Paula Myo rubbed a hand over her forehead, pressing hard enough to furrow up the skin. “Possible,” she conceded. “Although I have to take other factors into consideration.”
“Yes?” Maggie prompted.
“Classified, sorry,” Paula said. Even though she was tired, she wasn’t about to confide her concerns to anybody. Although if Maggie was any kind of detective she should be able to work it out.
As Mares had said, a hundred thirty-four years without an arrest was an uncomfortably long time. In fact, it was impossible given the resources Paula had to deploy against Bradley Johansson. Somebody had been providing Johansson and his associates with a great deal of assistance down the decades. Few people knew what she was doing on a day-to-day basis, so logically it was someone outside the Directorate. Yet the executive administration had changed seventeen times since she had been assigned command of the case. They couldn’t all contain secret sympathizers of Johansson’s cause. That just left her with the altogether murkier field of Grand Families and Intersolar Dynasties, the kind of power dealers who were always around.
She’d done everything she could, of course: set traps, run identification ambushes, deliberately leaked disinformation, established unofficial communications channels, built herself an extensive network amid the political classes, gained allies at the heart of the Commonwealth government. So far the results had been minimal. That didn’t bother her so much, she had faith in her ability to work the case to its conclusion. What concerned her more than anything was the reason anyone, let alone someone with true wealth and power, would want to protect a terrorist like Johansson.
“Makes sense,” Maggie said with a trace of reluctance. She knew there was a terrific story behind the Chief Investigator’s silence. “So what action do you want to take about the message?”
“Nothing immediate,” Paula said. “We simply wait and see what Elvin does next.”
“We can arrest all of them now. There are enough weapons stored at Lancier’s dealership to begin a war.”
“No. I don’t have a reason to arrest Elvin yet. I want to wait until the operation has reached its active smuggling stage.”
“He was part of Abadan. I checked the Directorate file, there are enough testimonies recorded to prove his involvement no matter how good a lawyer he has. What more do you need to arrest him?”
“I need the weapons to be shipped. I need their route and destination. That will expose the whole Guardian network to me. Elvin is important primarily for his ability to lead me to Johansson.”
“Arrest him and have his memories extracted. I’m sure a judge would grant the Directorate that order.”
“I don’t expect to have that option. He knows what will happen the second I have him in custody. He’ll either suicide or an insert will wipe his memories clean.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“He’s a fanatic. He will not allow us access to his memories.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“It’s what I’d do,” Paula said simply.
Paula briefed the watcher teams before the shift changeover, explaining her suspicions about the encrypted message. “It changes our priorities slightly,” she said. “If it was a cancellation then Elvin will make a break for the CST station. I need a detail of officers on permanent duty there to arrest him if he tries to leave. Detective Mares, will you organize that, please?”
“I’ll see the captain about more personnel, sure.” During the week of the operation Don Mares had modified his attitude slightly. He didn’t contend anything, nor disagree with Paula; but neither did he put any extra effort into the operation. She could live with that; baseline competence was a depressing constant in law enforcement agencies throughout the Commonwealth.
“Our second option,” Paula said, “is a go code. In which case we need to be ready to move. There will be no change in your assignments, but be prepared to implement immediately. The third option is not so good: he’s been warned about our observation.”
“No way,” Don Mares said. “We’re not that sloppy.” There was a grumble of agreement from the team officers.
“As unlikely as it sounds we have to take it into consideration,” Paula insisted. “Be very careful not to risk exposure. He’s smart. He’s been doing this for forty years. If he sees one of you twice in a week he’s going to know you’re following him. Don’t let him see you. Don’t let him see the car you’re using. We’re going to get a larger vehicle pool so we can rotate them faster. We cannot afford mistakes.” She nodded curtly at them. “I’ll join the lead team today. That’s all.”
Don Mares and Maggie Lidsey came over to her as the other officers filed out of the operations center. “If he catches a glimpse of you, it really will be game over,” Don Mares said.
“I know,” Paula said. “But I need to be close. There are some calls you can’t make sitting here. I’d like you to take over as general coordinator today.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you have the qualifications, you’ve taken command of raids before.”
“Okay.” He was trying not to smile.
“Maggie, you’re with me.”
They caught up with Adam Elvin as he was taking a slow, seemingly random walk through Burghal Park. He did something similar most mornings, an amble through a wide-open space where it was difficult for the team to follow unobtrusively on foot.
Paula and Maggie waited in the back of a ten-seater car that was parked at the north end of Burghal Park. The team had the rest of their vehicles spaced evenly around the perimeter, with three officers on foot using their retinal inserts to track his position, never getting closer than five hundred meters, boxing him the whole time. The Burghal was a huge area in the middle of the city, with small lakes, games pitches, tracks, and long greenways of trees brought in from over seventy different planets.
“That’s twice he’s doubled back on his route,” Maggie said. They were watching the images relayed from the retinal inserts on a small screen in the car.
“Standard for him,” Paula said. “He’s a creature of habit. They might be good habits, but any routine will betray you in the end.”
