‘They’re still accessible?’
‘They’re not supposed to be. There are only a handful left in the entire country, mostly inset into buildings or walls of historic value. The slots are supposed to be sealed shut, but this one’s been tampered with. It’s rigged with a catch: if you know where to press it’ll open and then snap shut again once you let go. Nance said the genestock vials were sealed inside a super-insulated flexcase; it would have slipped right in. He made two deposits. He also said his instructions were via ghost message, you know, the kind that auto-delete? One way only, so he had no way of telling anyone when he’d made a deposit. And he was explicitly instructed not to try, just to drop whatever he had whenever he had it. And I do believe that, because he seemed truly baffled about how anyone was going to know it was there, much less get it out.’
‘Hacked security vidcam. Easy.’
‘Except there aren’t any eyes on that alley. It’s not really a shortcut to anywhere, just a dogleg between buildings with major roads at either end. Sheer walls on both sides, London brick. As for getting into the thing, one of my guys had to borrow what we needed from a museum.’
‘There must be something. A microcam.’
‘We scanned for vid signal and found nothing. But guess which building is right around the corner – literally fifty yards or so from the end of the alley. I couldn’t believe it; I hadn’t realised it would be so close until we got there.’
‘Bel’Natur.’
‘Yep. Bloke even strolled up and introduced himself as head of security, asked if there was a problem in the area he should know about. I checked he was who he said he was and we had a little chat. Said they didn’t have any cams on it, seemed surprised the city doesn’t either. But he said it was far enough away from their building, and anyway they haven’t had any security concerns for a few years now. Hope nothing’s changed in that respect, Inspector, if we can be of any assistance, blah blah. It was like all the stories Mikal’s been telling me about the new and improved Bel’Natur.’ She paused.
‘But.’
‘But. Seems a little too close for coincidence to me.’
‘How did he know you were there? If he doesn’t have eyes on it?’
‘Said he was just passing by, glanced into the alley and noticed us …’ She caught his look and shrugged. ‘I agree, it feels very convenient. But it’s also completely plausible.’
‘A distance cam? Inside the building itself, high up?’
‘Angles are wrong for the postbox. We checked.’
‘Damn.’ He thought. ‘Was there anything in the chamber? When you opened it?’
‘Just a layer of dust. Disturbed, as though something had been there and been removed.’
‘Okay … and it’s just around the corner, hang on, let me work this out …’
How does a layer of dust get inside a sealed box?
On his screen, Sharon was frowning again.
‘There’s a risk in being so certain it leads back to Bel’Natur that we ignore other possibilities. Or discrepancies. Like, would they really have gone to the trouble of creating an investment trust, sheltered behind a daisy chain of shell companies that appear to take advantage of every corporate secrecy provision on the planet, just so they could pay off Nance? The truth is they wouldn’t have needed to set up anything so complicated. But that’s how JKE Investments is structured.’
‘That’s what it’s called? JKE?’ His heart sank. Ari had been right, again. ‘That’s her. Zavcka Klist.’
‘Her personally? How do you know?’
‘I’ve had Klists on the brain today. Ari thought she was involved – don’t look like that, I had to tell her, you know she won’t say anything. Good thing I did, too, because now it’s all coming together.’ He explained what he had learned from Aryel. ‘According to the files Dr Walker found, there was a big blow-up about some secret project called Phoenix – remember them? – and shortly afterwards Klist Applied Genomics was merged into Bel’Natur. The person who now runs Bel’Natur is a direct descendant of Jarek Klist and therefore probably controls whatever remains of her ancestor’s legacy. JKE could stand for a lot of things; “Jarek Klist Estate” is one of them.’
‘That’s a hell of a leap, Rhys.’
‘It’s what I do. I know it’s all circumstantial, but it fits.’
