Great North Road (47 page)

“I’ll take them in this morning,” Jacinta said. “If you can collect them tonight. They’ve both got clubs, so it’ll be six o’clock.”

“Sure.”

Their hands finger-played again. “I know you like to get in early after a weekend.”

“Thank you.” He grinned.

“Urgh,” Will said, his nose wrinkled as he gave their hands a dismayed stare. “What is wrong with you two?”

“Nothing, everything is fully functional, actually,” Sid said. He smirked at Jacinta, who started giggling.

Will gave his sister a perplexed glance, then shook his head dismissively and scooped up some more porridge.

Sid and Jacinta exchanged one last glance. He knew they wouldn’t be able to get away with that kind of behavior in front of the kids for much longer. That, moving house, the case—however it ended—it was definitely the end of an era. The world had that feel to it these days, as if he was marking time. He suspected it was the eternity of the zone theater simulation he had to return to day after day that was conjuring up the sensation.
Aye, well, only 109 of the little bastards left now.
Today they’d reach the halfway point. Somehow he knew he wasn’t going to convince the team it was all downhill from now on.

Sid let the Toyota’s auto make the drive to the Market Street station. It hadn’t snowed for five days, and the roads were reasonably clear, allowing traffic to flow as it always did when the majority were on auto. A heatless low sun shone brightly out of a clear sky, glinting off the ice that gripped the buildings.

He let the official police overnights roll down his grid, keeping current with how the city had behaved over the weekend. As badly as usual by the look of things. Assaults, drunken brawls, burglaries, two arson burnouts, three murders, a medium-sized tox bust at a club, a whole column of car smashes from faulty autos, drunk manual drivers (
why do they do that still?
), and not enough grit on the roads.

As the Toyota dipped down into the station’s underground car park Sid frowned and asked his e-i to bring up the file on one of the murders. The name was vaguely familiar. When the file started to expand he wished he could close it all down again. Jolwel Kavane had been found on the Heaton GSW site. Actually a passing agency patrol car had seen him at four o’clock in the morning. It wasn’t difficult. Someone had doused him in bioil and set it alight.

When Sid got up to Office3 he used the secure net to run a check. Jolwel Kavane had been mentioned in the information Hayfa Fullerton had sent down from her task force. He was a longtime police informer who was due to be contacted by the task force.

Hayfa Fullerton wasn’t at all pleased to see him when he stepped out of the lift on the fifth floor. She never said a word as they walked down the corridor to her office. Sid took a guess that she hadn’t been up to see O’Rouke yet. The murder of a police informant was going to bring down a pile of grief as well as a formal investigation.

“So what happened?” he asked.

“You tell me. Everything was going along fine until we shared our intelligence with you.”

“No. Don’t even try that one. I accessed the file. Kavane was one of your actives on this. You were working him.”

“Maybe. We’ll never know now, will we?”

“So do you handle the murder investigation, or does that get kicked downstairs?”

“Downstairs. I don’t have time and money to waste on crap like this.”

“Crap like this?” Sid snarled. “He was burned to death, man. It doesn’t get any worse.”

“That’s the point. It’s how the gangs deal with snitches. That’s why they do it in public, too, not just bump them off in some cellar where nobody will ever find them. It’s a warning to everyone else. One you don’t ignore. All our contacts will be diving for cover today. Whatever the hell was going down, we won’t find out about it until after, if then. This is over now, do you understand? We blew it.”

“Ah, crap on it, man.”

“Still no taxi, huh?”

“Still no taxi.”

“Okay, look, we’re both going to get our arses kicked on this. If you find the taxi, let me know.”

“Why?” Sid asked suspiciously.

“You said it, these two are probably connected. Find the taxi, see who gets in and out with the body, and I’ll run them through our AI. We both know they’re gang members, and we have hundreds of names, confirmed and suspected. If anyone can identify them for you, it’ll be my task force.”

He didn’t have to consider the deal for long. “Okay. I’ll keep you in the loop.”

The message came through at eleven o’clock, issued from O’Rouke’s office. He was to report to the senior briefing room on the sixth floor in ten minutes. Sid thought he was getting hauled up before O’Rouke for a bollocking; then he noticed who else was included on the message: every detective above grade four in the station.

