‘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 ageing 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. Rachael 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 mid-morning two days later. It dominated all the news streams and current event 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 centre. 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.’
‘So they’re not concerned about this instant enclosure, then?’
‘No. The Dyson enclosure happened over a thousand years ago, it’s pre-history. Irrelevant to the Guardians.’
‘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.’
‘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 humouring 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 Rachael 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 got 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 Velaines’ iniquitous black-market arms traders was carefully recorded and filed, ready for the bust which would end the whole operation.
On the eleventh day, the observers logged a call which Adam Elvin made to a warehouse in town, authorizing them to forward an assignment of agricultural machinery to Lan-cier’s dealership.
‘This is it,’ Tarlo declared. ‘They’re getting them ready for shipment.’
‘Could be,’ Paula admitted.
On the other side of the operations office, Mares just sighed at her. But she did ask for the arrest teams to be put on standby.
Maggie was in one of the cars parked close to the dealer-ship. When the eight lorries arrived, stacked high with crates of agricultural machinery, she relayed the pictures to the operations centre. Wide gates in the fence surrounding the dealership compound were hurriedly opened to let them through. There was a brief hold-up as yet another of Lancier’s cars went out on a test run. The lawful business had been doing well for the whole duration of the observation, with up to a dozen cars a day taken out by legitimate customers. Sales were brisk.
All eight lorries drove into the largest of Lancier’s warehouses. The doors rolled down as soon as the last one parked inside. Sensors which the observation team had ringing the site reported screening systems coming on immediately.
‘Where’s Elvin now?’ Paula asked.
Tarlo showed her the images of their prime target finishing his lunch in a downtown restaurant. Paula settled down at the side of the console to follow him, using the sensors carried by the observation teams.
After lunch, Elvin walked round one of the shopping streets, using his usual tactics to try and spot any tails. When he got back
to the hotel he started packing his suitcase. Late that afternoon he went down to the bar and ordered a beer. He drank it while watching the portal at the end of the counter, which was showing Alessandra Baron interviewing Dudley Bose. In the early evening, just as the sun was falling below the horizon, his suitcase followed him downstairs, and he checked out.
‘All right,’ Paula announced to the teams. ‘It looks like this is it. Everybody: stage one positions please.’
Don Mares was in one of the four cars assigned to follow Elvin. He waited a hundred metres from the hotel, seeing the big man emerge from the lobby. A taxi drew up at the request of Elvin’s e-butler. His suitcase trundled up onto the rear luggage platform as he climbed in.
‘Stand by, Don,’ Paula said. ‘We’re placing a scrutineer in the taxi drive array. Ah, here we go, he’s told it to take him to 32nd Street.’
‘That’s nowhere near the dealership,’ Don Mares protested as their car took off in pursuit.
‘I know. Just wait.’ Paula turned to the visual and data feeds coming from the dealership. Rachael Lancier and ten of her people were now inside the sealed-up warehouse with the lorries. The rest of the workforce had been sent home as usual at the end of the day.
On the console in front of Paula, data displays began flashing urgent warnings at her. ‘Hello, this is interesting. Elvin is loading some infiltration software into the taxi’s drive array.’ She watched as the police scrutineer program wiped itself before the new interloper could establish itself and run an inventory on the operating system.
‘He’s changing direction,’ Don Mares reported. There was an excited note in his voice.
‘Just stay calm and stay with him,’ Paula said. ‘But don’t get too close, we’ve got him covered.’ Out of the six images of the taxi which the console’s big portal offered her, only one was coming from a pursuit car. The others were all feeds from the civic security cameras which covered every street and avenue of the city. They showed the taxi sliding smoothly through the rush-hour traffic.
Elvin must have ordered it to accelerate. It began to speed up.
