Something Coming Through, page 8
part #1 of Something Coming Series
‘I only told them the truth,’ Chloe said.
It still sounded weak.
‘If there’s a problem, Helena will deal with it,’ Daniel said. ‘She’s on your side. We all are. Ada Morange is very pleased.’
‘Ram told me. I have some other news. About Fahad Chauhan—’
But Daniel wasn’t listening.
‘Ada suggested a press conference, but I have a better idea,’ he said. He was drinking tea from a big white mug with WORLD’S BEST DAD printed on it.
‘I really don’t want to have anything to do with the press,’ Chloe said.
‘This would be a one-on-one interview. One of my friends from the production company that did my series? He works for Channel Four now. He’ll give you the questions before it starts, and you can choose which ones to answer, let me handle the rest. It will be very friendly, very relaxed. It will be great PR,’ Daniel said enthusiastically, ‘and it will give us control of the story.’
Chloe thought of Neil. She thought of Richard Lyonds’s ex battling past cameras and shouting reporters. She said, ‘Will it get the press off my back?’
‘No doubt the bottom-feeders will try to dig up some dirt, but the rest will be happy to rerun footage of the Q&A. You aren’t the main story, Chloe. The crazy accountant is. But we can definitely make good use of this. Put out our side of the story. I’ve already talked to the press, of course. When you were arrested, and a brief statement after you told me you’d been released. But they need to hear you tell your story. You need to put it out there.’
‘Just a few questions.’
‘They’ll be gentle lobs over the net, I promise. All you have to do is pat them back.’ Daniel took a noisy slurp of tea, twinkled at Chloe over the top of his mug. ‘How are you holding up?’
‘I didn’t know what I was thinking when I did it,’ she admitted. ‘I’m trying to work out what I think about it now.’
‘And?’
‘I feel like a fraud.’
‘Far from it. You’re a hero. And that’s another thing we need to talk about. Richard Lyonds is probably a lone nut who blames the Jackaroo for everything that went wrong in his life. But there are plenty of people who agree with him, inside and outside the Human Decency League. So I think that we should find a place where you can lie low for a few days. Just in case.’
‘You’re saying what? That I might be a target because I tried to save the avatar?’
Daniel nodded, suddenly very serious.
‘Have there been actual threats?’
‘So far, no more than the usual garbage from people who think we are interfering in things man was not meant to know. But it’ll get worse before it gets better. You’re still required to appear before that committee, but after that I think we should find you a nice quiet place where you can wait out the fuss. Ada Morange has offered to fly you out of the country. Or there’s the bothy my family owns in Orkney—’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘It’s very cosy, very quiet.’
‘And if any crazies find out where I am, it’ll feature a re-enactment of Straw Dogs. I have a better idea,’ Chloe said. ‘You remember Fahad Chauhan, the kid who drew all those pictures? He and his little sister were hiding out in the DP camp where that breakout occurred. Before that, it turns out, they were living in Norfolk. Martham, this little town in the middle of the Flood.’
‘I don’t think this is the time to get into that again,’ Daniel said.
‘Hear me out and you’ll see how we can kill two birds with one stone. Three years ago, Fahad’s father went up and out, to Mangala. His ticket was paid for by a construction company, Sky Edge Holdings. He was acting as a consultant on a project to build a pharmaceutical plant. Still is, I guess, because he hasn’t come back.’
Neil had passed on that information from his friend in the Foreign Office, telling her that she should keep it to herself. It wasn’t exactly against the law, he’d said, but it was against procedure. Chloe had promised that she wouldn’t tell a soul, but this was kind of an emergency…
Daniel studied her for a moment, then smiled, showing most of his big white teeth. His smile always reminded her of a picture of Red Riding Hood’s wolf in the fairy-tale collection she’d been given one Christmas.
He said, ‘You think the father sent his kids a souvenir. Some kind of artefact. And you want to go look for it.’
‘I want to check out where they used to live,’ Chloe said. ‘It’ll get me out of London, away from all the fuss. And it’s in Norfolk, way out in the Flood. Who would expect to find me there?’