‘She’d have had her eye on Nance for a long time.’ Sharon’s voice was distant, her eyes staring off the edge of the screen as she thought it through aloud. ‘She’d have been grooming him, whether he knew it or not. Maybe she snuck the hunt for the Phoenix genetypes into a more general portfolio of industrial espionage. So she found out where the stock was, in half a dozen different gemtechs, and maybe she even had a plan for getting it. Buying it. Such old stuff, they’d have been happy to sell it. But then human gemtech is suspended, the stock is confiscated, the Declaration comes along, and all of a sudden it’s a much bigger challenge.’
‘To which she engineers a solution, using Nance. Even if she didn’t instruct him herself, when he got the nod he’d have had a pretty good idea who was behind it. That’s what gave him the confidence to go ahead, like you were saying, and it’s what’s making him scared now.’
Wouldn’t she be scared? That’s a lot of exposure – both to Nance and to whoever’s her go-between. She must have some kind of insurance. I wonder if Nance knows what it is. ‘Maybe you just need to lean on him a bit more.’
‘I would so love to do that, but he’s been taken ill. By the time I got back from the alley he was being rushed to hospital. Some kind of breathing difficulty, the medic here says it was probably stress-induced …’
‘Is it serious?’
‘Very. I’ve just had a message come in while I’ve been on with you; he’s in intensive care and deteriorating. Bugger goes and dies that’ll be another fucking headache.’ She winced. ‘Sorry. That’s not very professional of me. Of course I hope he’ll make a full recovery.’
‘I wouldn’t count on it.’ The search Rhys had begun running when Sharon said head of security was scrolling up results in a side panel on his tablet. Bruce Dunmore. He’d been there well over a decade, through revolution and regime change, and his rise to head of department paralleled Zavcka Klist’s ascension to the top post in the company.
Not part of the purge Callan’s been talking about, then. He’s old school. And you don’t need vid on the box, you wouldn’t want it, nothing that could be scanned for so easily. All you’d need is a radio signal, and it hasn’t got to travel more than fifty yards or so in a straight line, so it could be weak. Tough to spot in the general stream traffic. Stick a transmitter at the right spot and anything falling through the slot would activate it. You’d coat it in an obsolescence gel that’s triggered by the transmission, so if your operative was rumbled and the wrong person opened the box all they’d find is dust. If the drop goes smoothly you just stick a new one in when you make the pick-up. Same tech they used to spy on each other, and to get around the government prohibition on tracking runaways. Old school.
And then one day you get a signal, and when you rock up there’s a bunch of cops wrestling the thing open. So you have a friendly chat with the officer in charge, stroll back to your office, and activate the insurance policy. Breathing difficulty? That’s a nanite bug, the same ones they used during the gem riots in Bangla back in ’22, back when Bruce Dunmore was working retrieval for Bel’Natur in southern Asia. Respiratory paralysis. Nance will be dead inside an hour. And he didn’t know. Sharon could never have made him talk if he did.
He explained it to her. ‘This Dunmore character is part of it, he has to be. Nance is being eliminated. They know how close you are. They’re going to be getting rid of all the other evidence too – the genestock, if it’s still in the building, any remaining traces of KAG, any links to Phoenix.’
‘You said Eli had copied some records? They won’t be able to wipe his stream.’
‘No, I don’t think they know about what he fo
und. But he doesn’t know anything about this either, and the stuff he mirrored has nothing to do with it, it was just a bunch of old correspondence. It’s not important, that’s not what—’ He heard his voice rising and stopped. Deep breaths, Rhys. Calm down. She was staring anxiously out of the tablet at him, and he knew he had to explain.
‘Sharon, I’ve got a personal stake in this. A big one. Gwen and I are KAG gems, that’s why Ari came to tell me what Dr Walker had found. We’d spent years trying to find out what happened to that company.’
‘I know, she told me about that. She said you wanted to know what they’d designed you for, and then you were trying to find your genetype—’ She broke off, and he could see the comprehension wash over her face.
‘I need it. I need it badly, it’s probably the only chance I’ve got. And now I know where to find it.’
‘As long as it’s still there, and as long as they don’t wipe everything before we get to them. Oh, Rhys.’