He shared the lift up with three of them, all exchanging puzzled glances. They trooped into the briefing room and waited until O’Rouke came in. He was flanked by Jenson San and another man Sid didn’t recognize, but he wore the kind of stiff attitude and dark suit that nailed him as a senior bureaucrat—manipulative, negative, self-serving.

“This is a GE-wide interagency alert,” O’Rouke said. “And is classified Global Restriction.”

Sid was icy alert now.
Another Global Restriction? Crap on that.

“Mr. Scrupsis is from the GE Bureau of Alien Affairs, he’ll explain what’s going on.”

The bureaucrat stepped forward. “Thank you, Chief Constable. This is basically a missing persons alert, and I’ll explain the importance of it in a moment. We are issuing this to every local and national law enforcement agency in the GE, and our equivalent colleagues are doing the same all over Earth. As of last Friday a Professor Sebastian Umbreit and his family—his wife and two girls, aged ten and seven—have gone missing. They live in Switzerland just outside Geneva, and the alarm was raised by work colleagues late last Friday. The local police investigated and found no sign of a struggle. As far as we can determine, Mrs. Umbreit picked the children up from school as normal, at sixteen hundred hours on Thursday, and returned home. Local traffic records confirm this. Professor Umbreit left the institute at eighteen seventeen that evening, and also drove home without incident. Both cars were in the garage when the police arrived. We have not yet determined the exact time or method of abduction, but it is clearly a very professional operation.”

Sid was glancing cautiously around the room to try to see Hayfa Fullerton, and what her reaction to all this was. Surely this couldn’t be the big operation the gangs were mounting?

“As to the reason for the high level of the alert,” Mr. Scrupsis continued, “all I can tell you is that Professor Umbreit works for the Swiss National Nuclear Research Agency. His knowledge could be extremely dangerous in the wrong hands. So, his profile will be loaded into the civic AIs, which will scan every surveillance system for him; in addition you will be issued a basic file on him, which you are to pass on to every member of your team. His field of expertise must not be revealed under any circumstances, not to them, or friends, or family. I hope this is understood.” He stared around the room for emphasis, meeting as many gazes as he could. “Very well, thank you for your cooperation.”

“Stay behind for a moment,” Jenson San said quietly to Sid as everyone started to leave.

Sid waited where he was until the room cleared—even Jenson San bailed, clearly glad not to be a part of the smaller meeting. The blue seal came on around the door, and the windows turned silver. O’Rouke stayed up on the small rostrum, directing an inscrutable stare at Sid. For once his face had lost its ruddy flush, not that Sid could detect any nervousness.

“So is there a connection?” Sid asked.

“To your case?” Scrupsis said. “We don’t know, obviously. But this is the second major trans-stellar criminal incident in five weeks—actually in twenty years. That’s pushing it for a coincidence.”

“What was Umbreit’s specialty?”

“He is head of a D-bomb design team. You know what a D-bomb is, don’t you?”

“Oh crap on it,” Sid grunted in complete dismay. “Yeah, I know; it’s the nuke they fire into a Zanthswarm.”

“To be specific, it’s the nuke they fire into the spacetime rift that the Zanth use. It distorts the rift at a quantum level, and makes it useless—for a while anyway. The Zanth adapt to everything we throw at them, that’s why the designs have to be constantly improved. As a rule of thumb, what worked last time won’t work next time.”

“Aye. Look, man, I can see what a huge deal this is, but really I don’t figure a connection with my case.”

“What do you think your case is, Detective?”

“Find the alien who murdered the 2North.”

“And you believe that?”

Which wasn’t a question Sid had any intention of answering. “It’s a very unusual case, and that’s why it has the resources it does.”

“Good answer. If there are aliens running around Earth, then they might well be trying to acquire our advanced weapons technology. Speaking for myself and my department, I believe that to be a pile of crap. This is vile corporate maneuvering, conducted on the grandest scale, and we intend to expose it for what it is.”

Sid turned to O’Rouke as if he were appealing to a priest. “So what do you want me to do?”

“Continue exactly as before,” Scrupsis said. “Run down the gang that killed the North. When we have them, we will have their corporate paymasters. Then we will step in and close this whole shoddy enterprise down permanently.”

“Aye, I can do that.”

“Good man.”

“Give me updates as soon as you have anything new,” O’Rouke said. “I’ll liaise with Mr. Scrupsis.”

“And what about Ralph Stevens?” Sid asked levelly.

