Necropath (22 page)

They passed along wide tree-lined streets. The citizens of Sapphire Falls were hurrying home, bundled up in thick, insulated jackets and trousers.

Chandra checked his handset. “Renstraas. This is it.” He turned down a quiet avenue and drew to a halt outside an imposing—and spuriously ancient-looking—two-storey warmwood house.

As they stood on the porch, waiting for Jenson to answer the bell that chimed through the house, an icy wind sprang up from nowhere. Through the stained glass of the door, Vaughan saw a tall, broad figure eclipse the hall light—but there was no accompanying mind-noise. Even unaugmented, as he was now, he should have picked up something.

“He’s shielded,” he said.

“What?”

“I said the bastard’s shielded.”

Lars Jenson pulled open the door. He was a large, silver-haired man in his sixties who Vaughan instantly recognised from the images he had read in Elly Jenson’s mind aboard the freighter.

Jenson peered at them, suspicious. “Yes, gentlemen?”

Chandra displayed his identity. “Investigators Chandra and Vaughan, Bengal Station Law Enforcement Agency.”

Jenson hesitated, quickly calculating his options, before deciding on hospitality. “Gentlemen, please. It’s getting cold. Come in.”

He led them into a comfortable lounge, an open log fire radiating warmth. He indicated an overstuffed sofa, saw Vaughan looking at the flickering flames in the hearth. “A hologram, I’m afraid. But very realistic, yes?” He seated himself in an armchair, an authentic book laid print-down on the arm where he’d left it to answer their summons. “Gentlemen, how might I help you?”

Chandra cleared his throat. “We’re investigating the abduction of your daughter, Elly, from Verkerk’s World.”

On the mantle-shelf above the fire, Vaughan saw half a dozen framed graphics of Elly and Lars Jenson. In all of them she was smiling, a pretty dark-haired girl in the arms of her father. He looked at Jenson, an ungovernable emotion, somewhere between anger and incredulity, building within him. He would have given anything at that moment to have been able to read the man’s mind.

“But I assure you,” Jenson was saying, “that my daughter’s departure from Verkerk’s was totally legitimate.”

“We believe she was selected by the Church of the Adoration of the Chosen One as the Chosen One.”

Jenson inclined his head. “That is correct. Of course, I was both honoured and amazed when it was found that she was the Chosen.”

“You yourself belong to the Church?”

“I am a member, yes, Mr. Chandra. Unfortunately, my time being strictly limited with my business commitments, I cannot worship as often as I would like.”

“Your daughter went willingly to Earth?”

“Of course. Do you think I would have sent her otherwise?”

Vaughan almost interrupted, but stopped himself. He recalled Elly Jenson’s terror at being taken from Verkerk’s World.

“Did she travel alone?” Chandra asked.

“Of course not—she was accompanied by two highly respected members of the Church.”

“Can I have their names, please, Mr. Jenson, and their present whereabouts?”

“By all means. They were Jen Freidrickson and his wife, Olga. They will be on Earth now, of course, with Elly.”

Chandra tapped their names into his handset. “You don’t have their current address on Earth?”

“Unfortunately, no. You see, they will be travelling from church to church over the next few months.”

“Mr. Jenson,” Vaughan spoke for the first time, staring at the man. “You mean to tell me that you let your daughter travel to Earth, stay there without you for months—you agreed willingly to this?”

“Mr. Vaughan, you don’t seem to understand what a great privilege it is to have one’s daughter selected to be the Chosen One. It is the equivalent, in Buddhism, of having one’s son pronounced the incarnation of the Dalai Lama.”

Chandra said, “How is the process of selection made, Mr. Jenson?”

“The Council of High Priests retires for three days and undergoes a long, rhapsody-induced trance. In this trance they are contacted by the Godhead, and the Godhead informs them of His choice. This time, praise be, Elly was Chosen.”

Chandra stared at his manicured fingernails, at a loss for the next question. Vaughan stood and took a pix of Elly from the mantle-shelf. With her brown eyes and long dark hair, her resemblance to Holly was quite remarkable.

Jenson was saying: “If that will be all, gentlemen. I really am quite busy—” He stood, indicating the door.

Vaughan turned on him. “I think what you’ve just told us is a pack of lies, Jenson.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Jeff...” Chandra warned.

“You heard me—” He made a grab and Jenson ducked quickly, avoiding Vaughan’s reach like a boxer. He came up against the chair, and this time could not back away from Vaughan’s next lunge. He caught Jenson by the shirt front, ripped at the material. “If you’re not lying, then you won’t mind if I throw your shield away.”

“Jeff—what the hell!” He felt Chandra’s arms around his waist, pulling him away.

Aggrieved, Jenson arranged his shirt. “If this is the way you conduct your investigations on Earth—” he began.

“Don’t give me any of that righteous bullshit!” Vaughan said. He pointed at Jenson. “If you’ve got nothing to hide, then get rid of your shield.”

“Jeff, he’s quite within his rights,” Chandra said.

