Great North Road (53 page)

Ruckby was Sherman’s second bodyguard and enforcer. A man who took a more normal approach to achieving an intimidating presence by bulking up on bad food and possessing a nasty temper.

The only other regular was Valentina, a seventeen-year-old beauty from Canada who was chauffeured to Sherman every night, and took a cab back to her flat just behind Quayside the next morning.

So far Ian had established that Sherman slept at the
Maybury Moon,
a flat in Heaton, and a house in Benwell. Details where he went during the day were difficult. Twice he’d changed cars after stopping at a café. But the profile was growing.

Ian put on the netlens glasses and examined the morning’s information. So far Sherman had driven into town from the Benwell house and gone to an office block in the center, not far from The Gate district in the city center. He’d stayed there less than half an hour.

That didn’t matter, it was another location to watch. Ian’s e-i supervised a whole string of searchbots running in the new Apple console, tracing ownership of the office, monitoring links in and out, capturing images of everyone who visited, harvesting basic profiles for them.

After he left the office, Sherman had gone straight to the city’s ring road and driven north up the A1. He’d turned off just before Alnwick. That was where coverage ended. Ian knew the area well enough, a maze of little country roads with an invisible maintenance priority level as far as the Country Highways Bureau was concerned. What there was of any macromesh would be covered by ice and snow that wouldn’t see more than one snowplow a month. Tracking Sherman’s Merc by remote was a lost cause. Ian loaded a search and notification order into the road traffic management network, which would alert the observation software as soon as the Merc ventured back onto a main road with a functioning macromesh.

Even though Ian was enjoying the feeling of superiority their whole covert operation provided, he had to admit it hadn’t turned up any kind of overlap with the North murder investigation. He knew what Sid would reply if he ever voiced that particular doubt: “Aye, man, give it time.”

Ian was starting to wonder how much time he could afford. But he couldn’t help the interest developing in the elusive Mr. Sherman. The man was a true player, the kind that had never featured in any of Ian’s normal investigations.

Satisfied that the surveillance software and the searchbots he’d added were going to contribute a reasonable-sized file to the growing profile they were building, he left the flat and headed back to Market Street.

T
UESDAY,
M
ARCH 5, 2143

The flight from Sarvar to Wukang didn’t bother Angela anything like the previous Edzell-to-Sarvar flight had. Perhaps it was a level of fatalism creeping into her mind, induced by the dark monotony of St. Libra’s rampant zebra vegetation. Or more likely, she admitted to herself, simply the lack of any meta-feature like the Eclipse Mountains to fly over this time. Their flight took them two thousand kilometers northwest from Sarvar to another of those now familiar strips of compacted naked soil with a little cluster of tents and Qwik-Kabins and vehicles at one end. Wukang was the first of the three projected forward camps, arranged almost like compass points, northwest, due north, and northeast from Sarvar, which was now being relegated to supply base status. Varese, the camp due north, was already having its landing strip bulldozed; while Oamaru, away to the east, had just received its first successful Berlin landing yesterday. No more forward camps were scheduled—this was as far as the expedition was going to venture, as far as the budget would take them.

Reasonable enough, Angela thought as the Daedalus’s rear loading ramp lowered itself amid a chorus of high-pitched whining from electrohydraulic actuators. If the xenobiologists couldn’t find any sign of animal life this far away from Abellia, then they weren’t going to find any—period.

She half expected Elston to be waiting for her at the bottom of the ramp, but he wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Antrinell had been doing a discreet but competent job of watching her at Sarvar.

As she stepped out onto the muddy, compacted soil she settled her sun hat with a quick flourish. The morning rain had left the air muggy. Mist was rising from the jungle vegetation that lay a couple of kilometers away from the flattish ground around Wukang. Away to the north, where the land rose sharply again, stationary clouds lurked amid the steep hills.

“End of the line,” she said.

“You make that sound kind of sinister,” DiRito said.

“It’s not meant to be. This is simply as far as we go. The next time we get on a Daedalus, it’ll be for the flight home.”

“You don’t think we’ll go any farther?”

