Regeneration (24 page)

He looked just as solemn now, sitting silent and focused at his workstation, stream-feeds scrolling, cranial band pulsing, fingers flying. Mikal commandeered an empty chair and waited until Gabriel finished pushing out whatever it was and turned toward him.

“So what's the reaction?”

“
Dumbfounded
would be a good word,” Gabriel said. “It doesn't look like any of the streams saw this one coming. The reporters are scrambling to find a way to talk about it without the kind of speculation that could get them in trouble. The socialstreams don't care about that, of course; they're already buzzing.”

“And the buzz is?”

“
Of course
Bankside has the resources to pull something like this off, and
isn't it interesting
that this guy Fischer used to work for head office. Also
it makes you wonder
what else they might be up to.” Gabriel smiled without humor. “I'm guessing Bankside didn't get the advance notice that we did, since they haven't responded yet.”

“I expect not,” said Mikal noncommittally. “Are you engaging?”

“Not much. There are loads of requests for comment, and for interviews with Pilan, of course, but the publicity service can deal with those; they're to direct everyone to the statement we posted. I expect a few news crews will show up here at some point, but we'll deal with that when it happens.” He glanced at the screen, checked something and turned back to Mikal. “The commentators who might generate the kinds of conversations we need to respond to haven't had time to push much out yet; so far it's just snarky one-liners to reassure their followers that they really are themselves.”

“Think it'll put a scare into the regular trolls?”

“I think it might.” He made a face at his uncle. “We can but hope.”

Mikal laughed out loud; that was one of his standard lines. “I can't argue with that. How are
you
doing?” He looked around meaningfully, and dropped his voice. “Anyone I need to head off for you?”

“Nope.” It looked to Mikal like Gabriel's gaze lingered on an empty workstation nearby, but he shook his head firmly. “Lapsa's got
it covered. I don't think there'll be a problem—well, not unless you all keep fussing, in which case everybody
will
start to wonder what's going on.”

Mikal chuckled and shoved himself out of the chair. “Since you put it like that, I shall take myself off and go and represent the public. Call me if you need me.” He peered around the big room. “Where is Lapsa, anyway?”

“Outside, I think. Some people from Environmental Management showed up and she went to deal with them.”

Lapsa was on the quayside, hands on hips, talking to two dive-suited persons in a small launch standing off the quay. They wore EM logos on their shoulders, the full head-and-body kit that was standard for underwater work, and the attitude of people who are already hard-pressed and put-upon and would like very much to get on with their job if only the nice lady in the dark purple bodysuit would leave them alone.

“Please, ma'am, don't come in the water yet,” said one, peering through his mask, his voice distorted by the breathing apparatus. “We don't need any help, and the safety warnings for you folks haven't been lifted yet. Once we get these units in place and they've synced with the rest of the system, you can start getting back to normal.”

“But why weren't we told you were coming today?”

The two men looked at each other and shrugged.

“Beats me,” said the one who had been talking.

“We don't work for the most efficient department in the city,” said the other. “You might have noticed.”

“My guess is someone decided they needed to speed things up, only they didn't think to tell you.”

“Typical,” grunted the other.

“Oh, all right,” said Lapsa irritably. “It isn't your fault, and we're desperate to be back in the water. It's just that I didn't know, and we've got a lot going on at the moment.”

“We'll be no trouble at all. Should be done within an hour.”

“Right. Well, come inside and have a cup of tea when you are.”

She waved to them and turned to Mikal as the boat nosed along the quayside toward the far end of the Thames Tidal building. “They go from one extreme to the other, these people.”

“Environmental Management?”

“Yes. They were supposed to install new monitors around the basin next week, only they've showed up today instead.” She made an exasperated gesture at the boat. “I don't know why I'm complaining. We wanted it done sooner, but they said it was impossible.”

“They don't excel at communications,” Mikal observed. “Sharon tells me the liaison they appointed is good, though.”

“Fayole? She's been great. That's why I'm so annoyed.”

