Inherit the Earth (20 page)

He had not known what to expect, but he could never have expected
this
. It was as terrible as it was absurd.

The message read:

CONRAD HELIER IS NOT DEAD
CONRAD HELIER NOW USES THE NAME “DAMON HART”
“DAMON HART” IS NAMED AN ENEMY OF MANKIND
FIND AND DESTROY “DAMON HART”
—OPERATOR 101

M
adoc Tamlin had had no alternative but to return to his apartment to gather the equipment he needed for his expedition, but he had known that the necessity was unfortunate.

“I want to go with you,” said Diana Caisson, in a tone which suggested that she intended to have what she wanted no matter what objections Madoc Tamlin might raise. “You owe me that.
Damon
owes me that.”

“I really need someone here to man the phone,” Madoc lied. “This business is moving too fast and it’s getting seriously weird. If you want to help Damon, here’s where you’d be most useful.”

“I’ve been manning your stupid phone for two solid days,” Diana told him. “What’s the point if you’re always out of touch? This is the first time I’ve clapped eyes on you since we went to visit that idiot boy in the hospital, and I don’t intend letting you out of my sight until I get an explanation of what’s going on and a chance to help. You owe—”

“I don’t owe you anything!” Madoc protested, appalled by her temerity. “Not even explanations. I only let you stay here for old time’s sake—you were supposed to be gone by now. You don’t have any claim on me at all.”

Diana wasn’t impressed. “
Damon Hart
owes me explanations. I lived with him for nearly two years. I never knew that he was Conrad Helier’s son, and I certainly never knew that he was Conrad
Helier himself, and an enemy of mankind. The day after I gave up trying to make our relationship work I found out I’d been living with a trunkful of mysteries, and they’ve been getting stranger and stranger with every hour that passes.
Two years
, Madoc! I want to know what I wasted my two years on, and if you’re Damon’s legman in Los Angeles you’re the one who has to start paying me off. Wherever you go, I want to go—and whatever you find out, I want to know.”

“This wasn’t part of the deal,” Madoc told her. “I let you stay for a couple of nights when you walked out on Damon—that’s not the same as taking you into partnership. One of the things Damon is paying me for is
discretion
. He doesn’t want
anyone
knowing what I find out, and he’d certainly include you in that company.”

“It’s okay for me to carry his messages,” she pointed out. “It’s okay for me to pass on messages from your pet streetfighter. What’s
not
okay for me to know? What is it that your apprentice Webwalkers have turned up that even Interpol isn’t supposed to know?”

The problem, Madoc knew, was time. What Interpol didn’t know yet, they might very soon find out—and they’d find out all the sooner if he were fool enough to start blabbing to Diana Caisson, even in the privacy of his apartment or his car. It was easier for him to turn up evidence of work done through illegal channels than it was for officers of the law, but this case was now a triple disappearance, with a rich icing of crazier-than-usual Eliminator antics. The police would be making a very big effort now, even if they hadn’t before. Whoever had stirred up this hornet’s nest had done a thorough job. He had no time to argue with Diana, and the only way to shut her up was to give in on
something
.

Anyway, he rationalized, if he forced her to stay behind that would only increase the danger that she might do something really inconvenient by way of getting her own back—like calling up the LAPD and sending them after him.

“It could be dangerous,” he said, knowing that it wouldn’t serve as a deterrent.

“It’ll probably be less dangerous,” she countered, “if we both know exactly what we’re trying to do. What have you found?”

Before answering, Madoc collected the last of the crude mechanical tools he’d come back to gather. The men who had broken into Silas Arnett’s house hadn’t needed cutting gear and crowbars, but Madoc hadn’t got the kind of technical backup they must have had, and he was heading for a different kind of house. If it was a fortress, it was likely to be a
brute
fortress, not a sophisticated affair of anxious eyes, clever locks, and mazy software. He was able to shut Diana up with a gesture—but only because the gesture implied that he’d pick up the conversation later.