Angela indicated the mobile biolabs filling the center of the fuselage, which the plane’s flight crew were now uncoupling from their lockdown latches. “They’ll travel out from here, maybe even forty, fifty klicks. But that’s it.”

“The owls didn’t see anything around here,” Omar said.

“Do they know what to look for?” Angela countered. “That thing I encountered was intelligent. And they’ve had ninety-two years since humans arrived on St. Libra to prepare for us. No, for once the HDA is right, genetic variance testing is the way to go.”

She watched as Antrinell climbed into the cab of the first biolab. His attitude toward the machine was almost protective. The fuel cells fired up with a mild gust of white vapor from their exhaust vents on the side of the big vehicle.

“Uh-oh,” Paresh murmured. “Tents.”

Angela followed his gaze. Lieutenant Pablo Botin was heading their way.

“Tents,” she agreed. High up in the sky, another Daedalus was circling to line up on the runway. More equipment, more personnel. Each of the big airlifters was flying three times a day out from Sarvar. Passam and the command staff were throwing everything at establishing the forward camps as fast as possible.

Wukang and its two cousins were the HDA’s statement of intent to the vast planet. They challenged the eternal jungle, making it very clear that humans were going to uncover its secrets one way or another.

Angela couldn’t help wonder what would happen if they succeeded. For some reason that scenario had been missing from every general briefing HDA officers had made. She knew they’d have one; she could only hope that it was going to be good enough. All she’d had was a single blind survivalist impulse:
Run like hell
.

They were tight white shorts. Hot and sexy on a blond babe with a fit body. Clingy, quality fabric with a sparkly sheen, designer label, cheeky cut to emphasize taut buttocks. Marc-Anthony and Loanna had stood back and admired their choice, especially when those shorts were matched by a low-slung, ebony mesh halter top.

The top had been left behind when Angela sneaked back to Bartram’s seventh-floor study. And now the shorts were ruined. Blood was to blame, blood soaking into that expensive, absorbent fabric. Mariangela’s blood, Coi’s blood, Bartram’s blood, Benson 2North’s blood, Blake 2North’s blood … Blood that had come teeming out of ripped flesh and shredded hearts. Enough blood to turn the mansion’s marble flooring into a slippery lake of the stuff.

Angela had slithered and skidded in the lounge, falling over repeatedly. Her bare flesh was covered in blood. Hair matted with the stuff. And the funky shorts had turned to a glistening scarlet belt, becoming sticky and restrictive as they were heated. And her skin was very hot by now.

She’d run. Of course she’d run. But there was method to it. She still possessed just enough presence of mind to snatch a small bag from her room on the sixth floor. A bag that was always casually ready for a quick departure, with those truly important items she’d need if things went wrong and she needed to make a fast exit. Not that they’d ever considered it would be like this horror.

The bag was now gripped by fingers with white-stressed knuckles as she fled down the rest of the stairs, trapped within the mansion’s silent gloom. The silence frightened her more than the treacherous glimmers of ringlight that seeped across the stairs, distorting their size, stretching out deep shadows to fool her. Again she’d fallen, tumbling hard down the unforgiving marble, leaving long smears of blood in her wake. Her grunts and muted cries absorbed and killed by the silence.

But she was the only one making any noise. There should have been alarms blaring out across the night, waking everyone, summoning guards with weapons. Alarms that banished the silence. Comforting alarms. Instead the silence engulfed her, followed her as she fled in terror down the stairs to the huge ground-floor atrium. More silence was waiting as she took the next flight of stairs down to the basement garage. Not even ringlight ventured down here; it was pitch dark. Within the sensory absence she stretched her arms wide, fumbling against the walls to give some illustration of where she was. Blind, running for her life, hoping—praying!—there was nothing sharing the darkness.

Below and in front: a hint of light. Four slim lines. A rectangle. Door!

Angela burst through it into the garage. Here at last was light. Ceiling strips shining a bright, universal green-tinged light. She blinked in the comfortless glare, hyperventilating wildly. Looked down at herself in numb dread. The blood that painted every part of her was congealing, darkening, flaking, molting off her own skin like some obscene scab membrane.

Her wretched wail echoed around the garage.