“Thank you,” Jenson said, arranging his shirt collar. “As a matter of fact I have certain information—involving my business transactions here on Verkerk’s—that in the hands of competitors from neighbouring systems would be highly disadvantageous to my home planet’s economic security.”

“That’s one hell of a long-winded excuse, Jenson—”

“I’ve had about enough of this, Mr. Chandra. If you don’t leave and take this madman with you, I shall have to call the legitimate police.”

Chandra turned to Vaughan. “Jeff, for pity’s sake—this is getting us nowhere.”

Something in Chandra’s expression, a look between concern and despair, spoke to Vaughan’s reason. He closed his eyes, nodded. “Okay, yeah.” He shrugged off Chandra’s hand and moved to the door. He pointed at Jenson. “You’re lying, Jenson. Whatever you’re up to, I’m on to you.”

Vaughan strode down the hall and pulled open the front door. An icy blast of wind met him, chilling the exposed flesh of his hands and face. He could hear Chandra inside the house, trying to smooth over his outburst.

He walked down the garden, his footsteps crunching frost, stopped by the roadster and stanchioned his arms on his knees, hanging his head and closing his eyes against the tears.

He heard footsteps behind him. “Jeff, what the hell were you playing at?”

Vaughan straightened up. He focused on Chandra. “How could he, Jimmy? How the hell could he let his daughter go like that? If you’d seen her in the freighter...”

“Okay, okay. Calm down, Jeff.”

“He’s lying, Jimmy.”

“Okay, so he’s lying. We know that. But blowing up won’t get us anywhere. We’ve got to keep our heads, work out what’s going on. That’s the only way we can find him out, Jeff. Aggression won’t get us anywhere.”

“I just wanted to beat the truth out of the bastard.” Vaughan shook his head. “I don’t know how anyone can let their daughter go like that.”

Chandra sighed, shook his head. “We’ll get to the bottom of this and nail Jenson sooner or later. Come on, it’s freezing out here. Let’s get back to the house, ah-cha?”

As they climbed into the car, Vaughan said, “And how come the guy was shielded?”

“Like he said—business interests—”

Vaughan snorted. “Bullshit. You heard what Laerhaven said, pins are forbidden here. Don’t you think it a bit suspicious that Larson was wearing a shield just as we turned up?”

Chandra thought about it. “Maybe...”

“Damned suspicious,” Vaughan said, wondering how Larson could have known.

On the way back, Chandra’s handset chimed. It was Laerhaven.

“Gentlemen, I’ve been talking with colleagues in the capital, Vanderlaan. I enquired about the ex-spacer, Essex.” She paused.

Chandra said, “And?”

“Well... he’s currently under police protection in hospital in Vanderlaan. Apparently he approached the police there three days ago, claiming that his life was in danger. He was vague, almost incoherent. My colleagues dismissed his claims, sent him away.”

Chandra glanced across at Vaughan. “Don’t tell me,” he said into his handset.

“Two days ago an attempt was made on his life. He was shot at close range by an unknown assailant in a park in the city. Fortunately for Essex, a police patrol was passing nearby and heard the shot—they intervened, but the gunman got away.”

“And Essex?”

“Badly wounded, but he’ll live.”

“Did he say why someone wanted him dead?”

“He’s been in no fit state to say anything, Mr. Chandra. My colleagues are hoping to interview him when he recovers.”

“We’d like to question him, if possible,” Chandra said.

There was a pause, then Laerhaven said, “I’ll give you the address of the hospital, and the code of the officer in charge of the case. I don’t foresee any problems.”

Chandra thanked her and was about to sign off when Vaughan said, “Lieutenant Laerhaven, Vaughan here. Did you by any chance mention to Lars Jenson that we wanted to question him, and that I was a telepath?”

The reply was immediate, “No. No, of course not.”

Chandra said, “Thank you, Lieutenant. We thought not.” He cut the connection.

Vaughan glanced across at Chandra. “Did
we?”
Vaughan asked pointedly.

“You think she might have mentioned it to Jenson?” Chandra asked. “You don’t think she’s in with him?”

Vaughan shrugged. “Not necessarily—but she might have mentioned it inadvertently.”

They continued the drive in silence.

Later that evening, after a passable curry cooked up by Chandra with the meagre ingredients available in the house, Vaughan stepped through the French windows and stood on the frost-crackling lawn.

Alerted by movement above him, he stared into the sky. He laughed, the sound harsh in the silence. Snow was falling and, through the sudden flurry he could see—like snowflakes that had elected, en masse, to defy gravity—the still points of light that were a million stars. Unbidden, the recollection returned of a night very much like this almost twenty years ago, when he had stood beneath the vast Canadian night sky and stared up into the heavens. Now he was overcome with the recapitulation of the feeling he had experienced back then—the overwhelming optimism of a young boy at the start of life, with all of the hopes and none of the fears, with all the cosmos at his fingertips.

He thought of Holly and Tiger. He wanted to be able to stand with them now and stare up at the teeming stars. He wanted to experience, however vicariously, their delight at being young and alive.

It came to him that the tragedy of their deaths was not so much the termination of what they had been, but the ultimate and irrevocable termination of all that they would have become. That was the terrible tragedy.