‘Can you help me?’
‘I can try. Everything you’ve laid out – as you said it’s all circumstantial, it’s not ideal for a warrant, but I can argue that the risks are so great they need to make an exception. Let me get on to the hospital, tell them what we suspect is wrong with Nance. If they can confirm that part it’d be a big help.’
‘How long?’
‘I’ve got to pull lots of things together and get Masoud on board. It’s past noon already – probably tomorrow morning.’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘At the earliest. I’m going to move as fast as I can, Rhys. Look, they know Nance is out of the picture, and they know he can’t have implicated them, otherwise we’d be banging on their door already. We were at a complete loss in the alley, Dunmore will have seen that. They don’t know about you, they don’t know how we got on to Nance; they’ll assume it was the EGA who spotted the theft, that he screwed up somehow and got caught. They don’t know that we know about the hacks, or Phoenix, or KAG. They’ve got no reason to rush.’
No, but they will, Rhys thought. No one who is this careful, this meticulous, this ruthless, is going to leave anything to chance. Not even for a day.
Sharon was already pulling back from the screen, eyes darting and urgent, worried despite her own reassurances. He knew there was nothing more he could say, nothing more she could do beyond the task she was already leaping to. The Metropolitan Police would be inside Bel’Natur within twenty-four hours, and it would not be fast enough. He swallowed.
‘Okay, Sharon. Whatever you say.’
*
When his earset buzzed Callan thought for a moment it must be Aryel, or Eli calling to offer some explanation for his strange behaviour. When he heard Rhys’ voice his heart skipped.
‘Hi, sweetie. You okay?’
‘I’m fine. I was wondering – what’s going on there today?’
‘What?’ Callan was nonplussed. ‘Nothing. Apart from Eli going home to talk to Aryel about something, and Sevi finally working out Herran’s wiring. So yeah, I guess there’s a bit happening. What do you mean?’
‘I just wondered if … if Herran had a minute to check messages … Dr Walker’s on his way back here?’
‘Yes, should be with you in the next few minutes. You said you needed Herran?’ The unease that had begun earlier with an uncharacteristically assertive Herran and flustered Eli deepened and strengthened. What is going on?
‘Yes … I mean, I messaged him a while back, I was hoping he’d have one of his breaks …’
‘He’s had a couple.’ Callan looked over at Herran. The little gem had been sitting up for the past ten minutes, feet stuck straight out in front of him and fiery curls tumbling unconstrained by the sensor net as he hunched over his tablet, tapping and swiping and ignoring them all. Now he was being lowered back into position for the next test run, but he turned his head towards Callan. Again he felt a jolt of surprise, as if someone he barely recognised was beginning to look out of Herran’s pale eyes.
‘Tell Rhys okay,’ Herran declared. ‘I send.’ He tapped the blank screen of his tablet significantly.
‘Send what?’
‘Directions. Secret. Rhys knows.’
‘Oh well. In that case.’ Callan pretended an exasperation that was not too far from the truth. ‘Forget I asked.’
Into his earset, to Rhys, ‘Did you get that?’
‘I heard. Callan, I … it’s not that big a secret. I can explain later. Okay?’
‘Okay.’ He paused, wondering again at the gnawing fear that was beginning to growl and rumble around the base of his ribcage; wondering what the connection was between the nervous tension in Rhys’ voice and the expression on Herran’s face that was almost like a smile. ‘See you later, then. And Rhys?’
‘Yes?’
‘Love you.’
‘I love you too. So much.’
25
Zavcka Klist spun on her heel at the last instant before she would have crashed headlong into the wall of her office, and the delicate piece of shimmering glass sculpture mounted on it. Her fury was such that she would have been pleased to break something, even something as expensive as that, but not quite at the cost of her own skin. Instead she paced back, panoramic window on her right side now, the expanse of sky and steel punctuated by smudges of deep, bluish grey. The oppressive heat of the past few days seemed finally ready to summon up a storm.
