Inescapable (9 page)

‘You did
exactly the right thing,’ Sam interrupted. ‘Someone who breaks into
a house may not think twice about silencing a witness. They were
interrupted and they left.’

The older cop
was also nodding. ‘Mister Clarion’s right, Miss.’ He looked back to
Sam. ‘I can get someone down here to run forensics and check for
prints, DNA…’

Sam shook his
head. ‘Someone professional enough to recognise a vertol overhead
and know what it means is not going to have left enough trace
evidence to get us anywhere. I’ll see to the security and call it a
useful indication of where I need to tighten things up.’

There was more
nodding and Sam showed the cops to the door, closing it behind them
before he turned back to Marie. ‘You said that the sound you heard
meant they had to be in the utility closet?’

Marie nodded.
The entrance hallway had doors off it to the left and right which
led into the ground floor rooms, and a staircase which curved up to
the next floor. Set into the angle of that staircase was a doorway
which she went to and opened. ‘I looked in here with that officer,
but I couldn’t see anything wrong.’

Sam looked now.
There were cables carefully bundled together and fixed to the
walls, ducts up and down to pass those cables through to other
parts of the house, a couple of boxes with blinking lights on them,
and a large panel with an electrical warning sign. Anything to do
with computers and communications had to have blinking lights; Sam
had no clue what the blinking lights meant, but nothing was
alarming about the way they blinked. ‘They must have opened the
door to make the noise you heard?’

‘Yes.’

‘But it was
closed when we came in here. B and E merchants don’t worry over
closing doors. Uh, breaking and entering, yes? Even if they opened
it to check what was inside, they wouldn’t have bothered closing
it, and there’s no other evidence that they searched anywhere.’

‘Well, okay,
but–’

‘It means that
they were interested in the contents of this closet, Marie, and
they didn’t want anyone to know they were.’

Marie frowned.
‘But there’s nothing in that closet.’

‘No. Or
apparently that’s the case.’ He paused, glaring at the wiring for a
second. ‘Don’t clean in the hall or this closet for the next few
days. I’ll see if I can get a friend to take a look at it.’

‘Your
neighbour?’

‘Yes. When she
finally gets back.’

MarTech East Africa,
28
^th
March.

‘It’s a scratch,’
Duncan said, looking at the enlarged image Pythia was
displaying.

‘It is,’ Fox
agreed.

‘It could have
happened any time.’

‘It could not.
The walls of the duct are aluminium. In air, aluminium oxidises
fairly rapidly forming an oxide surface which is actually tougher
than the metal. It’s considered a good thing. The scratch cuts
through that oxide layer and the layer has started re-growing in
the scratch.’

Realisation
dawned. ‘So you can estimate the age of the scratch by how much
oxide is in it.’

‘Less of an
estimate, given that we have very good records of temperature and
humidity. These scratches were made very recently and we know this
quite precisely.’

‘Scratches?’

‘This is one of
several the swarms found. Someone, or something, climbed down that
duct, so they got in. The question is, why did they bother?’

Duncan sighed.
‘I’m still coming up with nothing.’

‘And I tend to
agree, but they went to a Hell of a lot of trouble to get in here
for no apparent purpose. No one does that. I’m going to go take a
look at where they would have got to once they got out of the duct.
I’ll keep you posted.’

From the
hangar, she went down to the utility room where the duct let out
into the building. It was not entirely insecure, there were sensors
and grills and the top side vent was barred, but all of those could
be bypassed. Fox knew they could be bypassed by someone with the
right skills and tools, because she had followed the man who had
done it for her team. She stood looking up at the service panel
which could be swung out from inside and remembered the swift,
clean deployment.

‘Are you okay,
Fox?’

Fox turned her
gaze down at Kit, standing there with a look of concern on her
face. ‘I’ll be fine once I’ve stood here for a minute and wallowed
in misery. Then I’ll push it all out of my mind and get on with the
job, and think nothing more about it until I can allow it.’

‘You can do
that? Just… decide not to feel.’

