by Various
Speaking of which, he had a conference to go to in the morning. He stubbed out the last of Glenda’s cigarettes and went to bed.
The assassin woke at dawn on Manly Beach. He’d slept under a monofilament weave blanket, in a hollow where the sand met the scrub. He wore nothing but a watch and swimming trunks. He stood up, stretched, scrunched the blanket into the trunks’ pocket, and went for a swim. No one was about.
Shoulder-deep in the sea, the assassin removed his trunks and watch, clutching them in one hand while rubbing his skin and hair all over with the other. He put them back on when he was sure that every remaining trace of the synthetic skin would be gone. Most of it, almost every scrap, had been dissolved as soon as he’d keyed a sequence on his palm after his failed attempt, just before he’d made his way, with a new appearance (his own) and chemical spoor, through various pre-chosen alleys and doorways and then sharp left on the next street, up to Kings Cross, and onto the train to Manly. But you couldn’t make too certain.
Satisfied at last, he swam back to the still-deserted beach and began pacing along it, following a GPS reading that had some time during the night been relayed to his watch. The square meter of sand it led him to showed no trace that anything might be buried there. Which was as it should be–the arrangement for payment had been made well in advance. He’d been assured that he’d be paid whether or not he succeeded in killing the target. A kill would be a bonus, but–medical technology being what it was–he could hardly be expected to guarantee it. A credible near-miss was almost as acceptable.
He began to dig with his hands. About forty centimeters down his fingertips brushed something hard and metallic.
He wasn’t to know it was a land mine, and he didn’t.
One of the nuclear power companies sent an armored limo to pick Angus up after breakfast–a courtesy, the accompanying ping claimed. He sneered at the transparency of the gesture, and accepted the ride. At least it shielded him from the barracking of the sizable crowd (with a far larger virtual flash mob in spectral support) in front of the Hilton Conference Centre. He was pleased to note, just before the limo whirred down the ramp to the underground car park (which gave him a moment of dread, not entirely irrational), that the greatest outrage seemed to have been aroused by the title of the conference, his own suggestion at that: Greening Australia.
Angus stepped out of the lift and into the main hall. A chandelier the size of a small spacecraft. Acres of carpet, on which armies of seats besieged a stage. Tables of drinks and nibbles along the sides. The smell of coffee and fruit juice. Hundreds of delegates milling around. To his embarrassment, his arrival was greeted with a ripple of applause. He waved both arms in front of his face, smiled self-deprecatingly, and turned to the paper plates and the fruit on sticks.
Someone had made a beeline for him.
“Morning, Valtos.”
Angus turned, switching his paper coffee cup to the paper plate and sticking out his right hand. Jan Maartens, tall and blond. The EU’s man on the scene. Biotech and enviro portfolio. The European Commission and Parliament had publicly deplored Greening Australia, though they couldn’t do much to stop it.
“Hello, Commissioner.” They shook.
Formalities over, Maartens cracked open a grin. “So how are you, you old villain?”
“The hero of the hour, I gather.”
“Modest as always, Angus. There’s already a rumor the attentat was a setup for the sympathy vote.”
“Is there indeed?” Angus chuckled. “I wish I’d thought of that. Regretfully, no.”
Maartens’ lips compressed. “I know, I know. In all seriousness…my sympathy, of course. It must have been a most traumatic experience.”
“It was,” Angus said. “A great deal worse for the victims, mind you.”
“Indeed.” Maartens looked grave. “Anything we can do…”
“Thanks.”
A bell chimed for the opening session.
“Well…” Maartens glanced down at his delegate pack.
“Yes…catch you later, Jan.”
Angus watched the Belgian out of sight, frowning, then took a seat near the back, and close to the aisle. The conference chair, Professor Chang, strolled onstage and waved her hand. To a roar of applause and some boos the screen behind her flared into a display of the Greening Australia logo, then morphed to a sequence of pixel-perfect views of the scheme: a translucent carbon-fiber barrier, tens of kilometers high, hundreds of kilometers long, that would provide Australia with a substitute for its missing mountain range and bring rainfall to the interior. On the one hand, it was modest: it would use no materials not already successfully deployed in the space elevators, and would cost far less. Birds would fly through it almost as easily as butting through a cobweb. On the other hand, it was the most insanely ambitious scheme of geoengineering yet tried: changing the face of an entire continent.
Decades ago, Angus had got in early in a project to exploit the stability and aridity of Australia’s heart by making it the nuclear-waste-storage center of the world. The flak from that had been nothing to the outcry over this. As the morning went on, Angus paid little attention to the presentations and debates. He’d heard and seen them all before. His very presence here was enough to influence the discussion, to get smart money sniffing around, bright young minds wondering. Instead, he sat back, closed his eyes, watched market reactions, and worried about a few things.
