The Hunting (16 page)

‘No, it’s unsafe. The cliff is too soft. A police diver went down but he didn’t say anything. I mean, they got her body out. Hard to cover up something like that.’

‘We’re talking about the Fortress, son. Everyone, including the coroner can be bought.’ Marshall walked towards the door, picking up a long thin canister on the way and stashing it under his arm. ‘I seem to recall you made some coffee.’

Genie gave the phone back to the girl. ‘I’m sorry but Dad gets cranky if I don’t call, and I lost my phone.’

The girl just smiled. ‘Tell me about it. I think my ma tracks me on Google every place I go. I only have to get within five feet of a guy and she calls.’

‘It’s a Google world, girl.’ Genie smiled and rejoined Rian and Renée. Moucher sat by her feet and leaned in on her.

She felt happier for having called him, even if she didn’t have answers right away. A Harley slowly went by with a man and woman dressed in something approaching Elvis outfits. They were smiling and seemed real happy to be here.

‘What’s the plan, guys?’

Rian presented Renée like a magician’s assistant. ‘Renée here has a surefire plan to make us a fortune.’

Renée laughed. ‘We
are
going to make a fortune, girl. Let me show you this.’

Genie found herself staring at a red inflatable cushion with sparkles on it. Moucher barked and tried to get in on the act.

‘Well, you got Moucher sold,’ Genie told her. ‘But I’m not sure I get it.’

‘We just spent our last bucks on buying every last inflatable cushion in town. Ten cents each. Can you believe it? Warehouse closing down, going out of business. We were just walking and there’s this auction going on of everything they own and …’

‘Serious?’ Genie asked, her heart sinking. ‘All our money?’

‘One thousand and forty-two cushions to be precise,’ Renée said.

Genie sat down on the sidewalk and suddenly wanted to cry. Sometimes life got too much, y’know.

‘
R
adspan?’ Miller asked his dad when they got back outside with their coffees.

Marshall frowned. ‘That girl can get right into the Fortress psyche. She’s in deeper than I thought. Radspan was Dr Milan’s idea. Radial Spanning. Teleportation transmission tests to designated stations. Cost a fortune. No successes.’

‘But it caught you by surprise.’

‘Radspan was the original concept. Dr Milan developed his ideas back in the sixties when all that we do now was completely impossible.’

‘We’re talking “I’m from Mars, you’re an idiot, Dr Milan”.’

Marshall smiled. ‘You remember that? You only met him once back in nineteen ninety-one. You were just a kid.’

‘He nearly pulled my ears off and called me an idiot. He made an impression.’

Marshall was trying to pull off the lid of the canister. It came away finally and he up-ended it and pulled out a map, which he unfurled to show Miller.

‘Radspan. This is the ninety-six map. There may have been later additions. You are looking at half a billion dollars here. That was real money back then. Strindberg was one of the original investors. Put his dotcom money into it.’

Miller stared at what looked a lot like a subway train map of Canada with stations clearly outlined. Some still marked
Opening 2000
. It was clearly a totally impossible thing. No one needed a tunnel in the prairies.

‘What am I looking at, Dad?’

Marshall took a sip of his coffee, watching an eagle gracefully circling above their heads, scraping the tops of the fir trees.

‘If you were going to build a railroad, which would you build first – rail or stations?’

‘That’s one of those chicken and egg questions. But logic says rail, I guess.’

‘Not in Milan’s world. Take Radspan One. Which I might add is pretty much directly under here somewhere, about half a mile down.’

‘No way.’

‘See the tunnels on the map there? Goes all the way to Synchro. Miles of cables, enough space to walk upright and drive a small vehicle.’

‘That’s incredible.’

‘Cost a fortune. ‘

‘So Synchro is Radspan Two?’

‘No. Synchro station was never built. But others were. There was a problem with the water table along the way. This was around nineteen-ninety, maybe ninety-one. He’d already started on the other tunnel when he had a breakthrough in late ninety-four and he pretty much realized that he didn’t need the tunnels or the cables at all. He was trying to emulate CERN, the Swiss collider concept – you know, atom smashing – and needed speed. Speed is all in this business. Hell, the Hadron Collider only got up to a fraction below the speed of light in two-thousand-and-ten, so he was never going to do that with this half-assed thing shaped like a horseshoe. He was using super magnets to bend light. He was trying for supersymmetry well before he would be able to achieve it.’