Finally, he led her to the door of the apartment and let her follow him out. He signaled once again that he couldn’t speak, for fear of the eyes and ears with which the walls were undoubtedly sown, and she had perforce to wait until they got into the car. Even then, he insisted on bringing the vehicle out into the street before relaxing slightly.

It was midmorning and the traffic was well below its daytime peak, but it didn’t matter—he wasn’t headed downtown.

When Diana was certain that he had run out of excuses she repeated her last question, richly salted with seething impatience.

“An address way out east,” he told her. “It’s not a million miles away from the alleys, but it’s not gang turf. Above the ground it still looks derelict, but the word is that some heavy gantzing’s been done underneath by way of excavation. The hole’s been set up for use as a black-box drop site, supposedly untraceable. Nothing’s authentically untraceable, but no one’s had a reason yet to send hooks into this one. Harriet’s boys tipped her off that something was on, though, and she dug up some background on it, working back from the cowboy contractors who did the gantzing.”

“I thought the idea of gantzing was to raise buildings up,” Diana objected, “not to dig holes.”

“The neobacteria that cement walls together are only part of the gantzing set,” Madoc told her wearily. “You have to have
others that can unstick things, else you wouldn’t be able to shape the product. Moleminers use the unstickers to burrow through solid rock. It’s not the ideal way to dig out a permanent cellar or tunnel but it does the trick—and you can use the cementers to harden the walls and ceilings, making sure they’ll bear the load. Anyway, that’s not the point. Even moonlight labor has to be paid for. The title deeds to the property are locked up tight, but there’s a trail leading back from the people who worked on it to one of the people Damon told me to ask about: the one who can’t be located in San Diego, Surinder Nahal.”

“You think these underground workings might be where Silas Arnett’s being held? The Praill girl too?”

“Maybe. Maybe it’s something else entirely. All I know is that I need to take a look, and there aren’t any spy eyes I can use. The Old Lady dug up some information about the security they installed, but being gantzers rather than silicon men it’s mostly solid. Not much of a challenge to a man of my talents, but I guess they didn’t want to bring in state-of-the-art stuff because putting a top-quality electronic fence around a supposedly derelict building would look suspicious in itself.”

“So we’re going to break in and look around?” Diana said, stressing the
we
to make sure that he understood that she had no intention of waiting in the car.

“If we can.”

“Suppose
we
get into trouble? Is anybody going to come looking for us? Will anyone know where to look?”

“It’s not that kind of deal, Di—but if we
were
to vanish from human ken, the Old Lady would put two and two together. She’d tell Damon.”

“Damon? Not the police.”

“He’s the man who’s paying us—and one of the things he’s paying for is discretion.”

“What else have you found out?”

“Like I said,” Madoc retorted obstinately, “one of the things he’s paying for is discretion.”

“If he’d been discreet enough not to use my body in his porno-tapes, I wouldn’t be here,” Diana said, “but he did and I am. When he talked to me he said it was no big secret, but that was probably a lie.
Is
Damon really Conrad Helier, like the last notice said?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Madoc said. “I knew him when he was barely starting to shave and I nursed him practically day by day from his first fight to his last. Believe me, I’ve seen enough of him over the last ten years to know that he isn’t a hundred and thirty-seven years old trying to pass for twenty-six. He’s exactly what he appears to be—and that includes the fact that he’s Damon Hart and not Damon Helier anymore. If Operator one-oh-one wants some lunatic to take a shot at Damon, it’s not because anyone thinks he’s an enemy of mankind unworthy of immortality—it’s because Operator one-oh-one now thinks Damon may be dangerous to
him
. Maybe he knows that the Old Lady and I have been sniffing around—maybe he thinks that I’m getting too close for comfort.”

“If he thinks
that
,” Diana pointed out, suffering a sudden attack of logic, “we’re probably riding straight into a trap.”

“Do you want to get out?” Madoc asked. “If you do, better do it now. The badlands start at the end of the street.”