‘Did you think of this just now?’
‘I was going to ask you anyway. But you can see how the two things fit together. You want me to get out of London; I want to follow up on that breakout. Fahad’s father went up and out, but his mother might still be living in Martham. She might know where Fahad and his sister are. They might even have returned home. And there might be other artefacts. The father has been gone for three years. He might have sent more than one.’
‘Or this might just be a wild-goose chase.’
‘Eddie Ackroyd’s client thinks otherwise. And even if there is nothing to it, it’ll still get me away from media attention.’
Daniel studied her. ‘It really has hooked you, hasn’t it?’
‘I think it’s something real. And didn’t you hire me because I can tell real artefacts from fakes?’
She felt her heart beat while Daniel thought about that. She told herself that if he said no, fuck it, she’d go anyway.
At last, he said, ‘I’ll have to talk with Ada Morange’s people. And if I do let you go, it will have to be after the committee reconvenes. None of us are going anywhere until then.’
‘Okay.’
‘Also, I wouldn’t feel right if you went alone—’
Jen Lovell knocked on the frame of the open door. ‘There’s a problem,’ she said, and before she could explain more two men appeared behind her. One was flourishing a piece of paper as he shouldered past, telling Daniel that he was being served with a warrant that ordered him to surrender all fragments of the avatar at once.
The man with the warrant identified himself as Chief Inspector Adam Nevers, of the Met’s Alien Technology Investigation Squad, otherwise known as the Hazard Police. Like the Breakout Assessment Team, they dealt with possible and actual threats created by contact with the Jackaroo and Elder Culture artefacts. Disruption Theory had a fairly good working relationship with BAT, which monitored cults, sects, self-styled prophets, and crazes, manias and other behavioural changes that could be traced back to contact with artefacts, algorithms and eidolons, but the Hazard Police, which tracked down illicit imports and hazardous artefacts, was more belligerent and had sweeping search-and-seizure powers.
Daniel scanned the papers and said that he had never been in possession of the items in question. Adam Nevers said, ‘If you don’t hand them over or tell me where they are, Dr Rosenblaum, we will have to search the premises.’
‘I’m afraid I must plead commercial confidentiality.’
Chloe watched the two men standing up to each other, Daniel beginning to realise that he was outgunned but refusing to back down.
Nevers said, ‘Perhaps I should give you a moment to consult with your employers, sir. I’m sure they’ll advise you to do the right thing.’
‘I’m in charge here.’
‘But you answer to Dr Morange.’ Nevers pronounced it the right way, with a hard g. ‘Tell her people why I’m here, and what I’m looking for. We’ll wait outside.’
Inside the office, Jen and Daniel had a brief intense exchange, Daniel spreading his hands in a gesture of surrender, pulling out his phone. Outside, Chief Inspector Adam Nevers said to Chloe, ‘I saw what you did. Pretty cool, stepping up like that.’
He was an imposing guy in his early forties, dressed in a light brown summer-weight suit and a crisp white shirt and a gold tie with an impeccable Windsor knot. He nodded to his partner, a younger man with a mop of blond hair, who started to amble slowly around the big room. No doubt scanning everything in it with his spex and, Chloe was pretty sure, giving Nevers time to try to dig something useful from her.
She said, thinking of the best form of defence and all that, ‘Is it true that you lot report directly to the Human Decency League?’
‘As a matter of fact we came here to retrieve property that belongs to the Jackaroo. It isn’t a good idea to piss them off. They aren’t always as friendly as they like to make out. As I’m sure you know.’
The other policeman was standing in a corner of the workroom, spex glinting as he looked around.
Chloe said, ‘I thought the HDL set up the Hazard Police because they’re against all things alien. But you’re here to help the Jackaroo?’
‘We’re helping to protect people from meddling in things they’re not meant to know,’ Nevers said, with a nice little smile.
