The Affinities (14 page)

“Since you did it with somebody who isn't a Tau.”

“Honestly? A few years.”

“Who was it? I mean the last one who wasn't in your Affinity.”

Jenny Symanski. “Just a girl I knew.”

“Like me.” She kissed me again. “Now I'm a girl you know.”

She got up, left the room, came back with a joint and a lighter. I liked the way she moved, unselfconsciously naked, fluid, her body more wave than particle. The bed creaked when she climbed back in. We shared the joint: some generic weed Amanda would have turned up her nose at, but it did the trick. We settled into a measured second round.

The next thing I noticed was the fading light from the bedroom window. Because this was a basement apartment the window was high in the wall but low to the street. Sunset turned the curtains scarlet. We listened to the sound of footsteps passing on the sidewalk outside. Strangers coming home from work. Shadows of unfamiliar lives. The murmur of voices. “Might rain tonight,” Rachel said sleepily.

“I wish I could stay, but—”

“I know. It's okay. I have to go get Suze.” Suze was at her grandmother's, where she often went after school.

“Need a drive?”

“Easier to bus it, but thank you for asking.” She cleared her throat. “So … is this just a happy afternoon, or can I call you?”

She meant it casually but I heard a hitch of tension in her voice.

“Of course you can call me. More likely I'll call you first.”

“That's a nice thing to say. Are all Taus as nice as you?”

“In their way. Uh, maybe not
quite
as nice.”

I used the bathroom before I left. There was a row of brown prescription bottles on the shelf over the toilet. I resisted the temptation to read the labels, and I congratulated myself for respecting her privacy. Or maybe I just didn't want to know what was wrong with her.

*   *   *

I stopped by the building where we worked to pick up some papers and to see if there was anyone I could recruit for dinner company. I ran into Amanda, who was hurrying down the hallway. She noticed me, stopped, did a double take, and drew an instant conclusion about where I'd been and what I'd done. I couldn't help it: I blushed.

“Well,” she said.
“Well.”

“I, uh—”

“Uh
yeah.
So I guess she didn't ask for money, huh? Or
did
she?”

“That's not fair. And no, she didn't. Where are you rushing off to?”

“Meeting. With Damian. You're invited.”

We joined him in one of the building's newly renovated conference rooms, nothing inside but a trestle table, a dozen folding chairs, and a faint haze of plaster dust. Just the three of us. If Damian had any thoughts about what might have happened between Rachel and me, he didn't bother to share them. He had bigger issues.

Meir Klein was dead.

Klein had died in his big house in the Okanagan Valley. “Staff found him,” Damian said, “when he didn't get up this morning.”

“His cancer,” Amanda whispered.

“Actually, no. According the police, he died of a ligature injury.”

In other words he had been strangled. Or had strangled himself: maybe an autoerotic strangulation gone wrong, unlikely as that sounded given Klein's fragile physical condition. The evidence was ambiguous, the coroner was performing an autopsy, but until the report was finalized, the police were betting on foul play.

*   *   *

Amanda knocked on the door of my hotel room a few minutes after midnight, and it didn't take Tau telepathy to figure out what she wanted. She pressed herself hard against me. “Now fuck me,” she whispered, “like you fucked your tether.”

I didn't like the word “tether.” It was what some Taus called the lovers they took outside of the Affinity. It was a term of contempt, like
shiksa
or
shegetz
. As in,
Don't let that tether of yours drag you down.
But this was Amanda. It was not in my power to refuse her. Which is to say, I didn't want to refuse her. And she knew it. “Let me shower first,” I said.

“No,” she said. “
Now
. While the smell of her is still on you.”

 

CHAPTER 8

Amanda and I met Damian at the office the next morning, an hour before the research teams arrived, early enough that the light of dawn through the east-facing windows made the motes of plaster dust in the air sparkle like diamonds. Amanda slumped in the nearest chair, her eyes still bruised with sleep. Damian stood at the head of the table, looking grim. “I've been talking to some contacts in the Vancouver Police Force,” he said. “The RCMP is investigating Klein's death, not the cops, but I managed to learn a few things. Almost certainly homicide. A couple of hard drives are missing from Klein's office. So we can assume that whoever killed him knew he was in possession of valuable data.”

