Mappa Mundi (44 page)

A chill ran over her body as she sat dutifully listening and she shivered. Guskov looked across at her from his seat, wondering if the Selfware was causing her distress. She had to wait for him to ask, “Are you all right?”

And only then did she let herself say, “I'm fine. Just cold.”

“Fetch Doctor Armstrong a fleece,” Guskov ordered, signalling to one of the privates with an imperious flick of one hand. The man glanced at his general and then went to obey. To Natalie's pleasant surprise he returned with a piece of her own clothing. Her luggage had obviously made it here as planned. She took off her jacket, ignoring their stares at the holes in her shirt, and put the thin top on, zipping it to the chin. Better. A taste of the normal in the midst of madness.

She wondered if Guskov knew that there was an organization opposed to Mappa Mundi's existence that was operating within the armed forces and wider political arenas, but she guessed he did at least suspect it. It was almost a necessity, and what did it matter if Bragg or someone else was in the thick of it? Inside this high-security prison that didn't even let microbes in or out the science team were sitting ducks. What a good job they knew nothing about Bobby X yet. But there she had a kernel of doubt. She hadn't heard or seen Ian since the truck business and he might well never be coming back, despite his intentions. He would be the first thing Guskov asked her about and the last thing she wanted to explain fully. Without having an exact reason, she knew that he could be valuable in what was coming; and wasn't that nice, using him this way? She scowled and tucked her chin into the circle of collar beneath it.

When the briefing and documentation of her arrival was done Natalie and Guskov were escorted to a closed vehicle and another journey began. She wouldn't have known the site of the Environment at all were it not for the fact that the driver knew the way very well
and liked to describe the scenery vividly as he drove. Natalie knew the places as names from a tourist column her mother had once written for one of the glossy magazines, pretending to be a glamorous city girl roughing it across North America's scenic territories.

They headed into Virginia, up along the Skyline Drive where the road ran along the ridgelines of the Appalachian Mountains, and finally arrived at a little town that was no more than a few houses, a bar/diner, and a gas station. Its name was Stone Spring and it had some mildly interesting caverns that weren't much of a match for the larger tours down at Luray a few miles away. But the caverns here had been quietly acquired and put to a better use as a military installation of which no residents were aware. It had once been a secondary site when Mount Cheyenne was being developed, but had then been left to go dusty awhile until the need for more biosafety research centres arose out of Pentagon plans.

The truck parked up in the driveway of the house on Lot #22 and they all got out. It was a long way from the road, isolated by a winding, potholed dirt track that felt to Natalie's sore spine like it must mud-out every time there was any serious rain. Around the scrappy building's grey-painted boards mature trees and heavy brush loomed and cut off most of the bright daylight as afternoon shifted into early evening. Insects spun in the warm air and, apart from the scrunch of boots on gravel and the sound of voices, there was a deep hush in the place as though it was a long way from civilization, despite being only a short drive from several popular resort hotels.

Natalie was sorry she wasn't going to be staying at the house itself—it would have been just what she needed, some solitary peace—but Guskov led the way into the garage and there all pretence of normality and old-style America vanished.

The elevator was waiting for them at the top of its smoothly channelled shaft. She and Guskov stepped inside the car and their escort saluted as the doors closed.

He turned to her. “A tedious journey. I apologize. But we were all most surprised by your … detour.”

Natalie raised her eyebrows. Let them be surprised. It was none of their business.

“I'm here now,” she said. “That's what matters.”

The elevator car dropped them a hundred feet into the antechambers and they passed through the airlock systems without talking. Another elevator skimmed them deeper into the rock and then sideways on tracks that she estimated took them about a quarter-mile north of the actual town overhead. The underground redoubt wasn't a walk-out. A power cut would trap them effectively. She tried not to think too much about that and the fact that she might not stand out in the sun again, but it was difficult. She concentrated on Guskov instead and found that he was worried about her, and not in an entirely scientific and selfish way.

“You read my messages?” he asked then, as though her attention had prompted him. Perhaps it had: she would have to get to the bottom of what was going on.

