Great North Road (52 page)

“When do you go out on patrol?” she asked.

“Forty minutes. We’ll be out for six hours. Captain Chomik wants us to familiarize ourselves with the whole area. Possible infiltration routes, counter tactics, observation points; we’re to make it our home turf.”

“He’s taking things seriously, thankfully. I wish I could make you do the same.”

“Hey, I know they’re out there.”

“You just tell me that so you can get laid.”

“No. I know you well enough now to know you never killed anyone. So it has to be real, right?”

“Yep, that’s good enough to get you laid today. When did you say your patrol finishes?”

Paresh couldn’t quite keep the happy gleam from his face. “We’ll be back around seventeen hundred hours, then I’ll have a debrief with the lieutenant.”

“Six o’clock, then. That gives me long enough to find somewhere private.” She looked around at Sarvar in its ginger pallor, the cargo rows that were still lengthening with every Daedalus flight, the fuel bladder store, the lines of parked vehicles, and the tent town. “This camp is big enough now.”

“I wish we didn’t have to skulk around like this. We’re grown-ups, for heaven’s sake.”

“I know. But the HDA has its rules. The last thing I want is to damage your career. We’ll cope just fine. Then when all this is over, we’ll talk about the future.” That last was to stop him doing anything stupid like declaring how much he loved her, or wanted them to walk off into the sunset together. She wouldn’t put it past the puppy boy to blurt it out, his worldview was that simple. And if he did go and make an ass of himself she’d have to play along, which ultimately would mean hurting him badly when he realized how he’d been manipulated—that he was simply a commodity she’d traded.

Twenty years in jail must have given her more of a conscience than she’d realized. That or she’d become weak. It had never bothered her before, certainly not with Barclay, who by letting her into his life had unknowingly supplied her with all the codes she needed.

It was balmy that long-ago night, as all nights were on St. Libra. The air was ripe with the scent of the sea as Angela walked down the gallery that ran the length of the mansion’s seventh floor. She was naked except for a lace-trimmed black velvet choker and a towel from Bartram’s bedroom slung over her shoulder. There was nobody else awake at this time, so her only real worry was that she might leave some telltale oil smears on the marble floor as she went. Earlier that evening the other girlfriends had taken it in turn to give her erotic massages while Bartram voyeured their sapphic performance. Each one had applied more oil, and now her skin was simply covered in the stupid stuff. But she had to take the risk—there wouldn’t be a better opportunity than this.

There were no security sensors on the seventh floor. Bartram was quite obsessed about his privacy, and didn’t want to risk some bytehead punk hacking into the mansion’s network and watching him through his own sensors. Security in the mansion, therefore, was perimeter-based, geared up to make sure nothing untoward got inside and up to the seventh floor, which was where Bartram actually lived.

Along with the mansion’s senior staff, Angela and the other girlfriends had their rooms on the sixth floor. Most nights they would be dismissed from Bartram’s bedroom when they’d finished satisfying him, and have to go back downstairs to sleep. There were a lot of nights when they were back down on six, after they’d showered and changed, that they’d all congregate in one of the rooms—without Marc-Anthony hovering as he did all day every day—and they’d wind up drinking an unauthorized bottle of wine and chattering like sisters. Angela had resisted at first, content with Olivia-Jay’s friendship, but after two months at the mansion she was so bored with the daily routine she gave up and joined in.

But not tonight. Tonight Karah, Coi, and Mariangela (Lady Evangeline’s replacement) had been sent back down to the sixth floor after getting all hot and slippery with Angela, leaving her and Olivia-Jay with Bartram as a threesome. Forty minutes later, Bartram was snoring softly with Olivia-Jay curled up beside him, also sleeping soundly, as well she might after combining that much tox with champagne. Olivia-Jay only had another ten days left on her contract, and she was trying hard not to show how disappointed she was about not being offered a renewal. Angela rolled off the bed and went into the en suite for some towels to rub as much oil off her legs and feet as she could.

The big windows at both ends of the gallery were open, and all the lights were off, leaving dusky-silver ringlight alone to illuminate her way. There was a moment when she thought she heard someone else moving about. No one else should be anywhere near the seventh floor at that time. The dark weapon implants in her hands switched to semi-active status. She simply couldn’t risk discovery, not yet. But it was just the gauzy drapes fluttering slowly as the mellow sea breeze gusted through.