The first was Maartens’ solicitude. Something in the Commissioner’s manner hadn’t been quite right- -a little too close in some ways, a little too distant and impersonal in others. Angus ran analyses in his head of the sweat-slick in the handshake, the modulations of the voice, the saccades of his gaze. Here, augmentation confirmed intuition: the man was very uneasy about something, perhaps guilty.
Hah!
The next worries were the unsubstantiated unease he’d felt just before his sister’s call, and the content of that call. It would have been nice, in a way, to attribute the anxiety to some premonition: of the unusual and worrying call, or of the assassination attempt. But Angus was firm in his conviction of one-way causality. Nor could he blame it on some free-floating anxiety: his psychiatric ware was up to date, and its scans mirrored, second by second, an untroubled soul.
Had it been something he’d seen in the market, but had grasped the significance of only subconsciously? Had he made the mistake that could be fatal to a trader: suppressed a niggle?
He rolled back the displays to the previous afternoon, and reexamined them. There it was. Hard to spot, but there in the figures. Someone big was going long on wheat. A dozen hedge funds had placed multiple two-year trades on oil, uranium, and military equipment. Biotech was up. A tiny minority of well-placed ears had listened to voices prophesying war. The Warm War, turning hot at last.
Angus thought about what Catriona had told him, about the undocumented, unannounced mitochondrial module in the EU’s next genetic upgrade. An immunity to some biological weapon? But if the EU was planning a first strike–on Japan, the Domain, some other part of the Former United States, Brazil, it didn’t matter at this point–they would need food security. And food security, surely, would be enhanced if Greening Australia went ahead.
So why was Commissioner Maartens now onstage, repeating the EU’s standard line against the scheme? Unless…unless that was merely the line they had to take in public, and they really wanted the conference to endorse the scheme. And what better way to secretly support that than to maneuver its most implacable opponents into the awkward position of having to disown an assassination attempt on its most vociferous proponent? An attempt that, whether it succeeded or failed, would win Angus what Maartens had–in a double or triple bluff–called the sympathy vote.
Angus’s racing suspicions were interrupted by a ringing in his ear. He flicked his earlobe. “A moment, please,” he said. He stood up, stepped apologetically past the delegate between him and the aisle, and turned away to face the wall.
“Y
es?”
It was the investigator who’d spoken to him last night. She was standing on a beach, near the edge of a crater in the sand with a bloody mess around it.
“We think we may have found your man,” she said.
“I believe I can say the same,” said Angus.
“What?”
“You’ll see. Send a couple of plainclothes in to the Hilton Centre, discreetly. Ask them to ping me when they’re in place. I’ll take it from there.”
As he turned back to face across the crowd to the stage he saw that Maartens had sat down, and that Professor Chang was looking along the rows of seats as if searching for someone. Her gaze alighted on him, and she smiled.
“Lord Valtos?” she said. “I know you’re not on the speakers list, but I see you’re on your feet, and I’m sure we’d all be interested to hear what you have to say in response to the commissioner’s so strongly stated points.”
Angus bowed from the waist. “Thank you, Madame Chair,” he said. He cleared his throat, waiting to make sure that his voice was synched to the amps. He zoomed his eyes, fixing on Maartens, swept the crowd of turned heads with an out-of-focus gaze and his best smile, then faced the stage.
“Thank you,” he said again. “Well, my response will be brief. I fully agree with every word the esteemed commissioner has said.”
A jolt went through Maartens like an electric shock. It lasted only a moment, and he’d covered his surprise even before the crowd had registered its own reaction with a hiss of indrawn breath. If Angus hadn’t been looking at Maartens in close-up he’d have missed it himself. He returned to his seat and waited for the police to make contact. It didn’t take them more than about five minutes.
Just time enough for him to go short on shares in Syn Bio.
Copyright © 2011 by Ken MacLeod
Art copyright © 2011 by Robh Ruppel
Novels
THE FALL REVOLUTION:
The Star Fraction (1995)
The Stone Canal (1996)
The Cassini Division (1998)
The Sky Road (1999)
THE ENGINES OF LIGHT:
Cosmonaut Keep (2000)
Dark Light (2001)
Engine City (2002)
Newton’s Wake (2004)
Learning the World (2005)
The Execution Channel (2007)
The Night Sessions (2008)
The Restoration Game (2010)
Story collection
Giant Lizards from Another Star (2006)
Omnibus editions
Fractions (comprising The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal) (2008)
Divisions (comprising The Cassini Division and The Sky Road) (2009)
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Jaskey wasn’t nervous. He had his flashlight. He had a few things to say. The sky felt low to the ground, dark and hazy. People were coming too, and not too many. Jaskey had spent a week putting up handwritten flyers. Skin flaked off the back of his hands like scales. He tried to make the flyers look professional; he kept it short, not like the ravings of so many other latter-day pamphleteers. Time as told by the setting of the sun, every evening until he could perform no more, no admission charge but trade goods greatly appreciated, in the oldest part of the old town. Come and see, come and see. It was twilight and when the last of the indigo was leached from the sky, there was enough of a crowd to begin. Jaskey stepped onto the corpse of a vehicle—maybe it had been a very large SUV or a small Armored Personnel Carrier—and smiled out at the small crowd. His clothes were comfortably loose; dark against darker. The roll of his belly hung over a well-beaten pair of slacks. Jaskey turned on his flashlight; he stood up straight, his left foot ahead. He tilted the light under his own chin. There was a scattering of applause, and of other sounds—flesh against flesh anyway if not exactly palm against palm.
