Tears in Rain (50 page)

Just then the policewoman and her colleague appeared at the door.

“Where did you get to? Your orders were to guard this room at all times,” thundered the inspector.

The officers stood there opening and closing their mouths, looking embarrassed.

“I...I felt dizzy and...we went to...” stammered the woman.

Lizard pointed his sleek, regulation plasma gun at them.

“Hand over your weapons right now. You’re under arrest.”

The pair of them, distraught and with hands trembling, meekly complied, and then Lizard handcuffed both of them to an old radiator out in the corridor. The inspector came back into the room and closed the door behind him, dejected.

“What do you think, Bruna? Are they just incompetent or corrupt? You can’t trust anyone one in this damn case.”

The man walked over to Habib, trying not to step on the brains strewn everywhere, and scrutinized the body.

“And you say it’s your gun?”

“Yes, he held it to my temple. I think he wanted it to look like suicide. I’m sure he’s wearing a dermosilicon glove so as not to leave any fingerprints.”

Lizard nodded in agreement.

“Probably. But how did he find out where you were?”

“I told the public defender to let him know.”

The inspector snorted angrily.

“Right. Well, I’ve called in a couple of reliable colleagues to come and protect you. They’ll be here any minute. Naturally, the examining magistrate and forensics will arrive too, and someone charged with taking away that pair of imbeciles I’ve left handcuffed out there. And undoubtedly some police bigwig or politician will also appear to protest. That’s a given. I’m going to see if I can find somewhere else to put you.”

Bruna looked at him transfixed, her expression totally transformed.

“Paul.”

“What’s up?”

“I’m wondering...why all this effort to kill me? They’ve already gotten what they wanted from me. Well, I didn’t release the gas, but they have made it look as if I’m guilty of Hericio’s murder. What do they gain by removing me from the scene now?”

“You can’t prove your innocence.”

“Yes, but why the rush to finish me off? Right now I can provide them with a lot of airtime and be very useful to them. I’ll appear everywhere as the rep assassin. But it looks like they’re desperate to liquidate me. Yesterday they sent that guy, and today it’s Habib himself, who I don’t think is a minor player in the game. They’re risking a lot to kill me. Why?”

Lizard rubbed his fleshy forehead.

“What do you think?”

“My son. The memory of my son. It was so real! And all that love and that pain.”

Bruna shivered.

“It still smarts inside. Listen, what if they used real memories as a model? Some memorists do that. I know mine did. That would certainly have been easier for them than inventing something sufficiently intense and believable. What if that child really existed? What if they’re afraid I can still remember something? I mean, what if they’re scared I can remember them?”

“And could you?” asked Lizard with interest. “The salt crystal has already dissolved.”

“But there are bits still left...tiny fragments of feeling, although they’re rapidly erasing themselves. Just as the memory of a dream is wiped out as the day progresses.”

“Well then, give it a go right now. Try. What do you need?”

“Quiet. Concentration. Maybe darkness would help.”

Luckily, the windows had venetian blinds, which Lizard lowered. The room was plunged into a cold semidarkness. They sat down at the work table, as far from the body as they could. With her back to Habib, Bruna leaned her elbows on the table, buried her face in her hands and tried to remember.

It was like descending into a cellar in the shadows. A chubby little hand. That was the first thing she saw. A plump baby hand with little dimples on the knuckles.

A sudden pain constricted her throat. Oh, that touching, uniquely beautiful hand of her son! That child for whom she was prepared to die and to kill!

The memories—broken, fragmented—kept arriving like the flotsam from a shipwreck that waves deposit on the shore. A crash of the sea, and the image of a child appeared, running after a ball, sweaty and happy, bubbles of foam. And now she was seeing Gummy in the hollow of his cot, waking up, his lips still puffy from sleep.

That child for whom she was prepared to die and to kill.

Pain was circling around the bottom of her brain like a shark.

