Going Grey (17 page)

And probably in my own home, if I count my wireless connection, my streamed TV, and my phone.

For a moment, Kinnery saw the world as Maggie had seen it. It was a cold, alien, sinister place. Then he saw himself through her eyes as well, and he was a component of its menace.

If all this monitoring had been in place twenty years ago, could I have created Ian and gotten away with it?

He walked the eight blocks to the restaurant as casually as he could, past tourists openly recording their trip with phone cams, and a bespectacled girl wearing those clunky recording glasses, head moving in that telltale way that suggested she was new to it. He tried not to worry whether this trip would be vacuumed up, analysed, and distilled into the information that Charles Kinnery had come to Washington to lunch with Leo Brayne. He could have caught a bus or a cab, but they had on-board cameras too. Did he ever really say that those with nothing to hide had nothing to fear? He'd forgotten to add the qualifier that it was only true if those doing the watching were benevolent, honest, and competent enough to draw the right conclusions from the data.

He did have something to hide. But it was Ian who had something to fear.

I never even got the chance to test facial recognition on him.

Kinnery didn't have much of a plan for the meeting with Leo Brayne beyond a kind of mutually assured destruction. If Kinnery's sins were made public, Leo might want to avoid being mentioned in the same sentence. He'd opposed Ringer, He hadn't been willing to go to the wall over it, though, and human embryo research, legal or otherwise, was still politically fraught. Kinnery wondered if he could use that lever.

But Leo was one of those staggeringly wealthy men from a bygone era who took their politics as a serious public duty. Kinnery suspected he made no profit from it and wielded more power outside it, and that made him dangerous. People with a sense of mission weren't motivated or scared by the same things as ordinary men.

But this has to be about Ian. I have to make sure this is what's best for him. I'm not just saving my own ass, am I?

Kinnery didn't know. That was the worst of it.

He had to accept that he was already out of his depth, tossed in the deep end by Maggie's goddamn stupid,
stupid
letter. He was left with two options; to cut off all contact with Ian and leave him to fend for himself, because he was the one remaining lead that could enable them to hunt the boy down, or to take a chance on Leo's ability to think a lot further ahead than most politicians.

Nobody else knew where Ian was. If the worst happened, Kinnery would make one call and warn him to go to ground.

Run, Ian. Run and hide.

The restaurant was a haven of smoked glass and discreet signage that was illegible from across the road. When Kinnery put his hand on the door, it opened without any effort and he found himself chest to chest with a member of staff who looked well trained in the art of identifying and ejecting the wrong kind of customer. The hum of the traffic died the moment the door closed. Kinnery was in another world. He almost expected to step into snow. It was that kind of quiet.

Leo, a tall, lean man in an immaculate navy blue suit, sat in a booth inspecting the menu. The years since Kinnery had last seen him in person hadn't treated him too badly. His hair was more grey than brown these days, but he still didn't look his age. Kinnery envied him that.

Kinnery let the waiter take his coat and walked across a carpet so thick that it felt like a sprung dance floor. Leo didn't get up. He shook Kinnery's hand from a seated position.

"Glad you could make it," he said. Kinnery watched him snap a breadstick into three pieces and place two on the plate while he chomped on the third. He wasn't the kind of man to casually nibble the entire stick from one end. Leo broke things, and broke them into the exact size that he wanted. "This is as private as it gets without some curious intern seeing you arrive at my office."

The Jacquard fabric whispered against the seat of Kinnery's pants as he slid into the booth. He glanced up to check for security cameras. He couldn't see any.

"So you heard," Kinnery said.

"I got a call from your former partner. I suppose he was heading off his most likely source of trouble." Leo tapped his breadstick on the side of his plate like a conductor whipping the woodwind section into shape. "Or maybe he just missed our little chats."

Kinnery didn't need reminding. Leo had grilled KWA ferociously. This lunch was starting to give Kinnery that same sensation of waiting for Torquemada to ask him the time.

"Shaun was always more political than me," he said. "With a small P. I hope he doesn't know we're meeting."

"Of course not. But just be aware he's watching you. He's a keep-your-enemies-close kind of man, I think. You probably know that better than me."

You bastard, Shaun.
All Kinnery's hopes of finding a way to put some pressure on Leo evaporated. He was hopelessly outgunned, an unarmed child who'd wandered onto a battlefield.  He was savvy enough to realise that nobody opened negotiations with a concession, though, least of all a politician. Leo was sharing that information to show Kinnery just how deep in the shit he was.

"So I'm not being paranoid, then," Kinnery said. "It's hard to decide which question to ask first. Okay – how do you know?"

"Well, I'm good at watching people watching others, for the most part, so your surveillance from the airport was spotted. That probably means you've been tracked from Vancouver, which isn't hard. And we'll both keep this meeting private from Shaun, because I don't like
not
being told about things like that. It makes me wonder what else is being kept from me."

"What else is being kept from
me?
"

"I don't know. What have you been keeping from him?"

"Are you willing to tell me what he said?"

"I'd like to hear your side of it first."

"Are you planning to use this to take a shot at the biotech industry?"

"Why would I do that?"

"Apart from the fact that you think it's the work of Beelzebub?"

Leo didn't blink. "Apart from that."

Kinnery had no choice but to bend over and take it. "If this blows up, you're on record as opposing the project. You'll point out that you're the clairvoyant guy who said no good would come of it. So why else would you get involved now, except to hammer us?"