‘Like q-phones, construction coral, biomachines that clean up the sea and the air, easy travel to other planets…’
The two of them were sparring, having fun.
He said, ‘Do you enjoy your work, Ms Millar?’
‘If I didn’t, I’d be doing something else.’
‘And you get on with your colleagues.’
‘Why shouldn’t I?’
‘What about Dr Morange? Have you ever met her?’
‘Just once, for about thirty seconds.’
It had been a couple of years ago, soon after Chloe had joined Disruption Theory. They’d all been Eurostarred to Paris, a party held in a section of the catacombs. Vaults and passages done up with swags of blue material, video screens, big tropical plants, three different bars, a seafood buffet, fairground rides. It was impressive, but not a patch, apparently, on the Wagnerian debauches of the company’s heyday. Disruption Theory’s crew had huddled together, outnumbered by Karyotech Pharma’s teams of scientists and philosophers, lawyers and administrators, but Daniel had seemed completely at ease, glad-handing a group of investment managers, taking the arm of one of the chief scientists and walking away through a stand of tree ferns, deep in conversation. Later, he’d taken Chloe to meet their host. Ada Morange, who had suffered from an exotic variant of lymphoma for twenty years and required a hospital’s worth of advanced medical technology to keep her alive, sat in a carbon-fibre wheelchair within a bower of ferns and orchids. Chloe, slightly tipsy from three glasses of vintage champagne, wondered if she should curtsy when Daniel introduced her. The thin ravaged old woman, with her fierce gaze and cap of synthetic hair white as snow, had a queenly presence.
One of her assistants bent to explain who Chloe was; the entrepreneur fixed Chloe with her dark gaze, saying, ‘Daniel tells me that you have a talent for finding the strange and new.’
‘I spend a lot of time on the streets.’
‘One day something will come through that will amaze us all. Perhaps you will be the first to see it.’
‘Please enjoy our party,’ one of the assistants had said, before Chloe could think of a reply, and that was that, for the interview.
Nevers said, ‘She’s one of those people who think they can change history. I’d like to ask her what makes her think she has the right. By the way, how did you enjoy that little display in Dagenham?’
There it was.
Chloe thought of the two policewomen and the BAT officer, of Eddie Ackroyd. It wouldn’t surprise her in the least to discover that Eddie was feeding information to the feds.
She said, ‘I thought that the Hazard Police are trying to close down people who deal in illegal imports. Why would you be interested in a silly little breakout?’
‘Was that what it was?’
Chloe, with a sharp uptick of unease, saw the other policeman go into Ram’s tech suite. She said, ‘Sure. Just another snake cult.’
‘Conan the Barbarian,’ Adam Nevers said. ‘Great little film. Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Earl Jones. Arnie is searching for the man who killed his mother, finds what he thinks is a harmless cult. Except, as it turns out, it’s a lot more than that. You never know what a silly little cult might grow into, never know when one of their so-called breakouts might become a problem. Start infecting innocent people, spreading…The trouble with this Elder Culture stuff is that we don’t know what any of it really does. It’s completely outside our experience. We’re like a bunch of toddlers hitting an atom bomb with hammers.
‘I used to work in the drug squad. I saw some sights then I can’t forget. Shine isn’t too bad at first. Users become comatose, have vivid dreams. But those heavenly visions turn into terrible nightmares, real heart-stoppers, unless users up the dose. Soon, they have to take massive amounts just to maintain, and the residue destroys their circulatory systems. People lose arms, legs, they have strokes…And meq is much worse. Repetitive behaviour, full-blown psychotic attacks, self-harm, what users call wilding.
‘The first dead meqhead I saw had killed herself by banging her head against the floor until she fractured her skull, turned her brain to jelly. Her kid was in the next room. A four-year-old girl, watching TV. Too frightened to talk for more than six months afterwards. Some people say, well, that’s what happens if you use illegal drugs. But meq and shine are far worse than anything we had before the Jackaroo came. We can’t handle them. And what does it say about us,’ Nevers said, in a level, serious voice, holding Chloe’s gaze, ‘when just about the first thing we do when we reach other worlds is look for stuff to get us high? That when we find things that are a cross between animals and machines, all we can think to do with them is squirt extracts of their blood into our veins. That’s some sorry shit, right there.’