Two long rows of silver-blue Jaguar JX-7 coupes were lined up on either side of her. She thought she heard something in the stairwell behind, and jumped, whimpering.

“Get a grip!” Angela screamed at herself. She ran for the first Jag and vaulted over the door into the driver’s seat. Her hand slammed down on the dashboard, and she winced at the sharp flash of pain from the dark weapons in her fingertips as they hit the walnut veneer. The tips had come sliding up out of her flesh just behind the nails, tearing her own flesh as they rose—the little gashes were still raw. Despite the presence of those extraneous tips, the Jag’s auto read the biometric as Barclay 2North. The joystick telescoped out of the dashboard and the seat’s fat shoulder harnesses hinged around to hold her comfortably. She flicked the car to manual and twisted the joystick hard, demanding full acceleration. Wheels spun fast, sending up tire smoke, and the machine leapt forward. Auto override kicked in, assisting her steering as she turned to avoid the other row of Jaguars and the concrete stanchions. Then she was aiming the car at the ramp, racing up into the night. Headlights came on, cutting through the drizzle outside. The coupe’s roof started to slide up.

Angela hit 170 kph by the time she reached the short tunnel connecting Gironella Beach with the Rue de Provence on the other side of the hills. There was some skid as the traction control fought with the rain-slicked road, but Angela refused to ease up.

In the tunnel, shock finally caught up with her, and she started shaking uncontrollably. Tears flowed then as the numbness and focus of instinctive self-preservation ebbed. Breath was taken down in convulsive gulps. They were dead, all of them, slaughtered. Everyone she knew in the mansion: butchered mercilessly.

The Jaguar zoomed out of the tunnel and she let go of the joystick, switching back to auto. Driving was just too much now. Amid the shock and fright, her mind was trying to grapple with what had happened, to be rational. It was difficult. Death on such a scale and with such visceral ferocity wasn’t something she’d ever considered. But now it had happened, and had to be dealt with. Had to.

The contract had been awarded. She’d managed that, actually pulled off the heist. The money transfer had gone through. Abellia’s Civic Administration finance office had paid GiulioTrans-Stellar 108 million eurofrancs as a deposit for the infrastructure contract. Right now all that binary code money would be percolating along the route they’d devised, twisting and changing at every bank and finance house; identity and currency would morph a dozen times before vanishing into the digital event horizon at the end of the route, the void of which she knew nothing.

Full completion would take a couple of hours. Anything involving that many exchanges and owner switches was by necessity complex. She couldn’t afford to be caught, not until she was sure it was complete. That single notion cooled her thoughts to an icy calm. Nothing else mattered. She was still on mission, no matter how ludicrously fucked it was now.

Ringlight shrank away, smothered behind a wall of thick cloud that frothed across the sky. Drizzle turned to a torrent of rain that splattered down across the tarmac, forcing the auto to slow.

Angela slammed the brake on, making the car fishtail as the wheels fought for grip. She opened the door and scrambled out to stand under the monsoon. Tipped her head back to let the heavy drops sluice her clean. Hands scraped urgently at the disgusting drying blood that caked her skin, and red rivulets began to trickle down her legs. She stripped the shorts off, and flung them away across the verge. Obsession to be rid of the gruesome contaminate consumed her now; she scraped and scraped at her skin until she was scratching and grazing herself. Completely naked, saturated in the swirl of water, she was shaking again, from the cold this time. When she looked back at the car, with its orange interior lights glowing, the driver’s seat was tarnished with blood. She opened the boot and pulled out a blanket to sit on. Only then did she set off again, ordering the auto to take her into town, all the way down to Velasco Beach.

The monsoon was lifting by the time the Jag arrived at the car park behind the beach. It was half past three in the morning. She knew there’d be no one about, she didn’t even bother checking.

Down to the beach itself, fifteen paces from the bottom of the promenade steps, one pace out from the wall. And dig. Don’t think what you’d look like to some accidental observer, naked, in the rain, clawing desperately, trying not to cry anymore. It took a minute, burrowing into the sand like some mad dog, before her fingers scrabbled against the emergency package.