cloud CC. In just this brief bout of research, I’d become so used to getting the information I needed immediately that the sudden dead end was annoying. I didn’t have time to dig around any more, though, and I was sure that Sentinel resources would eventually show me who Basson was working for.
For now, though, I stepped out of the precinct’s unmarked pool car, making sure it couldn’t be seen from any of the buildings on the property. I was aware of how conspicuous I’d look, a woman in city clothes strolling up this worn-out industrial road in the middle of the rural hills. As I approached, walking alongside a long fence of spaced wooden slats, a battered white truck with no logo reversed away from one of the warehouses at Misty Vale and turned a groaning circle in the dust before pulling out of the gate. I hid behind a tree and set The I to record as it came past, zooming in on its licence plate and a glance at the driver’s face through the window as it passed.
A man came out of a small prefab building at the fence and pushed the gate closed, and I watched him go back inside before scanning the lot for further movement. White steam plumed from a pair of high smokestacks at the far end of the warehouse, and the wind whipped it fitfully down from the mountainside, replacing the familiar starchy odour with grassblood and mud from the ploughed fields across the road.
Aware of my dwindling time with The I, I set it to infrared and heat-scanning modes, noting three adult figures inside a barn behind the warehouse and three in the warehouse itself. The heat scan showed no sign of any children – no living children, at any rate. Magnetic resonance threw up the shadows of a couple of pickups, three more trucks, and a sedan, shaped a lot like a Toyota Camry. The way it was parked, at the back corner of the property, I’d have to go past the gate and the guardhouse and down the neighbouring drive to get a straight-line view of the car. Calculating how much time it might take – The I offered me an estimated walk time of thirteen minutes – I considered running back to the car and driving up the next farm’s drive, but if there was a closed gate, something I couldn’t see from this angle, I’d have to reverse back, raising as much suspicion as hiking past the guardhouse in my city flats.
As I was deciding which was the better of two poor options, I heard a yapping sound piercing though the distance and saw a small, shaggy white dog bolting away from the obscured doorway of the barn, springing up on its back legs then squatting on its haunches, yapping excitedly. A tennis ball followed it, and the dog launched off and rounded on the ball in a tight circle, pluming up dust from the lot. Then Sofie Barrett strode out, calling to the dog, slapping her thighs. I jolted as Sentinel’s version of The I started speaking in my ear: Here, Pika. You’re so cute. Good girl. The words broke up and were filled with a neutral machine voice which merged and flowed with Sofie’s voice. It took me a moment to realise that now the target was in line of sight, the tech was integrating long-range auditory signals with lip-reading software to produce an almost real-time play-out of what she was saying.
The dog delivered the ball, darting away each time Sofie reached out for it. Finally, she bent down and caught hold of it, fluffing the fur around its head and giving it a kiss before throwing the ball again.
I watched on the infrared feed as the two remaining adult-sized figures moved around the barn, stopping, squatting and stretching every few yards, methodically measuring up the space. Every few moments, they came together to consult what was probably a notebook or plan, and then moved away, measuring segments of the periphery again. Finally, one of the figures moved away from the middle of the barn and towards the doorway. I followed his form out the front and then it conjoined with my real vision as he emerged from behind the warehouse and stood in the lot.
‘—get the generator to you in the next hour and you can start,’ he was saying to the heat signature that had stopped at the threshold.
He paused, listening to a reply.
‘Yeah, it’s a shitload.’
The second heat-shape moved closer to the doorway, and then he was out, and The I captured and instantly matched his features to the pictures of Roger Basson that Sentinel had on file. The enhanced I locked into the sound waves and the motion of his face and rendered a digital voice for him. ‘—completely secure,’ he was saying as he stepped out. ‘There’s no way, is there?’
Vidal replied, ‘I know. They shouldn’t be able to find them; there should be no way. But that’s if they’re playing by their own rules. Which I now know that they’re not.’
‘How so?’
‘Egus told me I’ve got a tail.’ My gut clenched and I froze, as if he was talking right to me.
‘Jesus.’ Basson lifted his arm to wipe his hand over his brow, blocking the signal for a moment. ‘That’d… breach of trust. If that came out…’ He muted himself again by wiping his mouth, the most cutting-edge tech defeated by that ancient gesture of evasion.
‘Yeah. Massive. My contact inside has been watching and is still a hundred per cent sure Stanton PD isn’t tracking me and isn’t interested in the kids, just as we hoped. I don’t know if Egus is just messing with me, or what this tail might want. From what my contact sees, it doesn’t seem official, at any rate. All the same, we have to get ready to move them. But it’s dangerous. So we need to get the biome up and running, before we even think of transferring them.’
While Vidal spoke, Basson went back inside, into the sound-shadow, turning back into an infrared shape.
‘Thanks,’ Vidal said. ‘You’re a lifesaver. We have to move quickly.’
Vidal stood watching his daughter. I shifted slightly to make sure I was out of sight, too far away to make out the subtleties of his expression, but my overactive mind filled in the blanks between him and me. I knew I was being stupid, but my eyes started prickling as I watched him watch Sofie; a man with silvering hair with one object of devotion. A man who would change his life for his daughter.
