Havoc (15 page)

‘What do we do?' asked Fyffe.

‘We carry on,' said Lanya. ‘Find One City. Pressure Dash. And hope that we get to
Nomu before the Kelleran woman does.'

CHAPTER 19

The Inkwell, known as the Drinkwell by Tornmoor seniors, was a café-bar down a narrow
lane in the old student quarter in St Clare. It was just big and dark and busy enough
that you could bunk study periods in there and not be easily spotted by a passing
teacher.

Dash was waiting for me. The place was busy with the breakfast crowd but everyone
made a small clear space around her. That's the power of that uniform. I squeezed
my way through to her booth and sat down opposite her. Her eyebrows rose and she
smiled at me with so much confidence I felt like getting up and leaving.

She said, ‘I didn't know whether to expect you or not after your disappearing act
on Friday.'

‘You had a gun. You were trying to arrest me.'

‘Rescue you.'

‘I don't need rescuing.'

One of the staff appeared with a platter of fresh bread and small curls of yellow
butter. ‘With our compliments,' he said, almost bowing at her. ‘Would you like breakfast,
ma'am?'

Dash shooed him away, hardly looking at him. He did the almost-bowing thing once
more and left.

I watched him go.

‘Times change, huh? Remember when they'd just about X-ray our money to make sure
it was real before doling out the food? And now, look. Free food and service with
a squirm.'

‘Don't be like that.'

She glanced across the tables, sharp eyed, with the kind of look that went with the
uniform: it said, I'm in charge and I'm watching. ‘We provide a service, too. And
they're grateful for it. Why shouldn't they be? We keep them safe.' She pushed the
bread to one side and put a small reader in front of me. ‘Take a look.'

‘I'm here about Moldam,' I said.

‘Just one look, it'll only take a second.'

‘I want to talk about Moldam and Operation Havoc.'

‘I don't know what that is.' She nodded at the reader. ‘Take a look first.'

I tapped the screen. A photo: Frieda Kelleran, half turned away, and with her a younger
woman facing almost full on to the camera. She had dark brown skin, wide black eyes,
a gentle mouth, a braided rope of black
hair trailing over her shoulder, a long orange
scarf and a thread of gold across her throat. My breath stalled in my lungs. I widened
the photo until there was only her face filling the screen, smiling at me.

Dash said, ‘Well? What do you think?'

I tried to keep my face blank, but I didn't trust my voice. Finally I managed, ‘How…how
do I know it's her? I was four the last time I saw her.'

Dash smiled. ‘You know. I can see it.' She reached out and touched the corner of
my eye, ‘Here,' and the corner of my mouth, ‘And here. You know.' I pulled away.
‘There are more,' she said.

I scrolled to the next photo: the same woman in a garden, smiling broadly straight
at the camera. There were six more: of her with Frieda, and with other people I didn't
recognise. She looked relaxed in all of them—no signs of fear or compulsion. I stared
at her hard, trying to read her expression, trying to hear what she was saying across
all those years. Why was she smiling at Frieda? Because Frieda was telling her lies
that she wanted to hear? Or because she and Frieda shared a secret? I went back through
them again. It was her. I did know it—something in her eyes, or her smile. Something
in me wanted badly to reach out and climb into the photo.

I put a hand over the screen. ‘Okay,' I said, ‘She's talking to Frieda, but I don't
know what they're talking about. It could be anything. I already know that they
knew
each other—this doesn't prove she was an agent.'

Dash's smile was still all confidence and superior knowledge. She said, like she
was reciting from some official file, ‘Elena Osei worked as an interpreter at the
Marsh before the uprising in '87. Mrs Kelleran recruited her to work as an asset
because she was everything they needed: very bright, beautiful, Breken—and loyal
to the city. Perfect.' She leaned forward. ‘She joined a group of Breken sympathisers
here on Cityside and got together with your father and when the time came she did
what was required and took him out of the picture.'

‘No,' I said. ‘Get your story straight. The line your bosses are running at the moment
is that he was army.'

She nodded. ‘That's right, army with a dishonourable discharge. He took his revenge
by joining the hostiles on Southside.'