“I’m sticking to you like gantzing glue,” she told him stiffly. She didn’t believe what he’d said about the Operator getting spooked because he and the Old Lady had got too close. Neither did he—but he’d had to say something, to cover up the fact that he hadn’t the slightest idea why anyone would draw Damon into the game and then make a show of setting him up for target practice.

As they passed from the well-tended streets into an unreclaimed district Madoc slowed down slightly and checked for signs of pursuit—but when he found none he speeded up again. If Damon hadn’t sent an e-mail canceling the instruction that Madoc should meet him at the airport Madoc would have been in a quandary about whether to delay the adventure, but since
Damon had decided to stay away for a while longer Madoc felt that the whole burden of action was on his shoulders, and that he had to press on as quickly as possible.

“I’m here because I care, you know,” Diana said defensively. “I walked out on Damon because he hurt me, but it was as much for his good as for mine—to make him see what’s happening to him. I still love him.”

“I’d never have guessed,” Madoc muttered, with savage irony.

“You don’t understand,” she said flatly.

“That’s a matter of opinion. I should have left you tied and gagged at my place. If I had any sense . . .”

“If you had any sense, Maddie,” she told him, “you’d have a nice safe job with PicoCon—an honest job, with prospects. There’s no real profit in living on the edge, you know. It might be more fun, but it won’t take you anywhere in the long run. The day of the buccaneers is long gone.”

This new argumentative tack was even more irritating than the one she’d set aside. “Did Damon tell you that?” Madoc said acidly. “Did you consider the possibility that he might have been trying to convince himself? There’s
always
scope for buccaneers. Rumor has it that the best and boldest of the old ones are still alive, if not exactly kicking. Adam Zimmerman never died, so they say—and if Conrad Helier didn’t, my bet is that he’s sleeping right next door.” He realized, belatedly, that he had been so concerned to score the debating point—off Damon rather than Diana—that he had let discretion slip a little.

Diana didn’t seem to realize that she’d just got a partial answer to her question about what else he’d found out while digging on Damon’s behalf. “Who’s Adam Zimmerman?” she asked, attacking the more basic question.

“The guy who set up the Ahasuerus Foundation. Known in his own day—or shortly thereafter—as the Man Who Cornered the Future or the Man Who Stole the World. Born some time before the turn of the millennium, vanished some time after.”

“But he’d be more than two hundred years old,” Diana objected. “The oldest man alive only passed a hundred and sixty a
year or two back—the news tapes are always harping on about the record being broken.”

“The record only applies to those alive
and kicking
,” Madoc told her. “Back in the twentieth century, people who wanted to live forever knew they weren’t going to make it to the foot of the escalator. Some elected to be put in the freezer as soon as they were dead, looking forward to the day when it would be possible to resurrect them and give them back their youth. Multimillionaires who couldn’t take it with them sometimes spent their dotage pouring money into longevity research, stone-age rejuve technologies and susan—that’s short for suspended animation. Long-term freezing did a lot of damage, you see—very difficult to thaw out tissues without mangling all or most of the cells. The tale they tell is that Zimmerman tried to ride a susan escalator to the foot of the emortality escalator, commissioning the foundation he established to keep him alive and ageless by whatever means they could, until the time becomes ripe for him to wake up and drink from the fount of youth. Now
that’s
bold buccaneering, wouldn’t you say.”

“And you think Conrad Helier went to Ahasuerus in search of a similar deal?” Diana said, picking up the point which he shouldn’t have let fall. “You think he
might
be still alive, and that if he is, that’s where Ahasuerus comes in.”

“I don’t think anything,” Madoc said, wishing that he could sound more convincing, “but if there’s some kind of interesting link between Ahasuerus and Helier, that would be a candidate. It’s impossible to say—Ahasuerus is stitched up very tight indeed. They’re
very
keen on privacy. It’s partly a hangover from the days when they faced a lot of hostility because of their founder’s reputation, but it’s more than just a habit. Who knows how many famous men might be lurking in the vaults, sleeping their way to immortality because they were born too early to make it while awake? I’d be willing to bet that there wouldn’t be one in ten that the Eliminators would consider
worthy of immortality
.”