Mappa Mundi (10 page)

But at the end of it she didn't feel clean. She felt sick. There were so many unknowns and sudden, nasty traps: he's lying, he's a plant, he's a double agent, a foreign agent, a test from the MoD, or he's telling the truth. But which one? And the physical fact of him had confused her more than she'd liked. Well, that wasn't strictly true. She'd liked that by far the best, which was unprofessional, stupid, and had already got her in trouble.

Composing herself, Natalie sent a message to the conference room explaining that she would be late by another ten minutes because of a Pad failure. In that time she ought to be able to see what this file was exactly. Although she'd read it in the airlock she'd been so distracted by him she wasn't sure.

With shaking hands she loaded it into her own Pad and started reading in earnest.

Dan's second lunch meeting was outside the Clinic, but not far away. It took place over a secure Pad link, and the lack of glamour in its location—a park bench—was more than made up for by the pay. Not that Dan was short of money now, but he knew it was going to take more than a measly few hundred thousand to get rid of Ray's interest in him during the foreseeable future. This job had the added bonus of being legit.

Shelagh Carter worked for the Defense Directorate as a watchdog, a person who kept an eye on Ministry business from within, making sure there were no unfortunate leaks or sudden departures of key people. Her job title itself was hazy and Dan didn't remember it, but
her credentials were impressive and the small good deeds that she asked him to do, keeping the country honest, made Dan feel better after his much less virtuous dealings with Ray Innis.

Carter opened the channel on the dot of two and issued her instructions. Dan's Pad accepted her files and transmitted his answers to the last set of enquiries she'd made: personnel movements, work hours logged, service records for the major equipment, dull admin stuff like that. She never asked him to do anything underhand, such as actual spying or recording of conversations, and he was grateful, because he probably would have done it and that would have crossed the line into Bad Dan mode again.

Her face, if it was hers, was calm. “Good work, Dan,” she said. “I'll be in touch. Usual time and place.”

No, it wasn't Shelagh Carter who had made him late, but the fact that he'd forgotten to get the sandwiches, and by the time he remembered the shop was all out and he had to walk another half a mile to find something. He ran back to the Clinic at full trot, head down, fringe hanging, out of breath and smacked full face into some engineer coming out of the revolving doors with a big metal flight case in his hands. The security guard had to get involved to pick up all the things that fell out of the case—and the egg and cress, which had to be scraped off the carpet and reinstalled between its slices of bread.

Another dilemma. Egg and cress was Natalie's sandwich. Dan's was cheese and pickle. Should he change them? Would she notice a few nylon fibres? No, she probably wouldn't. She had a stomach for two-day-old pizza and cold curry. Natalie could take it. She'd think the shop had done it.

When the sandwiches were all together again, like Humpty if he'd ever managed to get back on his wall, Dan met the bloke's eye and thought,
He looks familiar, wasn't he sitting outside the pub an hour ago?
But it couldn't have been. That guy was slick and this one was older, rougher, and tired. He gave Dan a weary
look that wished him heartily under a bus. However, when Dan apologized he said, “Hey, no problem. Take it easy next time,” and his voice was as darkly American and friendly as Dan had imagined.

He wondered if this were something to mention to Carter. Then he realized he was an hour behind schedule and started to run indoors again, the guard shouting at him to slow down. Well, what Shelagh didn't know wouldn't hurt her. He made a note to tell Natalie instead. In fact, if the guy was hanging around on business, Dan would be interested in meeting him again.

Natalie was in her office. She snatched the sandwich, unwrapped it and took a bite without taking her eyes from whatever she was working on. “La' fr'a mee'ing,” she said around it and pointed at him with an index finger. “You are a bas'ard. Fu' off an' do some wor'.”

“I'll see you at home time, then, sweetie,” he said. “Enjoy!”

Natalie. She was a brilliant mate. Dan was smiling from ear to ear as he swung himself out and down to the staff lounge for a coffee.

Jude dumped the engineering clothes, equipment, and ID immediately after he was sure he was clear of the Clinic and its crowd of security personnel. He checked out of the Hilton and moved to a guest house on Fulford Road. It was the kind of place where he felt like he was living in someone's home—small, fussy, and full of overdone feminine decoration—but it was very close to Wenlock Terrace, where he knew Natalie Armstrong lived with the same guy who'd run into him outside the Clinic. The risks of staying in town had increased enormously now that he was recorded by the Clinic AI security system, but he thought he should be okay for another twenty-four hours. His Pad, on the other hand, wasn't a good machine to use for calling White Horse; he knew it was tapped by at least one set of people back home. To call his half sister he had to find a public phone somewhere that wouldn't give anything away by filling the background with locational details.