“Yes, thank you.” She was polite. “The Free State of Mind. I read them. Is everyone else here of the same opinion as you are?”

“No. Some are here under duress. I regret that, but there are times when it is necessary to get a thing done.”

“And there was I, thinking you had human welfare so much at heart,” she said, meeting his gaze. “But it sounds like utilitarian practicality when you get closer to it.”

He smiled, wolfish. “Do actions carry with them into the real world the burdens of morality and intention?”

They stepped out of the second elevator car and into a corridor, as the plans had stated. Like the one running to Jude's apartment it was functional and no more. There was still a smell of carpet glue and paint about it.

Natalie matched Guskov's look and answered, “Where is the real world, Mika? Answer that and I'll answer your question.”

He froze on the spot and his face became heavy, eyes glittering with a combination of ego and the intelligent understanding of power that would be extremely dangerous to try and cross. But she wasn't upset.

“Only my closest friends call me that,” he said.

“And you didn't ask me in that close. And even they aren't really that close, those who are still alive,” she said and smiled, enjoying her own power as she realized it for that moment. “Yes, I know.”

Jude walked into the offices at ten past ten. He'd gone home, tidied up, packed the peanut butter cans in thick plastic, boxed them, and taken them to a U-Stor-It, the keys to the room taped underneath the passenger seat of his car. After minor attention to his back with antiseptic he'd changed his clothes and thrown the whole set he'd worn the day before into a Dumpster two alleys down from the U-Stor-It. He felt tired, sore, and his chest physically hurt with a dull ache that persisted no matter how much breath-practice he tried to use to calm down. In the end he bought a can of Gatorade and one of SlimFast and drank them both on the steps outside the Sciences building before getting up and heading in.

He looked at his watch and then out of his window and across town to the south. He wondered how Natalie was and then made himself sit down and think. That lasted about a minute before Perez herself appeared in the doorway.

“Hola
, Jude,” she said in her preoccupied style, “
¿Como estás?”

“Vale,”
he said. They continued to speak in East Coast Spanish.

“Is it true?” She closed the door behind her and crossed to his desk, touching his elbow. “Your sister?”

“Yes, it's true.” He looked at his case and its open contents. The file. It was right there if he wanted to spill it all to her and have it lifted out of his hands. The temptation was so strong that he actually took the breath to start—and then let it go in a big sigh.

“It has something to do with your absence, with your trip home,”
she said, not asking. “I thought it would. But if it concerns the department, you can talk to me about it.” Her softly pouched face with its heavy care lines and her white-streaked braids of hair were good for motherly expressions and they held one now—canny but sympathetic. “I will help you.” She squeezed his arm and then let him go.

“Thank you.” He lifted the file out, set the bags containing the scanner's electronics down on it, and placed his Pad beside them before raising his eyes to meet hers. “But I think that would be a mistake for both of us. I don't have enough evidence for a case, only a lot of disconnected lines. Which is what we've always had on the Russian and I don't expect to tie them up without treading on a government tail. It's hard to say whether it would be worth involving the department.”

“But if you won't, then I can't give you more time and more money,” she said simply. “Either you and Mary start to show me what we can deal with or you can find another case. I mean it, Jude. It's a waste of your life and talent to pursue this one man and his problems.”

“But—”

“But no more buts. I'm telling you. I want to help you. You can take leave. You can take a sabbatical. Ask me for what you need. But don't keep chasing tails if you don't mean to tread on them with the full weight of the law.” She was at his pinboard, looking at his large array of photographs, pictures, and displays. “That I can't sanction, for your own sake, and I can't pay for. I won't be able to fish you out of it if you get into trouble. Do you hear what I'm saying?” She shot him a look from her deep brown eyes that was flinty. Then she softened.

“I guess your sister is a part of this. But think first, Jude. Be careful. Don't drag us in. It's face first or not at all.”

He nodded.

She poked at a colourful sheet of paper. “What is this?”

“It's a scan of Martha Johnson's brain,” he said. “The storekeeper who tried to burn White Horse to death.”

Perez smiled and flicked the corner with her poppy-red fingernail.