Then I snapped myself out of it. I knew nothing about this man, except that his car was delivering dead children to a Claymarket bakery in the middle of the night and that he was deliberately evading the authorities. I hardened myself. I had what I needed, and it would have to do for now.
As I stepped back towards the car he must have noticed the flicker of movement, and although he was far away, attuned only to gut feelings rather than priceless surveillance equipment, he turned to look at me. Into my eyes. I was certain he couldn’t be seeing me for what I was, half-obscured by the shade of the tree and the slats of the fence, and I knew he could never pinpoint my pupils at such a distance, but he held my gaze while I stood, frozen like a rodent in the grass in the glare of a predator’s scrutiny, trying to manage my breathing.
Ten seconds, fifteen. Then a frown, and a sigh, and Vidal Barrett turned his attention back to his daughter.
V
19 Three months before, Vidal might have chosen to run; he might have chosen to toy with the investigator, play a losing hand just for the hell of it. It might have been fun, to see just h
ow long he could evade her, even though she clearly had technology on her side – technology no state agent should be using.
But that was three months ago, before Dierdra had died. Now, Vidal’s priority was getting Sofie to school on Monday and he couldn’t drag her around the countryside playing cops and robbers, and he couldn’t leave the Green Valley children to look after themselves. The time he’d bought by tricking David Coady’s sister-in-law with the tape loop had been enough to get the contingency arrangements in place with Basson, and to avoid being pulled in for questioning and leaving Sofie alone in the apartment.
So he let Sofie scruffle Basson’s dog goodbye, then packed her back in the car.
‘I wish we lived out here, Dad,’ she said as they pulled out of the yard.
‘Really? It’s in the middle of nowhere.’ He noticed the immediate fall of her expression and chided himself. The parent’s trick of subtly deflating kids’ hopes before they even knew they were inflating – he was learning quickly. No bullshit, he reminded himself. No manipulation. He’d promised himself when Sofie had rejoined his life. He changed his tone. ‘What do you like about it?’
She regarded her hands, mucky from a paste of dog-slobber and dust, her chewed nails flaked with chipped polish. ‘I don’t know, really. It is pretty far away from everything.’
They drove on for five minutes, and the longer the silence went on, the heavier it became, so Vidal broke it. ‘You liked that dog, didn’t you?’
No answer. Sofie just stared out of the window at the subliminal glower of the mountains and the lamplit signs of the orchards spinning by like fireflies in the darkness.
‘What was his name again? Pookie?’
She let out a snort of laughter. ‘Her. Pika. She was cute.’
‘It would be nice to get a dog, wouldn’t it?’ he said, manoeuvring past a farm truck. ‘We could get an apartment with a garden, a cute dog like Pika. That’d be fun, wouldn’t it?’
In his peripheral vision, he noticed her turning to him, but could only glance at her face once he had clear roadway ahead of him, and when he did and a car swept past in the opposite direction, illuminating her features, she was fixing him with such a pitying look, he almost wrenched the car into the gravel. ‘What’s wrong?’ he said.
‘Dad, I’m… you know. I’m not going to be around for ever. I don’t even know where I’m going to be next year, never mind in ten years when that dog is still going to be sniffing around your duplex.’ She stared at his face. ‘Christ, Dad, don’t look like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘You know. Needy, I guess. Bereft.’ Vidal was fixing his eyes on the road ahead of him, because it was hard enough to concentrate on the driving itself at this stage, but he could hear her sniffing. ‘You’ve helped me, and I’m grateful. But I’m not the five-year-old you left. I’m not your baby and you can’t expect me to be half of you.’
I didn’t leave you, I never wanted to leave you, he wanted to tell her, but he just nodded, his hand clenched on the wheel and his eyes on the road, the dark grey mirage of Green Valley seeping up from the horizon.
* * *
When he got back into Stanton, Vidal left Sofie with Rainbow at the shelter, parked around the corner from Lucie Sterling’s apartment, found a shadowy alcove, and waited for her. The main Museum crawl was busy with cars offloading patrons in suits and scarves, groups walking home from dinners and private viewings and theatre shows. Above him, rich yellow lights from the lofty apartment blocks looked over the broad sidewalk, waiting to welcome their owners home.
It was close to ten when they came along the sidewalk. It wasn’t particularly cold tonight, warm winds sweeping in from the mountains inland, but Lucie was folded into herself, her arms crossed, talking seriously to the man next to her. Even without Bugs Bunny’s intel, Vidal would have recognised him – Fabian Tadic, the renowned privacy crusader. He’d fronted so many class-action suits against old corporates that every Stanton lawyer knew his name. Barrett & Sanders had tendered for a spot on one of his counsel teams years ago, when Vidal was naive enough to imagine that Fabian Tadic would spend a second of his time with a two-bit – make that one-bit – outfit like his. The Omega group, self-styled guardians of the Turn, the powerful lobbyists keeping Stanton government on the straight and narrow, only played with the big boys. It was a little surprising, then, when Vidal discovered that Lucie Sterling, currently using illegal tech against a Stanton citizen, was involved with Tadic. Only a little, though, because in Vidal’s experience, the higher up the power went, the less holy the alliances.