“I am a failure,” he said. “But it is the failure you should all fear. You must know this by now.” He could barely see the audience; they looked like underfed trees, all white branch and bone. “But with every failure, my friends,” Jaskey said, “with every failure my plans come ever closer to fruition. My machinations are nearly complete.” Jaskey’s voice was a growl from the diaphragm. He knew how to project; he’d picked the old parking lot because the ruined buildings surrounding it would help the acoustics, because they towered over the audience.
“There are armed men surrounding you,” he said. “Ready to rain down bullets, fire, bricks, dead cats ripe with buboes, letters by young women from all over this gray and ashen land that will break your very hearts!” He swung the flashlight; audience members flinched and flung up their arms to keep their eyes from the light.
“Do not be afraid,” Jaskey continued, “all is proceeding according to plan. You and I, we are the lucky ones! We have a special mission. The human race, a group to which…most of you belong—” he stopped and waited through the titters, “exists on the edge of oblivion today. I am here today to speak of humanity.
“Its prevention.
“And cure.”
Jaskey again swept the beam of the flashlight over the crowd. “Like most of you, I have two parents.” He nodded, to himself, then added, “Both of my parents died many years before I was born.” Some of the crowd chuckled. “My mother hated me. My father, he was far kinder. A warmhearted man, he only despised me. Let me tell you a story of my youth.”
Jaskey lowered the flashlight. His feet were bare. He wiggled his toes, as if waving with them to the audience. “On one bright day in the midst of winter, when the snow glistened on the streets like great piles of diamonds, my parents brought me before this old man. He was old enough to be my grandmother.” Jaskey chuckled because nobody else did. Finally, someone snorted in support. “And he told me the most horrid tale. When he was a boy my age, he lived in a camp. He was rarely fed. His parents were as thin as sticks. Men in uniforms ordered them about and threatened them with work and rifles. This boy had a job. There was a small stage made of scrap wood, and a frame painted like a proscenium. With some scraps of cloth and burlap, he and a few of the other children were allowed to put on a puppet theater. It was a Punch and Judy show, he believed. He remembered only one routine.”
Jaskey again brought the light to the underside of his chin. His eyes were wide. “Punch threw his little baby, played by a dead and quickly rotting mouse, out the window, and the police were brought forth quickly to arrest him. The judge—another puppet of course, perhaps even an entire sock in order to present as regal a manner as possible—explained to Punch that he was to be hanged by the neck!”
Jaskey raised his arms, his fists tight, “Until dead! Dead, dead, dead!” Then he turned the light back onto himself, holding it arm’s length, like a spotlight, like a firearm at his own head.
“‘Am I supposed to die three times,’ Punch asked in this play,” Jaskey said, his voice a high squeak for Punch’s sides. “‘I don’t know how to do that!’ And then this old man laughed and laughed and laughed. He looked down at me, his young grandson, and asked me a question when he saw that I was not smiling and laughing.” Jaskey shifted his weight to one foot and shrugged. An aside: “I didn’t want to interrupt him, you see. He asked me, ‘Do you get it?’”
Again Jaskey pointed his light toward the crowd. “Do you get it?”
Jaskey sighed and let his arms fall limply at his sides again. “I didn’t get it.” Jaskey shrugged, as his grandfather once did. “‘Well,’ th
e old man said to me, ‘It was the Holocaust. I guess you had to be there.’”
The audience laughed, though an undercurrent of boos reverberated across the scene as well. A rock clunked against the hulk on which Jaskey stood. “Another failure!” he roared, the flashlight suddenly up again. “Who was it!” He pointed the flashlight at a member of the audience, a man with agitated flippers where arms once were. His face was narrow, too small for his flat head except for the nose, which was piggish. His eyes bulged from his head and glowed starry in the beam of Jaskey’s torch. “It had to have been you! Who else wouldn’t be able to throw a rock well enough to hit me?” For a moment he turned the light off. The click was loud. “You can try again if you like.” Another rock did strike against something in the dark. Jaskey yelped a comical “Owie!” and the audience laughed again. He turned the light back on. In his free hand he held a rock and dropped it against his makeshift stage.