The Mandel Files (149 page)

“Fine, thank you. How are Fielder and Whitehurst?”

“The medics gave the girl a second anaesthetic for her fingers and some treatment for the swelling. She’s exhausted, but physically she’s in good shape, nothing the clinic can’t fix up. The boy is still in shock from the death of his father.”

Greg nodded, he’d let Fabian think Jason Whitehurst had died as the airship crashed, it was a lot kinder than knowing the truth. “And what about Suzi?”

Melvyn Ambler couldn’t quite keep his face straight. “All right, though the doctor says her knee’s going to need some work. She’s been telling us about how tough it all was in the old days.”

Greg let out a small groan. “Back when hardliners were real hardliners?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The name’s Greg, thanks.” Sir reminded him of the Army.

“Right.”

Greg stood up slowly, pleased to find his neurohormone hangover had run its course. He thanked the pilot and followed Melvyn Ambler back through the Titan’s fuselage. Charlotte Fielder was being helped down the ramp, she was wrapped up in a bright orange padded suit, as if she was wearing a polar sleeping bag. Fabian Whitehurst was walking ahead of her, his eyes dead to the world.

Greg watched Suzi being lifted into a wheelchair by a couple of the crash team. Her teeth were gritted.

“Just a flesh wound?” Greg asked innocently.

“Bollocks!” she shouted back, then shrugged. “I landed wrong back there in the airship.”

“Never mind, Julia will pay for a new knee, no doubt.”

Suzi grinned. “You finished with me for today? I’ve’ got me a date with good old Leol Reiger.”

“I think you’d better put that off for a day or two.”

“Come on, Greg, we’ve got the Fielder girl.”

“Yeah, and it’s where she’s going to lead Julia to that worries me, no messing.”

“Right. Suppose I’d better stick around, then. But, Greg, it’s not going to be for ever.”

The generator building served as a hangar for several Typhoon fighters as well as three Titans. Greg saw a Pegasus parked at the far end as he came down the loading ramp. Julia and Victor were waiting for him, along with a large blond-haired man wearing a crumpled suit jacket.

Julia put her arms round him and rested her head on his shoulder. “I didn’t know it was going to finish up like this, Greg.”

“That’s OK.” He stroked the long hair down her back. “Tell you, I’m just sorry about Rachel and the other three.”

Julia nodded silently, giving him a lonely smile. “Rachel’s been with me for twenty years. I know her father and her brother. They were all so proud she was doing well for herself. Personal assistant to the mighty Julia Evans. Now I’ve got to tell them she’s dead. She was out of hardlining, Greg. Clean away, then I made her go back.”

“This wasn’t hardlining. Not really. It was just crazy. There was no need for it, the Pegasus wasn’t armed.”

“We really have made a mess of today, haven’t we?”

“I got you Charlotte Fielder. Nothing that important ever comes cheap.”

“Yes. Well, that girl had better bloody well start telling me what I want to know.”

“Tomorrow,” Greg said. Even without his espersense he could tell Julia was feeling the strain, and that was with all the protection the NN cores threw around her. Chasing after Fielder wasn’t all this deal involved by the look of it. “She’s had a rough time of it this afternoon. So’s young Fabian, come to that.”

Julia stepped away from him. “Yeah, I know, I was there.”

“So you were.” Greg looked at Victor. “Did Leol Reiger survive?”

“We don’t know. We’ve been monitoring the air-sea rescue traffic. The Nigerian coast guard have picked up quite a few of the Colonel Maitland’s crew from their escape pods. I haven’t got a list yet, my Lagos office will squirt one over in a couple of hours.”

“What about Baronski?”

“Snuffed, along with the girl who was with him. There were three people killed when Reiger’s tekmercs opened fire on you in the Prezda well, another thirty-eight injured, seven seriously. I’ve never known anyone like this Reiger; he’s a mad dog, absolute mad dog. I’ve been in touch with the Tricheni security chief, that’s the kombinate which owns the Prezda, we’re launching a joint search-and-destroy deal.”

The big man standing behind Victor was looking more and more uncomfortable.

“Good,” Greg said, surprised by his own anger. “Did you find out who’s behind Reiger?”

“Yes,” Victor said. “We’ve got quite a bit to tell you about that.”