Did Tadic know that Lucie Sterling was a reanimated version of a bad-old-days cyberspook? If so, he was a fulsome hypocrite. If not… Vidal would love to be a fly on the wall when he found out.
He crouched back into the shadow, an incidental stranger, as they approached the front door of their apartment building. They pushed through the glass doors into the bright, marble-lined lobby, Vidal trailing a few yards behind. There were enough people coming through the lobby on this busy Friday night, and Lucie and Tadic were so wrapped up in their low-toned conversation that Vidal was invisible to them. He positioned himself next to the potted ficus opposite the elevators, a casually dressed middle-class man, drawing no special notice from the concierge, who was busy signing in a group of five loud students heading up to a party.
Vidal glanced around before approaching Lucie. She sensed him coming and turned, but her face froze and then cycled through confusion before she locked him with a complex, suspicious gaze.
‘You were looking for me?’ he said.
‘I think you know why,’ she said.
‘Who is this?’ Tadic asked.
Lucie and Vidal ignored the question. ‘Do I?’ Vidal said.
‘I’m not in the mood to play games. I know what you’ve been doing and I need you to tell me right now: where are the children?’
Vidal felt a bump of relief. If she didn’t know that, she didn’t know anything. She was fishing, and she was working alone. As he’d suspected, the whole Stanton police force and the city’s black ops were hardly interested in him. He could control the way this played out.
‘Is this him?’ Tadic asked.
‘I want to show you something,’ Vidal said to Lucie.
20 Vidal checked the time on the dashboard clock as they drove closer to Barrett & Sanders. Past one. They’d be offline at the moment, but it should be okay.
God knows what exactly Lucie had said to Tadic or what he thought of it, but she’d made Vidal wait for hours in an all-night kebab shop in Claymarket, until he was uncomfortably full and had memorised the backlit Perspex menu and had earmarked the Monday-night doner, fried chicken and chips special for a father-daughter date night of his own with Sofie.
‘Listen, Lucie,’ he said, keeping his eyes fixed on the road in front of him. The Toyota’s brakes were stiff and its tyres were smooth, and the denizens of Claymarket were prone to lurching out into the foggy road from its underlit sidewalks. ‘Do you mind if I call you Lucie rather than Special Agent?’
She pulled her eyes away from the battened shopfronts rolling by in the mist-washed dark, and towards him. ‘Go ahead, Vidal.’ He couldn’t read anything on her silhouetted face, and although his name dripped with bitter sarcasm from her lips, he liked the way she said it. She pronounced it like his grandmother would – soft d, long a – but he could also imagine her whispering it in his ear, the languid drape of the last, long vowel, the curl of her sharp tongue on the l. This line of thought was inappropriate in the context of everything that had happened over the past few days, and proof that Sofie was right – he should get a life, instead of fantasising about some orange-and-spice-smelling stranger just because she was within touching distance of him in his humid car.
Besides, as she’d got into the passenger seat, she’d made a show of removing a can of mace from her bag as she dropped her keys into it, and pocketing it. The look on her face made him wonder what other ordnance
she might be carrying.
‘Since we’re being honest as judges with each other, I need to tell you something,’ he said.
‘Yeah?’
‘The reason I’m talking to you, the reason I’m taking you inside my building, the reason I’m telling you anything about my business, which mostly – until recently at least – has been all strictly legal, which is more than I can say about your activities—’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Jesus, get on with it.’
He drew to a stop at a red light. ‘The reason is all the same. I need you to stop bothering my daughter. She’s been through a rough time and she needs a normal life, not to have spooks watching her sleep, not to have plods watching her when she goes to school. She’s not stupid. In fact, she’s the smartest person I know in this world, and she can see you, and she’ll begin to doubt whether her ethical instincts are right, and she doesn’t need that in her life, not right now, and not ever. Her instincts are a whole lot purer than any of the filthy scumbags who maintain law and order in this city, you and me included. Do you get me?’ To her credit, Lucie didn’t sneer or shrug or groan or say anything sarcastic; she just nodded. Vidal watched the pattern of the rain on the windscreen while he spoke. He glanced at her as the light changed all the droplets green, and he pulled off. ‘So the quickest way I can get you to understand what I’m doing here is to show you, even when I know that most of our friends at the police wouldn’t understand. But for some reason, I think I can trust you. I don’t think you’re them, if you know what I mean.’
‘I just want to know the truth. It’s personal for me, too.’
He rounded into the gap beside Barrett & Sanders and pulled up the handbrake, checked for any miscreant youths lurking down the dark end of the alley, but it was raining and they’d have moved their bottleneck-smoking to some warmer alcove. He got out, the odour of oil and piss and old beer being spirited up from the concrete by the rain, unlocked the two chains around the back lot’s wire fence, got back in, and parked the car.
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