Great North Road (46 page)

“Get me his ID,” Sid told Lorelle Burdett in the control room.

“Running a recognition routine now,” she assured him.

The taxi pulled away from the club and maneuvered backward onto Worswick Street, moving in the half-time that the detectives had found was the easiest way to follow vehicles reversing along Newcastle’s ancient tangle of streets and through the dead coverage areas of ripped meshes and pulsed smartdust. This was the seventy-fourth they’d backtracked, and Sid was starting to worry about human error creeping in. It was tedious, boring work that had so far produced nothing except for short tempers and growing resentment. Probability alone meant that they’d find the right taxi soon enough, and discover where it had picked up the unknown North’s body.

Twenty minutes later the taxi was driving backward along George Street toward the vast Fortin singletown, a carbon-black macrobuilding constructed in 2105, which had evicted the college and all the commercial units from Scotswood Road on the south up to Elwick Road, with George Street making its eastern wall and Maple Terrace its western. At thirty stories high, it dominated the surrounding districts, looking like a nest of manufactured coral, soaking up the sunlight as part of its low-energy commitment, inset with ten thousand blind silver windows. A self-contained community with housing, shops, offices, schools, theaters, and fully protected by agency police. Connected to the metro network, and with a recognized civic council that made sure local taxes were low, it was both inclusive with and separate from the rest of the metropolis. Singletowns were the best possible way forward for Earth’s cities, its developers championed back then; projects that would eat up GSW areas, banishing urban blight, providing homes and jobs for everyone. Indeed, three other singletowns had been built in Newcastle around the turn of the century. With low property taxes and a screening policy to keep out undesirable residents, they became havens for the corporate middle classes; the ultimate gated communities, shutting out the rest of the world’s problems.

Sid watched the taxi back its way down George Street, getting ever closer to the ramp junction that led to one of the Fortin’s underground road access ramps. “Come on, down you go,” he murmured. If the taxi had come out of there, picked up the passenger from inside the Fortin, that would effectively eliminate the vehicle. The surveillance systems in the singletown worked; privately funded, any rip, glitch, or damage was repaired immediately. They could grab a full history of the man.

Once again, the investigation had no luck. He watched the taxi roll past the ramp junction and into Blandford Street. From there, of course, it wound up in the dead gap of the junction with St. James’s Boulevard.

“Why did it take that route?” Lorelle asked.

“Who knows?” Sid replied, and told her to center the junction. Sometimes they got lucky, and a mesh farther down the road would give them a bad visual angle on the blanked-out section. Not this time. Naturally. So Sid had to study the busy junction for several minutes, working out which of the taxis that drove through it was the one he was following.

And that was why this was getting dangerous. They’d decided that each investigator was limited to a two-hour shift; the level of frustration combined with the finicky detail required meant that shortcuts and assumptions were too tempting. Sid wanted to backtrack every taxi himself, to be absolutely sure. But that was a physical impossibility, so he had to trust his colleagues. The nightmare scenario was they finished all 207 only to find somewhere down the line they’d made a mistake, that someone had overlooked a gap because the route appeared obvious, or they were tired, or they’d been distracted for a couple of seconds. If they didn’t find which taxi it was they’d have to start over.

Actually, that wouldn’t happen; O’Rouke would make very sure of that.

Sid confirmed that the taxi traveled all the way along the boulevard to the junction with the A186, and handed over to Eva at eleven o’clock. His two hours were up, and the relief was as strong as the guilt as he walked out of the theater.

The state of Office3 was a perfect reflection of the team’s morale. He still had a full complement of detectives working their way through data at each of the consoles. All of them in sweaters against the poor aircon. Fast-food wrappers and disposable cups were piled up precariously in the bins. The carpet had acquired additional unidentified stains. Cushioning on the arm of Abner’s chair was held on with black gaffer tape.