Dunmore had seated himself in one of the chairs on the other side of the mammoth desk, and was watching her impassively.
‘It’s all very well to say he’s not going to do any more talking,’ she snapped. ‘The problem is you don’t know what he’s already told them.’
‘If he’d told them about me I wouldn’t be here to tell you about it. We have time.’
She spun round again, this time at the midpoint of the great table with the great window behind her blazing too, too much light into the room. The shadow it threw onto the polished surface before her was sharp and small as she grabbed the back of her own chair and leaned over it to glare at him.
‘How much time, Dunmore? Can you tell me that?’
‘No ma’am, I can’t. Most likely several days, maybe several weeks. They might never make the connection.’
‘Or they might be making it right now. That’s a risk I’m not prepared to take. We need to clear out. Get the staff and every last piece of the experiment off site and far away from here.’
He regarded her with his usual stolidity before nodding agreement. ‘I can get the staff out now, but we can’t move anything else during the day without attracting attention. It’ll have to be tonight. Late. I’ll make the arrangements.’
She felt a surge of relief, and the rage that had been on the cusp of boiling over into aches and trembling began to subside. Dunmore’s unflappable demeanour was a strange palliative, she thought; it always seemed to help pull her back from the brink. Not for the first time, she wondered if he had already associated her condition with the enormous costs and risks of their illicit project; and if not, what he thought they were doing it for. ‘You agree we need to move fast, then.’
‘Strictly speaking I don’t think it’s necessary to move this fast, but there’s no harm in being careful. That Inspector Varsi might not have a clue, but she’s no fool either. If she got pointed in the right direction …’ He shrugged.
‘I could probably slow her down. For a while at any rate, before Masoud got wind of it and took over.’
He looked momentarily surprised. ‘Oh?’
‘By all accounts she’s very fond of her husband.’
‘I see. Well, she’d have to be.’ He heaved himself to his feet. ‘I’d better get on. Is there anything else I should be taking account of, ma’am?’ He looked pointedly at her tablet where it sat angled for reading on the desktop, and glanced towards the door through which Khan had been summarily ejected when he came in to make his urgent, private report. Even though their instinctive dislike made them wary of each other, it would have be
en impossible for someone as sharp as Dunmore to miss the younger man’s bubbling excitement.
She dropped into her chair and swiped the message from Sevi back onto the screen. ‘No, not really. It’s our other experiment of the moment, the neural to digital study. Seems they’ve finally worked out how Herran’s language centres do the processing. They’re already modelling a translation matrix that they think will mimic it.’ She smiled up at him faintly. ‘That one’s excellent news, Dunmore. Nothing to concern you.’
Instead of turning away with his usual barely articulated grunt of acknowledgement, Dunmore looked thoughtful. ‘Glad to hear it, ma’am. Although I’d got the impression you weren’t as interested in that project any more.’
‘Not at all. I just decided to let them get on with it. They didn’t need me hovering.’ The memory of how she had been dismissed by Eli Walker still made her want to grind her teeth, but she stopped herself. If Dunmore picked up any hint that her withdrawal had not been voluntary, there was no excuse or assurance on earth that would prevent him from wondering what could possibly have been important enough to compel her to swallow such an insult. As far as he knew the secret project and the public one were unrelated, and she could not risk him, even him, suspecting otherwise.
No one can be allowed to know everything. No one can ever be trusted that far. Once this is over, what do I do about Dunmore? So valuable, so reliable, but the truth is he already knows too much.
I wonder if he knows that I can do to him what he did to Nance. I wonder if he’s arranged some insurance of his own.
No hint of her thoughts showed on her face as she flicked Sevi’s breakthrough off the screen, as though it was a matter of little moment. She nodded a brisk dismissal to the security chief, channelling full, cool command as she issued instructions. ‘Take every precaution, Dunmore, and any resources you need. As of now this is your only responsibility. I’ll expect an update every hour.’
He gazed back at her, equally imperturbable. ‘Of course, ma’am.’
*
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