“Sharron,” he said impatiently. “I’m talking about Sharron. My father’s wife.”
“Checking. Full name is Sharron Ria McCutcheon, nee Aldritch?”
He stared at the display in surprise. “You had to check that? He didn’t think it was important enough to restore?”
“I do not know what information was not restored, Christopher, nor why it was not included.”
“Are you saying you don’t have anything about Sharron?”
“I’m compiling biographical information from several sources. I’ll have a report for you in the next thirty seconds.”
“I don’t want anything from outside. I want to know how he saw her. I want to see her myself. Where are the family albums? Didn’t he keep anything of hers?”
“Not in my records, Christopher.”
Seizing the nearest Portable, Christopher pulled open the drawer and pushed the book into the empty data port. “What about there?”
“This volume is Wild Animals of North America, published by the National Geographic Society. It contains no archives.”
“What?” Quickly, Christopher swapped another book into its place. “What about that one?”
“This volume is Ptolemy’s Daughter: The Art of Sabra Adams, by—”
“I can read the goddamned titles.”
“It contains no archives.”
“What’s going on here, Lila? These are the same books I read from on Tuesday, aren’t they?”
“Yes, Christopher. Those files were erased as you read them, on Mr. McCutcheon’s instructions. I find no other files.”
“Son of a bitch,” he breathed. “Why didn’t you tell me? If I’d known I was only going to have one chance to read them—” He stopped, seeing the answer to his own question.
—I’d have photographed the screen, or transcribed the entries, or read them into a recorder. And then I could have shared them with anyone. For your eyes only. This tape will self-destruct in ten seconds.
“You did tell me.”
“Yes, Christopher.”
“No other files marked for access by me, or no files at all?”
“I find no files at all.”
I can see Sharron in his eyes and hear Deryn in his words. They are both inside him, pulling at him to follow. Follow where? They had both found a way to leave him, but by very different ways to very different destinations.
They are both inside him—
You never wanted me to know who I am. You closed all doors but one, barred all paths but the one that would lead me back here. You tried to draw my eyes from her by shining more brightly. What is it you didn’t want me to see? You knew, you bastard, you knew all the time. Did you want me to like you, or just to be like you?
“What’s the magic word?” he asked suddenly.
“Excuse me?”
“What is it I have to say to earn the prize? He wanted me to take his place. The will gives me the castle. I know it does. You have to give me the crown. I’m the one he picked, right? He’d rather have given it to me than anyone, if only I could pass the test.”
“I can’t answer that, Christopher.”
“But you know, don’t you? You know.”
“I can’t answer that, Christopher.”
“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you? Silly question,” Christopher said. “Of course you would, if he told you to. I should take you down and clean you out so you’re working for me. Except someday a call’d come in and we’d be right back where we are now. Son of a bitch.”
“Mr. McCutcheon is the primary user.”
“Mr. McCutcheon is dead, you crystal moron.”
“I know that, Christopher.”
“Miracle! She knows something. How about something useful? Tell me about the Chi Sequence.”
“Checking. No information.”
“Did my father love me?”
“No information.”
“Where’s my father’s body?”
“No information.”
“Who is Jeremiah?”
“I can’t answer that, Christopher.”
“How did my mother die?”
“No information.”
With a wild swipe of his arm, Christopher sent the neatly stacked books cascading onto the carpeted floor. “Then you’re not much goddamn use to me, are you, Lila?” he said, coming to his feet. “Between what you can’t tell me and what you won’t tell me, not much goddamned use at all.”
The decision was made in that moment, but the arrangements took more than a week to complete, with another week’s waiting tacked on after that. The delay gave Christopher a chance to measure his motives and consider his choice. No better options presented themselves, even if some doubts did.
He used the time well. Not knowing when he might be back, he revisited his favorite spots in the Northwest—postcard-beautiful Boiler Bay, where basalt cliffs and chaotic Pacific waves created a dramatic tapestry; Bridal Veil Falls, one of the hidden treasures of the Gorge, which he had discovered in the company of an adolescent love; the winding climb up to the high lodge on fog-wrapped, snow-cloaked Mount Rainier.
While he was in the house, there were issues to research, logistical and technical problems to resolve, and still a few doors to knock on. He allowed Lila to present what she could gather about Sharron from public sources; he called his mother’s brother and father and tried to break through the wall of resentment; he took several of the Portables to a hack shop in Seattle to be cracked and copied.
None of his efforts yielded more than a few drams of insight, but, oddly, every failure only made what he was about to do seem more right and reasonable.
There were also financial matters to settle. A final Allied paycheck appeared in his account, as Dryke had said it would. Christopher transferred the full amount to the Kenning House account, as much an attempt to preserve his place there as a reaction against the source of the funds. And paying for his ticket and poundage on the Horizon shuttle from Los Angeles proved a challenge. His credit lines had shrunk when his resignation was posted, forcing him to juggle advances and accounts to cover the fare.
