Christopher Brookmyre (11 page)

It had just been a matter of back-up, nothing more underhand, and nothing he hadn't anticipated anyway.

'I've no way of knowing whether you've copied these files and you've no way of proving you haven't,' he said. 'But if you do have copies, I'd advise you to erase them right away and to do so without looking at them. What's on them won't mean much to you anyway, but as I always say, what you don't know, you can't be tortured to reveal.'

She hadn't examined them, not even the DivX audio-visual files, not having needed any dire warnings to reason that it was best for her own protection to be only the courier. She was paranoid enough about saying something that would give her away to Bett, a danger that would be greatly exacerbated by a burden of knowledge she wasn't supposed to have. One wrong word - or rather one informed word - and she might have a lot of explaining to do. Nor had she felt remotely comfortable about storing this stuff on her hard drive at home, despite the data being re-encrypted, the file-extensions altered to disguise their nature and the whole cache buried somewhere so deep in the hierarchy that nobody would ever stumble across them unless they really knew what they were doing. Erasing the files seemed like the most logical and sensible thing to do because, once they were gone, so was the evidence of what she'd done, meaning she could draw a line under the whole thing. However, logic and sense were not enough to overcome Lex's instinct and compulsion: when it came to data, she only erased what she was sure she'd never need again, which had thus far included only mislabelled MP3s and emails offering to make her penis twice as long. For Christ's sake, she still had a CD up on a shelf, full of save-game files so she could pick up where she left off if she ever felt like reinstalling
Doom II
. There was no way she was trashing the Marledoq files for the sake of most probably only fleeting peace of mind. There was a compromise: if she wouldn't be remotely comfortable storing the files locally, then she would be comfortable storing the files remotely. She copied them to an FTP server and committed its address to memory, before wiping all trace of the server and the Marledoq files from her system. After that they were out of sight and increasingly out of mind. Until Bett rang the doorbell.

'Grab what you need - absolute basics and essentials,' he said, once she'd sufficiently recovered from her shock to step aside and let him stride through the door into her hall. 'Something's come up, time-sensitive. Rebekah's prepping the Little Prince.'

'Do I need overnight stuff? I mean, like, how long?' she managed to mumble.

'Just put on something you didn't sleep in and bring whatever brain capacity isn't currently online, which doesn't appear to be much. Come on.'

'I'll be right there,' she said, going to the bedroom to change her underwear and pull on a fresh T-shirt and some jeans. She was indeed still wearing what she'd slept in last night, or fairer to say she'd slept for a while in what she was wearing when she started work. 'I just need a second,' she called out. 'I didn't know you were coming. Why didn't you page me?'

'I did,' he replied, with testily over-pronounced patience. 'Twice. After that, I had ascertained you were likely to be Glasgow Coma Scale four in front of that monitor and was on the verge of calling Armand instead, but as you were the first person I thought of when this thing came up, I set off in the hope of having greater success via your doorbell. For your information, you had approximately twenty more seconds before I kicked the door in and dragged you physically away from the computer.'

'Sorry, sir. It was the Lisbon project. I figured out a way to get beyond this impasse between--'

'Relevance suspended. Get your laptop. We're going back to Deimos.'

That last word echoed around Lex's head as she descended the stairs and followed Bett out to the street, where his Porsche was waiting. She'd no idea what this was about yet, and no rational reason, therefore, to make any assumptions, but merely hearing the name again was enough to unsettle her. Marledoq hadn't gone away. She may have cached the evidence and covered her connection to it, but there was no way of knowing what might have been set in motion when she handed over those files.

Bett's other remarks did little to quell her unease, and she was wary of how they piqued her curiosity.
You were the first person I thought of when this thing
came up.
Why, she wondered, though her desire to vocalise this question was tempered by the returning fear that in doing so she might give something away. Would it sound strangely defensive for her to ask this, or would a lack of curiosity be more suspicious?