He was thinking about this as he returned to York's minuscule downtown, trying to keep his mind from speculating on what Natalie had seen in the file. Instead, he thought about the way he'd got the message. Natalie Armstrong's hands on his head and that point-blank stare; the way they'd been able to communicate without speaking, the subaudible conversation their minds had been having across the black bandwidth of the iris…it made him walk faster, his heart accelerating.
He'd never had anything like that happen before. He wanted to know what it meant (although some piece of him knew that he already knew and just didn't want to admit it because he wasn't comfortable about it). And he'd sooner dwell on the curiosity of that than on the last piece of information that Natalie had given him about the scanner itself—which meant that there was something else White Horse had lied to him about.

The city was busy despite a light rain that seeped from the sky in condensing droplets, as though just over the hill an ocean was slowly rising to the boil and the town was immersed in its steam. Chinese and European tourists fought for space on the slippery cobbled streets of the oldest sections along the Shambles and the bizarrely named Whipmawhopmagate, where the local storekeepers were dressed for the thirteenth century to give “color.” Jude was caught on a dozen photographs and surveillance cameras before he reached the relatively unpopulated space of a modern building that supplied offices on short-term lets and tried the public phone there. He called his own apartment, willing his sister to be there, but all he got was the answering service. Her personal number zeroed him out with a Receiver Not Active signal that could mean anything from death to battery failure.

He had a feeling that she knew damn' well he was trying to call and didn't want to know. Now she'd got her investigation moving and her teeth well stuck into him she was only interested in seeing results, and even if he had gotten through she would have reamed him out over trying to question her methods. He slammed the handset back down in its cradle and cracked it. Even thinking about her pseudo-Marxist bullshit was enough. He didn't have to have the actual conversation because he knew how it would have gone:

HIM:
You stole that thing. Where did you get it?

HER:
I told you. I found it at Martha's store, in the back.

HIM:
That's bullshit.

HER:
What the hell does it matter anyway? You've got it and it has to be part of the trouble. Hard evidence. Just like you always sing on about. You can't get it for your stupid case against that Ivanov guy you've followed for five
years
, but I've got it and now all you can do is bitch your ass off.

HIM:
Just tell me the truth for once in your life. Where did it come from?

HER:
Do your job since you wanted it so much. When are you going to risk yourself for anything worthwhile? When are you going to take a chance? Scaredy cat. Do you think they're going to come and fall in your lap and confess?

HIM: You know I'll find out. Can't you make anything easy?

HER:
Easy. Easy. Hah! Your whole life is too easy!

WHACK! Burrrrrr…the handset cracks.

And in the heat of the arguing Jude wouldn't even have managed to tell her to get rid of the cursed thing any way she could before it saw her swallowed up into the prison system—or dead. She should know that it could. But he could see the stubborn look on her face, her contempt for danger and official ways and anything that said You Can't. He would bet she had it on her all the time, like the Polaroid of the burned house that he'd taken from the inside pocket of her jacket when she was in the shower—and that had told him she'd been lying, too, because there she was on his doorstep, hands still smutty with ash from thousands of miles away, hair five inches shorter and crispy at the ends,
and she'd never mentioned that there was no house on the res any more. Not until he asked.

Jude turned around and looked through the plate-glass doors of the office block out towards the river, which had swollen even more in the last few hours. Its sludgy quality had thinned and he could just see the table on the bank where he'd sat before, its legs partly submerged and the pub doors sandbagged shut behind it. His mind returned slowly to the problem of Ivanov, his long-term investigation that had been running before this came up.

Yuri Ivanov was a man who moved like that river, in currents unseen, his curious touch reaching out much further than seemed possible from one minute to the next. Ivanov was only one of his forms, the first in which Jude had encountered him. He had many other shapes and names; how many only the man himself could know, and uncovering them didn't just mean following simple paperwork trails of birth certificates, passports, photographs, licences, and addresses. His chameleon-like changes of identity were comprehensive—at least one intensive course of plastic surgery had transformed his features from their previous state into Ivanov's present appearance: thick, Mongoloid features and straight black Chinese hair. On its own such a thing would be enough to interest Jude in a suspect, but when you added in Ivanov's vast swathe of qualifications—scientific, philosophical, criminal—the man became a living enigma that demanded someone solve his puzzle. He also happened to work in exactly those fields that Jude also picked and winnowed: breakthrough technology, social adaptation, Perfection.

A woman in a raincoat came hurrying in to make a call. Jude left and turned at random onto another street.

Perfection hadn't really got a toehold in England yet, he thought, watching a colourful pod of umbrellas chase each other along the bridge just ahead of him. And he was glad. He liked this place, with its quiet, kooky corners, its tiny, unbalanced buildings, its sense of deep age and permanence, however illusory that might be.

Thinking of Ivanov made him aware that it was time to check in with Mary and see how their case was going in his absence. His enthusiasm was as damp as the sidewalk underfoot. He wasted ten minutes with a coffee from a Burger King, thinking it would remind him of home, but it tasted nothing like American and made him long for Washington's humidity and stifling summer heat. This abiding damp and chill in summer couldn't be right. The coffee tasted of muddy river water. The piece of him that had talked silently to Natalie Armstrong took it as a sign that the mission was as good as dead.