Gummy singing, Gummy whimpering, not really wanting to cry. Houses and stairs, tree-lined avenues dappled with sunlight, the sound of the wind. The child smiling from someone’s arms. That smiling child was very still. And the person holding him in her lap was still as well. It was a photo. And the person holding the child was definitely a woman. To kill and to die. Bruna knew that woman. She was young and she was dressed in a different style, but she knew her without a shadow of doubt. The rep opened her eyes.

“It’s RoyRoy.”

A
fter Habib’s death, the revelations succeeded one another with devilish speed.
It’s like the final stages of a jigsaw puzzle
, thought Bruna,
when the few remaining pieces begin to fit in place at a dizzying pace as if they’re attracting one another, until the gap that’s left, the final unknown piece, is closed, finally revealing the entire design.

In Habib’s office they found a second computer that, although protected by a sophisticated security system, was easily accessed by the experts and revealed a mine of essential information, including the material used to create the threatening holograph sent to Chi, and an encoded list of contacts that they were meticulously analyzing. The anatomical-recognition program proved that the eye reflected in the butcher’s knife belonged to Habib himself. That it was his eye, as apparent as the eye of the Helix nebula, was an obvious conclusion that had, however, never occurred to Bruna. It was no doubt Habib who had provided Chi with the information about the first dead replicants and who had left the threatening ball in her office. It was Habib who suggested they should infiltrate the HSP, and who sent the chip to Nabokov so she’d go mad. That data chip was what he must have been looking for so desperately when he and Bruna were searching Chi’s apartment. He was always around, that damn Habib, but the detective didn’t see him.

One of the first names they were able to decode from the list of contacts turned out to be that of a second-rate racist bully who’d already had problems with the law over assaults and public indecency. The man was arrested at his house like a rat in a trap, and an hour later, he was confessing all that he knew—which wasn’t a lot, apart from the fact that the Democratic State of Cosmos also seemed to be connected somehow to the whole business. The police actually already knew about the connection, since their experts had been able to break into Habib’s computer only because his sophisticated security system came from Cosmos, and the system had already been broken earlier by Earthling spies.

And as for RoyRoy, Lizard himself led the operation that went to retrieve her from Yiannis’s house, but when they arrived, she wasn’t there. She had disappeared, leaving behind all her belongings, including a stunned and desolate archivist. Perhaps the billboard-lady had arranged that Habib would give her a coded call when he’d accomplished his mission and had decided to flee when the call didn’t come through. The central ID database spent hours analyzing some pictures Yiannis had taken of RoyRoy, and in the end it found that her real name was Olga Ainhó and she was a famous biochemist who had disappeared fifteen years earlier. An apartment in the Salamanca district had been rented using Ainhó’s ID tag, and in the apartment they found a small lab with the capacity to synthesize neurotoxins, as well as documents with various images, the majority of them recordings of scientific experiments. But there was also a close-up of Hericio’s evisceration with a spine-chilling audio of Ainhó explaining to her paralyzed victim why she was doing it to him.

Bruna had spent all the previous day, Tuesday, and that night in detention, but the avalanche of evidence ended up exonerating her. The duty magistrate had released her at 10:00 on Wednesday morning, and it was now 10:38 and she was having breakfast with Lizard in a café near the courts. The inspector had been waiting for her at the door of the courts when she walked out.

“When I recall the fuss Habib made about me not telling him where I was—ha! By that stage he already knew that I was at the circus. It was Yiannis who suggested I go there, and Yiannis was with RoyRoy. What a despicable fraud,” mumbled Bruna with her mouth full of a sticky bun.

“Lately we’ve been recording all the RRM communications. A security measure. I guess Habib was establishing an alibi when he called you,” Paul commented.

“Not just that! He also called me so that his henchman would be able to locate me inside the circus. The sound and light from the mobile led that character straight to me. What I can’t understand is why Habib was open to doing all this.”

“Money or power. Which ends up being the same thing. Those are always the basic reasons.”

“Do you think so? In this case, I’m not so sure. A rep activist collaborating in a supremacist plot targeting reps? And working for Cosmos, a power on whose territory technos are banned? I don’t see why he’d take part in a plan that might lead to his own extermination.”

