Inherit the Earth (33 page)

“Exactly what
is
it that you think Conrad’s followers are doing?” Silas asked curiously.

“If you don’t know,” the monk replied tartly, “they must have been so deeply hurt by your decision to retire that they decided to cut you out entirely. Even if that’s so, though, I’d be willing to bet that all you have to do is say you’re sorry and ask to be let back in. You really should. I can understand that you felt the need to take a holiday, but people like us don’t retire. We know that the only way to make life worth living is to play our part in the march of progress. We may not have true emortality, but we have to try to be worthy of it nevertheless.”

“Cut the Eliminator crap,” Silas said tersely. “You’re not one of them.”

“No, I’m not,” the monk admitted, “for which you should be duly thankful. I do like the Eliminators, though. I don’t altogether approve of them—there’s too much madness in their method, and murder can no longer be reckoned a forgivable crime—but I like the way that they’re prepared to raise an issue that too many people are studiously avoiding: who
is
worthy of immortality? They’re going about it backwards, of course—we’ll never arrive at a population entirely composed of the worthy by a process of quasi-Darwinian selection—but we
all
need to think about the myriad ways in which we might strive to be worthy of the gifts of technological progress. We are heirs to fabulous wealth, and the next generation will be heirs to an even greater fortune. We have to make every effort to live up to the responsibilities of our inheritance. That’s what this is all about, Silas. We don’t want to eliminate your estranged family—but they have to acknowledge the responsibilities of their inheritance. The fact that they played a major role in shaping that inheritance doesn’t let them off the hook.”

“And if they won’t?” Silas wanted to know.

“They have to. The position of God isn’t vacant anymore. The privilege of Creation has to be determined by negotiation. Conrad Helier may be a hundred and thirty-seven years old, but he’s still thinking and still learning. Once we get through to him, he’ll understand.”

“You don’t know him as well as I do,” Silas said, having finally become incapable of guarding his tongue so carefully as never to let any implication slip that Conrad Helier might not be dead.

“There’s time,” his captor assured him. “But not, I fear, for any further continuation of this conversation. I don’t know who, for the moment, but
somebody
has finally managed to locate you. I hope we’ll meet again, here or in some other virtual environment.”

“If we ever meet in real space,” Silas hissed with all the hostility
and bravado he could muster, “you’d better make sure that your IT is in good shape. You’ll need it.”

The woodland blanked out, leaving him adrift in an abstract holding pattern. He heard a door crash inwards, battered down by brute force, and he heard voices calling out the news that he was here. He felt a sudden pang of embarrassment as he remembered that he was nearly naked, and knew that he must present a horribly undignified appearance.

“Get me out of this fucking chair!” he cried, making no attempt at all to censor the pain and desperation from his voice.

The hood was raised from his eyes and tilted back on a pivot, allowing him to look at his cell and his rescuer. The light dazzled him for a moment, although it wasn’t very bright, and he had to blink tears away from the corners of his eyes.

There was no way to identify the man who stood before him, looking warily from side to side as if he couldn’t believe that there were no defenders here to fight for custody of the prisoner; the newcomer’s suitskin had a hood whose faceplate was an image-distorting mask. He was carrying a huge handgun that didn’t look like a standard police-issue certified-nonlethal weapon.

“I think it’s okay,” Silas told the stranger. “They left some time ago. Just cut me loose, will you?”

The stranger must have been looking him directly in the face, but no eyes were visible behind the distorting mask.

“Who are you?” Silas asked as it dawned on him belatedly that his troubles might not be over.

The masked man didn’t reply. A second man came into the room behind him, equally anonymous and just as intimidatingly armed. Meanwhile, the first man extended his gun—holding its butt in both hands—and fired at point-blank range.

Silas hadn’t time to let out a cry of alarm, let alone to feel the pain of the damage that must have followed the impact or to appreciate the full horror of the fact that without his protective IT even a “certified-nonlethal” shot might easily be the death of him.

