She paused for breath herself, and took stock. His fists were clenched on the table, and his mouth was clamped shut.
‘So then, having made such a huge success of your new venture’s first big commission, you immediately wound it down in order to take a much more modestly paid position running the system you’d just installed. My guess is you got that job based on the premise that no one else could understand it and take full advantage of its capabilities as well as you. I suspect that was absolutely true, though not in the way the EGA imagined. What I find fascinating’ – she made a show of leaning forward and tapping up information on her angled tablet screen, though everything she needed was already there – ‘is that your partner in the business, JKE Investments, didn’t seem to object to this at all. In fact, even though the whole thing ended up posting a considerable loss, they’ve since made several rather large payments into your Abu Dhabi credit account. Which I notice isn’t mentioned anywhere on your European Federation tax return, by the way, but we’ll leave that aside for now.’
She looked up, held his eyes and let the last vestiges of the smile slide off her face. ‘Who is JKE, Mr Nance?’
He managed a smirk. It was fairly unconvincing, and there had been no mistaking the spark of worry at the mention of that name. ‘You tell me, since you know so much.’
‘I’ll be able to do that very soon. One way or another. I admit the datasearch is taking a little longer than expected – they’re very well shielded, far more than is reasonable for an ordinary private investment trust. But we’re closing in. We’ve already gone through the first layer of extra-territorial satellite registration, down to the Caribbean, across to Dubai, back up into space and now over to’ – she squinted at the feed scrolling up the edge of the screen – ‘Eastern Europe. Almost home. You need to consider, Mr Nance, that if I find them and find out what they’ve done with the stock before you get around to telling me, I’m not going to have any reason to go easy on you.’
He tried to cover his unease with sarcasm. ‘Oh, is that what you’re doing?’
‘So far that is exactly what I’m doing.’
‘I don’t know what happened to the genestock. I can’t tell you something I don’t know.’
‘Who did you hand it over to?’
‘Who says I handed it over to anyone?’
‘So you still have it.’
‘No I don’t.’
‘Then who did you give it to?’
‘No one. I told you.’
She regarded him gravely for a long moment. ‘A dead drop? Is that what you’re trying so hard not to tell me, Mr Nance?’
‘I’m trying not—’ He stopped, shook his head and spat, ‘I’m not trying to tell you anything.’
‘Yes you are. You’ve been trying to tell us how clever you’ve been for a couple of weeks now. You just didn’t expect us to turn out to be as clever as you.’
And there it was at last, the reaction she was looking for, shaken out of him by the shock of her ambush: a wash of pallor, jaw slack for a moment with surprise, a jolt of real fear. Rhys had been right. And how interesting, that it was this revelation which concerned him most. Sharon sighed, putting a little theatre into it. Time to drop the final bomblet that Achebe had uncovered last night while they were pulling the case together for the warrant application. ‘You know, Mr Nance, when I met you I thought you looked familiar but I couldn’t put my finger on why. Turns out it was because I’d met your brother only a couple of days before. You resemble each other. He’s taller and thinner, of course, and he hasn’t changed his surname. You have. Why was that, Mr Nance?’
He stared at her, bewilderment at the sudden change of subject sliding quickly into fury, then into something else. For the first time there was naked hatred on his face. Sharon could hear the other officer react to it, a sharp intake of breath and a shifting of stance. ‘I decided it was for the best. I don’t have to explain why.’
‘Were you trying to distance yourself from your family, or shield them from your anti-Declaration activities? Or just make it harder for anyone to work out what you used to do for a living?’
‘I wanted a new name. A new start. People do that all the time.’ He spat it out, struggling for composure.
‘They don’t, actually. It’s quite rare. Also, most people don’t have a brother who leads an evangelical UC splinter group. Did his actions at the concert that night have anything to do with why you decided to let the police know that a major theft of highly engineered genestock had taken place under their noses and there wasn’t a damn thing they could do about it?’
