Janus (38 page)

Elinda woke haunted by the music Henry had played her; and when she walked to the Greenhouse the dark air quivered with sinister glissandos. Ominous chords, just above audibility grew like distant thunder. She had a sudden vision of a performance—the triple timpani, two players crouched over the skins, with the cellos sawing away, double basses giving out sporadic plucked notes like approaching gunfire, while the hoarse growl of the trombones began to rise towards fury, and, massed at the back, the horde of human voices was poised to erupt.

I’m going mad
, she thought. That bastard did something to my head with his trick drink. For that piece he had played, whatever it was, had been electronically synthesised—no timpani, or trombones, certainly no massed choirs. But it wouldn’t leave her head. The twin moonlight appeared to her as a
sforzando
diminished seventh on horns and trumpets, the pale snow fields were piccolo shrieks, the wooded and shimmering slopes were the burnished voices of cellos and violas slithering down from discord to discord.

“Lovely morning,” said Chris when she reached the office. “Halfway to sunrise and there’s hardly any frost on the window. Do you think winter’s over for this year?”

“My god, I hope so.”

“You see there’s a new report of the sea serpent? They picked the wrong hemisphere for the biologists. Schneider’ll be having fits if that thing’s real and nobody’s ready to play Ahab.”

Somehow she was going to have to work while her head was swimming with last night’s chaos. Chris being sunny and talkative didn’t help. Nor did Larsen when he came in, late, silent and preoccupied. She wondered what he had learned to disturb him, but with Chris chirping away beside her, she had no way to ask.

Chris tried to ask him about the codings for a promised batch of chick embryos, but Larsen was staring hard at his own terminal and couldn’t help. She shook off her inertia and helped Chris find what he wanted. Then she returned to her own tasks—reports to prepare, production data to evaluate—with her head full of sick tension and hallucinatory music.

At the dam, Osmon wandered over to a group of men taking a lunch break from the shift in the turbine rooms. He sat down with them on a mound overlooking the river. Another man joined them, wearing a striped rugby shirt over a high-necked sweater and carrying a sports bag. Under the arc lights, the men exchanged sandwiches while they talked and gestured at the caverns on the far bank. When they packed up their belongings, it was not obvious if everyone had recovered his own property. The man with in the rugby shirt went across for the afternoon shift in the turbine rooms. He carried his bulky sports bag with him.

Elinda worked into the afternoon and then got up and put her coat on.

Grebbel was not at the dam site. Menzies, the foreman, gave her a sour look and said everything was getting disorganised; who knew which shift anyone was on nowadays?

She walked to Grebbel’s building and found his door locked; there was no response when she hammered on it. She lowered her hands and forced herself to be calm. The clinic, then. He might be working there. He might still be prepared to help her.

When she got to the entrance, the lights in the administrative offices were going out. The man at the desk was struggling to carry a large parcel into the room behind, and she slipped in without disturbing him. There was no sign of Grebbel. She paused at the end of the corridor where Barbara’s room was. She wondered what she could achieve by going in, and then wondered why she was looking for excuses not to. Approaching the door, she heard movement and turned the handle. The door was locked.

She knocked, then called out and tried the handle again.

“I’ve got the key,” Dr. Henry said behind her.

He was breathing deeply. “What a pleasant surprise,” he said. “We can continue our recent discussions. In fact I’m quite anxious to do so.” His fingers clamped onto her upper arm. “I think we need a good old-fashioned heart-to-heart.”

She was still holding onto the door handle, but he pulled her away. “Don’t make a fuss, please,” he muttered. “I’d prefer to avoid messy scenes, but there are still Security staff on duty, and they’d help me if I summoned them.”

In her pocket she slipped the
record
switch. “What were you going to do to her?”

“All in good time. This way, please.”

“Where are we going? Is she all right? You can tell me that, can’t you? How is she now?”

“A bit late in your concern, perhaps? Could it be a sign of a troubled conscience? She’s well enough for the time being. In here please.”

They were in the instrument room.
If he tries to lock the door
, I’ll fight, she thought—
go for the eyes and the balls. I’ll use Carlo’s gun and splatter his brains on the wall.
But he guided her to an armchair beside the bench and sat facing her. He was between her and the door, but a visitor would see only the dedicated physician having an informal discussion with his patient.

“Well?” she said.

“Patience, my dear.” He seemed in control of himself now, but tense. “We have the whole night ahead of us.” Resting his chin on his fists, he regarded her thoughtfully. “I think we might start by hearing some more music.”

Larsen had worked all day, without stopping for a meal. When the other two left, he locked the office door and returned to his terminal. He pulled out the sheets with the names and identifications of the possible conspirators, and worked his way into the files on the status of the workforce, to see if he could find any pattern of absences that might give a clue to what Grebbel planned and how many were involved.

On the path from the caves, Grebbel stared toward the landing field. The children with their kites were led out and the gate in the fence was locked. He had seen the procedure often enough to recognise it even from this distance. Beside him, Lafayette and Mahmoud fingered their new machine pistols. “All is usual?” Lafayette asked.

“Yes, so far. Now—we haven’t had time to go over it as well as I’d like—you understand what you have to do? The whole thing depends on your disabling the alarms in the control tower—making sure no one sounds a warning until we’re established.”

“What is to understand?” muttered Mahmoud. “We make exercise of our skills, we are quiet. We save these”—he gestured with the gun—“for when it is hopeless. These are old rules for an old game.”

“Then all you have to worry about,” said Grebbel, “is getting in there without raising any suspicions. Come on, let’s go. I’ve got to meet the others.”

Niels Larsen looked at the pattern emerging on the monitor screen and knew he was too late. The sheets of paper with the names were at his elbow, but the important ones named there were already acting. Several, in office jobs, had reported sick, others were currently untraceable; and there was no response when he tried to test the alarm circuits at the armoury. So he had to assume they had weapons. There was no way now that he could act in time to prevent anything without revealing himself—and he didn’t even know where they would strike.

He scrabbled at the keys, searching the databases for clues. If he knew where they were, perhaps he would be able to fake an alarm, a fire, anything to get the authorities involved. But sending unprepared firefighters into the middle of an armed attack would be murder. . . .

Behind him, the locked door thumped, then splintered and sprang open.

“Working late here, too?” asked Sidney Tallis. “I’ve seen you do that a lot lately. I don’t think it’s good for your health.”

Larsen tried to bluster, but the words died in his throat. Tallis came and stood over him. He produced a large, pointed knife and flipped the papers at Larsen’s side with it. “You shouldn’t have done that,” Tallis said. He peered quickly through the window towards the landing field. “You’re too late now, unless the sirens start in the next two minutes, and I don’t think you’d got that far, had you? Had you?”

Larsen shook his head, clinging to any shameful hope that he might yet survive this.

“But you shouldn’t have done that to us. If I didn’t have to hurry, I’d take some time to convince you of that. As it is . . .”

“Tallis—it’s me. I brought you back.
I
did. Don’t use the knife. Don’t—”

Oh Jesus Christ—if you exist, return and forgive me—