“InterAlia's data,” Amanda said.

“You're picturing some goon ransacking the place and murdering Klein on orders from corporate headquarters. And maybe that's a reasonable assumption, but unless someone was unforgivably clumsy there won't be any evidence linking the murder to InterAlia. What we have to ask ourselves is, if InterAlia
is
behind this, what's their next move? Especially if the drives they stole contain anything that would connect Klein to
us
.”

I said, “Somebody wants to keep Klein's data from going public, they have money to spend on hired thieves, and they're apparently willing to kill for what they want. If they suspect Klein passed us the data, we're the next logical target.”

“Maybe. But only as long they figure they have something to gain by intimidating us.”

“So if they're going to act,” Amanda said, “they have to act soon.”

“Right. So we need to be able to protect ourselves. We have two teams here, twenty people in the building during daylight hours if you include the three of us, and any or all of us could be targeted. How do we afford protection to twenty people, either here or when they're moving freely around the city?”

“Warn them, obviously,” I said. “House them in one place, even the ones who live here in the city. And we need help. People who know how to do real-world security.”

Damian nodded. “I'll get on T-Net this morning and set it up.”

T-Net was the hidden webspace where sodality reps interacted with each other. A tech guy had once tried to tell me how it worked. All I remembered was that the explanation involved words like “serial/parallel encryption” and “onion routing.” Basically, it was a space where sodality-level Taus could exchange information with minimal risk of surveillance. Through T-net, Damian could put out the word that he needed volunteers with security and military experience who lived in the area or could get to Vancouver on short notice.

“Okay,” I said. “But are we the only ones at risk?”

“What do you mean?”

Amanda said, “He's thinking of the guys who questioned his new tether, Rachel Ragland.”

“I doubt she's in any danger,” Damian said. “They've talked to her already, they didn't learn anything.”

“Depends on whether they know I've been seeing her.”

“Well, that's easily fixed,” Amanda said. “Stop seeing her.”

Damian said, “The guys who came to see her, did she describe them?”

“Only vaguely.”

“Do you think you could get a better description from her?”

“I don't know. I could try. Why? Do you think they're the same people who went after Klein?”

“Could be. It would help if we could give our security guys some faces to look out for.”

“You mean, like a sketch?”

“Yeah,” Damian said. “Like a sketch.”

I said I would get on it.

*   *   *

The first of our new security team showed up that afternoon, a local guy named Gordo MacDonald. Gordo was ex-military, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, chest like a rain barrel, abs so defined you could count them through his t-shirt. Shaved head and one glittering gold earring. I would have flinched when we shook hands, but
the look
passed between us. The Tau look: a wry curvature of the mouth, something indefinable about the eyes, but it was as if all the threat went out of his face. He gave me a sheepish grin, and I gave him one back. “Hey, bro,” he said.

I wasn't a
hey bro
kind of guy, but I said, “Hey.”

Gordo told Damian he wanted to start by walking through the building, get to know the layout, “make sure the bad guys don't have a place to hide.”

Amanda touched my arm after Damian and Gordo left the room. “I wanted to say, I wasn't just being bitchy this morning. About Rachel Ragland, I mean. It's none of my business whether you keep on seeing her. It's just, I can't help thinking, a single mom on social assistance, she's bound to need more than you can give her. A couple of months of great sex and then you're gone—is that good for her? Does she need that?”

“I told her what the situation is.”

“You told her, but did she hear you? You've been living in Tau-land. It's different out there. People lie. Not just to each other but to themselves. People get hurt.”

“I know that. And I don't intend to hurt her.”

“It may not matter what you
intend
. You're treating her like a Tau, and she's not.”