‘I didn’t—’ He stopped. She thought he was trying to work out whether it could be to his advantage to admit blowing the whistle, while still denying the theft, and was unsurprised when he apparently concluded it wasn’t. ‘My brother’s activities are embarrassing.’
‘Are they? Is that why you spent an hour onstream with him the night he was arrested, and why you posted his bail?’
‘He’s my brother.’
‘He’s never done quite as well as you, has he? Never had the grades, the career, the sense of conviction. He’s a fairly ineffectual character, really. But still you’ve supported him, like a good brother should – although if he embarrasses you it could only be by not taking as tough a Reversionist line as you would like. You share a lot of his views, Mr Nance, and you hold them far more strongly even than he does. We’ve been taking a look at your life onstream, all your handles and the forums you post to. It’s been very enlightening. Your brother made a fool of himself that night, but it’s clear from the comments you made that that’s not how you saw it. You felt he had been humiliated by a pair of gems and the institutions that now protect them, and it made you angry. It made you want us to know we were being made fools of in turn. So you pointed us at the stolen genestock, you gave us the finger, because you wanted to see us run around in a panic; and you were certain we could never trace either the theft or the tip-off back to you. But you were wrong, Mr Nance. And here we are.’
He was breathing hard now, face red, teeth grinding behind white lips. The explosion was close, and after it the collapse.
She needed to push just a little harder. ‘History’s going to repeat itself, I’m afraid. Your brother will get a slap on the wrist, a telling-off from the judge, a hundred hours or so community service. You, on the other hand, will get the full whack. Criminal conviction, custodial sentence, seizure of assets …’
He came up out of his seat, teeth bared, slamming his body against the table so that it and the tablet shook. The chair fell over behind him. Even though she had been expecting something like it, it took all Sharon’s self-control not to flinch as he screamed into her face.
‘You think you can do anything to me? You nasty, unnatural, traitorous bitch! You can’t fucking touch me! You think I don’t know who you are? What you’re married to?’
Sharon’s right hand was up and clenched, the signal to the officer who had surged forward behind her to hold position. She resisted the urge to punch Nance with it. Hard and fast in the larynx, be weeks before he could speak again.
‘You think I’m afraid of you?! I have protection, you hear me? You can’t prove anything! You—’
‘Sit down, Mr Nance.’
‘You don’t deserve to carry a warrant! Call yourself police—’
‘Sit down!’
It was a controlled shout, honed by years on the beat: low and sharp as a whip-crack, and with all the command she could put into it. He stared in amazement as she sat at ease, as though nothing had happened, and then took in the officer standing behind her with stinger baton half drawn.
Sharon said, very softly, ‘I’m not the one you need to be afraid of.’
She let the moment stretch, let the reality sink into him, until he stepped back from the table with his hands open and raised. A flood of invective continued to tumble out, low and vicious, as his eyes stayed fixed on Sharon’s face. She flicked two fingers up and
the officer moved, hand still on the baton, to right the toppled chair.
‘Shut up. That’s enough.’ The chair slammed back into place. ‘You can’t talk to Inspector Varsi like that.’
‘It’s fine, constable.’ Sharon spoke peaceably, fingers laced together on the table again, posture deliberately relaxed. ‘Mr Nance is entitled to his opinion. Sit down, Mr Nance.’ She injected steel into her voice. ‘I won’t tell you again.’
The chair was prodded against the back of his knees, none too gently. He went quiet and folded down onto it. The constable stood behind him, fists on hips, until Sharon gave her the nod and she strode back around to her place, the colour still high in her pale face.
Guess it’s okay to dish shit out to our own, but no one else is allowed. Good to know.
She returned her attention to Nance.