Ever since the plot had begun to unravel, there had been a storm raging inside Bruna’s head. A flood of facts, churning and clashing and pairing up with one another in search of meaning. The rep needed to reinterpret and untangle what had happened. Now she realized, for example, that if the enemy always seemed to know of her movements, it was because the archivist was telling RoyRoy everything. Ainhó, that is. She felt a prick of resentment toward her garrulous friend, but it was immediately diluted with compassion. Poor Yiannis. He must be devastated. To discover that the woman with whom he had fallen in love was a monster capable of coldly disemboweling someone must be terrifying. Moreover, everyone knew that emotions inevitably affected the brain cells. That was why she didn’t want to fall in love again. She threw a discreet glance in Lizard’s direction, and he seemed stronger to her than ever. A wall of flesh and bones. A
man so big that he was blocking out her light. The inspector had cut everything on his plate—the fried eggs and the entire slice of ham-flavored soy—into small uniform pieces, and now he was rhythmically eating the little squares, leaving the egg yolks till last. He was like a child, an enormous child. A moist warmth flooded Bruna’s chest. The gooey softness of affection.

“Thanks for coming to get me this morning. It was very thoughtful.”

“Actually, I came to make you a semiofficial proposition,” grunted Paul.

Bruna choked on her bun. She leaned back in her chair feeling ridiculous. Whenever she let her emotions go, she ended up burned.
Four years, three months, and nine days.
She hastened to compose her features into a serious, professional, somewhat disdainful expression.

“Oh, a proposal. Excellent. What is it?”

“We’ve just found out that Olga Ainhó is a member of the diplomatic corps of the Embassy of Cosmos. Unbelievable, isn’t it? She’s never appeared publically in anything connected with the delegation, but she is accredited. And we think that’s where she’s taken refuge. I got the ambassador out of his bed, and he didn’t take it at all well. He denies that the woman has committed any crime, he talks of fake evidence and an orchestrated campaign, and says that Ainhó has full diplomatic immunity.”

“In other words, he’s admitted that she’s there.”

“In reality, no. Officially, the Cosmics categorically refuse to collaborate and the matter is turning into a sort of international incident. In short, the ambassador is an idiot, but it would seem that behind the scenes they’re trying to defuse the situation. They’ve called to tell us that the ministerial counselor has agreed to receive us. An informal meeting, they stressed. At his home. At 12:00 sharp.”

“Receive
us
?”

“I thought you might like to come along,” said Lizard.

His fleshy cheeks crowded together into an irresistible smile that lit up his entire face. Nothing remotely like his usual sarcastic, tight-lipped, disdainful sneer. The warmth of that radiant expression softened the rep again.

“You should smile more often,” she said in an unexpectedly hoarse and intimate tone.

Lizard closed up like a Venus flytrap. He swallowed the last piece of his egg, gulped down his coffee, and stood up.

“Shall we go?”

And Bruna again felt like a complete idiot.

The members of the Cosmos diplomatic delegation lived on the top floors of the embassy. The building was a huge, truncated, inverted pyramid, so the widest part was on top. However, while the first ten floors were glass and totally transparent, the top four floors were clad with huge blocks of stone and windowless. The result was disturbing. It looked as if, at any moment, the heavy stone mass was going to pulverize its glass base. Whereas the headquarters of the Labarians was a neo-Gothic and archaic building, this one was neofuturistic and subverted traditional values, perhaps to symbolize the social subversion the Cosmics espoused. Either way, both buildings were inhuman and oppressive. The section clad in stone was reserved as residences for the legation; the more powerful you were, the higher up the pyramid you lived. As the ministerial counselor was second in command, his residence, which he shared with two other high-ranking officials, was one floor from the top. The vast top floor, the biggest one, the one that was oppressively squashing all the other floors, housed the ambassador.
That relentless hierarchical architecture must also have a lot to do with life on Cosmos
, thought Bruna.