The conference room had a broad silvered window looking out over the rest of the oceanic energy field. It showed the other generator platforms as oblong ochre silhouettes on the darkening horizon, navigation lights winking steadily.

He sat with Julia, Victor and Rick Parnell at one end of a long black composite table, listening to Victor give a review of Royan’s Kiley probe, and the waiting personality packages.

The office’s three teleconference flatscreens were on, plugging the three NN cores into the discussion, two showing images of Julia, while Philip Evans filled the third. Julia’s grandfather had synthesized an image of himself at fifty, a thin face with a healthy tan and silver hair.

Greg could see that Rick Parnell was having trouble coping with the NN cores, glancing up at the screens then back down at the table. The blunt hardline talk about Leol Reiger wasn’t helping to settle him either. He wasn’t quite out of his depth, but he was certainly having his world-view shaken today.

“If Clifford Jepson already has the data on the nuclear force generator, why would he want to find Royan?” Greg asked after Julia finished telling him about the two partnership offers she’d received. “Especially, why go to this much trouble to find Royan? I’d say hiring Leol Reiger was almost an act of desperation.”

“To make sure Royan doesn’t plug me into the alien, and do a deal direct. Clifford would be left with nothing then, Globecast can’t develop the nuclear force generator by itself.”

“But Globecast doesn’t have a monopoly on the generator data,” Greg said. “Mutizen’s offering you the same deal.”

Julia looked up at the screens, arching an eyebrow.

“Buggered if I know, girl,” Philip Evans grunted.

“It is odd,” Julia’s NN core one image agreed.

Greg turned to Rick. “Are we sure Royan’s alien is the source of the atomic structuring technology?”

“No idea,” said the SETI director. “It’s conceivable that the microbes could live on the outside of a starship, that they were brought here rather than drifted across interstellar space. But that would mean the alien has been here a long time; a couple of centuries before the Matoyaii probe was launched, at least. Remember, we’ve now inspected just two rocks out of all the millions which make up Jupiter’s ring, and both of them had microbe colonies. No matter how vigorous they are, it would take a long time to spread that far.”

“Is that significant?” Victor asked.

“I think it must be,” Rick said. “If the aliens have been here, been watching us for so long, why make contact now?”

“Because we discovered them,” Julia said.

“No, we didn’t,” Rick said. “Without all this hardline chasing around and the appearance of atomic structuring technology we would have cheerfully believed the microbes were interstellar travellers. There is nothing to make us suspect they came on a starship. And in any case, any aliens with starship-level technology could quite easily have tampered with Matoyaii. One very simple robot probe operating alone six hundred million kilometres from mission control, we have the technology to fool it. if there is a starship, then we were deliberately allowed to know about the microbes. But don’t ask me why.”

“I think we have to assume Royan’s alien is the source,” Victor said. “There’s just too much interest being shown in his whereabouts, by too many people, for any other conclusion.”

“No messing,” Greg muttered. He took a salmon sandwich from a plate on the table, surprised at how hungry he was. “Have you come up with a proper profile on that maid, Nia Korovilla?”

“Not a thing,” Julia’s NN core image said. “The only data we have on her is the file my personality package squirted out of the Colonel Maitland’s ‘ware. You saw it, it tells us very little.”

Greg finished the sandwich, and started on another. There was a jumble of impressions cluttering up his mind, all the knowledge he’d picked up today. There was no order to it, not yet. But there could be. He was sure of that. Intuition. Something would link it all together, a key, a connecting factor, some word or phrase. It was just a question of looking at it from the right angle, afterwards it would be obvious. Of course, he could force it, use the gland. One of the Mindstar psychologists involved with his training had called his intuition a foresight equal to everyone else’s hindsight.

He swallowed the last of the salmon sandwiches, and started on the beef ones. It was almost completely dark outside now, the platforms had switched on floodlights to illuminate their superstructure. “What about the observation team in the Prezda well?” he asked.

“I’m afraid you and Suzi are the only ones who saw them,” Victor said. “Certainly Prezda security has no knowledge of them.”

“So we’ve no idea who this third party is?”

“None,” Victor agreed.

“Someone who can afford to keep a sleeper on the Colonel Maitland for eight years,” Greg observed pensively.