“You continue to report to him,” O’Rouke said. “After me.”

“Aye,” Sid said. He glanced back at Scrupsis. “You and Stevens, you don’t work from the same office, do you?”

“No, Detective, we do not.”

“Got it.” He turned to leave.

“How’s the taxi hunt going?” O’Rouke asked.

Sid’s e-i quested the door to unlock. The blue seal light faded. “Absolutely bloody nowhere, man.”

F
RIDAY,
F
EBRUARY 22, 2143

By eight o’clock in the evening the last of the day’s thin clouds had blow away over the North Sea, leaving the stars shimmering harshly in the thin clear sky. The temperature had been dropping all across the city for hours. It was going to be a cold night even by Newcastle standards.

After he parked his car at the end of Falconar Street, Sid pulled the jacket zip right to the top and put on a wooly hat. He could make out his cloudy breath in the pale streetlights as he walked along to Ian’s place. It was so tempting just to forget about all this and go home. Immerse himself in the noise and fun chaos of the kids, a meal together with Jacinta, some time alone after the kids went to bed. A good answer to a week that had been pure hell, starting with Kavane’s gruesome murder and the alert over Umbreit kidnapping. He absolutely hated the politics of it all, Ralph’s office against Scrupsis, neither of which he could control; O’Rouke’s involvement, too, made him more wary. Then he’d had a meeting with Aldred. It was the same little Jamaica Blue café on John Dobson Street as their very first encounter. It had taken a while, and some delicate investigation, but Sid finally discovered why Aldred didn’t mind having a conversation in broad daylight with him: Northumberland Interstellar owned the franchise; all the smartdust was deactivated while they were sitting together—nothing was recorded, so no lip-reading software could ever be applied. It gave Sid an appreciation of just how extensive the North family’s influence extended.

Aldred had come in on the Wednesday morning, and they sat in their usual corner booth, away from the door.

“I take it you want to talk about Umbreit?” Aldred asked.

“And Scrupsis.”

“Ah, the man from Alien Affairs. Bad name I always thought, makes it sounds like they’re shagging them rather than investigating them.”

“They think your brother’s murder and the kidnapping are connected. Scrupsis believes it’s all part of some big corporate scam.”

Abner’s eyebrows rose. “A D-bomb scientist is part of corporate maneuvering? Did he say in what way? Are our rivals going to nuke us?’

“Aye, man, don’t you start in on me.”

“Sorry.” Aldred grinned as he blew gently at the chocolate-sprinkled foam on top of his espresso. “But it is funny. Two government agencies in a jurisdiction war, and they accuse the corporates of arming up as an excuse to cage-fight.”

“So who does want a D-bomb scientist?”

“The distant worlds, most likely.”

“The what?”

“Distants. Planets like New Persia, or Kofon, or True Jerusalem, or Georgia. Worlds that don’t have gateways to Earth, that were opened by nationalist societies that want to propagate colonies made up entirely of believers; pure cultures taken from the old country. They need protection from the Zanth just like everybody else, and as they’re distant, the HDA can’t help them.”

“I thought True Jerusalem was just a rumor. And I hadn’t even heard of the others. Are they real?”

“Who knows. As you and I aren’t Jewish we’d never get the secret invitation handshake, would we. And I’m certainly not Chinese or Muslim, so same goes there. The much better rumor is there’s another US world out there somewhere; apparently their government will evacuate to it if we ever lose Earth.”

“I don’t need this, man, I really don’t.”

“Look, you’re here for my advice, right?”

“Aye.”

“It doesn’t bother us who gets involved higher up the ladder, okay? It’s a government turf war—irrelevant to what’s actually going on. You are the one finding out who killed our brother. And you’re doing it properly. That’s what matters. So … kiss the arse of whatever idiot is putting the most pressure on O’Rouke, flog your team, file your reports with everybody, but don’t slow the investigation. We’re relying on you, Sid.”

The Norths were about the only people who were, Sid reflected that night as he made his way to Ian’s flat. Everyone else was waiting for him to screw up so they could initiate stage two of their conflict. As he opened the front gate on the little terrace house he contemplated exactly what he should tell Ian and Eva. It might just be time to cut them loose, make sure their careers weren’t tainted too bad by the case. Even as he thought it he realized he’d all but given up on the taxi simulation.