D
amon was intending to call Interpol anyway, so the fact that his phone hood lit up like a firework display commanding him to do exactly that didn’t even make a dent in his schedule. It did worry him, though; no one got a five-star summons like that unless there was something far more important on the agenda than his ex-girlfriend’s bail bond.

Hiru Yamanaka took Damon’s incoming call personally. Interpol’s phone VE was stern and spare but more elaborate than Damon had expected. Mr. Yamanaka was reproduced in full, in an unnaturally neat suitskin uniform, sitting behind an imposing desk. The scene radiated calm, impersonal efficiency—which meant, Damon thought, that it was as inaccurate in its implications as the most blithely absurd of his own concoctions.

“What’s happened?” Damon asked without preamble.

“Thank you for calling, Mr. Hart,” the inspector said with a determined formality that only served to emphasize the falseness of his carefully contrived inscrutability. “There are several matters I’d like to discuss with you.” The inspector’s eyes were bleak, and Damon knew that things must have taken a turn for the worse—but he also knew that Yamanaka would want to work to a carefully ordered script. The inspector knew that Damon was holding out on him, and he didn’t like it.

“Go on,” Damon said, meekly enough.

“Firstly, we’ve received the medical examiner’s final report on the body discovered in the house where Miss Caisson was arrested. DNA analysis confirms that it’s the body of Surinder Nahal. The ME estimates that the time of death was at least two hours before Miss Caisson and Madoc Tamlin arrived on the scene, so we’re certain that they didn’t kill him, but it has become a matter of great urgency that we see the VE pak which your friend removed from the scene. We have reason to believe that it might contain valuable evidence as to the identity of the real killer and the motive for the crime.”

What reason? Damon wondered. “I’d be very interested to see it myself,” he countered warily. “Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to contact Madoc. I presume, then, that you’ll be releasing Diana immediately?”

“I’m afraid not,” Yamanaka told him. “The local police are still considering the possibility of charging her with illegal entry—and she was of course an accessory to the assault.”

“So charge her and bail her out.”

“I’m reluctant to do that until I’ve talked to Madoc Tamlin,” the inspector told him.

“You can’t hold her hostage, Mr. Yamanaka.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Yamanaka assured him, “but until Tamlin and the VE pak are safely in my hands, I can’t be sure of the exact extent of her culpability.” The virtual atmosphere was still heavily pregnant with some vital item of information that Yamanaka was carefully withholding.

Damon fought to suppress his annoyance, but it wasn’t easy. “You must know as well as I do that the VE pak is an ill-wrapped parcel of red herring that’s already begun to stink,” he told the inspector waspishly. “The same is probably true of its resting place.”

Yamanaka didn’t raise an eyebrow, but it seemed to Damon that the policeman’s synthesized gaze became more tightly focused. “Do you have any evidence to support the conjecture that the body is
not
that of Surinder Nahal?” the inspector asked sharply.

“No, I don’t,” Damon admitted, “but the evidence that it
is
could have been cooked up by a biotech team with the necessary expertise just as easily as a fake VE tape. If whoever is behind the kidnapping really is convinced for some reason that Conrad Helier faked his own death, it would be only natural for him to hire a bioengineer with a similar background to repeat the trick. Ask yourself, Inspector Yamanaka—if you were in that position, who would
you
have hired to do the job?”

“I’m a policeman, Mr. Hart,” Yamanaka reminded him. “However difficult it may be, my job is to collect evidence and build cases. You, on the other hand, are a citizen. Your duty, however you might resent it, is to obey the law and give what assistance you can to my investigation. That VE pak was taken from a crime scene, which makes it evidence—and I’d be very annoyed if anyone tampered with it before handing it in.”

“If I can get the VE pak for you,” Damon said bluntly, “will you drop all the charges against Madoc and Diana?”

“That’s not my decision,” Yamanaka replied unyieldingly.

Damon gritted his teeth and paused for a few seconds, instructing himself to remain calm. “What else?” he asked. “What’s happened to heat things up?”

