Christopher Brookmyre (13 page)

'Worst-case scenario?' Willis resumed. 'I suppose that would have to be that he's been murdered. If they knew he was already dead, they'd be guaranteed all the time they needed to search his apartment.'

'But why?' Bett pressed, forcing him back to the point.

'I really don't know. The first thing that comes to mind is, well, drugs, I suppose. I hate to say it, and it's probably just one generation's prejudice.'

'And is there anything more than prejudice to support that notion?'

'Not specifically in Ross's case. But I'm not entirely naive in these matters. I've seen a lot of very dynamic, very driven young people working with us, working extremely long hours, sometimes in isolation. Stimulants are not unprecedented.'

'Is Fleming well paid? I mean, he doesn't appear to have much of a social life, so would a speed habit have him in that much hock?'

'I can't say I know the going rate for any given controlled substance, but you make a fair point. I can't imagine him racking up debts to dangerous people without giving off signals that something was amiss.'

'Drug addicts can be most resourceful at concealing their problems,' Bett observed, 'but I can't envisage the local whizz dealer quietly and meticulously doing this to the place over an unpaid debt. "Pay up or we de-alphabetise your CDs." Nor would he be likely to turn up any unused drugs or unpaid cash inside Fleming's My Documents folder. So rack your brains a little harder, Mr Willis, dig deep and dig dirty. What do you think this is about? What do you
fear
this is about?'

Willis sighed again.

'I fear it's about work.
That
's my worst-case scenario and I'd prefer it to transpire otherwise. I'm aware of how selfish that sounds; but if we're digging dirt, then I suppose I shouldn't flinch from appearing grubby myself. I'll admit it, I'd be relieved if this was to do with some matter personal only to Mr Fleming, though that wouldn't make him any easier to replace.'

'What was he working on?'

Willis paused, wincing a little. 'I know this is frustrating, but that's not something I can freely comment upon.'

'Can you comment on whether it would make him any kind of target? Can you comment on whether someone might believe he had materials or information that he could pass on via bribery or coercion?'

'I can say this much: I brought you people in last December to tighten up security at Marledoq precisely to prevent those possibilities. Deimos is not a gun manufacturer launching a new line of automatic pistols. When you're in the business of innovation, there is nothing more potentially damaging than industrial espionage. It's not just that we can't afford to suffer the theft of blueprints or prototypes: it's that we can't afford to let anyone know what we're developing full stop. If this was the pharmaceutical industry, what do you think the other drug companies would do if they found out we were working on a cure for an ailment they sold remedies for?'

'You're saying what Mr Fleming was working on poses a threat to the arms industry?' Bett asked, with a quiet calm that Lex had learned to recognise as masking grave concern.

'Of course not. But we're developing a number of projects, any one of which might pose a threat to someone's profit margin, and this is not an industry renowned for its scrupulous practices in defending the bottom line. I don't wish to impugn your own integrity, Mr Bett, but the fact is, this kind of information is so sensitive that I can't tell you what Fleming was working on just in case his disappearance turns out
not
to be related to it. However, if some of that information is already out of the box, then yes, bribery and coercion might potentially have been applied to procure materials and information, and yes, he is potentially a target. As would be anyone who got between him and his pursuers.'

'Which is really why you came to us,' Bett stated. 'You need people who can look for Fleming but who are capable of watching their own backs while they're about it.'

'Yes. That and the fact that if this is what it looks like, then it's down to a breach of
your
security system. I'd need to check the fine print of the guarantee, but--'

'User error isn't covered, Mr Willis. No security set-up can offer contingency against individual indiscretions on the inside. If sensitive information got out of Marledoq, it wasn't because an intruder walked in and took it. For one thing, the intruder would need to know there was something specific worth looking for in the first place.'

At this point, Lex was grateful to be under the desk disconnecting the hard drive, her colour-drained face and reflexively gawping eyes hidden from view. Up until then, she hadn't been absolutely sure. Marledoq was a huge place. Fleming had already noticed something was amiss and had set off the alarms, so he could have tailed her, or been hiding out near where she happened to appear: just because he'd snuck up on her there didn't mean that was specifically his lab or his machine, she'd told herself. But now she could have no reasonable doubt that it had been his machine, and that this was therefore the second time she was swiping data belonging to the same man.