“You'll probably find that she couldn't tell you because whoever is responsible didn't tell her. I might push for a review of their management procedures when this is over.”

“I'll sign that petition. Thank you for coming. Are you off?”

“I am. You'll keep an eye on Gabriel?”

“I'll keep an eye on Gabriel.”

When Mikal looked back from the far side of the basin, the EM launch was moored in a distant corner, and neither diver was on board. Environmental Management appeared for once to have taken the initiative on something, even if they were still failing the finer points of coordination. Aryel had told him that their work with Bel'Natur on the inhibitor had mostly amounted to them staying out of the way. Thinking about that as he headed along the riverwalk toward the piazza and the steps up the side of the great bridge, Mikal was grateful beyond expression that Bel'Natur had moved fast enough to render Standard BioSolutions's offer redundant. Given what he now knew, the prospect of Standard being involved on the recovery side of this mess made him feel queasy.

The evidence was, as Sharon kept reminding him, circumstantial—but how many coincidences could there possibly be before it was impossible for them to
really
be coincidental? She didn't yet know the latest snippet of connection, innocently vouchsafed to him by Gabriel just this morning during their cold walk to Sinkat: Aryel's observation of the similarity between Kaboom's methods and the strategy that Zavcka Klist had once pursued. It felt satisfyingly like
another piece of the puzzle sliding into place, and with any luck it would leave Sharon just as stunned as her news had left him last night.

She'd waited until long after the kids were asleep and the grownups had found better things to do than talk; they were lying together in lazy bliss afterward and he was just about ready to drift off himself when she nudged him and said, “Guess what?”

She sat up in bed. “It's time for tonight's round of Improperly Shared Information. I know something about your friend Moira Charles.”

“Not funny,” he yawned, “unless you happen to know that she's involved in the Bankside business up to her eyeballs and you've got a nice cold cell waiting for her. That would be very funny indeed.”

“Not quite, though I do know that she knows our man Fischer from when he was at Standard and that she continues to share an extracurricular interest with him.”

Mikal made a comic-shocked face at her and she batted playfully at his blanketed body. “No, not this one, silly. Less fun, but possibly significant. Achebe turned it up this evening when he was working through Mr. Fischer's extensive—and I do mean
extensive
—list of contacts. So, it transpires that a lot of the people Fischer's worked for are also founding members of the exclusive Karma Club—where you were recently wined, dined, and unsuccessfully bribed? Mitford isn't on the books, so it was probably Charles who arranged for him to meet you there: she
is
a member, along with Fischer. Achebe discovered that mostly by accident, while chasing down
another
exclusive network that Fischer is part of. Turns out Ms. Charles is part of that one too. It turns out that a
lot
of the members are.” She explained.

“The Karma Club is the secret headquarters of the Klist Cult?” He stared at her in open-mouthed disbelief. “You
cannot
be serious. This is turning into a really bad vid drama.” He pulled the sheet over his head.

“Don't blame me, I just work here.” Sharon pulled the sheet back down. “
Headquarters
is probably overstating it, but there's a lot of overlap between the people who pay their dues at the Karma Club and some of the more active members of the Klist movement.”

“But how—who—
why
?”

“How should I know? Maybe the kind of self-important snob who's inclined to hand over ridiculous membership fees for the privilege of drinking the same wine in more expensive glasses is also the type to buy into a secret society dedicated to pursuing the Zavcka Klist model of eternal life.”

“You don't have strong views about this at all, I can tell.”

“It's the
arrogance
of it that makes me crazy. They don't seem to realize that they've just
invented
a reason to feel important. You should have seen Fischer when we went back in and asked him about the Klist thing—it was the closest to a reaction we'd gotten all day, but it wasn't embarrassment or defensiveness, oh no. He just had this superior little smile on his face, as if he expected us to be impressed.”

“You should've told him it was you who arrested her. That might have knocked him back.”

She laughed and snuggled under the blankets beside him. “I was tempted, believe me.”

“Could she be involved? Directing them, somehow?”