Paying for his seat was only slightly harder than booking it; the shuttles were inexplicably full in what should have been the post-holiday lull. The alternate route, through Technica, was no better. He even checked flights from Hawaii and Florida. Except for premium fares, which Christopher could not afford, every North American commercial shuttle was sold out through the end of January. He ended up booking for February 6, almost a month away, though he also bought a place on the six-hour standby list.
The extra expense proved worthwhile. In midmonth, just as the waiting was starting to wear on him, the notification call came through. There had been a cancellation for the 10 p.m. flight to Horizon—could he be there?
“I’ll be there.”
He had rehearsed the ritual often enough in his head that he was able to move quickly. In but a few minutes, his bag was packed with his clothes and the very few objects he wanted from the house. He loaded the bag in the Avanti, which he then moved safely away from the house. Disabling the alarms and extinguishers took a little longer, but he had already scouted the systems and acquired the necessary tools.
By that time, Lila’s curiosity had been aroused. But the next step was to shut off all power to the house, which squelched her questions. Only then did he bring out the two ten-liter tins of accelerant. Changing into some of his father’s clothes, he splashed every room, with special attention to the spaces he had occupied. He wanted it to burn hot and fast, leaving only ashes and enough mystery to prompt an investigation.
There were risks, but the only risk-free course was surrender. If his father’s body wasn’t found, if the investigation focused on arson rather than William McCutcheon’s disappearance, if Allied and Mikhail Dryke chose to silence Christopher rather than intervene—if, if, if. There were a hundred things that could go wrong. But he could not leave his life or his father’s death in limbo. There was some
thing he had to prove—to the homunculus of William McCutcheon that lived inside his head, to Mikhail Dryke, and to himself.
Only when it was time to strike the spark did he hesitate. Standing on the front step before the open door, back in his own clothes and holding the lighter and the bundle of chemical-spattered clothing in his hands, he found his heart racing, his lungs aching as though he had just run up the ridge road from the gate. Do I have the right to do this? jostled with Can I see this through? for first place in his insecurities.
The revelation of two weeks ago was slipping away. He had to make himself say it out loud to break the paralysis that had seized him.
“I don’t ever want to come back here.”
Flame touched cloth, which flared happily into life. Christopher quickly tossed the bundle through the doorway, turning his back and retreating across the lawn. As he climbed into the Avanti, he stole a peek back, and was rewarded by a flickering orange glow playing behind the first-story windows of the far dome.
Christopher circled the house at treetop level until the second-story windows exploded outward in billows of gray smoke and gouts of yellow-red fire. Then he turned away, banking toward Portland, refusing to look back. He kept the Avanti on the deck to keep its movements off the air traffic monitors, settling into the I-26 surface traffic as he approached Banks. It was hard to hold his speed down when what he wanted to do was run.
The last detail was the Avanti, which he knew he could not keep. He left it at the curb on Killingsworth Street, four klicks from the city’s transplex, with the passenger door unlocked and the travel log’s memory wiped. The flyer was baggage at this point, and he did not care if it was stolen, stripped or impounded.
Keeping his pace brisk and his thoughts disciplined, Christopher hiked to the transplex and the tube station. He was invigorated by the freedom that came with action, by the peace that came with purpose. The police might soon be searching for him, Dryke could soon be hunting him, but he did not care. In a few short hours he would be beyond their reach, for Horizon was not his final destination. This journey would not end until he reached Deryn’s arms and Sanctuary.
CHAPTER 29
—UGA—
“These ships are frail”
Prainha had become a prison for Mikhail Dryke.
In the moment he fired the first bullet into Jeremiah’s body, he had understood that Sasaki would not approve. He had recognized that, by passing on the opportunity to simply collect Jeremiah, he was crossing a significant line. He had known that the decision would look different in Prainha than it had in the underground room.
And though Sasaki had said not one word in reproach, her actions argued loudly enough that Dryke had been right. It began with Sasaki’s explicit order that Christopher McCutcheon be left free and alive. She had never interfered with Dryke in that way before, and he read the message clearly: I can’t undo what you’ve done, but I will not permit you to repeat the mistake.
“We can’t kill all our enemies, Mikhail. I do not consider the son a risk,” she had said. “Separate him from us and leave him there.” She neither invited nor accepted Dryke’s counsel on the decision.
Another clue: In the two weeks since the event, no official announcement of Jeremiah’s death had been made, even within the Project. The committee and senior security staff knew, and the Houston center was rife with apparently unsquelchable rumors. Marshall had offered token congratulations; Matt Reid had gratefully welcomed the news. But that was the extent of it.
Even more telling, it seemed as though he was being insulated from the real work of his own department. Part of it was his own doing—there was no place for him in the everyday operation of Corporate Security unless he shouldered aside one of his own handpicked lieutenants.
But Sasaki seemed determined to keep him from his accustomed role as fire fighter, as well. She had placed the entire First Directorate under travel restrictions, meaning that he needed her explicit permission to leave Prainha. And there was always some new reason why he couldn’t leave. He spent his days chasing down problems which were beneath him and sitting through meetings to which he had nothing to contribute. He understood that, too. She wanted him in sight at all times, on his invisible leash.
