The Administration Series (83 page)

She could call Warrick. Call Warrick, warn him that Carnac was up to something, and let him handle it. She didn't like to think how pissed off Toreth would be if he found out she'd done
that
. Still, it would be worth being called a cunt again, if it stopped Carnac hurting him.

Or should she wait and see how things went on Sunday, and then call?

Sunday lunch had been nice: long, expensive, and well lubricated. Then they'd gone to a gallery, of all places, which had something to do with someone Carnac knew. Toreth hadn't been paying that much attention, but it had only been two-thirds as boring as he'd expected. The hotel afterwards had been much more fun — better than Carnac's usual standard of self-absorbed fuck, anyway. Warrick was right; the man was bearable, when you got to know him.

Now Toreth was horrendously late. He'd barely had time to dash home, change into something smart, and get round to Warrick's before 'late' became so late it turned into 'didn't show'. He thought up excuses in the lift up to the flat. For some reason, mentioning Carnac felt like a bad idea, so he settled on something simple and easy to remember.

He'd half expected, and half hoped, that Warrick might have gone without him, but he was still waiting. Not to mention looking thoroughly fucked off.

"You're late," Warrick said unnecessarily, as he let him into the flat.

"I know. I'm sorry. I was at the gym and I lost track of time." He smiled with all the apologetic charm he could muster. "I'll make up for it, I promise."

It might have worked, except that he tried to follow it up with a kiss. Warrick pulled back, turning his head away sharply.

"What?"

"You weren't . . . you weren't at the gym."

"Yes, I was." Even as he said it, he knew it was a mistake.

"Please, at least don't lie about it. I can smell him on you." His voice was tight with anger. "Carnac. At least I assume it's him, unless you're fucking someone else as well."

Toreth blinked, surprised at the sudden venom. "All right. Yes, you're right. I'll have a shower. It won't take a minute."

"You do that." Warrick took a deep breath. "Go home, have a shower and don't come back here."

"What?"

"Go away. Don't come back. I don't think I can make it any simpler unless I draw pictures."

The icy words brought a touch of real fear — stupid, because Warrick didn't mean it like that. Couldn't. "Why, for fuck's sake?"

Warrick laughed without any humour at all. "Quite. I suddenly find that I don't have the patience for this any more. Not on a Sunday."

Understanding, he was simultaneously angry and unsettled.

"That's not what you said before. What happened to 'I don't own you, I don't want to own you'?"

No mention of any days of the week, as far as he could remember.

Warrick sighed with exaggerated patience. "Toreth, I'm not saying 'don't fuck anyone else'. I'm not even saying 'don't fuck Carnac'. I'm saying . . . " He frowned, as if he wasn't entirely sure himself. "What I'm saying is that as long as you are fucking him, I will be busy doing other things. I don't think that's an unreasonable position to take, and if you think otherwise, then it has just become your problem, not mine."

"He'll be gone in a couple of weeks."

No response.

He gave it one more try. "I don't see why it's such a big deal."

"Yes, I'm quite aware of that. Now, please leave."

Warrick opened the door, held it open.

So he left.

On Monday, Toreth came in in a foul mood. Sara gave him until lunchtime on the slim hope that it might be a hangover. Then she waited until he'd gone out for lunch — with Carnac — and called SimTech.

"I'd like to speak to Doctor Warrick, please. Tell him it's the inestimable Sara."

One day she'd have to look the word up. She'd always vaguely worried that it would turn out to be something unflattering.

The screen changed to show Warrick, doing 'mild surprise and polite interest'. "Hello, Sara."

"Hi." Get to the point. "I need to see you. About Toreth."

All expression vanished. "I'm afraid I'm busy."

She knew what that meant. "It won't take long, I promise."

"If he wishes to leave me a message, he can call me himself."

Oh oh. Flying debris from a row that must have been a good one. No further explanation for Toreth's bad mood was required, anyway. The question was, had they argued about Carnac?

"
I
want to talk to you. Toreth has no idea I'm calling. Please, Warrick."

Then she held her breath while he thought it over.

"Very well. Public or private?"

She briefly imagined Toreth accidentally seeing them together. Unlikely, but she daren't risk it. "Private, please."

He nodded once. "My flat, eight o'clock."

After giving her the address, he cancelled the connection without saying goodbye.

When he let her into the flat his expression was for once perfectly readable. If it hadn't been, his opening words were a bit of a clue.

After he had shown her through to the living room — and distracted as she was she still noticed that it was a
nice
flat — he offered her a seat, sat down opposite her, and said, "If you've come all this way to let me know that their relationship is rather more than professional, then I'm afraid you've had a wasted journey."

At least he knew, which she had been worried about. The bad temper she could excuse. "It's not that. It's Carnac. He gives me the creeps. He's fucking with Toreth in more ways than the usual."

Warrick frowned. "Explain."

"He's got some game going, only I'm not sure what. I think he's trying to hook Toreth and then he's going to do something . . . Jesus, I wish I knew what."

"Mm." Thoughtful pause. "Would you like a drink? Coffee? Tea? Something alcoholic?"

"Coffee would be great, thanks."

She didn't mind the change of subject — he was still thinking about what she'd said. She followed him through into the kitchen (huge and full, as Toreth had told her, of a bewildering array of cooking equipment) and watched as he made expensive coffee in an expensive antique brewer, some weird-looking type of thing she'd never seen before. She'd forgotten how loaded he was. Loaded
and
domesticated. If Toreth ever decided he didn't want Warrick any more, she might be tempted herself.

Once the coffee had been made, they sat down in the kitchen, which she guessed to be a step up in intimacy from the living room.

