Daylight Runner (16 page)

Vicky's eyes opened, crusted with sleep, and she saw her big sister looking down at her. She smiled weakly, and Cleo beamed back, hugging her gently and kissing her cheek. Vicky wrapped floppy arms around her in return. They both started crying, and then they laughed as Vicky put on a mock pout and said, “You broke my wrist, you cow.”

“I wouldn't have needed to if you didn't weigh as much as a tram,” Cleo retorted.

They giggled and hugged again, and their mother and father crowded around them. They all embraced and cried with relief, their bottled-up emotions flooding out now that the worst was over. When Cleo felt she had made enough of a fuss of her sister, she left her in their parents' capable hands and told them she was going to get some air.

It was hard to find any privacy in the hospital: the pale green corridors were packed with patients on trolleys, staff hurrying back and forth, worried relatives wandering aimlessly or sitting fretting. Cleo had heard rumors that there could be dozens dead, but nobody knew for sure—over a thousand had lived in the apartment block. She tried the roof first; it was still dark outside. But the rooftop had a crane pad, and the work of the ambulances was being supplemented by the cranes' emergency carriages, one of
which was sitting on the pad, its paramedic crew sipping hot tea as they took advantage of the lull. Cleo stepped back inside the stairwell and made her way to the floor below.

She found a window that opened onto a fire escape, looking out over a deserted alley. Climbing out onto it, she shivered as its denceramic grillwork brought back the fury of the fire. She sat with her knees up against her chest, braving the cold air so that she could finally have what she so desperately needed. She took the crumpled remains of the joint from her jacket pocket and lit it, drawing in the smoke with an audible gasp of relief—and then coughed painfully as it scoured her raw lungs.

Someone landed on the walkway with a muffled jolt, and she gave a start, dropping the joint. It fell through the grille beneath her, and she rolled onto her knees, pawing at it, but it was too late. She saw the little dot of fire drop through the walkway on the next floor before disappearing in a burst of sparks in the darkness.

“Goddamn it!” she said, then turned belatedly to see who had just lost her that last smoke. It was Sol. “You idiot! What the hell do you think you're doing, creeping up on me like that? You asshole!”

“Sorry,” Sol said breathlessly. “I was near the hospital, up on the roof over there, trying to find a way to talk to you. And then I saw you come out of this window….”

There was a figure standing in the shadows behind him, a hard-faced black man with a long mustache.

“Who's your friend?” she asked.

“This is Maslow, the guy I was telling you about,” Sol replied. He glanced down through the walkway's grille. “I know it's no consolation, but if you knew what that stuff does to your lungs and arteries—”

“Guess how much I give a damn!”

Sol sat down beside her, unsure how to say what he needed to say. He had to know what she had found out from Walden's widow about the crane accident, but he didn't want to sound as if he was just using her. And seeing her like this, without her cool pretensions, reminded him of the girl he used to train with when they were young. It had been one of those friendships that only occurred in a certain time and place, but now he felt that closeness again. Except this time she was a budding young woman with all the right curves and an in-your-face attitude he was finding more attractive all the time. He felt all the worse for getting her caught up in this.

“Is your family all right?” he asked tentatively. “Were any of them hurt?”

“My sister broke her wrist. Me and her nearly died.”

Sol nodded, stuck for something else to say. He never knew how to make small talk without sounding as if he was just making small talk.

“I'm glad you're okay,” he said. “This wasn't an accident, you know. It was sabotage: the Clockworkers.”

“I think…I know.” She looked up at him. “I saw one of them on the roof.”

She didn't think to ask Sol how he knew—it just seemed to fit in with his new occupation as wanted fugitive, and she was still recovering from her brush with death. A new suspicion was forming in her mind. What if her connection with him was the reason the Clockworkers had come to her building? Would they really do all that to get at her? She couldn't believe it. But why else would they cause the fire? There was nothing special about that building—there were a hundred others like it. It must just have been a coincidence. And yet the suspicion would not go away.

“You wouldn't believe what they do, Cleo,” Sol continued. “I mean, some people reckon they're a myth, and yet they're going around pulling this stuff all the time. Sabotage, assassinations, kidnapping—and you think all this is to keep the Machine running smoothly? Like hell it is! Do things seem to be running smoothly to you?
They're
the ones
messing it up
, Cleo! And I can't even figure out why. Why would anyone do that?”

Cleo shrugged. She was hardly listening. “You're here to find out what I picked up from Walden's widow, yeah?”

She looked around at him, and he saw the exhaustion on her face.

“Yeah. Sorry.”