‘You’ve made a very big mistake, Mr Nance,’ she said, quietly, so that he had to stay quiet himself in order to hear. Use the adrenalin crash, dangle the possibility of a way out. ‘And I think you know that now. You might have had protection once, but you won’t any more. If you hadn’t sent us that message there’s a good chance no one in the EGA or the police would ever have discovered the theft. And I think, Mr Nance, that’s what JKE wanted. And expected. It was never part of their plan to have the Met hot on their trail. I think whoever’s behind them is going to be very, very pissed off when they find out just how badly you have screwed things up. And they will find out. They’re not going to be looking out for you then, are they, Mr Nance? No, they’re going to be getting as far away from you as they can, they’ll be finding ways to drop the whole thing on you. Isn’t that right, Mr Nance?’
He was shaking his head, whether at her or himself she did not know. There were traces of spittle on his lips. ‘They won’t … they can’t—’
‘Oh, I think they can, and I think they will. And you think so too.’
He sat there for a while, shoulders slumped, head hanging down. He would finally, she thought, be taking in the entire depth and breadth of the hole he had dug for himself.
When the words came, they were bitter and broken. ‘What do you want?’
She sat back and let out a long, silent breath. Her reply was no less bitter. ‘I want details on how you beat the system. I want to know all about JKE. And I want you to tell me about the dead drop.’
*
Their icons snapped into place, the hair-thin lines that linked generation to generation glowing bright as the program he had written matched up sequences, measured the infinitesimal shifts of mutation and manipulation, and confirmed the suspicion that had nagged at him all night. Rhys stared at the screen as he and Gwen slotted with the neatness of inevitability into the genealogy he had worked out the day before. He did not know whether to howl with rage or dance for joy or cry.
He had formed the conviction that it would be worth checking, worth testing, probably pointless but just in case, no reason to think they were but no reason to believe they weren’t. Then he had fallen asleep while wrestling with the paradox that unless he already had his genetype for comparison, he had no way of finding out whether an analogue of it sat somewhere on the Phoenix ancestral tree. A circular conundrum, an insoluble riddle.
Until he woke up with the answer.
A full genetype included the huge, unwieldy dataset of the underlying genome; but without the index of engineered mutations and the epigenetic directory of intricate molecular switches that regulated their expression, it was barely useful. Everyone relied on those registers; every analytical tool was keyed to them. They extracted meaning from millions of base pairs, translated the information, organised it. They told engineers and doctors and desperate young gems not only where problems lay, but where solutions could be found. Having the genome alone was like having a complete set of grid references, but no actual map. And that was all he had of himself and Gwen: just their genomes, decoded by the hospital, a string of six billion inscrutable indicators.
And the genomes into which the Phoenix sequences had been inserted, sitting like bedrock beneath the rest of the hacked data, so obvious he had been unable to see it. And the indices that mapped those sequences back to their insertion points, that he could use to compare with the same points for himself and his sister.
And there they were.
He traced the lines with his finger and mulled over the implications. So KAG Labs had also been a Phoenix client, and like Phoenix had disappeared. On its own this information was of little use. But he was connected to Phoenix, and by more than just coincidence. The segments of his own genome that the medical team had identified as being where the problem most likely lay were a tidy subset of the sequences he had found embedded in stolen genestock. Somewhere in the layered history of splices and recombinations, something had gone terribly wrong. Somewhere in that same history, in the panoply of variants that the thief had taken, would be the key to putting it right.
Think, Rhys.
A rustle on the edge of hearing, a hint of spice and musk, a sense of presence. He said, ‘Hi, Ari,’ and looked up.
‘Hey.’ She stopped at the threshold where the narrow perimeter walkway opened into the expanse of the living room and leaned against the wall, surveying him. ‘I’ve got some news.’
So have I, he thought. But you’ll tell me to back off, Ari, leave the business end of it to Sharon, get permission before I hand these genetypes that Gwen and I are related to over to the analysts. I’m not sure I can do that. But I’m not sure what else I can do.
‘What news?’
‘I’ve just found out where KAG Labs went.’ She told him.
‘Hang on. You’re telling me KAG is now part of Bel’Natur?’
‘Yes and no. Bel’Natur absorbed them completely; there’s not even a listing on the datastream. The messages Eli’s searchbot found were resurrected from trashed files.’