“That was my first thought, but there's no sign that she's ever had any communication with them, or even wanted to. The prison governor says she was disdainful whenever they were mentioned, and Offender Management is certain there's never been any contact. But it's significant in that it's another point of connection between Fischer and Charles: they used to work together, they're both members of the club, they're both members of the cult . . . and one of the things we always look for in cases like this is: how do the various players find each other? As a rule, new networks form from within existing ones; people already know who they can trust, and who has the resources they need.”

“The Karma Club membership would be a hell of a network—”

“Exactly. And the Klisters would be people with whom you'd already share a somewhat clandestine interest. You'd know who you could go to with something really sketchy.” Sharon was the one yawning hugely now. “This is all speculation though, honey, so don't look for us to be arresting Moira Charles tomorrow. At this point it wouldn't surprise me if she were running black ops against Thames
Tidal on behalf of Mitford, alongside the upfront corporate strategy and the politicking, but I've got no proof. So far these are all coincidences.”

Then she had fallen asleep, instantly in the way she did, leaving him to lie awake wondering how long it would take for someone to find something tangible enough to act on.

That nighttime conversation had loomed large in Mikal's mind as he listened to Gabriel's account of his conversation with Aryel, although he had said little; he could tell the young man nothing about the Klist Cult affiliations that had already been uncovered. That line of inquiry was being kept quiet, the better to be pursued without hindrance and dropped without fanfare if it proved a dead end.
But it won't,
he thought.
It makes perfect sense.
The Klist Cult's precise objectives and degree of organization varied depending on whom you talked to, which streams you followed; but a common thread was the obsession with unearthing the mechanism for Zavcka's preternaturally long life. He had heard it said that they wished not only to reproduce the phenomenon for themselves but to understand how she had used it to amass vast wealth and influence. Any devotee of her methods would know about the propaganda campaign she had masterminded twelve years ago, and wouldn't be averse to emulating it.

Mikal strode across the piazza to the foot of the steps, idly glancing beneath the bridge as usual—and stopped. The heavy fog of the morning had lifted, although it was still bitterly cold; but there under the bridge, along the piers and up against the arches, shreds of mist appeared to be lingering. When he peered closer he could see that it was not fog but wisps of a translucent
something,
pulling away from the stone and concrete, clouded with condensation. It made the lines of the structure look even fuzzier than usual. He leaned over and squinted, then reached his long arm out and just managed to touch it with his fingertips. His fingers came away not just damp but tacky, as though he had touched paint that was not quite dry.

He stared for a moment, puzzled, then took the steps two at a time, hands clenched in aggravation. Here was another, more mundane reason to be relieved that Standard had no role in protecting
gillung communities from future attacks: only a few months since the bridge work had been completed and the sealant on the underside was already washing away in the river. It was an
appalling
failure. He would have to get on to the Council's contract managers, get them to—

He was halfway across the bridge when it hit him.

—
washing away in the river.

He stopped as suddenly as if he had walked into a wall, or a revelation, then swung around to lean over the rail, peering down into the water far below. The barrier that was chest-high for everyone else reached only to his waist, prompting cries of alarm from passersby. Mikal didn't hear, not until a man tugged at his coat, urging him back, and he saw anxious faces staring at him and heard their remonstrations.

“It's fine—sorry—I'm fine! Nothing to worry about, thank you,” he jabbered at them, and ran back the way he had come, his long legs eating up the ground at a tremendous rate, almost pitching headlong down the stairs as he scrambled back to the piazza below the bridge, back to the point where he could see and touch the dissolving sealant. He had stood almost exactly here, he remembered, on the day he had come to see Pilan, newly home from the hospital, the day Moira Charles had offered Standard's help against the mystery microflora as well as the meeting with Mitford; the day Sharon had declared the Thames toxin a terrorist attack. He had stood here that day and he had not noticed . . . But it had been sunny then, and far warmer than today.