"Mud's indiscriminately adhesive once flung." Leo looked weary for a moment. "But I do have a raw nerve where this is concerned. My son served. A lot of his comrades came back broken or in body bags. I think defence funding's primary purpose is to give our military personnel the best chance of winning and coming home intact, not to create civilian jobs or shareholder dividends. It's good if it does, but it's a bonus, not a reason. So is it true?"

"Which part?"

"The most extreme allegations made by a certain alternative news site."

What have I got to lose? I'm still the only one who knows where Ian is. And Leo's the only person I know with enough real power to salvage something.

"I wouldn't be here if we were just talking about embryos," Kinnery said. "Or if the subject was dead."

Leo carried on chewing the breadstick. There weren't many men who could eat and still maintain an icy dignity, but he was one of them. It didn't humanize him one bit. He took some time to respond.

"Good grief." It was just a rumble in his throat. "Really?"

"I know it takes some believing."

"And is this person in a secure place under your control?"

"No."

"That's unfortunate."

Kinnery was starting to wonder if Leo had dismissed the whole thing as a hoax. "Do you think I'm a sane and rational man?"

"I'll give you a conditional yes."

"Well, I've seen it with my own eyes."

"Do go on."

"I still don't understand how I achieved it. But I've seen him do it. And it isn't going to go away."

Leo nodded. "Pronoun noted."

"What?"

"
I
. All your own genius, then. Did Shaun know? Did he have a hand in the Petri dish?"

Kinnery could have spread the blame, but the denial was out of his mouth before he'd even thought about it.
He'd
achieved this. Nobody else. He was telling the truth but for all the wrong reasons. Where did
that
fall in the moral spectrum?

"No," he said. "Shaun had no idea at all."

"Well, he knows now, even if he doesn't believe most of it. I suspect he thinks you've wandered off with some intellectual property that's his."

A waiter approached silently from the back of the room and hovered at a discreet distance behind Leo. The senator just lifted a casual finger, his arm still resting on the table. He must have had the wraparound vision of a fly to see the man. The waiter took his cue to approach.

"I'll have the
vongole,
please. Charles?"

"Risotto." It was the first thing that came into Kinnery's head, even without looking at the menu. "Mushroom, or whatever's good today. Thank you." The waiter dissolved into the quiet gloom at the back of the restaurant. "I haven't discussed this with anyone. But I'm going to be very surprised if my students and my employers don't get to hear about
The Slide
eventually."

"And you're telling me that there really is a live subject. Where is he?"

"I'd rather we fully explored the consequences of this before I go into detail."

"Is that plea bargaining?"

"This is a human being we're talking about. I don't want any agencies with a fluid sense of legal rights getting involved."

"Quick test," Leo said quietly. "Do you think government is, A, one happy, patriotic family with a common purpose, gladly sharing information for the good of the country? Or is it B, just another sub-set of human society, made up of the inevitable cliques, backstabbing empire builders, conflicting agendas, and petty, mediocre assholes collecting dirt on each other?"

It was odd to hear
assholes
said in that patrician accent. "That's a tough one. Can I phone a friend?"

"I don't care for unelected public servants deciding how we run the country." Leo seemed to be almost relishing this in a quiet, leave-it-to-me kind of way. "So this stays informal for as long as I'm able to keep it so."

He sipped a glass of water in silence. He might even have been growing a smile. It was a little late for Kinnery to scramble for the moral high ground. Leo hadn't asked why he'd done it – perhaps that question would come later – but Kinnery had the feeling that Leo thought he already knew, and had put Kinnery in the file marked
amoral know-it-all with sociopathic or narcissistic tendencies.

The meal arrived much sooner than Kinnery expected, fragrant and exquisite. He wished he'd had an appetite.

"Assuming that I believe any of this," Leo said, "let's split the problem into two. One is perception, and the other is actuality. I won't say
reality
, because both are real in their own way. Let's take perception first. God bless the Internet, Charles. It's all that stands between the powers that be and actual accountability."

"I realise
The Slide
isn't exactly regarded as the organ of record."

"Ah, it goes beyond the site and even the medium. Have you had a call from any other media? I'm guessing not."

"I've not been taking calls."

"Well, I doubt you'll get any. If I do, I'll laugh heartily. Because information has been utterly devalued. Most people neither know nor care what's true now. There's only
opinion.
It's all transmit and no receive, as my son's friend would say." Leo attacked the
vongole
in saffron sauce with the controlled precision of a spear fisher. "Everyone's got a front page via the Internet."

"You're not talking about democracy or freedom, I imagine. Whatever that means."

"Charles, when the Times or the Post broke a scandal in the good old days, it had real consequences, real
resigning
consequences, but now we have a volunteer misinformation army doing the cover-ups by accident. You can upload God's own documented truth about every black ops job we ever pulled, every diplomatic indiscretion, and after a while it just sinks in the sea of apathy. The more it happens, the deeper it sinks. Net change to the way the world runs or who runs it – zero."

Leo had a point and it hurt. People believed what they wanted to believe, and even if they didn't, they'd never been taught how to test what they were told. There was probably more information publicly available than at any time in history. Sifting it to work out what was real got harder every day.

Real. That'd be me, doing illegal research on human embryos. Keeping a child as a lab rat. Kidnap, effectively. Would I turn myself in for that?

Kinnery imagined walking into a police station and asking to confess. He wondered how many minutes it would be before the officer taking his statement started to nod and smile before suggesting he went home, promising that they'd be in touch.