‘Think there might be some trashed genetype files there too?’
‘If there are it’ll be more than he can do to search them out. He said he saw no sign of any filetype other than messages. It’ll take some proper forensics work to see if there’s anything else there.’
‘Can we ask—?’ He stopped. His mouth had gone dry with foreknowledge of what the answer would be.
Aryel was shaking her head grimly. ‘Yesterday, certainly. I needn’t even have mentioned Eli – he’s not sure how he accessed this stuff, and clearly he wasn’t meant to. But it wouldn’t have mattered. I could’ve just said that after much research we’ve learned that KAG Labs was acquired by Bel’Natur almost twenty years ago, and we’ve a KAG gem with a serious medical condition, and would they like to further enhance their reputation by helping to save his life? And the head of the company would have had no choice but to say of course, anything we can do to help. But today …’
‘Today the gem who needs saving is the same one who just implicated them in a criminal conspiracy.’ He felt panic rise in his chest. ‘But maybe it’s not them, maybe this guy Nance was working for someone else. Maybe they’re in the clear and they’d still be willing to help.’
She sighed deeply. ‘I have a horrible feeling that they are involved, Rhys. Maybe not the whole firm, but the person at the top, the person I’d have to ask. I can’t go to her directly now, not without compromising Sharon’s investigation. We have to wait.’
‘For how long?’
‘Until the threads she’s tugging at unravel a bit. Until Bel’Natur is either under formal investigation themselves, in which case we can get a warrant to search the archive under an imminent-threat clause. Or until they’re cleared, in which case we’re back to where we were yesterday and I can approach Zavcka Klist.’
‘You don’t think that’s the way it’s going to turn out, though.’
‘I doubt it. And an investigation creates all sorts of problems – for the infotech project and what we hoped to get out of it, for Eli, potentially for Mikal. It’s going to take a little time to work through, Rhys. Prob
ably a couple of weeks.’
I don’t have time, Ari. I’m close to another episode, I can feel it. I might not have two more weeks.
She came away from the wall and lowered herself onto a chair opposite, reaching out to ruffle her fingers through his hair as she sat. The gesture reminded him of how he and Gwen used to cuddle up on either side of her when they were little, one under each wing, while she read them stories or taught them their maths. Or let them amuse themselves, playing beneath and behind her while she buried herself in her tablet, her focus complete as she studied the world into which they already knew she would one day venture. Ari, the adopted big sister, always loving and caring but always with a bigger mission.
‘I will get what you need from them, I promise. I won’t fail you. But you need to be patient and to trust me. And whatever happens, you need to stay well.’
He nodded soberly, not meeting her eyes. All these other considerations, all these other people and priorities. A spark of rebellion flared in him.
It isn’t just Dr Walker. Herran’s there. If he knows what to look for he can find it, easy. They’d never even know.
23
Getting back into the deleted KAG sub-archive proved easier than Eli had expected. He had the trick of it now, and Rhys would have been interested to know that he had already spent a minute or two trying to determine what else might be accessible, and disappointed to learn that he had found no trace of any genetype files. There were indeed other dull grey links into what would once have been its datastream, but these really were broken; no amount of tapping and typing would prompt them into life. Eli was almost relieved. What he most wanted to pursue, the message files, were still there; still evanescent, but capable of being cornered and copied if he worked fast.
As he grabbed and mirrored, grabbed and mirrored, he realised they were not as jumbled as he had at first thought; he might not be seeing every exchange between Zara and her army of minions, of whom Jonah Wycliffe appeared to be the commander-in-chief, but what he was getting was clear and chronological. It was also very limited in scope. This was not a random selection of retrieved messages from the lost datastream of KAG Laboratories. They were restricted to a narrow timespan around the discovery of the Phoenix Project, and had two other things in common: every one was a communication from or to Zara Klist, and every one had Phoenix as a subject line. It was as though the searchbot had gone looking specifically and exclusively for evidence of how the chief executive had dealt with the discovery of the secret lab.
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