'We'll track down Fleming for you,' Bett assured Willis. 'But in the meantime you'd better ask yourself who knew enough to set this in motion. If you've got a leak, then you'd better find it fast, and don't trust anyone until then.'

'I won't, Mr Bett. I never do. Occupational hazard, I suppose.'

'Personally, I'd classify it under Health and Safety.'

Lex couldn't decide whether it was scarier flying with her eyes open or closed. Open, she had the full benefit of watching the sea pass so close beneath that they had to be leaving a wake; closed, there were the combined anxieties of vividly imagining the same sight anyway and of not being able to see disaster coming. Like it would make any difference.

They were heading for a trawler, collision course, she was certain. She assumed Rebekah could see it with her bare eyes as well as with the radar, but she didn't appear to have imminent plans for evasive action. Lex wanted to say something; actually, she wanted to scream something, but could tell from Rebekah's minutely detectable smirk that this might be a counter-productive action.

They passed directly over the trawler, which turned out to be further below than Lex had gauged, but not by much.

'Rebekah,' she said with Bett-like overstated calm, 'I just saw what that fisherman was having for lunch. He had a mug of coffee and a triangular sandwich. I could
see
what shape his sandwich was. We are too fucking low.'

'Alexis, you have got to chill,' Rebekah responded, grinning with despicable pleasure at her passenger's dismay. 'Did I hit anything yet? Did we ditch and I missed it?'

'No, but you'd only need to do it once.'

'Believe me, I've flown lower than this at, like, five times the speed.'

Lex turned her head to stare at Rebekah, fully taking her eyes off the water for the first time since they left dry land.

'What the hell kind of helicopter flies five times as fast as this?'

'Oh, it wasn't a helicopter. I guess it might not be the best time to admit this, but I'm not actually a helicopter pilot. Not licensed, anyway. I mean, I can fly this thing; hell,
you
could fly this thing.'

'So what are you licensed to fly? Oh shit,' she said, making a connection.

'Fighter planes. You're USAF, aren't you?'

'Well, that's my personal business, isn't it,' Rebekah stated, reminding Lex of the unwritten protocol.

'I'm sorry.'

'It's okay. But for what it's worth, I'm not USAF.'

Rebekah had grown considerably less withdrawn as the months passed, though she remained the most private when it came to what had brought her under Bett's wing. Everyone else was periodically given to less guarded allusions or even, occasionally, outright admissions, but, to be fair, these had all come after having been around a lot longer. Lex, for one, had taken her own time to accept that it would make no odds to her fortunes or reputation if the others knew of her place in the annals of either hackerdom or international diplomacy. However, even after reaching that understanding, she'd still felt protective of her past for reasons she couldn't quite nail down. Perhaps it was simply due to it being the episode that had made her most scared in her entire life, and exposing it at all tapped into a little of that fear. Rebekah was markedly more relaxed after Marledoq, her first real mission, though it had hardly been the most taxing exercise. Perhaps it had helped for her to have a defined, indeed indispensable, role, in order to feel she was somewhere she could belong. She'd grown conspicuously less jumpy about overhead aircraft too, a trait Lex had considered all the more curious once she learned what the role of Transport Manager truly entailed. Lex had come to realise that this nervy reaction was not in fact startlement at the sound of the engines, but simply that the sound acted as a prompt to be looking over her shoulder. Like Lex, and now like Ross Fleming, Rebekah had run from something, and in the place she'd run from there must have been airplanes. It wasn't, she now insisted, the US Air Force. So where the hell else would she be flying jets at five times the speed of this chopper?

Then Lex remembered some of the illicit data Bett had taught her to sift for. A Harrier jump jet had gone missing, the US considering the embarrassment more costly than the hardware, and thus concealing the incident. It had been a few months back, just about the time, now she came to think of it, that Bett introduced his latest recruit.