And that was true. But I needed to see her at least once more. If only to make a forensic sketch.

*   *   *

So when Rachel suggested we get together Saturday afternoon, I said sure. She had a whole day planned, she said. We could drive to Stanley Park with Suze. Walk the seawall. Drop off Suze at her grandmother's, then have the evening to ourselves. Go out for dinner and drinks, maybe. If I was free?

I said I was free.

When I pulled up to the low-rise building in New Westminster, Rachel came out of the lobby with a big backpack over her shoulder and Suze clinging to her left hand. Rachel was wearing shorts and a yellow blouse and a Canucks cap to keep the sun out of her eyes. Suze was decked out in a summer dress and pink plastic Barbie sunglasses.

“Remember me?” I said to Suze when she climbed in the backseat.

“No!”

“From the forest,” Rachel prompted her. “When our car broke down.”

I told her my name was Adam. Suze gave me a solemn look, then said she was pleased to meet me.

The car's sound system had been playing the news from a US netcast, but the announcer's voice was so solemn and the news so ominous (the India-Pakistan conflict had heated up again) that I turned it off as soon as we pulled into traffic. Suze immediately began to sing the chorus (and only the chorus) of a song from an old kids' movie: “
Chiddy
chiddy
bang
bang I-love-
you!
Chiddy
chiddy
bang
bang I-love-
you!
”

“It's ‘chitty,'” Rachel told her. “Not ‘chiddy.'”

“CHIDDY chiddy BANG bang! I LOVE YOU!”

“Have it your own way. A little quieter, though, okay?”

Suze grudgingly moderated her chiddies. An hour later we were at the seawall, watching cargo ships glide like iron ballerinas across the water of English Bay. The water was too cold for swimming, but Suze seemed more interested in digging in the sand and chasing gulls. Rachel and I settled into a patch of packed sand in the shade of a sea-bleached drift log. She opened her backpack and took out a selection of plastic-wrapped Wonder Bread sandwiches and a thermos of lemonade. I reached into my own pack and produced a sketchbook and a pencil. She said, “What's that? You draw?”

“Now and then.”

“Is that what you do for a living?”

“No. I thought about it once, but you go where life takes you. I'm more of a management consultant these days.”

She gave one of her quick, full-throated laughs. “That sounds like a money-for-bullshit job. No offense.”

“None taken. Those two men who visited you, you think you could describe them to me?”

“What, so you can draw them?”

I nodded.

“Are they so dangerous you need to know what they look like? No, don't answer that. Are you, like, a police sketch artist or something?”

“To be honest, I've never tried to draw a face from a description. I'd like to try. But we don't have to if you don't want to.”

“Oh, I think we
do
have to. Since you brought your pencil and paper and all. Afterward, maybe you can draw a picture of me?”

“I'd like to. Once we get this out of the way.”

She shrugged. “What do I do?”

“Start by picking one of the two men. Don't think about what he looked like, just think about something he did. Like, smile or not smile. Blink. Pick his teeth.”

She squinted her eyes. “The taller guy. His head…”

“What about it?”

“He kept cocking it to the left, like a dog hearing a whistle. Head shaped like a rectangle. Like a loaf of bread with eyes and a mouth.”

I made some tentative lines, more to encourage her than to accomplish anything. “Hair?”

“Bald as a bottle cap. I don't think he
shaved
it bald, I think it was just
bald
bald. Narrow eyes, close together. His mouth, when he tried to smile, you could see his clenched teeth. White teeth. He's got a good dental-care plan, whoever he is.”

“What do you mean, when he tried to smile?”

“He smiled like he was faking it. He had one of those mouths that opens like a puppet's jaw, like on a real crude hinge. Wide. Kind of bracketed, the lines at the side of it, not a curvy smile, kind of inorganic, like a robot smile.”

It turned out I wasn't especially good at translating any of this to paper, but before too long I had scribbled and erased my way to something Rachel called, “Cartoony, but I guess I'd recognize him from that. Sure.”