“Is that how you tracked him?”
“Uh-huh. He never uses the same planet twice. And he nearly always uses the Intersolar Socialist Party to set up the first meeting with the local dealer.”
“So you turned Sabbah into your informant and waited.”
“Yes.”
“For nine years. Bloody hell. How many informants do you have, on how many planets?”
“Classified.”
“The way you operate, though, always arresting them for their crimes. That doesn’t make for cooperative informants. You’re taking a big risk on a case this important.”
“They broke the law. They must go to court and take responsibility for their crimes.”
“Hell, you really believe that, don’t you?”
“You’ve accessed my official file. Three times now since this case started.”
Maggie knew she was blushing.
That day Adam Elvin finished his walk in Burghal Park and caught a taxi to a little Italian restaurant on the bank of the River Guhal, which meandered through the eastern districts of the city. While eating a large and leisurely lunch he placed a call to Rachael Lancier, which the metropolitan police had no trouble intercepting.
ELVIN: Something’s come up. I need to talk to you again.
LANCIER: The vehicle you wanted is almost ready for collection, Mr. North. I hope there’s no problem at your end.
ELVIN: No, no problem about the vehicle. I just need to discuss its specifications with you.
LANCIER: The specifications have been agreed upon. As has the price.
ELVIN: This is not an alteration of either. I simply need to speak with you personally to clarify some details.
LANCIER: I’m not sure that’s a good idea.
ELVIN: It’s essential, I’m afraid.
L
ANCIER: Very well. You know my favorite place. I’ll be there at the usual time today.
ELVIN: Thank you.
LANCIER: And it had better be as important as you say.
Paula shook her head. “Routine,” she said disapprovingly.
Eighteen police officers converged on the Scarred Suit club. Don Mares dispatched the first three within two minutes of the conversation. The club wasn’t open, of course, they simply had to find three observation points around it and dig in.
Two of Lancier’s people arrived at eight o’clock that night, and performed their own surveillance checks before calling back to their boss.
When Adam Elvin finally arrived at one o’clock in the morning, ten officers were already inside. As before, they had managed to blend in well enough to prevent him from identifying any of them for what they were. Some of them assumed the role of business types looking for some bad action after a long day in the office. Three of them hung around the stage, identical to the other losers frantically waving their grubby dollars at the glorious bodies of the Sunset Angels. One had even managed to get a job, trying out as a waiter for the night, and was making reasonable tips. Renne Kempasa was sitting in one of the booths, the hazy e-seal protecting her from view.
The remainder of the team were outside, ready for pursuit duties when the meeting was over. Paula, Maggie, and Tarlo were parked a street away in a battered old van, with the logo of a domestic service company on the side. The two screens they’d set up in the back showed images taken by the officers inside the club. Rachael Lancier was already in her booth, a different one this time. Her skinny-looking bodyguard was with her: identified by headquarters as Simon Kavanagh, a man with a long list of petty convictions stretching back three decades, nearly all of them violence-related. When he arrived he’d swept the booth twice, scanning for any covert electronic or bioneural circuitry. The passive sensors carried by the officers nearby nearly went off the scale. He was using some very sophisticated equipment—as was to be expected from someone who worked for an arms dealer.
Paula watched Lancier and Elvin tentatively shake hands. The arms dealer gave her buyer an inhospitable look, then the e-seal around the booth was switched on. Its screening was immediately reinforced by the units that Kavanagh activated. One of them was an illegally strong janglepulse capable of frying the cerebral ganglia of any insect within a four-meter radius.
“Okay,” Paula said. “Let’s find out what’s so important to Mr. Elvin.”
A meter above the booth’s table, a Bratation spindlefly was clinging to the furry plastic fabric of the wall matting. Amid the artificial purple and green fibers, its translucent, two-millimeter-long body was effectively invisible. As well as a chameleon-effect body, evolution on its planet had provided it with a unique neurone fiber that used a photo luminescent molecule as the primary transmitter, making it immune to a standard janglepulse. It had only half the expected life span of a natural spindlefly because its genetic code had been altered by a small specialist company on a Directorate contract, replacing half of its digestion sac with a more complex organic structure of receptor cells. In its abdomen was an engorged secretion gland that threw out a superfine gossamer strand. When it had flown in from the neighboring booth, it had trailed the gossamer behind it. Gentle lambent nerve impulses from the receptor cells now flowed along the strand to a more standard semiorganic processor that Renne carried in her jacket pocket.
In the middle of Paula’s screen a grainy gray and white image formed. She was looking down on the heads of three people sitting around the booth table.
“So what the hell has happened?” Rachael Lancier asked. “I didn’t expect to see you until completion, Huw. I don’t like this. It makes me nervous.”
“I got some new instructions,” Elvin said. “How else was I supposed to get them to you?”
“All right, what sort of instructions?”
“A couple of additions to the list. Major ones.”
“I still don’t like it. I’m this close to calling the whole thing off.”
“No you’re not. We’ll pay for your inconvenience.”