Cleo shifted her aching body into a more comfortable
position and started telling Sol what she had learned from Helena Walden: about Francis Walden's investigations into accidents at Internal Climate, the company owned by Armand Ragnarsson; about how he claimed that accidents were going unreported, and people were being silenced; and about his move to the Schaeffer Corporation.

“She didn't say it out loud,” Cleo added finally, “but I think Helena reckons Walden was killed because he was going to blow the whistle on Internal Climate. People were getting hurt because the company didn't take safety seriously, and he wanted to do something about it.”

“The way things have been going lately, that would fit,” Sol muttered. “Vincent Schaeffer was supposed to be in that carriage, but he got called away at the last moment. The Schaeffer Corporation controls even more ventilation than Internal Climate. Ragnarsson could off Walden and nail his biggest competitor into the bargain.”

“But there's an investigation, right? Won't the police figure this out?”

“Some of the police
are
Clockworkers. I'd say they know how to hide a crime.”

Cleo gave a humorless chuckle, shaking her head at the scale of it all. Here they were still at school, and they were finding themselves up to their necks in murder and intrigue. She glanced up at Sol, seeing the same bemusement on his face.

“So what are you going to do now?”

Sol thought about what Maslow had said. He was digging too deep into this system of sabotage and death squads that lay beneath the civilized skin of the city; it was too big a risk. And yet he knew his father was caught up in it, and wherever Gregor was, he would be trying to dig himself out too. There seemed to be no way of finding his father without getting more involved in what was going on. As long as the Clockworkers operated freely in the city, his old life was over, anyway. Sol glanced up at Maslow, who still stood apart from them, leaning on the railing in the shadows beyond the window's light. What else was there for Sol to do?

“I think I want to talk to Armand Ragnarsson,” Sol said.

C
LEO WALKED SLOWLY
back through the hospital, lost in a daze. All around her, the aftermath of the fire could be seen and heard, and smelled. The burn unit was filled with people, the ward heavy with the stink of charred meat, disinfectant, and chemical salves. Patients moaned and screamed; children sobbed. There wasn't enough anesthetic or antibiotics. Medicine was always in short supply in Ash Harbor; the plants and minerals from which drugs were derived quickly passed into extinction as the city's overstretched hydroponic farms struggled to meet the demand for food. In the operating rooms, surgeons worked frantically to save lives and limbs; hurried skin grafts, stitched arteries, and amputations could be seen through the viewing windows. Surgery was being
carried out in the emergency rooms, sometimes even on gurneys in the corridors themselves.

Cleo descended some stairs to the ground floor and stopped as she entered the main waiting area. It was thronging with people who still had to be treated. The mayor, Isabella Haddad, was working her way through the crowd, flanked by two advisers. Tall, dark-eyed, and serene, she took people's hands, offering words of comfort, expressing her sympathy.

What are you going to do about this? Cleo found herself thinking. You stand there making your sympathetic noises. What are you going to
do
about this? She wanted to shriek at these people intruding on this tragedy, but she hadn't the stomach to face the charismatic mayor.

Cleo thought more and more about what had happened to her—to them all. For the last few years, she had believed herself to be a rebel, a voice of dissent against a society that forced young people into a box, condemning them to dreary lives of work and routine. She realized now that it was all talk, that it had all been about
her
; all she had wanted was the
image
of a righteous leader. It gave her music more credibility.

She hated herself for being so fatuous, so shallow.

Leaving the politicians behind, she walked on through to the emergency room. Muttered chatter and webscreen broadcasts melded with moans of pain and the beep and hum of medical equipment. Off to one
side, Ana Kiroa was standing near a bed where doctors and nurses were trying to defibrillate a dying boy. Cleo stared in dull disbelief, hearing the whine of the flat-line.

“Clear!” one of the doctors yelled as he held the pads to the boy's chest.

There was a thump, and the body went violently rigid, jolting on the trolley. The whine continued. Ana was covering her face with her hands. Cleo got a glimpse of the boy's face. It was Faisal Twomey. It couldn't be Faisal. There was another thump. The whine continued. Ana looked up and saw her, and hurried over.

“Cleo, you shouldn't be here. Where's your family?”

“That's not Faisal, right?” Cleo said, blinking.

“It is, Cleo. I'm sorry.” Ana seemed almost to be trying to comfort herself. “He breathed too much smoke. They did their best; they really did. Come on, let's get out of here.”

She went to take Cleo's elbow, but the girl did not budge, her entire body tensed like wire. Cleo turned to gaze at her, and Ana was struck by the intensity in her student's eyes. She knew that Cleo had always had a reactionary streak in her, a violent emotion that had yet to find an outlet.