He watched as she added milk and sugar to her coffee, then asked the question she'd been dreading. "What makes you think Carnac has any particular plans?"

"I'm . . . well, it's hard to say, as such." She shrugged. "It's the way he is. He was God's own bastard to start with — to Toreth, anyway. He drove him mad and it had to be deliberate because he can be so bloody smooth you could skate on him. Not that that stopped Toreth screwing him, of course. It never does."

Warrick closed his eyes very briefly.

"Sorry," she said.

"That's quite all right." Liquid nitrogen politeness. "Carry on."

"Anyway, then he did a real number on me." She looked down at her cup. "He got me to tell him all kinds of stuff about Toreth."

"Oh?"

"Yeah." She looked up and smiled, despite the situation. "All kinds of stuff I'm not going to tell you. After that he started being, well . . . nicer. Nothing you could point out specifically as wrong, but just . . . . Toreth's getting less and less annoyed with having him around. And he's still screwing him. I mean,
still
. I don't like it."

Warrick smiled wryly. "You think his displaying interest in someone for any length of time is a bad thing?"

"You know what I mean."

"Yes, of course." He sat for a while, turning his coffee cup slowly round in the saucer, expression closed.

"I spoke to him," he said eventually.

"Toreth?"

"Carnac. We had dinner."

She stared, far too stunned to say anything.

Her expression triggered a fleeting smile. "Nothing very exciting happened. We chatted about various things, primarily the sim, and he made a not terribly serious pass at me. However, he did mention Toreth and, adding what he said together with what you've said, I think your guess as to his motives is substantially correct."

"Does Toreth know you saw him?"

"The occasion to mention it never arose. Needless to say . . . "

"I won't say a word. Warrick, what's 'substantially correct' supposed to mean? What's he doing? Why is he doing it?"

Warrick looked past her for a moment, frowning, then said, "have you ever . . . seen Toreth's psych file?"

Meaning he
had
? "No. But he's a para. They're all the same, aren't they? More or less. He's — " She hesitated, but if he'd seen the bloody file he must know. Still, she didn't want to say it out loud. Toreth would hate the idea of them talking about him like this. It sounded better in the generic and non-specific. "They're not normal, basically. That's how they get selected for training in the first place."

"Right. So how many people would you say Toreth trusts?
Really
trusts?"

It took her a moment to make sense of the question, before understanding triggered a memory. "Oh, God. Carnac asked me that." She smacked her forehead. "And I
told
him: me and you. I'm an idiot. Could I have screwed it up any more?"

"Probably not. He thought it was 'terribly interesting'. And also that . . . "

"What?"

He shook his head. "That he, ah, maintains a relationship with us. That we're real people to him."

She never thought of it in quite those terms before, and it was weirdly flattering to think that out of everyone, it was her. Warrick as well, of course, but her first. Flattering and horrible, because it made her betrayal that much more awful.

Warrick was still speaking. "The point is that, I suspect, Carnac's curious as to how and why Toreth does trust us, because his file suggests it's something rather improbable. I expect he's testing a theory."

Her stomach sank — it sounded nastily plausible. Spooky mind-fuck games. "A theory? Getting Toreth to trust him is testing a theory? Because he's fucking
curious
?"

"That's only what I think he's doing. I can't be sure."

He sounded pretty bloody sure. "And then Carnac's going to turn round and tell him he was just fucking with him? In the mind-fucking sense."

"That I don't know. I don't know why he would want to, or what it would add to the hypothesis. But you're at I&I and I'm not, so perhaps you're right."

"Oh." Her stomach seemed to have taken up gymnastics. "It'd kill him." Her earlier fear returned. "And then he'd kill Carnac."

Warrick didn't comment.

"Aren't you going to say anything to him? About what Carnac's doing?"

"No."

"
No
?"

"He can work it out for himself. He's a grown man, Sara, and he's not stupid."

She tried to think of a tactful way of saying, Yes, but emotionally he's about ten. On a good day.

"Maybe he could . . . do with a hint?" she suggested.

"It's not that simple." He fell silent, looking lost for words, and, for the first time she could recall, she felt sorry for him. Much as she liked Toreth, he would be the world's worst nightmare to try anything serious with.

"Carnac is his problem," Warrick said eventually. "As I've already made clear to him."

A sudden chill, real enough to give her goose bumps. "Already?"

"Toreth was here yesterday. Briefly. I told him that unless and until he was finished with Carnac, I would be unavailable. Looking at it in this light, that may have been something of a mistake."

Oh, Christ. He wasn't wrong there. She understood why he'd done it — she even agreed with it — but still, oh, Christ. Lousy, rotten timing, hers and his. If only she'd called him on Friday.

Still, regrets butter no parsnips, as her mother said. Whatever the hell that meant.

Warrick was pouring more coffee for them both.

"What are you going to do?" she asked when he'd finished.

"Nothing." Flat and final.

"Can't you talk to Carnac?"

"Why suggest I do it? You're working with him."

"He wouldn't listen to me."

"Nor to me." He added a quarter of a teaspoon of sugar to his cup and stirred it. Three left, three right, three left again, before he tapped the spoon against the edge of the cup and set it in the saucer. Then he pushed the cup away. "One thing I do know for certain about Carnac is that if he has a set goal he will carry it through. He would deny there was any ulterior motive to his treatment of Toreth, and then carry on."

"Warrick, please, you can't let him — "

"Sara." He stood up and took a few paces away across the kitchen. When he turned, his expression gave away no emotion. "What exactly would you propose that I do?"