‘I had to learn
to do it, before Dallas. I’m not a natural killer. If I went into a
combat situation thinking about the people I might have to kill… So
I learned to turn off my emotions, my compassion. It came in useful
when I ended up doing police work.’

‘I can imagine.
Why do you let yourself feel the pain at any time? Why are you
allowing it now?’

‘It’s not
obvious?’ Fox gave her a bleak little smile. ‘I think people are
often more defined by their pain than their pleasure. If I turn
that off, keep myself free of the pain, I end up no better than the
people I hunt down and arrest.’

‘Oh… It is
obvious when you say it like that.’

‘Let’s get
moving. Give me a schematic of the rooms near this location and
their purpose, if you have the data.’ Fox watched as the wireframe
appeared in-vision. The structure was the same as the one she had
infiltrated in Dallas, but the utilisation of the rooms was not
identical. ‘Offices across the corridor?’

‘Yes, largely
administrative.’

Fox turned and
walked out onto the grey corridor. Two metres to the right and
across the way was a door which she knocked on and then opened. A
woman blinked at her from behind a desk which had half a dozen
virtual monitors racked up over it.

‘Can I help
you?’ the woman asked.

‘I’m Fox
Meridian. I’m investigating the break-in a few days ago.’

‘Oh, you’re
with Palladium. Yes. We were informed. I’m Evangeline Norris. I’m
the network supervisor here.’

Fox’s lips
pursed. ‘The network supervisor? You administer the local network
from here?’

‘Local network,
communications to the MarTech backbone, peering… All that kind of
thing.’

‘I am going to
send a couple of robots down here to do some scans, Miss Norris,
and I’m going to need you to work from somewhere else for a
while.’

Norris winced.
‘That’s such a bitch to set up. For security reasons, this is the
only desktop with the clearance for some things I need to do.’

