Regeneration (15 page)

He glanced back toward the hall and the kitchen before he replied, “The only question I have is how they could have seen fit to imprison you in the first place.” He kept his voice low, speaking
quickly. “I'm not alone in that, Ms. Klist. There are many of us who feel that your incarceration was entirely inappropriate.”

He stepped forward, holding something out to her; it looked like a small piece of cloth. Curious, she leaned toward him and took it, then settled back into the sofa. He resumed his deferential pose. The something turned out to be a tiny pouch, made of a fabric so sumptuous that her fingertips tingled with pleasure. There was something inside: hard, round, no bigger than a memtab or a pre-Syndrome coin. She slipped it out of its silken case and held it up to the light.

It was a flat disk made of a rich, deep gold that caught the autumn sunlight and glowed in her hand. The “K” was dominant, the “Z” smaller, superimposed to share the upper diagonal. The letters were contained within a smooth circle like a wedding band. There was a tiny bulge at the bottom where the gold swelled into something that resembled a flower, or a mouth, as though the band were swallowing itself. It was a beautiful object, heavy and pure, and full of meaning. It was also, Zavcka realized distantly as she turned it in her fingers, the first gift she had received from anyone other than herself in more decades than she cared to count.

“A small token,” Crawford said, “of our esteem.” His voice was thick with emotion.

She found herself clearing her own throat. “I don't think, Mr. Crawford, that the people who brought me here earlier would be happy about this.”

“No, madam, I don't imagine they would. But we've examined the rules very carefully and there's nothing that says you can't receive it.”

“No,” she mused, still looking at the pretty thing in her hand. “But there are lots of rules about whom I'm allowed contact with.” She held the symbol up, glinting between thumb and forefinger. “This should disqualify you.”

“I'm a senior consultant at an exclusive financial services firm in the City of London,” he said. “My qualifications in that respect are beyond reproach.”

“So, just to be clear,” she said, wondering how on earth they had pulled this off, “you really do work for Dhahab Investments, you
really are part of my account team and they really have assigned you to me.”

“Yes, madam.”

“I presume they're not aware of your other interests? Or is there a Klist Club in the premier-client division?”

“No, madam.”

“You must have done a lot of finagling, Mr. Crawford, to find yourself in precisely the right place at precisely the right time.”

Crawford ducked his head as though accepting a compliment. “I've merely been diligent, madam. We knew you would be allowed home eventually. We wanted to be in a position to make contact.”

“Now that you have, what do you expect is going to happen?”

“That's up to you, madam. There are things that belong to you that you must want back. I can and will, of course, undertake whatever business matters you wish to pursue, but we believe we have located the most precious asset of all: the child who was taken from you.”

Zavcka's breath caught, sharp as a knife in her chest.

There was a tiny smile on Crawford's face, almost a smirk, that told her he had seen. She recognized the look in his eyes now. It was longing, a longing that was worshipful in its avarice.

“There are things we want as well, madam, that you have been wise enough to keep from the authorities. The secret of your longevity, the knowledge you have guarded for so long. We hope we can prove ourselves worthy of your confidence.”

So for all the apparent reverence, there it was: an offer to horse-trade: the hidden child for the deepest secret.

Except there is no secret, you moron. I'm a mutant. I didn't disappear every couple of decades to turn back the clock with black-lab gene surgery, I went so no one would notice me not aging in the first place. If I'd known it would be you idiots who believed that story instead of the jury, I'd never have let the lawyer try it.

Were it not for what the man had offered her, Zavcka would have said it out loud and damned the consequences. As it was, she felt the blood roaring in her ears, anticipation pounding down her veins and the symbol of devotion in her clenched fist, sharp against her
palm. She made herself breathe deeply and slowly. This was going to be a far more immediate and delicate negotiation than she had anticipated.

“Sit down, Mr. Crawford,” she said. Her voice was strong, full of authority. “I'm sure we can come to an understanding.”

The access road that had been a pristine white line on Fayole's map was in reality a narrow, deeply rutted trammel of rich, dark mud. Its verges were thigh-high with nettles ragged with age and dirt, the recent passage of too many vehicles, and the ravages of autumn. The bright blue line of the drainage channel turned out to be a wash of turbid brown. Detective Superintendent Varsi stood close to where the road ended, in a stony apron wide and solid enough underfoot for a vehicle to turn, rubbing her feet through slippery grass to try and dislodge the worst of the mire from her shoes and thinking that her children would love the place.