‘Don’t be obvious,’ Paula muttered to the observation team as the taxi took a sharp right. It was a good hundred and fifty metres ahead of the first pursuit car now. Their standard boxing tactic had put the lead vehicle out of the picture. She watched the grid map with its bright dots, seeing how they rearranged themselves to surround the taxi.
Elvin turned right again, then quickly left, taking off down a small alleyway. ‘Don’t follow,’ she instructed. ‘It’s only got one exit.’
Pursuit car three hurried to reach the street where the alleyway finished. The taxi emerged smoothly, and took a left. It was heading in the opposite direction to car three. They passed within a couple of metres.
Don Mares’s car reassumed its tag position. The taxi began to speed up again. Screens along Paula’s console showed the blurred lines of car lights on either side of it, stretching away through the tall buildings of the city centre. The taxi turned onto 12th street, one of the broadest in the city, with six lanes of traffic, and all of them full. It began to switch lanes at random. Then it slowed. An overhead camera followed it as it passed under one of the hulking bridges which carried the rail tracks into the CST planetary station.
‘Damnit, where did he go?’ Paula demanded. ‘Don, can you see him?’
‘I think so. Second lane.’
Two cameras were focused on the other side of the bridge, covering every lane. A constant flow of vehicles zipped past. Then the cameras were zooming in on the taxi. It had changed to the outside lane again.
‘All right,’ Paula said. ‘All cars, reduce separation distance. Stay within eighty metres. We can’t risk loss of visual contact again. Car three, get under the bridge, check it out. See if he dropped something off.’
The taxi carried on with its evasive manoeuvres for another kilometre, then abruptly turned onto 45th Street, and stayed in one lane. Its speed wound back to a steady seventy kilo-metres per hour.
‘He’s heading right for us,’ Maggie said.
‘Looks that way,’ Paula agreed. ‘Okay, all pursuit cars, back off again.’
Eight minutes later the taxi pulled up outside Rachael Lancier’s car dealership. The gates opened and it went in, driving right through the open door of a warehouse. It stopped beside an empty repair bay.
Paula squinted at the portal image. The warehouse door had been left open, allowing the team’s sensors and cameras a perfect view. Nothing moved.
‘What’s happening?’ Tarlo asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ Paula said. ‘Rachael is still in the warehouse with the lorries. No wait . . .’
Simon Kavanagh was walking across the brightly lit concrete of the open warehouse floor. His bank tattoo paid the taxi charge. The rear luggage platform opened, and Elvin’s suitcase rolled out. It started to follow the slim bodyguard as he walked away. The taxi drove out of the warehouse.
‘Oh hell,’ Paula grunted. ‘All teams, you have a go code for stage three. I repeat, we are at stage three. Interdict and arrest. Don, stop that taxi.’ The city traffic routing array fired an emergency halt order into the taxi’s drive array. All four pursuit cars surged forwards, forming a physical blockade around the vehicle.
Maggie was already moving as the taxi emerged from the warehouse. The sun had finally sunk from the sky ten minutes earlier, leaving a gloomy twilight in its wake. Behind her, the towers of the city centre cut sharp gleaming lines into the shady sky. Ahead, there were only a few murky polyphoto strips fixed on the warehouse eaves to cast a weak yellow glow across the dealership with its rows and rows of parked cars. On the far side of the compound, an elevated rail line blocked the horizon, a thick black concrete barrier separating the city roofline from the darkening ginger sky. A single cargo train hissed and clanked its way along, a badly adjusted power wheel intermittently throwing up a fantail of sparks which marked out its progress as it slid deeper into the city.
Her fellow officers were advancing beside her, scuttling between the silent, stationary cars as they closed on the locked and screened warehouse. She activated her armour. The system, which looked like a chrome-blue skeleton worn outside her uniform, started to buzz softly. Its force field expanded, thickening the air around her. She prayed the power rating was good enough. Heaven only knew what calibre weapons they’d be facing.