“Somebody did this to us,” Cleo rasped from smoke-choked lungs. “I want to find out who it was. And why they did it.”

Ana's first urge was to try and placate the girl, take her back to her family and perhaps even get a doctor to sedate her so that she could sleep off the shock that was taking over her system. The fire had been an accident; that was all. No doubt there would be an “investigation” that would turn up nothing suspicious. But Ana could see something in Cleo's expression—a reflection of her own anger and frustration. She was thoroughly sick of the way their world seemed to be self-destructing, and she needed to do something about it.

“If somebody is responsible for this,” she told her student, “we need to find out who benefited. Somebody, somewhere, is going to make money out of this. Let's find out who.”

 

Sol sat in the passenger seat of a soon-to-be-stolen car, staring across the dimly lit street at the adscreen that dominated the wall of the elegantly tiered building opposite. The advert for cream cleanser had disappeared, to be replaced by the now-familiar blocky black type on its white background. Looming over them from the big screen, it read:

 

DO YOU KNOW ANYONE WHO HAS
“
DISAPPEARED
”?

WHAT QUESTIONS WERE THEY ASKING BEFORE IT HAPPENED
?

DO YOU CARE ENOUGH TO REMEMBER
?

 

Welcome to my life, Sol thought, snorting.

“What is all this?” He gestured at the screen in mild bemusement.

“Dunno.” Maslow grunted thoughtfully. “Some upstart assholes trying to buck the system, hopin' to get people riled up. I don't know. They haven't a hope. People are sheep; they don't give a damn as long as their bellies are full and they've got screens to watch, stuff to smoke and drink. If these guys keep running viruses like that, though, it won't be long before they're found. They'd better hope the police get them before my lot does.”

It was six o'clock in the morning, and they were in a shopping promenade bordering Meridian Gardens, the most affluent residential area in the city. Armand Ragnarsson's address was not listed on the web, but somehow Maslow was able to get access to the unlisted database. He had also found out that Ragnarsson lived alone, protected by at least two bodyguards at all times. Now, sitting in the driver's seat of the car, Maslow watched a little screen on a device the size of a wallet scroll down through a long series of numbers until it stopped at one. The car started, and he deactivated the device and pocketed it, pulling the car away from the curb and steering it toward the road that led down to Ragnarsson's plush home.

“I still think this is a bad idea,” he said to Sol. “We're exposing ourselves when we don't need to.”

“
I
need to,” Sol replied quietly. “Let's get on with it.”

He spoke to Maslow as little as possible now, uncomfortable with what the man was but willing to use him for as long as he could. When he was growing up, Sol had always loved action films that featured elite special forces and expert assassins who, obviously, fought heroically for a noble cause. He understood how Maslow could have been drawn into it. But Sol realized now that you became an expert only through practice and training, and the kinds of organizations that required people to be killed on a regular basis were unlikely to be very noble.

Particularly in a city that had no foreign enemies.

Soldiers followed orders; they didn't get to pick their causes. Maslow and the other Clockworkers became elite killers by letting themselves be used, and after a while, it probably didn't even matter to them what they were killing for. That was murder, plain and simple, and it seemed that Maslow was a natural. Sol wondered how much of that he'd been born with and how much was the result of hanging around with people who thought murder was just part of the job.

It was part of the reason why Sol still found it hard to trust him. That and the certainty he felt that Maslow had still not told him the whole truth about Tommy Hyung and his involvement with the daylighters. Sol found it hard to believe that Harley and the others could have planned to kill his father. They were a tough bunch, but he
just couldn't see them as killers. Not like Maslow and his old crowd.

Maslow was dressed in a dark red ISS uniform, one of a dozen costumes he had in a wardrobe in one of his hide-aways. Sol wondered if they were dead men's clothes. Probably not. The Clockworkers could no doubt get hold of whatever uniform or ID they needed. Maslow had given him a standard patrol officer's uniform that was too big for him, but the illusion would not have to last long—they just had to get into the house. Sol was sure that once Ragnarsson had a gun pointed in his face, he'd tell them everything they wanted to know.

The car glided through the streets, and Sol let his gaze wander over the lavish architecture. With such an emphasis on function in everything that was built in Ash Harbor, attractive but useless design features were a declaration of wealth. The buildings here had decorative details: casts of animals on the tops of pillars, columns framing the front doors, smoked glass. And there were dozens of other quirks and devices he had to struggle to remember the names of: crazy paving through gravel yards, fountains, coats of arms embossed on walls, floral designs sand-blasted onto glass.