“We’ve found another body,” the inspector told him bleakly.

“Karol’s?” Damon asked, although he knew that was the lesser of the two probable evils.

“No—Silas Arnett’s. He was found in a body bag dumped in the middle of a road up in the Hollywood Hills. Police officers conducting a routine search of the neighborhood found a chair identical to that displayed in the first broadcast tape in a house nearby. There were bloodstains on some recently severed straps that had been used to bind a man’s wrists and ankles to the chair. There were several spy eyes in the walls of the room, all of them on short loop times. The tapes we’ve recovered show Arnett being shot in the chest while still confined. The man in the body bag died from exactly such a gunshot—without his internal technology, he had no effective defenses against such an injury.”

Damon was silent for a few moments, absorbing this news.

“Does the tape show the shooter?” he asked.

“Yes, but he’s unidentifiable. His suitskin had a face mask. He had a companion, similarly masked.”

“But you think they’re Eliminators—and you suspect that the VE pak left on the burned body will be a similar record of an execution.”

“The body bag was presumably placed in the road in order to draw attention to the house, and to the tape,” Yamanaka said. “That seems consonant with the hypothesis that the shooting was the work of Eliminators.”

Damon couldn’t be sure whether the careful wording was routine scrupulousness, or whether Yamanaka was laying down a red carpet for any alternative explanation Damon might have to offer. Damon had already laid the groundwork for a rival account by suggesting that the burned body Madoc had found wasn’t Nahal’s at all but merely some dummy tricked out to
seem
like Nakal’s, possibly designed by Nahal himself—but Silas Arnett’s body hadn’t been burned to a crisp.

We haven’t killed anyone
, the mirror man had said—but he had certainly exposed the people he had named to the danger of Eliminator attack. Now Karol’s boat had been blown up, and Silas Arnett had been shot. If Conrad Helier had faked his own death, perhaps he had faked those incidents too—but that
if
was looming larger by the minute. Nor was Silas the only one who had been exposed to possible Eliminator wrath by the mirror man’s stupid broadcasts. Damon was the only one alive who had been forthrightly condemned as an “enemy of mankind.”

There was still a possibility, Damon told himself, that this was all a game, all a matter of carefully contrived illusions piled up tit-for-tat—but if it weren’t, he could be in big trouble. The question was: what did he intend to do about it?

“Your people always seem to be one step behind, Mr. Yamanaka,” he observed, by way of making time to think.

“So it seems,” the inspector agreed. “I think it might help if you were to tell us
everything
you know, don’t you? Surely even you must see that the time has come to give us the VE pak.”

It was the “even you” that did it. Damon felt that he had troubles enough without insult being added to injury.

“I don’t have it,” he snapped. “I don’t have
anything
that you could count as evidence.”

Yamanaka’s image didn’t register any overt trace of disappointment or annoyance, but the lack of display had to be a matter of pride. Yamanaka still had one card up his sleeve, and he didn’t hesitate to play it in spite of its meager value. “Miss Caisson is
very
anxious to contact you, Mr. Hart,” he said. “I’m sure she’d be grateful if you’d return her calls.”

“Thanks for your concern,” Damon said drily. “I’ll do that. Please call me if you have any more news.” He broke the connection and immediately called the number Diana had inscribed on his answering machine in letters of fire that were only a little less clamorous than Interpol’s formal demand.

The LAPD’s switchboard shunted him into a VE very different from the one Hiru Yamanaka had employed: a pseudophotographic image in which Diana was seated in a jail cell behind a wall of virtual glass. Fortunately, she seemed more relieved than angry to see him. She hadn’t forgiven him anything, but she was desperate for contact with the outside world.

“I’ve just been talking to Yamanaka,” Damon said, by way of preemptive self-protection. “I told him to charge you and bail you if he wasn’t prepared simply to release you, but he won’t do it. He’s got dead bodies piling up all over the place, and he wants Madoc badly. He’ll be forced to let you go eventually, but you’ll have to be patient.”