Fox nodded. ‘I
kind of thought you were going to say that. And it’s also why I’m
sure I need to go over this room with a fine filter.’

~~~

‘I have a telepresence
connection request from Sam,’ Kit announced as Fox lay on her bed,
reading.

‘Sam? Put him
through.’

‘Would you like
me to put you in more clothing in the projection?’ Kit’s gaze
flicked over the bodysuit Fox had stripped down to.

‘Sam’s seen me
naked. Sam’s seen me naked and drunk.’

Sam, when his
image appeared beside the bed, was not wearing a shirt. Fox did not
read Chinese and was not really sure what the ideogram over his
right nipple was telling her today. ‘Fox, Kit, I hope your trip’s
going well?’

‘I’m sitting in
a bunker in an area the Pan-Islamic Caliphate would like to call
their own on a Sunday night.’

‘Good point,
well made. You remember that little problem I had with finding a
body recently?’

‘Felix Kenan. I
remember.’

‘Well, I’ve
inherited his house, and a tenant and housemaid in the basement,
actually, but it’s the house I’m concerned about.’

‘You moving
home on me, Sam? I thought we had a good, neighbourly thing going.
Mind you, it did look like a nice house…’

‘I’m trying to
work out whether I can actually afford to run the place. He left me
money to help with it and there’s no rent, but my outgoings will
rise. I’ve aimed my accountant at it, but that’s not the issue.
Someone broke in there last night.’

‘NAPA not
hopeful on a resolution?’

‘I doubt NAPA
could resolve it, but the thing is… Well, they didn’t take
anything. Seemed like they broke in, opened up a wiring cupboard,
and ran away when they were noticed, but they tried to make sure
the place looked like no one had been there.’

Fox’s brows
furrowed. ‘There’s a lot of that kind of thing going around.’ Sam
raised an eyebrow, but she just shook her head. ‘You want me to
take a look?’

‘I was
thinking, when you get back, maybe I could hire a security
consultant to come in and review the building’s systems. Like I
said, I’ve got money for renovations.’

‘Okay. Can you
clear a couple of Palladium operatives for a visit tomorrow? I’ll
get someone around there to review the security straight away and
see if Jackson can spare someone to run a forensics swarm over this
cupboard of yours.’

‘Tomorrow… I
can get Marie to let them in. That’s the maid. You’d like her;
she’s a redhead.’

‘Job’s looking
up already. I’m not sure when I’ll get back. I’m
hoping
I’m
going to be done here in the next day or so, but it may take
longer.’

‘Well, it’s not
like my problem is urgent. Or I don’t think it is. I just have this
feeling…’

‘B and E with
no taking away isn’t always a sign of something weird going on. But
when the previous owner has been murdered, it does tend to push for
a degree of caution.’

‘Good,’ Sam
replied, a smile curling his lips, ‘it’s not just me being paranoid
then.’

29
^th
March.

‘Trouble sleeping, Miss
Meridian?’

Fox looked
around at the sound of the voice and saw a man in his middle years
she did not immediately recognise, but Kit’s rapid scan of
personnel files did. ‘Doctor Fieldman, right?’

He bowed his
head in acknowledgement. It was not long after dawn and the air was
still. The light had turned the eastern sky a pale blue with a
faint taint of red at low altitude, the result of dust stirring up
from the desert. Fieldman was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, even
though his frame was not suggestive of a man who exercised
regularly. He seemed to note the way her gaze was moving and
grinned. ‘I like to run when the air is still and the sun isn’t
quite up. It’s cooler and I don’t need to wear a mask.
Unfortunately, it’s not as common an occurrence as I’d wish.’

She returned
his smile. ‘I… get nightmares. There wasn’t much point in going
back to sleep. Besides, I’m not sure I’m going to get another
chance to see this without a mask.’

He let out a
bark of a laugh. ‘I’d heard you believe you’ve discovered what our
break-in was about.’

‘Looks like it.
I’ve got some forensic data analysis software running to confirm
it. I think it should all be wrapped by tonight.’ Her gaze returned
to the red light low on the horizon. ‘You might want to make that
run fast; I don’t think it’s going to stay clear for long.’

‘You may be
right.’

‘How the Hell
did we ever let it get this bad?’

Fieldman
paused, stepping a little closer and following her gaze. ‘When I
was a boy, before the century turned over, this was all plains, dry
but inhabited. I lived through the arguments about climate change.
The more we look, the more we find that humans have been changing
the world for millennia. The decimation of the megafauna, the rise
of agriculture, and then the industrial revolution. You know,
modern humans likely evolved here. This is the Garden of Eden, if
you’re of a biblical mind, and here I am trying to turn it back
into one despite all we’ve done to the place.’

Fox looked out
at the light, blue spreading quickly above the red haze. The Desert
of Eden: someone should get that on land reclamation posters. ‘Have
a good run, Doctor. And good luck on the work.’

‘Thank you,
Miss Meridian, even though it looks like the rainfall levels are
turning for the better, we’ll probably need it.’ And he ran off,
the heels of his running shoes throwing up small clouds of dust as
he went.

New York Metro, 30
^th
March
2060.

He watched her as she
strutted about the room like the queen of some old, European
monarchy, except that no woman with breeding would have worn a
lemon-yellow dress which hugged a lush body and barely covered her
behind. No, this was not a dignified queen, not one with any class,
but she certainly had money.

Money was why
he was there, why she had called him to her home, and why she was
largely ignoring him. She had more of it than she knew what to do
with and, like so many of her kind, she spent it without thought.
He had money, but not enough. Her money would see to it that he had
all he needed if he just kept doing what he did so well, so why was
it that he wanted so very,
very
much to take the bitch and
teach her just exactly what a man could do for her!

He bit back the
sudden burst of rage which threatened to make him leap across the
room to where she stood, hip cocked, looking at him as though she
expected something of him. Had she been speaking to him?

‘I’m sorry,
what was the question?’

She let out an
exasperated ‘huh!’ and set about repeating what she had said
before. He was only half listening as he imagined his hands
squeezing the breath from her throat.

31
^st
March.

‘Okay, the report’s
filed and everything’s there in the records for you to read. I
figure we might as well do this properly and have it all
documented. Yes?’ Fox looked around the conference room as she
asked. Jackson and Hoarsen were sitting in the room with her. Eaves
and Jarvis were there, but only as telepresence images projected
onto seats.