‘What was he dishonourably discharged for?'

Why was I even asking—no way would the official record be the truth.

‘I don't know,' she said. ‘That was years ago. The point is, why would you trust
someone with that on his record?'

‘Why would I believe you about any of this? About his so-called record or about Elena?'

‘You think those pictures are lying?'

I picked up the reader and stared at the photo of Elena looking straight at me.

‘Probably. They're Frieda's pictures.'

She sat back with an exasperated sigh. ‘Explain to me then, how you ended up in Tornmoor
and your father ended up in the Marsh. It was Elena's doing, Nik: she arranged to
send you to Tornmoor because she knew that if what she was really doing was discovered
by the Breken, they would probably kill her but that you would be safe.'

She stopped and watched me. When I didn't say anything, she said, ‘They killed her,
Nik. Not us.'

She held out her hand for the reader and saw my fingers tighten around it. ‘See?'
she said. ‘You know it's her. Now you have to decide whether you want to know more.'

Of course I wanted to know more, but more of what? Which was better: knowing something
through a Cityside lens that was at best spin and possibly complete fabrication,
or knowing nothing at all? At least I'd seen her now. That, I would remember, and
maybe that was enough.

‘That's not why I'm here,' I said.

‘You don't know your mother at all. Yet.' Dash took the reader from me and waggled
it in my face. ‘Mrs Kelleran knows. You can ask her if you like.'

‘That's not why I'm here. I'm here about Moldam.'

Dash turned the reader off and pocketed it. ‘So talk.'

Lanya and Fyffe and I had decided that I needed to call Frieda's bluff in this conversation
so I told Dash that we knew that an attack on Moldam was imminent and
that if she
didn't want to be party to mass murder she could help us by finding out when it was
likely to start and how.

She studied me, blank faced. ‘Who told you this?'

‘Doesn't matter. Is it true?'

‘I need to know who told you.'

‘Why? So you people can work out how to shut them up?'

‘You know we could take you in and haul that information out of you? There are people
at the Marsh who would happily do that. You have no idea how gentle we're being with
you—and that's because of me. I'm telling them that your brain is worth saving, but
I don't know how much longer they'll listen to me. You don't want that drug, Nik.
They say it's harmless, but it's not. If they use it on you too often it fries your
brain.'

I looked around the café. It had emptied. A waiter wiped a table, and another one
stood at the till gazing into space.

‘All right,' I said. ‘Nobody told me. I put two and two together: Frieda makes an
unspecified threat, Moldam gets locked down. That means something's in the wind.
What is Operation Havoc? You must have some idea.'

Dash shook her head. ‘I can't help you.'

‘What do you think the lockdown is for?' I demanded.

‘To stabilise the situation.'

‘A ceasefire and talks would stabilise the situation.'

‘Well,' she said. ‘One City put paid to that when they
blew up the bridge.'

I almost laughed. ‘You can't believe they did that. That's crazy.'

‘You think they're not crazy? You don't know them like we do. I can't help you. And
I have to go.'

She slid out of the booth, glancing at one of the waiters as she went.

I got half way to the back door before two agents came through it. Two more came
in the front door.

Dash brushed past me saying, ‘Rescued you. Did I mention?'

CHAPTER 20

They shoved me into the back of their van and cuffed one of my wrists to a bar beside
the window into the driver's compartment. I couldn't see through it because it was
covered in wire mesh; the back window was too. The air stank of disinfectant, hot
and thick and sick-making. Dash climbed in after me and the door was slammed and
locked. She sat down in the corner by the door, out of my reach, holding her gun
in both hands.

Stupid, I thought to myself. Stupid, stupid, stupid, to trust a promise from a security
agent, even if she used to be a friend, more than a friend. I wiped the sweat off
my face.

‘You promised Fy you'd come alone,' I said.

She looked up at me, clear eyed and guilt free. ‘Some things are too important.'