Pausing by the door while the blue seal came on, he found the drabness and apathy to be supremely depressing. What a difference a month made, from back when they started with their unlimited budget and big-time political pressure to get this solved. People had arrived early and stayed late, bringing a surge of enthusiasm to the monumental task. Now this. And he couldn’t even find it in himself to deliver a decent pep talk each morning. He felt like a fifth-division club manager at the end of the season, faced with relegation to oblivion. All his clever talk, keeping Eva and Ian tight to deliver the killer clue, had been pissed away in a drizzle of mediocrity. And from the way Chloe Healy and Jenson San regarded him in the canteen these days, like alligators watching a duckling, he was pretty sure O’Rouke was up on the sixth floor sharpening his knife.

His iris smartcell grid produced a communication icon that made him frown. It was the Newcastle Metro emblem, a dark yellow square with a stylized red M in the center. He twisted the icon and watched the text unfold from the metro management system, telling him his dayrover ticket was now active.

Just to prove how blue his thoughts were, it took him a good thirty seconds to work out what it meant. He collected his jacket from the inner office. “Out for lunch,” he told Ian as he walked away.

Light snow was falling from a dark gray sky, precursor to a heavier fall within a couple of hours. He trudged up Grey Street toward the metro station at Monument, the closest to Market Street. It was like early evening, the light level was so depleted. Sludge clung to his ankle boots as he went down the steps to the underground entrance.

Kaneesha Saeed was there, a ball of navy-blue mohair with a green tartan scarf and matching hat. She wandered over to a big map of the metro network stuck on the wall opposite the bank of escalators. He stood beside her, and she shuffled sideways until she was facing a hologram poster for a Parsec resort in the Mediterranean, where girls in bikinis played slo-mo volleyball on the beach, a white marble hotel glimmering in the background. A constant stream of people walked along behind them, tramping the slush and jostling their backs.

“No mesh on this,” Kaneesha said.

“No lip-reading software,” he finished for her.

“You’re growing into your job, Detective.”

“Thank you. Do you have a name for me?”

“No.”

“Crap on it, Kaneesha, what is this?”

“I picked up some words. Something’s happening. Something big.”

“Okay, man. What?”

“I don’t know that, moron. I’d have to be inside to know.”

Sid glared at the exotic beach with its brilliant sunlight and emerald palm trees. “Fuck’s sake,” he hissed.

“It’s a big deal going down. Think what that means.”

“Low odds on two major corporate ops running simultaneously.”

“Well done, pet. Whatever the murder covered up is reaching its endgame.”

“Can you find out?”

“No.” Her round head shook from side to side. “This is your way in. You need to work through the gang task force. They’re idiots, but they’re not totally useless. The evidence will be in their intelligence somewhere. A pattern, a name. You have to find how it hooks into your case.”

“Yeah, right.”

“We’re through now, Detective. Good-bye.”

“Take care, man.”

Sid had never liked the fifth floor. For a start it was home to the Police Standards Division, which ran in-house investigations against Newcastle’s officers; he’d spent enough time in their office last year. But it also housed three of the city’s major task forces, which regarded themselves as the elite. Sid had his own views on that.

Detective First Grade Hayfa Fullerton met him in the lobby outside the lifts; no one was allowed into the task force offices unescorted. A lot of smartdust scattered around had suppression functions, making sure the fifth floor’s networks remained secure.

Hayfa herself was in her fifties, with a tired-looking face to which she’d applied a minimum amount of makeup; her dark hair was cut short, a style that required little upkeep. Helped by a gray, midprice department store suit, she successfully projected the image of a drab bureaucrat too busy filling in expenses to deal with anyone. The greeting was professionally courteous, and nothing else. She showed him to her office. A corner office, Sid noted, the one directly underneath O’Rouke’s, though considerably smaller.

“So what can I do for you?” she asked once he’d sat down in front of her desk.

“You’ve heard about my case?”

“The North carjacking; word is you’re not making much progress.”

“We’re running a simulation that should produce our principal suspect.”

“Right. The taxi backtrack HDA forced on O’Rouke. He’s not pleased, Sid.”

“Name a time you’ve seen O’Rouke happy.” He gave her a cards-on-the-table grin, which was a master class in smooth. She was one of O’Rouke’s devotees, a real solid block of the support pyramid that kept him in his office. “Whoever killed my North had to have gang support.”