Detective Inspector Achebe trudged along the bank toward her, pants safely tucked into waterproof boots; the sludge line came up well past the ankle. Behind him, an EM engineer in a pair of waders was cautiously inching into the water along a crumbling slipway. Stakes had been driven into the earth at its head and the ooze at its foot, and a pair of ropes, one on either side, acted as makeshift handrails. The engineer was using the knots along their length to steady himself as he went. Sharon could see more suited figures in the water and on the
opposite bank of the channel, and yet another pair further out where it would normally empty into the huge sweep of the Thames. They were manning a small vehicle with a lifting arm that listed dangerously toward the water. A flatbed truck bearing the EM logo, upon which the vehicle had presumably been brought in, was parked at the side, along with another EM van and a couple of police transports.

“We're certain this was it?” she asked as Achebe came up, and also started wiping his boots against the grass.

He nodded. “The highest concentrations are—were—in the channel, and forensics indicates it's where the algae slurry was released. The sterilization is complete now; they're just testing to confirm no viable organisms. Then they'll remove the barrier and let the water flow into the river again.”

“So they've had to kill everything.”

“In the channel? Pretty much. Apparently it's going to stink to high heaven if they don't get it moving soon. You can smell it already.” His nose wrinkled in distaste at the whiff of organic decay in the air. “But once they do, I'm told it should all come back into equilibrium fairly quickly.”

“Right, well, EM looks like they're on top of that part.” Sharon put away her mental image of Mish and Suri playing hide-and-seek out here; it was too cold now anyway, and the water was dead, and the reeds and rushes were starting to sag as the year wound down. Maybe next summer, if it was warm and bright and all was well again. “Walk me through what we think we know.”

“They arrived shortly before dawn,” Achebe said, pointing to the muddy track. “It's all churned up now, but when we got here a couple of days ago there were several distinct sets of tread marks. Given the strength of the storm, we know they had to've been laid down after the rain had stopped. The ones we're most interested in were made by a heavy vehicle, probably about the same size as the EM truck over there. It was driven in, turned, and backed up to the slipway. We've got tracks going right onto the concrete. We think there was most likely a tank of some sort mounted on the back.”

“So they would've run a hose into the water and opened the tap.”

“That's what it looks like, and when they were finished, they drove straight back out. The departing treads indicate that the vehicle was considerably lighter than when it arrived.”

“And the other marks?”

“Just cycle treads along the margins, created sometime over the next day or so. There've been a few cyclists and walkers along since we cordoned the lane off—regular users, but none of them recall anything unusual happening before we showed up. One of them said he'd already been out here since the storm and we matched his treads. We've got appeals out on the tanker.”

“Anything promising from the road cams?”

“Not really, and we've already eliminated everything that's registered within the local area. That's important because the weight and volume of a tank that could've been brought on a vehicle of that size down a road of this size aren't enough to account for the amount of algae that went into the channel, not if it was being kept in a healthy suspension.” He slapped at a late mosquito. “The EM microbiologists and our own people all agree that the only way the maximum volume we've calculated works is if it's highly concentrated, and the algae wouldn't have been able to live long under those conditions, so that means it can't have been trucked in from any great distance. They think it would've been in the tank for no more than an hour.”

“So, subtracting the time to load up, get underway, maneuver into position, and unload at this end . . . about a forty-five minute drive?”

Achebe nodded. “Fifty, tops.”

Sharon made a face. That was probably too long to be helpful. “What's within fifty minutes of here?”

“At least a thousand different farms, factories, industrial estates, and private properties with outbuildings and a good water supply for the growth tanks. Quite a lot of biomass agriculture.” He caught her look. “We're prioritizing anyone who objected to Thames Tidal during the consultation stage, or signed that Estuary Preservation petition to try and block the power plant coming online, but unfortunately, that doesn't narrow it down very much. At this point I have to assume we'll be searching all of them.”

“How's that going?”

“Slowly. Lots of indignant farmers and site managers who can't imagine
why
we want to talk to
them
—or look around their premises.” He frowned, scratching at the mosquito bite. “They all maintain they know nothing about it, and so far we haven't found any evidence to the contrary. But it's conservative country out here, boss.” He gestured in the general direction of the lane, the surrounding suburbs, and the vast swathes of domesticated countryside beyond the bypass that defined the city's limits. “No one's come right out in support of the attack—they're not stupid—but there isn't the level of
disapproval
you'd expect, either. There's a lot of ‘us and them' language, along with a sort of . . . well,
appreciation,
really. A lot of remarks about how it shows gems aren't the only clever folk around these days, all said very jovially, and when pressed they swear they don't mean anything by it. That's probably true, but it's not the kind of thing you'd hear in east London, is it?”

Sharon's jaw tightened. “No, it's not. Not anymore, anyway.” She remembered too well the kinds of things that
had
been said in east London, and elsewhere, when she'd first met Mikal. “So even if only a few individuals are in on it, this is a pretty sympathetic region for them to be based in.”

“Exactly. It could be a local plot, or someone might have allowed their premises to be used without being too concerned with what they were being used
for
.”