The engine started up and I grabbed for a strap hanging from the roof and stood swaying
as the van moved
off. No prizes for guessing where we were going. I'd never been
there; even though Security and Intelligence ran Pitkerrin Marsh, as well as Tornmoor,
they didn't exactly go in for guided tours. To us at school the place was always
out there on the edge of the city: it was the Pit, the Mad Marsh, where dangerously
insane people—criminals and politicals both—were locked away and got the help they
needed or the punishment they deserved.

Dash spoke above the sound of the engine. ‘You haven't been to the Marsh, have you.
It's nothing to be afraid of. Like I said, they need you. They won't hurt you.' Over
the river, people told a different story. Everyone there knew someone who'd gone
into the Marsh and come out broken or not come out at all.

‘Your father was there,' she said. ‘He seems to have survived okay.'

Survived, yes, I thought. But okay? That might be pushing it. I didn't know what
he was like before he went there. I'd searched my memory for him and found nothing.
I'd only known him after, in these last six months. Maybe he was always grim and
silent, always turning away to the next thing he had to do. He never spoke about
his time in the Marsh or, for that matter, about the time before that with my mother.
All he'd said was that at the Marsh they specialised in so-called ‘therapeutic interrogation',
a process that had nothing to do with therapy and everything to do with interrogation.

We jolted and swayed through the streets. Dash didn't put her gun away. Maybe that
was regulation, but maybe she really would shoot if she had to. I wondered if she'd
ever used it. She caught me looking and changed her grip on it.

‘If you're genuinely keen on a ceasefire,' she said, ‘Why not work with us?'

I looked away and wondered how Lanya and Fyffe were doing. It was early yet. They
might not have even got to the posting, wherever it was—a long way, I hoped, from
Sentian and its wall-to-wall army.

Dash said, ‘We know you've been to Sentian.'

I stared at the floor, careful not to look at her in case she read the alarm on my
face.

‘We caught you on a cam,' she said. ‘You and a girl crossing Sentinel Parade yesterday
afternoon, and then heading back a couple of hours later. Did you find what you were
after?'

I started counting the tiny indentations on the rubber mat under my feet.

‘Is Fyffe hiding you?' she asked. ‘She must be. Does her father know? I wish you'd
leave her out of this. She's got enough worries.'

Like friends lying to her, I thought.

‘Okay, don't talk to me,' she said at last. ‘You can talk to Mrs Kelleran.'

The van stopped. Voices called out, and then we
rumbled on a short way and stopped
again. The back door swung wide. We'd stopped in a stone-paved courtyard surrounded
by the high walls of a grey concrete building with barred windows. In the distance
behind us was a ring of fencing but it was so far away I could only guess at the
loops of barbed wire that topped it and the sentry boxes that watched over it.

They took me into the building, down a narrow, brightly lit hallway, then down some
stairs and along another hallway into a windowless room where they took my wallet,
my watch and my boots. My wallet, I didn't care about, but I knew I'd miss my watch
and my boots.

When they'd gone I tried the door but it was metal and solid. I looked around for
something else. A single fluro tube glowed pale and faint above me: everything else
was blank, grey concrete—ceiling, walls and floor—all radiating cold and the stink
of stale sweat and urine. I walked around the walls, and arrived back at the door.
Nothing. It was a concrete box with a hole in the floor in one corner. I thought
about yelling at Frieda that she was wasting her time because I didn't know anything,
and that's when I realised that there were no cameras. Not a single cc-eye. That
meant that whatever happened in this room was deniable. More than that—it wasn't
a room for gathering evidence, it was a room for scaring the shit out of people.
It was doing a good job on me, and no one had even arrived yet.

It might have been summer outside, but it was ice cold in that room. The floor was
too cold to sit on, so I wandered around the edge of it trying and failing to keep
warm while I waited. And waited. And waited. On Southside you get used to waiting
because there you wait for everything, especially if it's coming from Cityside: food,
medicine, permits for traveling to Cityside as well as for who can work there and
under what conditions. I had no clue how much time was going by: it was long enough
for me to get very cold, and plenty long enough to get me thinking about the people
who'd been in the room before me, and wondering what had happened to them. I didn't
have to wonder too hard; I had many Breken stories of the Marsh to keep me company.
And of course, the one closest to home—the one my father hadn't told me.