“Logical. The taxi was one of theirs, and ripping the meshes took organization. But if I knew anything I would have given you the data. I mean, screw the memo on interdepartment cooperation, I could do with the credit.”

“Take the credit. I just need to survive.”

“So why are you here?”

“There’s a big play coming off, I think the two might be connected. I’d like your intel on it.”

“Uh-huh.” She gave him a neutral stare. “And how did you come by that notion?”

“My own investigation. A source dropped a word.”

“That’s a big word to drop.”

“So there is something happening?”

Hayfa took her time, making a show of deciding, pushing home just who was alpha here. “We’re picking up some activity on the street” was all she finally admitted to.

“Unusual activity?”

“Only in scale.”

“So there is something going down?”

“Could be. We don’t know yet. Best guess we can make from the money that’s being splashed around and the lowlifes it’s buying, there’s some kind of shipment coming in.”

“Okay. Who’s being loose with their money?”

“Good question. That’s what my people are trying to find out.”

“I need the data they’ve gathered. The AI can run correlation on it.”

“Our sources need to remain secure.”

“Aye, man, I wasn’t thinking of broadcasting this.”

“I’ll ask which of your team has clearance to handle this. It’s sensitive. If any of them make the grade we’ll talk again.”

“Appreciate that.” Sid got up to leave.

“How is the HDA connected to all this, Sid? Why the pressure?”

“It’s a North,” he told her.

“Bollocks. What’s going on?”

He couldn’t help himself: “If you like, I can find out if you’ve got clearance.”

“Screw you.”

“Sure. But I’d like you to get that data to whoever you clear out of my people by tomorrow morning at the latest. You don’t want me to go over your head on this, trust me, man. I’m swimming in shit, don’t get in with me.”

The blue seal around Hayfa’s door died away as it opened, and she gave him a V sign.

M
ONDAY,
F
EBRUARY 18, 2143

“Our survey was approved by the City Architect’s Office,” Jacinta said over breakfast. “It cleared the Civic Administration network last night.”

“Aye, brilliant, man,” Sid said. The survey was the last legal obstacle to selling their Walkergate house; an official report by a ridiculously expensive building structural analyst that concluded four walls and a roof existed, but guaranteed nothing else. Sid had already sorted out the mortgage with a company registered in Cambodia, which had agreed to loan them money for the Jesmond house based on a combination of their salaries, and provided a certification to that effect to his solicitor. That would allow the money to be legally transferred on completion of the sale. As far as his UK bank and GE Tax Bureau would know (and could prove), the Cambodia mortgage company held the deeds and received monthly payments. In reality Sid owned the mortgage company, and it had taken a loan from another finance market in Vietnam, a much smaller one, because they were using a big slice of Sid’s secondary savings as a down payment on the new house as well as the equity from the old one. So out of the official monthly mortgage repayments half would pay off the Vietnam loan at a reasonable rate, and the rest would go direct to Sid’s secondary. They’d legitimately wind up with a bigger house, and have more spending money per month than before.

“Does anyone want this house?” Zara asked anxiously as she spooned up her porridge.

“Fifteen virtual viewings so far,” Jacinta announced proudly. “The agent said three have requested a visit as soon as the datawork’s cleared.” She and Sid clasped hands and shared a look.

He didn’t have the heart to tell her just how bad things were with the case right now. No taxi and no overlap between all their data and Hayfa’s, plus he suspected Hayfa hadn’t downloaded everything. And O’Rouke wanted to reassign five of the team members.

“So you two are going to have to keep your rooms tidy,” Sid warned the kids.

“Mine is,” Zara said immediately.

For the first time Will dragged his gaze from the screen that was showing the news from St. Libra. The expedition e-Rays had successfully flown over the vast Eclipse Mountains and were relaying the astonishing images of soaring snowy crags and valleys. “And mine,” he protested.

Sid eyed the lump of porridge on the front of Will’s Monday-morning-clean school shirt and pulled a dubious face. “Aye, well let’s keep them that way, shall we?”