It was the gardens that really struck him. He had rolled down the window to catch the odors, and now, as they sped past spacious houses, he could see grass.
Real
grass. And flowers, a bewildering array of sweet scents. The
kinds of things he had only ever seen in the public hydroponic gardens, with their security cameras and proximity alarms.

Ragnarsson's house was surrounded by a genuine stone wall fronted by an antique cast-iron gate hung on massive pillars. The gate was operated from the house by remote control. Maslow rolled down the window and leaned out, pressing the buzzer. A voice answered.

“Yes?”

“ISS to see Mr. Armand Ragnarsson,” Maslow barked, holding a fake identification card in front of the scanner. Sol wondered how hard those were to make.

“Do you have an appointment?” the voice asked officiously, after the scanner had verified the false ID as genuine. A remote camera zoomed in on the car.

“Open the gate!” Maslow snapped back.

There was a pause while the security guard pondered over whether he wanted to argue with the ISS. Then the gate started to swing open.

Maslow winked at Sol. “If you're going to bluff, you have to do it with attitude.”

The driveway was real gravel, and the gardens were professionally designed, the manicured lawn bordered with curving beds of flowers and rock gardens. Flowers, trees, and space said more about Ragnarsson's status than anything else. In Ash Harbor, wealth smelled of a garden in bloom. They drove up and stopped in front of the porch.

“Stay out of my way until I'm done with the security,” Maslow said, straightening his cap and the pair of dark sunglasses he was wearing—a popular look for menacing ISS officers.

A stout, square-shouldered man in a tracksuit answered the door—off his guard as he took in Maslow's uniform—and was hurled back down the hall when Maslow jammed an electrical stun gun against his chest. The former Clockworker stepped inside and pulled out his pistol, straddling the unconscious man and handcuffing his hands behind his back. A second bodyguard came striding briskly into the hall to investigate the noise, and Maslow shot him with the stun gun, the pins hitting his chest, the charge shooting out along the wires and sending his body into spasm. The man gasped and fell to the floor, twitching. His limp arms too were quickly cuffed.

Sol stood waiting in the hall as the Clockworker disappeared deeper into the huge house. Hands in his pockets, he gazed around at the luxuriant décor. Real wood furniture and wallpaper made from some kind of organic fabric. The floor was wood too. The second guard had hit his head against it when he fell, and blood was dripping from a cut above his ear. Sol wondered if it would leave a permanent stain on the wood.

He could see the attraction of this kind of work. Charging in to nail this hugely powerful businessman, this giant of industry. His influence and wealth couldn't protect
him now. All it had taken was two committed people who were willing to do what needed to be done.

Maslow's voice came from the end of the hall. “Sol!” he shouted.

Sol put on a pair of synth-fiber gloves and followed the sound. He was not prepared for the scene that awaited him.

Ragnarsson, a handsome man in his late forties, was in the large, well-equipped kitchen, where he had obviously been having breakfast. There was the smell of meat, and a bowl of fresh fruit sat on the table: apples and oranges, pears and grapes. Worth more than a week's wages for most people. A woman in a traditional maid's outfit lay unconscious and bound on the floor.

Ragnarsson was in good shape, with a deep tan, corded muscle in his arms, a six-pack stomach, and toned legs. Sol imagined that he would have been quite the sportsman in his youth. The expensive styling of his hair was still apparent despite the mess it was in now. Sol's stomach turned as he realized what Maslow was doing at his request. The industrialist was sitting on top of the stove as the Clockworker bound him in place with electrical cord. He perched there, trembling, wearing nothing but his underpants, the rest of his clothes lying in a heap on the floor. A blindfold covered his eyes, and he was looking around with his chin raised, trying fruitlessly to see under its edge. Maslow took off his cap and sun
glasses, leaving on his ever-present gloves, and stood in front of their captive.

“Who are you? What do you want?” Ragnarsson asked in a controlled voice. “Is it money? Just tell me what you want.”

“We have some questions for you,” Maslow told him. “Answer them and we'll leave here without any more trouble. If you don't answer our questions, or if we think you're lying…I turn on this stove. Do you understand?”

The man nodded; sweat was breaking out on his forehead, but otherwise he was keeping his composure. Sol glanced uneasily at Maslow and moved closer. This wasn't what they had talked about. He had thought that they'd just question Ragnarsson at gunpoint and get the answers that way. There had been no mention of cooking anybody. He fervently hoped that Maslow was just trying to scare the man, but by now he knew the Clockworker too well. Sol had started this, he would just have to make sure Maslow didn't finish it.