Bartram’s study was halfway along the gallery. Angela stopped in front of the tall dark wood door, checking both ways. Nothing moved, no alarms sounded. She opened the door and slipped inside. The study was decorated in the same faintly retro-Egyptian style that pervaded the rest of the mansion. Bartram had a thing for the lifestyle of old royalty, and believed that the stark, expensive aesthetics of the pharaohs contained an elegance and impact that the lavishly opulent palaces of later European monarchies lacked. There weren’t many ornaments in the room, but those that did rest on pedestals and in alcoves had been acquired from auction houses for tens of millions of eurofrancs. Angela smiled bleakly at them, immune to their beauty and history.

Bartram’s slab-like ebony desk had three big console panes set into its surface, resembling windows into interstellar night. Angela took the choker off and slid her thumbnail along the slit on the inside. The velvet peeled apart to reveal the tiny interceptors hidden inside, like fat silver needles. She put the towel down on the floor and lay down on it, shuffling her way underneath the desk. The underside of the consoles were above her now, and she began to apply the smart needles against the correct locations on the casing of the middle one. Data began to flow across the contact netlenses she was wearing, showing her what to do, the progress they were making. It had taken months of practice to perfect the procedure, more time even than she’d spent memorizing football crap. She muttered instructions to the little systems as they wormed their way into the console’s internal circuitry and optical pathways, bypassing the built-in activation security systems.

The subversion took an achingly long ten minutes. Angela wriggled out from underneath the desk as the central pane came alive, showing the console’s basic management architecture: a tunnel hologram with icon levels stretching down toward the bottom of the universe. A keyspace projection materialized above and to one side of the pane. Angela smiled down at it, and pushed her hands into the floating array of sharp red symbols. The console read the biometric pattern of the hands, and agreed they were Barclay’s. A new layer of icons materialized in the pane, and she let out a long breath of relief; the mimic gloves she’d put on as she got dressed that evening had not only survived all the oil, but also replicated the pattern that the grabber gloves had recorded weeks before.

She started manipulating the keyspace. Barclay’s codes allowed her into the finance office of Abellia’s Civic Administration. Barclay’s codes, exposed by the little processors in the banana cufflinks, following and recording every tiny movement of his hands and fingers as they flicked through keyspace.

Once she was in, she called up a list of pending civil engineering projects. A quick review showed her several that were suitable, but she chose the Delgado Valley development purely for the timing, which was excellent: The project was due to move into phase one in another five months. Once a road tunnel had been drilled through the base of the surrounding mountains from the Rue de Grenelle, eight kilometers of valley all the way down to the sea would be open for development. There were more than fifty contractors bidding for the basic infrastructure project, starting with the tunnel.

Angela established a link to the Vietnamese legal office she’d set up before arriving at Imperial College, and Barclay’s all-important authorization certificate confirmed the legitimacy of one last bid. This was from GiulioTrans-Stellar, whose profile as an established construction and management company was included in the bid datawork, along with financial guarantees from the HKFD bank. GiulioTrans-Stellar was one of twenty-seven fake companies they’d fabricated in readiness, whose specialties covered a whole range of products and services that Abellia was always issuing contracts for.

Extricating herself from the finance office systems took as long as getting in. She went carefully, checking each stage to make sure she’d left no trace, that no monitors were raising queries. With the bid secure, she dived back under the desk and cautiously extricated the interceptors from the console’s physical systems, leaving no trace of the violation.