Jump jets flew off aircraft carriers.

I'm not USAF.

No, girl. You're a swabby. And you're damned well used to flying above water.

Lex sighed upon making this deduction, her posture slumping as the tension lifted a little.

'You finally chilling?' Rebekah asked, taking note.

'No. I'm practising holding my breath for when we inevitably splash down and go under.'

'Come on, admit it, you're starting to dig the ride. Beats the shit out of Space Mountain, don't it?'

'I think I'd be enjoying it more if we were on the way back.'

'I hear ya,' Rebekah replied. 'But you need to chill about that too. Bett's got faith in you, and he doesn't strike me as leaving much to chance and just
hoping
you do okay.'

'Sure, but that would be a bigger vote of confidence if I thought Bett's judgement was flawless.'

'You think his judgement is flawed because he has a higher estimation of you than you have of yourself?'

'It's not his estimation of
me
that I've got reservations about. And I don't believe I'm the only one. Nobody's said anything, but . . . '

'But they're thinking it, I know,' Rebekah agreed, nodding. 'He's one hell of a smart guy, and I'd hate to have him as an enemy. Jeez, being on his side is hard enough. But yeah, I'll hold my hand up, I've got my concerns about this one. He's normally got all the bases covered, so I can't help worrying that this time he's putting all his eggs in one basket.'

Lex managed a small laugh at this.

'What's funny?'

'Oh, just an alternative perspective. Remember what I was telling you about the Airplane Rule?'

'Yeah, two engines means twice as much can go wrong.'

'Well, there's a corresponding argument that the best plan is to put all your eggs in one basket - you just gotta make sure it's a really
good
basket.'

'So maybe Bett's judgement isn't so flawed after all.'

'We'll soon see.'

She remembered Bett sitting opposite her in the cabin most of the flight home, poring over the laptop like it was a dossier, formulating, processing. If he'd been a computer, his drive access light would have been blinking faster than the beat of a hummingbird's wings. Every so often he had a question, but it felt like he was accessing her just as functionally and impersonally as he was accessing Fleming's copied C-Drive; his own pronouncements not so much thinking out loud as the verbal equivalent of printing a hard copy of what his brain generated.

'Your take on Fleming,' he'd demanded, for instance.

'My . . . I . . . '

'Come on, first impressions, one word, no hesitation.'

'Okay, geek. Geek like me.'

'Geek. Nerd.'

'No, just geek. Geek isn't necessarily pejorative, in certain contexts. Nerd is.'

'Do geeks do a lot of drugs?'

'I'm not saying they don't, and I can't speak for the genus, but Fleming's drug of choice wasn't proscribed. You saw Chassignan, sir. You don't settle there for the nightlife. He's a lab-rat. He lives for work.'

'My thoughts too. So what else does a geek want? I'll rephrase that: what would tempt you enough to go behind my back in search of it?'

Lex's mouth fell open, but no words spilled out.

'Money?' he suggested, closing the trap door again.

'Two years in that little apartment? I didn't get a picture of a guy after a fast buck. He's young, driven, probably brilliant. Money would come in time.'

'Yes. Willis didn't tell us his salary, but, let's face it, it's the weapons business. You could say he's already sold out, and yet his motivations did not appear to be material. If he was trading secrets, it was coercion, not bribery. In which case, why not go to the police?'

Lex offered no answer, knowing none was being sought.

'Why did they shut down his PC?' Bett had later asked, yanking Lex back from window-staring introspection as to whether they could possibly get to the bottom of this without her own crucial role in it emerging.

'Huh?'

'Why bother? They didn't go putting anything back on shelves or in drawers, so why power down when they were done looking there?'

'To hide what they were looking for. Shutting down wipes certain temporary data from the OS, sorry, operating system. They went through the hierarchy manually, but, I'd guess, only after running automated searches. The keywords in those search strings would have been recoverable if they'd left the machine running.'

'And are they still recoverable? You said you could restore deleted files.'