He fumbled up Sharon's Met comcode, rejected the message option, and was routed to Danladi; he ordered her to get Detective Superintendent Varsi out of whatever meeting, interrogation, press briefing, or other important matter she might be attending to,
now
. He was breathing hard and sounding desperate, and Constable Danladi did not argue. By the time Sharon's voice came in over his earset half a minute later, he had more or less gotten his breath back, but he knew that his voice was cracking as he stared at the piers that supported the bridge, and their fading, fragmenting armor.

“Sharon—”

“What's—?”

“Secure this channel.”

Silence, then a soft tone as the encryption was activated.

“What's happened?” The tension in her voice had ratcheted up several notches, mirroring his own. He glanced around again to make sure that he was alone on the piazza, then once more leaned over the rail that kept him from falling into the Thames. This one was no higher than his hips and he held on with one hand to anchor himself as he peered beneath the bridge and told her where he was and what he was seeing.

“The paint is peeling?” she said, puzzled.

“The paint, the sealant, on the underside of the bridge. Where the river washes past it, where all of the water from upstream washes past. Standard underbid everyone to win the contract, and then rushed to get the work done before the end of the summer. And it's not peeling, it's kind of gone soft; you can see through it, it's almost disintegrating. Sharon, you and Rhys and Environmental Management, you never worked out what the catalyst was: the thing that activated the algae so it was at its deadliest just downstream from here, just as it hit Sinkat. You were looking for something released into the water on the day, or maybe placed there a few days before, maybe a week or two. That's why you couldn't find anything. It's been here for months, just waiting. Sharon,
they painted it onto the bridge
.”

In her warm, bright, book-lined study, with a steaming cup of coffee at her elbow and a sense of slowly building rage, Zavcka Klist pored over every detail of the newly disclosed Kaboom operation. She too recognized her own traces in the way the group had gone about their work; unlike Aryel, she was in no doubt about the connection.

Someone had called Patrick Crawford while he'd been at her house the previous day; called repeatedly, perhaps desperately. Someone who was trying to find a person named Fischer, and had an interest in her too. Well, here was
Fischer,
caught in an act she had once perfected. And here was she, the originator of his methods, playing host for hours every day to one of his associates, ideally positioned to be incriminated herself. The prospect outraged her. It was one
thing to be sent down for something she had actually
done,
to be outflanked and outfought by Mikal and Sharon Varsi, Rhys Morgan and his sister Gwen, Herran and Callan, Eli Walker and, most of all, Aryel Morningstar: it had taken
all
of them to find her out, corner her, strip her of liberty and dignity and power. Though she might rage at the defeat, she knew their victory had been fairly won. But to be dragged into some Byzantine scheme that was not of her making, to have her own plans put at risk because of it—
that
was intolerable.

Presumably Fischer had not yet implicated Crawford and his associate—or associates—since they were still at large. Or were they? Had Crawford been picked up overnight? Was he free, but under surveillance? If the latter, she would already be in the frame. She glanced out of her window for the dozenth time that morning, scanning the elegant square with its trees and grand houses finally emerging from the morning fog, expecting at any moment to see a police transport cruise to a stop outside her front door. But no, all was quiet. Turning back to her tablet, she went through the announcement again.

The language of the bulletin was typically terse, but there were links to much of Kaboom's false-flag commentary. That would give the streams a great deal to chew on, and one of the journalists at the briefing had had enough presence of mind to ask why evidence in the case was being released.

“This evidence is already in the public domain,” Superintendent Varsi had replied crisply. “In light of our investigation, we feel it is in the public interest to release these details.”

So: damage control. Someone was worried enough to insist on swiftly discrediting the message as well as rounding up the messengers. This strengthened her conviction that there was far more going on than was being revealed. There were subtler cues as well, and again she was not alone in spotting them. Someone else observed that the code name “Kaboom” was an unusually evocative choice for the Met; Varsi's curt explanation, that it had been the use of a peculiarly threatening word in an apparently innocuous context that had first caught the attention of investigators, struck Zavcka as oddly specific.