A final wipe of the floor to make certain there was no trace of oil to betray she’d ever been there, the choker fastened back on, and she slipped back out into the long gallery as silent as the fluttering shadows thrown by the drapes. The Delgado Valley contract wasn’t due to be issued for another month, coinciding with the end of her contract. The money for the winning company would be transferred to Abellia’s main civic account four days prior to the award, ensuring sufficient funds were available. That would be her window, which was cutting things fine, but establishing a legitimate-seeming contract was the procedure they’d agreed to. It was sophisticated and took time, but it had a much greater chance of success. The finance office network and North security were always watching for crash-and-burn raids. All she had to do now was pull off another intrusion like this one, and use Barclay’s certificate to nominate GiulioTrans-Stellar as the winner. The money would transfer in micro seconds, and then nothing else mattered, nothing at all. If they caught her it would be bad. Realistically, a brutal interrogation and possibly execution—the Norths were not known for forgiveness and charity. Hopefully, she’d be able to get out of the mansion and back to Earth while the finance office was still trying to figure out what had happened, and their security division did their best to trace the money. They never would find it, of course; there were too many cutoffs and anonymous accounts built in to the route through more than a dozen banks and four planets that’d been designed to deliver the prize where it was so desperately needed. And then there was the definitive safeguard: She didn’t know the final segment of the trail, so it didn’t matter what they did to her. Would they be surprised she was prepared to make that ultimate sacrifice to ensure the theft’s success? Yes. But then they were used to dealing with organized criminal gangs and sophisticated con artists and quiet sneaky byteheads. Not people like her.

Bartram and Olivia-Jay were on the big bed where Angela had left them, lying close enough to appear a normal couple. She dropped the towel in the en suite, and slid gently onto the gel mattress beside Olivia-Jay. The girl let out a sigh suspiciously like a whimper, her thick mop of raven hair stirring.

“Shush,” Angela whispered. “I’m here, darling, I’m here.” She kissed the back of Olivia-Jay’s neck tenderly, closing her arms around the disturbed girl. Olivia-Jay snuggled into the embrace and relaxed once more, falling back into a deeper sleep pattern.

Angela grinned for everything she’d achieved, and listened to her racing heart begin to calm.
One more month. One, that’s all
.

F
RIDAY,
M
ARCH 1, 2143

Ian went home during his lunch break. It was becoming routine. He didn’t speak to anyone as he went down to Market Street’s underground car park, but he did curse the overcautious auto as it crawled through the rain-slushed roads and delivered him back to Falconar Street; he almost cursed Sid and Eva for including him in their mad, doomed, scheme. There was no real reason for him to be doing this. It was only another murder, a police case. He didn’t give a shit, not outside the station and overtime hours. Except, this one, the North slaying, had tweaked that little demon of curiosity that lurked and whispered and goaded every genuine detective. Ian had to admit, he was intrigued by the complexities and politics.

So back home he went to keep a check on their surveillance operation. Sid and Eva both acknowledged that they really needed to run the whole thing with a real person monitoring and controlling the software. The police routines Ian had acquired were intended to keep an eye out for thugs, hookers, street scum, and known snatchers working the city’s stores. Trying to follow a vanilla criminal trained by corporate security and alert for any law enforcement activity was always going to be a stretch.

None of them could spare the time for that. Even if they did, their absence would bolster Market Street’s thriving gossip culture. Questions would murmur on rumor-greedy lips. They couldn’t afford questions.

But … The original code had been cutting-edge back when it was written. Newer, more expensive, versions had undergone multiple improvements until they’d risen beyond the budget of ordinary police forces—now they were mainly used by agencies on contract. However, the core functionality remained sound.

So slowly, hour by painful hour, the software began to harvest a profile on Marcus Sherman, unofficial main suspect for the North murder. Ian had launched the operation on Saturday; the surveillance quietly riding Dunston Marina’s meshes didn’t even spot and confirm Sherman until Tuesday evening. Since then it had followed Sherman as he was picked up in a black Mercedes every morning, using Elston’s HDA authorization to slip through the traffic macromesh, examining transnet cell records for his e-i access, learning codes and compiling a list of contacts.

Marcus Sherman kept some interesting company. First there was Jede, who seemed to be his lieutenant, always there shadowing the man, always the one you had to speak to before you could talk to Sherman himself. Boz, who was straight muscle, and took that job definition way too seriously. Illegal steroids and obsessive gym sessions had produced a caricature of a bodybuilder physique. Ian completely disapproved. Fitness was about gymwork, healthy eating, and body awareness—factors that combined to sculpt and maintain a toned athlete physique. Boz was just a loser grotesque. Not that Ian ever wanted to go one-on-one with the freak.