Miller was impassive. Science had never really interested him, much to his father’s disappointment.

‘Anyway, I was on the other team working at the Fortress and going in a different direction by now and he was really resentful that funds were being diverted from Radspan to the Fortress. He came to me about heat problems he was having and the cables burning out and I put him on track with carbon fibre, which radically improved his speeds. Miles Thysen developed the magnetic boosters and Milan’s tunnels were completed at last. In ninety-six I’d say he was ahead and he’d installed some new super computers from Cray, the technical leaders at that time, and he was already testing inanimate objects. Some near misses too. He wanted to be first. Whoever was going to get there first would get all the Federal funding, y’see.

‘He was so sure it was going to work he commissioned Radspan Phase Two. The stations. The ones on the map there.’

‘Connected by tunnels?’

Marshall chuckled. ‘You think the government would fund underground tunnels clear across Canada? No, son, this is teleportation. His original idea for the tunnels was to get the atoms up to speed so he could smash them and direct the incredible force generated down the pipe to the transmission generators. The energy needed to get that up and running is huge. That’s what we have been up against from the beginning. Speed. He commissioned fifteen stations at set intervals close to either hydro or nuclear power sources. All built in total secret and powered up, ready to go at a moment’s notice.’

‘He was that sure?’

‘He was that sure. I saw some of the early trials. He had human test dummies made of Teflon and he must have destroyed hundreds. But each time they got a little further, a little closer. Science isn’t like on TV, it isn’t magic. It’s painful steps – tiny, tiny and very time-consuming steps.’

‘And you were doing the same?’

‘We were building at the Fortress and I was working on transmission stability. That’s my area, remember. He was the only one working on practical application at the time.’

‘That’s when Thysen disappeared? I remember something.’

‘He experimented with a mouse. It was completely against the rules then. Claimed he sent it to Radspan Five.’

‘And?’

‘The problem with sending a mouse is that there’s a lot of mice out there and how do you know for sure it’s yours. There’re DNA markers but he couldn’t find his mouse.

‘He disappeared. Never came back. It caused a huge scandal. As Milan said, anyone can make something disappear, including money. The finance people began to get panicky and were critical, calling it the world’s biggest mousetrap. Strindberg was smart, he’d sold out his share early, switched allegiance to the Fortress. He was advising the Premier at the time on science matters and told him Radspan was a dead end. The Premier killed the funding.’

‘And history repeats itself right now. Only Strindberg’s actually in charge.’

‘Like having an arsonist in charge of the fire department.’

‘So Radspan was forgotten?’

‘Shut down overnight and everyone fired. Some of the teams transferred over to the Fortress, but it was considered a total failure and left to rot. The technology was old.’

‘So why is Genie thinking about it?’

‘Good question. Hell, I’d forgotten all about it. After all it was shut down in ninety-eight, I think. That’s like ancient history to us now.’

‘OK but—’

‘OK nothing. The point is, why is she thinking about it? Why was she there? Her friends are all locked up in the Fortress again.’

‘I know one was taken to the hospital when she collapsed and put under Fortransco guard. But if she wants to set them free, what would be the point if they’re, all, y’know, in a vegetative state?’

Marshall pursed his lips. ‘She was quite insistent on having been in touch with the others. If she did, it means they aren’t brain-dead, Max. There’s probably a neural connection keeping them alive. Genie can tap into that. Her skills are remarkable. Someone should study her.’

‘I should think she’s had enough of being studied. Can you help them?’

‘What if she could get to them from the inside?’ Marshall suggested.

Miller shook his head and laughed. ‘You mean like
Hellboy
? She bursts in, machine guns blazing, and then what? She has to teleport each one of them out of there. They are
so
going to let her do that.’