“Expensive,” Victor said. “I wonder if her controller was behind the observers in the Prezda?”

“If it wasn’t, then there’s a fourth organization involved,” Greg said.

“Too many. You think Korovilla was tied in with the Prezda observers rather than Reiger and Jepson?”

“I would say yes,” Julia said. “She was anxious to avoid Contact with Reiger’s tekmerc squad.”

“So who was she working for?” Greg asked.

“The organization that took the sample from the flower?” Julia suggested.

“Good point,” Greg said. “It could be easily the same organization. But then where does Jason Whitehurst fit in? He was obviously acting independently. Yet he knew how valuable Fielder was, that she was linked with atomic structuring, but not the nature of that link. He certainly hadn’t heard about the alien. So how did he find out she was valuable?”

“Jesus!” The word came out like a bark from Rick. He looked round the table, his neck jerking mechanically. “I’m sorry, but you people. . . You’re making it all so complicated. Who’s this bloke working for, these two are plugged in together, where does she fit in? It doesn’t matter! There’s an alien here, in our own solar system, making contact. God knows, it’s a strange kind of contact, but it wants to talk to us. Just ask this Fielder girl where Royan is, and go. Where’s the problem?”

“Atta, boy,” Philip Evans said. “You tell ‘em.”

Julia at the table, and the Julias on the screens all scowled together. “Behave, Grandpa,” they chorused.

Philip Evans rolled his synthesized eyes.

Greg looked at Rick, knowing exactly how he felt. Itching to do something positive, to see some action. He’d been like that himself when he joined the Army. Physical got everything solved, and you could see it happening. That particular fallacy took a long time and a lot of grief to unlearn. “It’s like this,” he said sympathetically. “Charlotte Fielder’s in a bad way. She’s a twenty-three-year-old girl who’s known nothing but the good life for the last five years. All that got shattered today; she’s been threatened, chased, shot at, had her fingers broken, seen her patron killed, and found out someone’s snuffed her sponsor. Right now she just wants to curl up into a ball and shut out the outside world. If I start interrogating her now, she isn’t going to co-operate, her mind will close up like a night-time flower. I’ll miss things; good as I am, I’m not infallible. But if we wait until tomorrow, she’ll have started to bounce back. She’ll want to help, she’ll want revenge on whoever terrorized her, she’ll open right up to us. And when that happens, I need to know the right questions to ask her.”

“Listen to him, Rick,” Philip Evans said. “He knows more about how people’s minds work than a pub full of shrinks.”

Julia gave Greg an impish glance. “And the fact that she’s devastatingly beautiful has nothing at all to do with wanting to go easy on her.”

Greg flashed her a feline smile, and snatched another sandwich. Victor was chuckling.

The tight fabric of Rick’s jacket rippled as he offered a shrug. “Sorry, I’m not used to this.”

“We need to go through it, Rick,” Julia said. “I’ve got to have the complete picture before I decide what responses to initiate. And right now there are too many unknowns involved. There will be a common thread linking these faceless dealers. If we can correlate the data we’ve amassed so far we should be able to find it.”

Greg smiled inwardly. Julia was doing the same thing as him. Tearing into the problem from all sides until she came up with a solution. The only difference was that she used the logic her nodes supplied, he used intuition.

He ordered a tiny secretion from his gland, not enough for an espersense effusion, but just animating his grey cells, tweaking them above the ordinary. A dreamy calmness settled round him, almost a physical veil, dimming the conference room, muting the voices. He let the images of the day slipstream through his mind. There were faces and places, vaporous collages. An overwhelming sense of certainty rose.

“Russia,” he said. “Russia is the connection.”

“How?” Julia asked.

“Tell you, intuition is always better than logic.” He cancelled the gland secretion.

“Greg!” she snapped.

“Spit it out, boy,” Philip Evans said.

“Nia Korovilla and Dmitri Baronski.”

Victor clicked his fingers. “Bloody hell, they’re both Russian emigres.”

“No messing,” Greg swung his chair round to face the three teleconference screens. “Run a search program,” he told the NN cores. “Every profile you’ve assembled today, every person, place, and company involved. I want to know every and any link they have with Russia, however tenuous.”

“We’re on it,” Julia’s NN core two image said. She and Philip Evans froze.

“Thank you, Greg,” Julia said.