“A tanker could've been brought in well before it was needed,” Sharon said, thinking through it. “That would've increased the risk of someone noticing it and asking questions. But if you know the natives are friendly, you might not worry about that too much.”

“You wouldn't,” Achebe replied. “Also, people are less likely to connect something they noticed several days before with an event that they know happened on a specific date.”

“And still less when it takes the police several
more
days to even know what they're looking for, or where to look.” Sharon knew that, had it not been for the swift work of the medics and scientists, it could easily have taken much longer. “This was old news before we even got here.”

“We're off to a late start,” Achebe agreed, “but maybe not quite as late as they expected.”

Achebe's remark nagged at Sharon as she drove an indirect and unfamiliar route back toward what her brain stubbornly insisted on identifying as The City. She had wanted to travel some of the roads the algae might have been brought in on, get a feel for the neighborhoods where its creators might be sheltering. The journey wouldn't take her out to the countryside, with its high-yield biomass farms and low levels of either wildlife or human habitation, but on a long, winding loop through the crumbling southern conurbations Fayole had spoken of. Still, the distance felt greater than it was, for the character of the world outside the windows of the car kept shifting.

What had once been affluent suburbia was now a hinterland, neither city nor country, neither modern nor properly ancient, neither tamed nor truly wild. Instead it was an uneasy amalgamation of undecided environments, where time was in some places accelerated and in others strangely suspended. Glancing down from an elevated roadway she saw what might almost have passed for parkland, had it not been studded with the crumbling ruins of terraced houses like strings of mislaid, misshapen pearls. The corpse of a commercial district flashed past next, entombed in concrete, and all the more desolate for it. But even here, trees had erupted through the asphalt. Thick ropes of ivy shrouded the remains of a collapsed shopping center, its levels flattened into each other like a stack of unappealing pancakes. The land humans had abandoned was being reclaimed, slowly and untidily, but steadily nonetheless.
The people who live around here must feel besieged,
she thought.

As if in confirmation, she found herself within a few seconds passing through a tired town center with a few offices, shops, and cafés bounded by residential streets. The buildings looked in reasonably good repair, but almost all were pre-Syndrome and the place had a shabby, disheveled look to it. There was a school on one corner, from which a crowd of rowdy preteens spilled onto a playing field, well used if the graffiti on the walls and damage to the institutional fencing were anything to go by. She wondered if the kids thought
of themselves as Londoners, or if the city was to them a distant, foreign place: a strange land to be sampled on a day trip, for some to dream of and others to fear; for some to avoid and some, eventually, to escape to.

For mile after mile she could see the struggles of the present and the scars of the past, but very little that looked much like a future.

Finally the neighborhoods became busier, newer, and more crowded, until she was traveling between buildings gleaming with polished aggregate and biosynthetic finishes, surrounded by the constant low roar of traffic and trains, people shouting and sirens in the distance: the myriad sounds of urban life. The road swept around and up and as she drove onto a bridge that would take her across to the north bank of the Thames she looked out at the great gray-brown ribbon, thinking that few things could be at once so innocent and so ominous. The red buoys marking the most upstream of the river turbines winked in the distance.

What
had
they expected, these people who had suborned the lifeblood of a city and turned it against its own? How long had they counted on a fruitless search for some local spillage to divert attention away from the real source of the poison, in the upstream heartland of those who sensed their own obsolescence? When it was eventually discovered, as they must have known it would be, what reaction had they anticipated from the police, the politicians, the public?

She caught a glimpse of the gleaming curve of City Hall as she came off the bridge and turned right. As though it had been a trigger, her husband's tale of his meeting with Gabriel came flooding back, now full of significance; it felt as though something that had been lurking at the back of her mind was now stepping forward and demanding her full attention.

At the time she had been so focused on the political tightrope Mikal was about to walk, and so annoyed at Gabriel and Herran for their amateur investigating, that she had pushed it away until she was in a better frame of mind to consider its implications. But somewhere on the too-long drive back into London, as she pondered not only the resources but the thinking behind the Thames toxin attack, the likelihood of a connection became clear to her.

Though one plot involved snark and spin on public streams and the other was a case study in black-lab bioengineering and black-ops execution, they played to the same whispered fears and simmering resentments. More than that, they shared a subtlety of implementation that she felt in her bones could not be coincidental, not when both had the same community in their sights.

Her instincts, honed by a decade and more of detective work, told her that Gabriel had uncovered another front in a hidden war. With any luck, its perpetrators still had no idea they'd been found out. And he'd had the sense to take his discovery to his uncle, knowing Mikal could act as a bulwark against publicity. Gabriel was smart and careful, and she wished there was a way to keep him completely out of it from now on. Gaela and Bal would not be pleased.

She considered the problem for a few more seconds, then shook herself in irritation, flicked her earset to active and called her husband.