‘And that’s an impressive speech.’
Chloe was wondering if she was supposed to agree with him, to renounce her work right there and then.
‘You and I know it isn’t all shiny new toys, don’t we?’ Nevers said.
‘But the difference is, maybe, you see the worst in people, and I hope for something better.’
‘That we’ll find enlightenment, make the Jackaroo worlds into utopias, that kind of thing?’
‘Why not? Why measure us by the worst we do?’
‘Like the New Galactic Navy, for instance?’
‘That didn’t have anything to do with Elder Culture tech,’ Chloe said.
‘They killed themselves right after you talked to them. Can’t have been a nice feeling.’
‘It was six weeks later.’ She knew that it sounded defensive, knew that he knew it too, and felt a hot twist of anger. She’d been through talking therapy, afterwards, she’d put it behind her, and now Nevers and the select committee wanted to dig up the bodies and use them against her.
Nevers said, ‘You get involved with people who do something stupid, it isn’t your fault, but it stays with you. I’ve been there myself.’
‘I can’t really discuss it,’ Chloe said. ‘Not until after I’m called back to the select committee, anyway.’
‘And I’m not going to pry,’ Nevers said. ‘We’re just having a friendly chat. Sharing notes about our common interests.’
He asked her how she liked interviewing people, said that it must be different from chasing down Elder Culture artefacts and alien beasties. She said no, not really. In the artefact biz you have to know how to find leads, and that means talking to people, getting them to give up what they know.
She’d shadowed Frances Colley at first, watching her talk to all kinds of people about their crazy theories. Although most of them didn’t seem crazy. Serious and intense, but not bug-eyed gaga. They were functional. They held down jobs. They were mostly of above-average intelligence, many of them professionals. Teachers, IT technicians, even a policeman, trying to make sense of the changing world by what Frances called dangerous simplifications. Chloe had learned from Frances how to maintain a non-judgemental attitude, how to let people explain their ideas in their own words, without leading them.
She was telling Adam Nevers about her first solo interview when Jen asked him if he and his colleague would like to join a phone conference with someone from Ada Morange’s research lab. Chloe drifted across the workspace, ducked into the tech suite. Ram said it was all good, that the policeman had just looked around, hadn’t touched anything or asked him about the breakout or the kid’s pictures.
‘He was scanning the shit on my workbench. The so-called eidolon detector Frances brought in the other day. I told him if he could make sense of it he could get a job here any time.’
Chloe felt a little better, but then saw, lying on the tray of the big archival scanner, Mr Archer’s flyer.
10. Do The Right Thing
Mangala | 25 July
As they drove back to the UN building, Skip at the wheel, Vic explained why they’d caught a break, how the whodunnit could be rolled up into Alain Boudin’s ongoing investigation of the ray-gun murders.
‘They were all drug-related. And Alain knows who did them. Cal McBride. He calls himself a businessman, but deals in meq. Runs a little gang of hooligans who trap biochines, extract the precursor from their blood, cook it, and sell the resulting product. We’ll show Dr Ngu’s report to Alain and point out that she concludes the cause of death is identical to his cases. And he’ll have to eat it. How about that? I’m beginning to think you aren’t such bad luck to have around after all.’
Skip didn’t look particularly grateful, saying, ‘So why isn’t this guy in prison? I mean, I guess he can’t be, if you think he did Redway.’
‘He was in prison, as a matter of fact, but not for the murders. Alain was putting the case together when McBride went down for something else. Some kind of sting run by drug enforcement. Alain and the prosecutor tried to get him to agree to add the murders to the other charges, time to be served concurrently, but McBride’s lawyer wouldn’t have any of it. McBride went to jail and the murder cases went cold. But if he can be put in the frame for this one, he’ll fall for all the rest, too.’