Cars skidded behind her with tyres squealing like wounded animals. Up ahead, the point members of the police tactical assault squad had reached the warehouse door. They barely stopped to fire an ion bolt at the bonded composite panelling. A dazzling flash threw the compound into monochrome relief, accompanied by a thunderbolt crack. Splinters of smouldering composite hurtled through the air, revealing two large holes in the building. Squad members raced through.
‘FREEZE, POLICE.’
‘DO NOT EVEN THINK OF MOVING, MOTHER-FUCKER.’
‘YOU, HANDS WHERE I CAN SEE THEM. NOW.’
Adrenaline was singing in Maggie’s veins as she rushed through the gap. She cleared the little layer of smoke on the other side, her ion pistol held ready, retinal inserts on full resolution. Surprise at the scene before her almost made her stumble.
Rachael Lancier was standing casually at the front of a lorry. The ten employees who had stayed behind were clustered round her. Heavyliftbots had removed several crates from the lorry, stacking them neatly on the floor. A bottle and ten glasses were standing on top of one, clearly waiting for a toast to be drunk.
‘Ah, good evening, Detective,’ Rachael Lancier said as she saw Maggie’s insignia. Her mocking grin was pure evil. ‘I know I offer a good deal on my cars, but there’s no need to rush. I have something to suit every bank tattoo.’
Maggie cursed under her breath, and slowly engaged her pistol’s safety catch. ‘We’ve been had,’ she said.
‘Don?’ Paula was asking. ‘Don, is he in the taxi? Report, Don.’
‘Nothing!’ Don Mares spat. ‘It’s
fucking empty. He’s not in it.’
‘Goddamnit,’ Paula shouted.
‘This is a stitch-up,’ Maggie said. ‘The bitch is laughing at us. I’m standing five metres away from her, and she’s still bloody laughing. We’re not going to find anything here.’
‘We have to,’ Tarlo cried furiously. ‘We’ve been watching them for three goddamn weeks. I saw those arms go in there with my own eyes.’
Now it was over, now the hype had cooled, the adrenaline cold turkey kicked in, Maggie felt dreadfully weary. She looked directly into Rachael Lancier’s triumphant gleaming eyes. ‘I’m telling you, we’ve been royally fucked.’
*
The one make-or-break moment came when he rolled out of the still-moving taxi under the rail bridge. Adam hit the ground hard, yelling at the sharp pain slamming into his leg, shoulder, and ribs. Then he twisted again, and surged to his feet. The second, empty, taxi was parked ready not five metres away. He dived in through the open door, and his Quentin Kelleher e-butler told it to take him directly to the A+A.
The vehicle slid smoothly out into the busy traffic flow. As he looked around, he could see a car brake hard under the bridge. Two people jumped out, and began scanning round. He grinned as the distance built behind him. Not bad for a fat seventy-five-year-old.
Room 421 was just as he’d left it, and the scanning array gave him an all clear. He limped in. The bruises were starting to hurt badly now. When he sat on the edge of the jellmattress and stripped off his clothes he found a lot of grazed skin that was oozing blood. He applied some healskin patches, and flopped down to let the shakes run their course. Sometime later, he began to laugh.
*
For two weeks he never left the room. The dispenser mechanism delivered three meals a day. He drank a lot of fluid. His e-butler filtered the output of the local and Intersolar news shows, with a special search order for items concerning Dyson Alpha.
He lay on the bed for twenty hours a day, feeding on cheap packet food, and crappy unisphere entertainment shows.Standard commercial cellular reprofiling kits cocooned his torso and limbs, slowly siphoning the fat out of him, adjusting the folds of skin to fit his new, slimmer figure, and ruining most of his OCtattoos in the process. A pair of thick bands with a leathery texture were attached to each leg, on either side of his knees. They were the deep pervasion kits which extended slender tendrils through his flesh until they reached bone. Slowly and quite painfully, they reduced the length of his femur and tibia by half a centimetre each, altering his height to a measurement which was absent from any criminal database.