‘Remember, up until recently you didn’t even believe teleportation would be ever possible. No, son. Genie’s smart. All those kids are maintained on around thirty thousand servers or even more. She can’t save them, not the ones on life-support. But what if she could transmit their DNA? What if she could find them, then flash forward them to a Radspan station where we could retrieve them? They’d arrive in a safe, secure environment, and from there they could break out.’

Miller blinked. ‘But that means there would be two of them!’

‘That’s the whole point. We’re transmitting DNA. There could be a way out of this if we had the power.’

Miller frowned. ‘But what about the kids lying there on life-support?’

Marshall looked away momentarily. ‘They’re already dead. I’m pretty sure of it. Whatever happened there – short-circuit, something – their bodies shut down. The fact that they all shut down at the same time means that they were trying something specific and it went very wrong.’

‘They killed them?’

‘Not deliberately. They were probably trying to control them. They wanted them back. Genie was terrified of this thing called Mosquito. I don’t know what it is exactly, but it’s most likely a short-wave electronic signal that affects specific brainwaves.’

‘But you’re suggesting we make copies. It’s not even cloning. They’d be copies. Would they even be the same kids? What about their memories?’

Marshall looked directly at his son. ‘Don’t you get it, son? They are already copies. You can’t teleport someone without full deconstruction. They are dead the moment they press the button.’

Miller whistled. ‘Do they know that? The kids, I mean, Genie an’ all?’

‘No. You gonna tell them?’

‘Not me.’

‘It’s the reason Fortransco is claiming them as their property. They know they’re copies.’

‘Copies with the same brains and memories?’

‘That’s the miracle, son. That’s the miracle.’

R
everend Schneider stared at the space that was supposed to be his yacht. He was incensed. He couldn’t believe they had let three kids and a damn dog sail away with his hundred-thousand-dollar yacht. Who the hell would believe he did Bible study classes on a yacht? That would be the day. This was his big secret hideaway and now Genie Magee had stolen it. It had to be her, although he had no positive description.

The question was: where the hell had they gone?

They hadn’t taken up any fuel, which meant they most likely didn’t have any money. He’d drawn a circle on the map for sixty ks, the maximum they’d probably go on half a tank – if they were lucky. (He discounted they would actually get under sail, but all bets were off if they did.) The real question was, did they go north or south?

They had tried hailing them on the radio, but got no answer. Tracking them via GPS was useless unless it was actually switched on.

One thing was sure, there was no report of them refuelling at Horseshoe Bay. The worst thing about all this was that he didn’t want the coastguard involved. He regretted even mentioning it. He didn’t want any publicity or police investigation. The yacht was not just a secret from all those who had given generously for the cause of missing children in Spurlake, but the taxman wasn’t aware of it either and there was no way he could write that one off on the church. He was grinding his teeth and felt his blood pressure rising. He stood there at the water’s edge, looking out beyond the Burrard Bridge and cursed Genie Magee. Again.

Strindberg stood on his dock, looking at the little yacht. It had obviously had some problems, but wasn’t seriously damaged. He’d heard there had been a terrific squall last night and he wouldn’t have gone out there for anything. Nevertheless he was more than just a little peeved it was moored here.

Furthermore, he couldn’t believe that Genie Magee had been in his home. Eaten breakfast there, with friends. It was like she was taunting him. He realized that he had been lucky that the housekeeper had recognized her from the picture in the gallery.

But that wasn’t the point. He felt invaded. There was supposed to be twenty-four-hour security. Where were they? They were
so
going to get theirs. This was a violation. Worse, she had been in the gallery. That was private. If word got out, if certain people knew he’d been collecting ‘samples’, it could be misunderstood. He didn’t let anyone into his private space – ever. No one would understand that was a record of scientific achievement. An archive of everything the Fortress did.

He was angry because this was getting out of hand now. How had a simple girl evaded all those people out to find her? At every sighting she had simply disappeared or got away. Wasn’t ten thousand dollars per head enough? Did he have to double it? Or do the job himself?

His houseman had driven them to Langdale. They could be anywhere now. Back in Vancouver or … He definitely didn’t want them in Vancouver.