“I don’t know. The inconvenience is getting pretty fucking huge. All it’s going to take is one suspicious policeman walking into my dealership, and I’m totally screwed. There’s a lot of hardware stacking up there. Expensive hardware.”
Elvin sighed and reached into a pocket. “To ease the inconvenience.” He put a brick-sized wad of notes on the table and pushed them over to Simon Kavanagh.
The bodyguard glanced at Lancier, who nodded permission. He put the notes into his own jacket pocket.
“All right, Huw, what sort of goodies do you need now?”
Elvin held up the small black disk of a memory crystal, which she took from him.
“This is the last time,” she said. “Nothing else changes. I don’t care what you want, or how much you pay, understood? This is the end of this deal. If you want anything else, it has to wait until next time. Got that?”
“Sure.”
Paula sat back in the thin aging cushioning of the van’s seat. On the screen, Adam Elvin had stood up to leave. The booth’s e-seal flickered to let him out.
“That was wrong,” she said.
Maggie frowned at her. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, that was nothing to do with additions to the list. Whatever’s really in that memory crystal, it won’t be an inventory.”
“What then?”
“Some kind of instructions.”
“How do you know? I thought it fitted what happened.”
“You saw his reaction to the message at breakfast. The camera caught his expression spot on. It shocked the hell out of him. First rule on a deal like this is you don’t change things this late in the game. It makes people very nervous. Rachel Lancier’s reaction is a perfect example. And it’s not a good thing to make arms dealers nervous. A deal this size, everybody is quite edgy enough already. Elvin knows that.”
“So? He was shocked his bosses wanted to change things.”
“I don’t buy it.”
“So what do you want to do?”
“Nothing we can do. Keep watching. Keep waiting. But I think he’s on to us.”
The news about Dyson Alpha’s enclosure broke midmorning two days later. It dominated all the news streams and current events shows. A surprisingly large number of Velaines citizens had opinions on the revelation, and what should be done about it.
Maggie kept half her attention on the pundits, both the serious and the mad, who appeared on the news streams while she was sitting around the underground operations center. Time and again, the shows kept repeating the moment when the star disappeared from view. Diagrams sprang up simplifying what had happened for the general public.
“Do you think Elvin was rattled by that?” Maggie asked. “After all, the Guardians of Selfhood are supposed to be protecting us from aliens.”
Paula glanced at the portal where Dudley Bose was being interviewed. The old astronomer simply couldn’t stop smiling. “No. I checked. The message was sent half a day before Bose confirmed the event. In any case, I don’t see how the Dyson enclosure concerns the Guardians. Their primary concern is the Starflyer alien and how it manipulates the government.”
“Yeah, I get their propaganda. Damnit, I fall for the message authorship every time.”
“Think yourself lucky you’re not the author. I pick up the pieces on those scams as well.”
“You know a lot about them, don’t you?”
“Just about everything you can without actually signing on.”
“So how does someone like Adam Elvin wind up working for a terrorist faction?”
“You must understand that Bradley Johansson is basically a charismatic lunatic. The whole Guardians of Selfhood movement is simply his private personality cult. It calls itself a political cause, but that’s just part of the deception. The sad thing is, he’s lured hundreds of people into it, and not just on Far Away.”<
br />
“Including Adam Elvin,” Maggie muttered.
“Yes, including Elvin.”
“From what I’ve seen of Elvin, he’s smart. And according to his file he is a genuine committed radical Socialist. Surely he’s not gullible enough to believe Johansson’s propaganda?”
“I can only assume he’s humoring Johansson. Elvin needs the kind of protection which Johansson provides, and his beloved Party does benefit to some small degree from the association. Then again, maybe he’s just trying to revive past glories. Don’t forget he’s a psychotic; his terrorist activities have already killed hundreds, and every one of these arms shipments introduces the potential for more death. Don’t expect his motivation to be based in logic.”
The observation carried on for a further eleven days. Whatever additional items Adam Elvin had requested, they appeared to be difficult for Rachel Lancier to acquire. Various nefarious contacts arrived for quick private meetings with her in the back office. Despite their best attempts, the Tokat metropolitan police technical support team was unable to place any kind of infiltration device inside. Lancier’s office was too effectively screened. Not even the spindleflies could penetrate the combat-rated force field that surrounded it. Her warehouses, too, were well shielded. Although the team had managed to confirm the two where the weapons were being held. Several modified insects had gotten through to take a quick look around before succumbing to either janglepulse emitters or electron webs.
Secondary observation teams followed the suppliers as they left, watching them assemble their cache of weapons and equipment before delivering it to the dealership. A whole underground network of Valences’s iniquitous black-market arms traders was carefully recorded and filed, ready for the bust that would end the whole operation.
On the eleventh day, the observers logged a call that Adam Elvin made to a warehouse in town, authorizing them to forward an assignment of agricultural machinery to Lancier’s dealership.
“This is it,” Tarlo declared. “They’re getting them ready for shipment.”
The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle Page 7