She wasn't cut out for bare-faced deceit. Stealth and subterfuge, sure thing, but not this. Trying to remember what ought to be natural, what she should or shouldn't appear to know, was never something she'd enjoyed much of a facility for. Not offline, anyway.

Happily, Bett saved her from making the decision; less happily, his words did anything but allay her anxieties.

'We're not going back to Marledoq itself,' he explained, pulling away on to the quiet, narrow street, 'but to Chassignan, where a lot of the workers live. However, the job should nonetheless provide you with an opportunity to redeem your little lapse there in December.'

'Yes, sir,' she said, as neutrally as her acting talents would allow, then remained silent, not because she reasoned it the best policy, but because she'd be struggling to keep the tremble from her voice if she said anything else. This was one occasion when it was definitely the right stance to sound like she knew what he was referring to, even though she didn't. If by her lapse he meant her spot of privateering, then it was wisest to play it straight and thus play it down. 'Oh yes, that, sir. I was wondering when you'd bring it up.' But realistically, he wouldn't be this calm if that was what he was talking about. Not unless he was being truly, dispassionately sadistic, a thought too frightening to contemplate. Her stilted answer precluded finding out what other lapse he could mean, but to do else would alert him that there was more than one lapse to consider; or, almost as suicidal, suggest she couldn't immediately think of any flaw in her performance that she needed to make up for.

They arrived in Chassignan a few hours later, Rebekah on air-chauffeur duty and evidently not much else given that Bett had begun briefing Lex in the passenger cabin and thus excluded their pilot from the discussion. Lex lapped up the information, sparse as it turned out to be, because every detail was further reassurance that Bett's agenda was something other than that which she feared.

'One of their staff has gone missing,' he said. 'And not the janitor, as I'm sure you can guess.'

Bett told her the name and she nodded, disguising the fact that it meant nothing to her. This in itself was not significant. Names were seldom the thing that stuck about people Lex met; stories, yeah, mannerisms, sure, hair, relative height. Not names. Everybody had one. Online handles were a different story, because at first they were all you had to remember someone by, but out in the Big Room, other aspects usually proved more memorable. In this case, then, it was no surprise she was drawing a blank. She'd only been to Marledoq for less than two hours three months ago, and as her principal interaction with most employees had been shooting them with tranquilliser darts, none of them had much time to make an impression, far less tell her their names. Except one. Ah. And now she had it: not just who Bett was talking about, but what her 'lapse' had been. The feeling of relief - that he meant the labgeek who'd got the drop on her - lasted for roughly the time it took to remember why the guy had been able to catch her off guard.

'He's in Research and Development, presumably working on something rather important. In my experience, there are few companies sufficiently concerned about employee welfare as to bring in professional help when one of their wage-slaves takes an unannounced mental-health day, and weapons manufacturers would be well down that list. If he was replaceable, they'd already be hiring.'

'So how missing is missing? Has he been gone long?'

'Details are sketchy, and I wouldn't expect them to get much clearer any time soon. What you'll have to keep in mind throughout this business is that we are dealing with the arms industry. These people are secretive and disin-genuous when they're asking you to pass the milk over breakfast. Just because they need our help and they're paying us doesn't mean they'll actually tell us what we need to know in order to get the job done.'

'And why do they need us to get the job done? I'm guessing they don't want the police involved--'

'Very good, you're learning.'

'But this isn't exactly our speciality either.'

'Quite. The police won't get involved in a missing-person case unless there's firm evidence of criminal activity, and if there is firm evidence of criminal activity, you can be damn sure Industries Deimos won't want the police getting involved. They came to us because we are a known quantity. We have a relationship with them and they trust us. Two seconds to identify the error in that statement.'

'Arms companies trust no one.'

'Correct. So in this context, by trust I mean they believe they can control our involvement and remunerate us sufficiently to guarantee our discretion after the fact.'

'And would the cache of gizmos we stole from them in December for Som to play around with constitute a down payment on this remuneration?'