The maddening part was that there were problems that cried out for his attention.
Item: In the street outside the twenty-six-story building housing the Tokyo training and processing center, the carnival of militant demonstrations continued its daily run. The strategy of the mostly youthful protesters consisted of blocking the street and baiting Tokyo police, Corporate Security, and—in absentia, since they had largely ceded the battlefield—the starheads. The police and security had shown restraint, even in the face of taunts punctuated by hurled bags of excrement.
The starheads, however, had not. There had been fly by shootings, gas grenades lobbed from blocks away, kamikaze drivers. Just three days ago, a small group of starheads had slipped into the fifteen-story tower facing the Allied building, taken over the roof, and rained thousands of marble-sized steel bearings down on the throng. In a particularly vicious twist, the starheads had begun shouting amplified insults down into the walled canyon just before the hail reached the ground.
Five demonstrators were killed and more than a hundred injured by the hail, some horribly so, with cheeks torn open, eyes splattered like eggs, facial bones shattered, skulls fractured as they turned their faces up to look for the enemy. In the riot that followed, the Allied building was breached and a fire set in the main atrium, and seven more died, including one policewoman and three starheads found dead by their own hand on the rooftop.
Item: In Cologne, Greens and Homeworlders together were trying to shut down an Allied-owned specialty metals plant by lying down in front of the haulers trying to leave the plant, which was producing both molded and machined parts for Memphis. More than three hundred had been dragged away from in front of the wheels and arrested, but there seemed to be no shortage of volunteers to replace them, even after a woman and a teenaged boy were crushed when one omni driver lost patience with the game.
Item: Yvonne Havens, director of operations at Kasigau Launch Center, had abruptly and unexpectedly resigned within the week. After the fact, she informed Sasaki that she had done so to “ransom” her mother, who had been kidnapped from her apartment in Cairo by a group calling itself Jeremiah’s Hands. Emboldened by their success, the terrorists had just taken the husband of a HELcrew launch chief and the daughter of the supervisor of Vehicle Manufacturing, making the same demands.
There were mitigating factors in all three situations. The Tokyo center was effectively mothballed, anyway, under Contingency Zero, but it was important to keep up appearances. The metals plant had completed more than ninety-five percent of its Diaspora contract, including all of the critical high-stress system fittings. And Kasigau’s efficiency had never been what it should have been under Havens.
Still, it was not in Dryke’s nature to discount such threats or to entrust others with the responsibility of responding to them. But he was faced with doing both, because Sasaki “needed” him in Prainha.
He would have been more upset, except for the odd conviction persisting that, with Jeremiah dead, it should be over. He did not have the old fight in him; he was merely annoyed, not aroused, by the news coming in. Even so, he would have talked to Sasaki about it, but she had disappeared beyond barriers of bureaucracy. His former access had dried up; he did not see her and could not get to her.
Overlooked and underworked, Dryke was left with time to wonder, more time than he cared for. Had he any taste for alcohol or other drugs, he probably would have used them to shorten the day. But his fetish for control in his life was too strong to permit him that escape. Were he less duty-driven, he might have declared his war over and gone home. But he could not abdicate, even though it was harder each day to see any reason for his being there.
He no longer knew what Hiroko wanted from him or what she wanted him
for. At times, he wondered if she was merely keeping him on hand to throw to the wolves when the snarling and howling grew too loud. Dryke had neither expected nor wanted to be greeted as a conquering hero—he felt too much ambivalence himself for that. But neither had he dreamed he would find himself recalled in disgrace, spinning out his days as the pariah of Prainha.
At midmonth, Dryke was granted a brief, tantalizing glimpse into what was happening in the inner circle. It came in the form of a visit from Roger Marshall, one of two outsiders on Sasaki’s seven-member advisory committee.
Though Marshall came and went from Prainha at will, Dryke had had only glancing contact with the billionaire California real estate developer. He knew him only as a well-dressed, well-mannered, well-spoken man. A reasonable man, as Dryke defined the term. Someone who listened before he questioned and thought before he answered.
Dryke knew a little more about Marshall’s company, Cornerstone Management. The problems of building a residential superscraper overlapped a great deal with the problems of building a starship, and Cornerstone had shown itself the reigning master of the former art, with Marshall the financial wizard who made the deals go. Marshall and Co. had put up Daley Tower in Chicago, the Gold Coast complex north of Sydney, and several other headline projects. Of the dozen or so architectural monuments around the globe which rivaled Memphis for cost and complexity, Roger Marshall had had a hand in five.
His expertise was unquestioned, but Dryke had always wondered at his interest. The committee was unpaid and unsung, second only to Sasaki in influence but invisible behind her. It seemed an odd place to find a Roger Marshall, unless he simply considered the Project as an interesting hobby, interesting enough that he was content with a secondary role. Dryke had no idea what a man who commanded wealth on Marshall’s scale did for self-indulgence.
That day, Marshall appeared at Dryke’s office without warning. “Good afternoon, Mr. Dryke,” he said, showing a friendly but measured smile. “Is there any chance I might steal you away from here for a while?”
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