She turned to him with a wry, sad smile, “I was going to say how pretty.” She took in his expression. “You won't always feel like this. It's a dangerous time.”

He knew she wasn't bluffing him. Her husband had been shot in a drive-by three years ago when he was on his way to the post office. She'd been angry since then, but it had mellowed and changed, hardened into a stubborn refusal to give in.

“Keep talking to me, Jude,” she ordered him. “But get out of here now. Go and do something else for a while.”

“I'm just sorting out some things,” he assured her, knowing his vagueness was only annoying. “I'll go to Dugway tomorrow with Mary and then I might take some days and go home, to Montana I mean. To Deer Ridge.”

“Can she go with you? You should have someone.”

“I'll be fine,” he said. “I'd rather go alone.”

“She was on her own in Florida when the lab was closed,” Perez said, without changing the tone of her voice. “Isn't that right?”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Is something the matter?”

“No, yes,” she said, shrugging in an elaborate way. “No. You endorsed her reports. Did you read them?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know that Tetsuo Yamamoto used to work for Gentrex Labs before the CDC?”

Jude's mind stalled and then started again, bumpily. Gentrex was a sweet little bulk-sequencing company that contracted to larger investors as basic number crunchers. They'd had a sideline for Ivanov in cross-matching and grading athletes' DNA in a scam to pick and train potential gold-mine pro basketballers, picking them up almost by random sampling from poor and disadvantaged areas of Asia and the eastern republics. It was a moneymaking venture and the science
had been pretty basic, but some teams had paid millions of dollars for the information.

“I didn't know that,” he said. Worked for Ivanov? Then it made it almost certain that Tetsuo had a good idea of what he was handling when he'd brought that vial for Jude—something illicit that Ivanov/Guskov was now making. Something to do with the mafia side and not the legitimate edge of his dealings. Not that one was ever really detached from the other.

Jude nodded slowly as he took it in.

“Okay,” Perez nodded. “Okay. Go and rest.”

He watched her leave and sat in his chair, mind churning slowly over what she'd said about Mary. Had there been something wrong in the reports? He had read them, that much was true, but he didn't remember the details, he'd already been tangled up in Mappa Mundi by then.

A familiar hand knocked on the door and pushed it all the way open.

Mary put her head around and smiled. “Hey,” she said, walking in and moving around his desk, bending down to give him a hug. “Hey, you. Haven't seen you in forever.”

He hugged her back, feeling how stiff she was, brittle and tense. She stood up and leaned on the edge of his desk, her arms crossed firmly, hands tucked into her armpits. Her normally pale skin was dead white.

“Are you okay?” When she spoke he knew she was upset because of the breezy way she asked.

“No,” he said, truthful. “You neither, by the look of it.
¿Qué pasa?”

She looked down at her feet and worked the toe of one shoe into the carpet, not answering, her arms becoming more rigid. It was so unlike her that a trickle of foreboding started to spread out beneath his ribs. Her gaze wandered up to the top of his desk. She turned and began to prod listlessly at the bags of circuitry, flicking the edge of the
file case with her finger before pushing it aside. She cleared her throat and a convulsive twist made her shoulders strain against the seams of her jacket before she forced herself to speak.

“A couple of weird things happened to me this morning.” Mary glanced at the desk again and added, trying and failing to smile, “I sorta thought someone here might be spiking the drinks, y'know.” Her Charlottesville accent had started to show up, too. She coughed again and tried to meet his gaze, looking suddenly away to the wall behind him. “I was walking here from the computer block and there was this cold spot.”

She dared a glance at him to see how he was taking the news. “And then I was at my desk, sitting, thinking about whether we should drop this whole Russian thing, when I had a kind of a … blackout.” Her arms flew back to their defensive position as if of their own accord. She shuffled her shoulders and they settled into a higher hunch. “It sounds ridiculous but I wondered if there was some kind of new weapon that could make you unconscious. Or some kind of magnetic effect from all the power cables under the grass that could … God, listen to me.” She rolled her eyes and smiled but the smile died back and was replaced by uncertainty.