'Not as far as Deimos are aware. The loss of such items merely highlighted the prevalence and ease of pilfering from the facility under such lax security conditions.'

Lex blanked out the more paranoid interpretations of this remark.

'I guess they wouldn't have called if they knew otherwise,' she said, thinking of the true extent of that night's theft.

'Oh, they might, they might. In the grand scheme, quite probably. If they needed us enough, they wouldn't let something as trivial as that get in the way. And they do need us. However, the main reason they've come to us pertains to the main thing we need to know and the last thing they're going to tell us.'

'Which would be what?'

'Whatever they're afraid of. Locating a missing person is, as you said, not our speciality. So I'd be surprised if Deimos haven't also engaged the services of others whose forte it most certainly is; freelance investigators, maybe the odd cop who's on backhanders. But I would predict that tracking down the missing scientist will prove less than half the battle. They came to us because they suspect that even once located, their quarry won't be easily retrieved. And retrieving what is guarded and hidden, my dear Alexis, most definitely
is
our speciality.'

They landed in a field outside of the village, and were met by Nicholas Willis, who'd been waiting for them by a large silver Mercedes. Willis was a tall, gaunt, middle-aged guy, bald of pate with trimmed patches of white hair above his ears. He was dressed in a suit and a greatcoat, but Lex pictured him wearing a cravat and frilly cuffs on his days off. He looked like 'Old Money', as her monetarily preoccupied (and not a little snobbish) grandmother would have approvingly observed.

Rebekah killed the engines but stayed with the helicopter while Lex followed Bett to the car. Bett got into the passenger seat, Willis chivalrously opening the rear driver's-side door for Lex. Bett and Willis exchanged pleasantries but avoided the matter in hand, like they didn't want to prejudice the experiment. Willis would have already told Bett all he could, or all he was prepared to, leastways, so there was nothing much to add prior to seeing the apartment. They spoke in English, Willis sounding even more Old Money than he looked.

Some people's accents altered in response to certain others': hardening and running to the colloquial, softening to accommodate an unaccustomed ear, stiffening in formality. Sometimes it was a relaxation, other times a courtesy; it could be a posture or a statement, and it could be entirely subconscious. Bett's accent did not alter one micro-nuance. This at least provided some suggestion that English wasn't his first language, but no further clues to his provenance. Chalk another one up to Mr Impervious.

The journey took less than three minutes. Chassignan was a pleasant but mousy little place, not so much sleepy as in chronic stasis. A small gas station was the only immediate exemplar of twentieth-century construction on the tree-lined main street, otherwise flanked by tall, well-maintained and uniformly shuttered apartment buildings. Lex's own place dated from the early nineteenth century, and these looked of a similar period or older. Closer examination of a few shop windows broke the fairy tale spell: recent DVD posters in the tabac, Microsloth and Macintrash logos looking out through the glass of an internet cafe. They had broadband ISPs and they had Vin Diesel flicks, so the village knew there was good progress and bad progress, but she couldn't imagine much had really changed around here in a couple of centuries. Had to be an abduction, she thought, sarcastically. How could anybody leave all this?

Fleming's apartment was one street back from the main drag. It was on the fourth floor of five (or the
troisieme etage
, the way the Europeans counted it), up a bright and airy stairwell with broad stone steps and wide, solid landings. Willis led the way on long, spindly legs, the hard leather soles of his shoes tapping loudly on the stone with each step. They looked and sounded expensive; the gait and footwear of a man unafraid to announce his approach. Lex glanced at her scuffed training shoes, their impacts dampened almost apolo-getically by chunky man-made grips. There was a good reason people called them sneakers.

Bett walked at the rear on Doc Marten patent Airware. The soles cushioned his steps, but his frame carried enough muscle for his footfalls to reverberate with a formidable sense of presence she could feel as well as hear. He was looking around as he ascended, scanning, analysing, evaluating, filing. Lex knew she could look in the same places and see no more than a staircase, which made her wonder what use Bett expected her to be when they reached the flat.