If he had any brains he'd leave right now on the next taxi to the airport, no looking back. It was inconceivable that he was going to get away with it. He shrugged his collar higher as it began to rain in slow, small drops, but he was thinking of Natalie Armstrong again and he knew that it was too late to go home.

At a café outside the city walls on some suburban road lined with dripping sycamores and verges thick with grass he made a coded Pad call and reached Mary at last.

He sat with his back to the window and mapped out the York scene, replacing it with footage of Seattle's Capitol Hill so it would seem he was where he claimed. On the screen Mary was tired, her coppery mane of hair looking faded in the sunlight as she stood in some anonymous early morning corner of an Orlando mall parking lot and confirmed, to his disgust, that their genetic sequencing lab had gone AWOL on them.

“Everything ripped out. They're long gone. The paperwork still links them in with the baby-fixing people at Fort Lauderdale but there's no hard evidence of Perfecting crime taking place. Unless I can find where they went and someone to talk, I think it's over.” She yawned and switched the Pad to her other hand.

“Can you ID them from a genetic forensics sweep?” Jude didn't hold out a lot of hope: the databases for national recognition were mostly put together from people already inside the penal system, not
ordinary citizens like science majors, and the machines the information was held on were notoriously hackable. Ivanov could delete what he wanted, given time.

“We're trying it but the place was cleaned out.” She shook her head and he imagined he could see the heat of the distant day bobbing in the coils of her hair. “No sign of him,” she added, knowing that he was going to ask her about Ivanov before he had to say anything.

Jude cut the call short with a few niceties. The fact of his lying made him unable to talk with her in a normal way, because they were friends. He hated the situation and its cheap, greasy feeling and he didn't want her to see any signs of tension in him, so he constructed a little fable about sailing on the Sound and heading into the Olympics for a few days to get some walking done, asked her how she was, and said goodbye with a smile on his face, remembering to make his eyes do the smiling, too.

Outside the rain eased and the sun began to come out. He drank a cup of English tea and felt the headache effects of his lunchtime beer roll across his forehead. He wanted to do something so badly instead of sitting around that he walked to the guest house and changed to go out for a run to watch the river's slow rise towards a spell of casual destruction.

The action was good, it felt like progress and it eased the crushing anxiety of the long wait for Natalie to call. He ran a long way, right out of town and into the countryside where another shower soaked him to the skin. Later on, drying off from a real shower in his bedroom, he attempted to reread the huge data files on the Ivanov case and within two minutes fell asleep on the bed, the Pad in his hand, opened to the gene sequencing notes, the logs, the times, the sightings…all the inconclusive details that had to add up to something. But what? What? And if there was no evidence in Orlando, then where and who and how?

Mary Delaney snapped off the call to Jude with nervous irritation and walked the last few yards to her car. She took a deep inhalation of the
air-conditioning when she turned on the engine and waited for the spec analysis of the call to come through from her Netwatcher. When it did she found herself chewing the ends of her hair in frustration. Not from Seattle at all, but the transmission had ended too soon to pin down. It was a fix, that background.

She stared out of the car window, thinking how generic everything looked these days and knew Jude had the smarts to do that for sure. But where was he? What was he doing?

She closed her eyes and prayed for one minute that it wasn't anything to do with Mappa Mundi. She prayed hard, with all her heart, but when she opened her eyes there was no relief, only the frontage of WalDrug and a kid eating a Popsicle, staring at the blacked-out windows of her Porsche in mesmerized delirium and staining its T-shirt with blue drips.

The icy air from the vents was starting to make her blouse feel like cold water on her skin. She turned the jet down and flicked over the Pad to send in her report to their boss in Washington—Conchita Perez, head of Special Sciences. Then she tapped in the code for Nothing to Report and sent it to her other boss, also in Washington, but in a very different environment.

It was a lie.

In fact, both messages were lies. The FBI report was nothing but what she had made up for Perez and Jude to read. It said that by the time she and her team had raided the lab in Orlando it had been cleaned out. There would be no more DNA resequencing to produce souped-up babies either with secondary sex characteristics straight out of Net porn or with brains tweaked for intelligence. The USA was back to production as usual, and all the chaos that Nature threw up, because that was better than planning ahead, and Perfection Law said so in spades. So Perez would be pleased at least with the lab's closure, even if Mary had failed to make an arrest. And her other boss, the secret one, back in the Pentagon, would give her a big, fat reward. All for lies.

Mary was used to lying and it had become merely tiresome to be inventive nowadays, instead of nerve-racking. Her hand on the big metal knob of the Porsche gearshift wasn't even breaking the mildest of sweats. She drove out of the lot and took the highway back in the direction she'd come, listening to the engine rev high and throaty, waking up the commuters.

The report contained elements of truth. The gene-sequence lab was cleaned out as well as she could manage, given the time, and now she had all the seized paperwork to go through and sift, making sure that any incriminating details never found their way into Jude's investigation. That was what made her foot start sinking to the floor. Lying to Jude.