The flatscreen on the forward bulkhead showed the Austrian alps slipping by underneath the plane. They reminded Greg of Greenland’s coastline after the ice had melted, a range of lifeless rock, scarred and stained. He could see massive landslides, where the pine forests had died leaving the soil exposed to torrential rains. Thick white-water rivers snaked down every valley, tearing out more soil and flooding the pastures. Reafforestation was progressing slowly, the ecological regeneration teams had to build protective shields around their plantations. From the air they showed as green rectangles sheltering in the lee of the mountains, fragile and precarious. But there were new hydro-power dam projects everywhere, ribbons of deep blue water accumulating in the deeper gorges. Most of the electricity was sold to the kombinate cyber-factory precincts in Germany. Austria had little heavy industry of its own, although low taxes and loose genetic-engineering laws had attracted investment from the biotechnology companies after the Warming. Event Horizon had several research centres in the country, he knew, as well as its main clinic at Liezen. He’d spent some time there himself, recuperating after tracking down the people who squirted the virus into Philip Evans’ NN core. It was where he had proposed to Eleanor.
He smiled at the memory, then turned back to his cybofax which was showing Baronski’s data profile. Dmitri Baronski was sixty-seven, a Russian émigré, leaving his motherland when he was twenty-three as an exchange student and never going back. He’d spent ten years as a PR officer for the Tuolburz kombinate, only to be dismissed for creaming off too high a percentage on the girls and boys he was supposed to supply for visiting executives. After that there were some arrests for pimping, one for fencing stolen artwork. Then fifteen years ago he’d hit on the idea of providing escorts for the wealthy, going for quality rather than quantity. He gave his girls an education in deportment equal to a Swiss finishing school, and discreetly presented them to European society.
He ran about a dozen at any one time, and the snippets of information they provided from pillow talk earned him about three-quarters of a million Eurofrancs a year from the stock exchange. It could have been more, but he was surprisingly honest with the girls, giving them a percentage.
‘Christ, will you look at this!’ Suzi exclaimed.
Greg left Baronski’s exploits to look over her shoulder. She was busy reviewing Charlotte Fielder’s profile on her cybofax.
‘What’s up?’ he asked.
‘This girl has run up a medical bill that a hypochondriac millionaire would envy.’
‘She’s ill?’
‘Neurotic, more like. There ain’t much of the original Charlotte Fielder left, the biochemistry she’s carrying around! Her piss’d rake in a fortune on the street.’ She ran her index finger down the wafer’s screen. ‘Get this, vaginal enlargement! What’s she been bonking, King Kong? Follicle tint hormones. Submaxillary gland cachou emission adaptation. What the fuck is that?’
‘It’s a biochemical treatment to alter her saliva composition,’ Rachel said. ‘Makes her breath smell sweet the whole time, even the morning after. Especially the morning after.’
‘Jesus wept. Bigger tits, yes, I can understand that; but this lot …’
Greg enjoyed her growing choler; Suzi didn’t show her real feelings often enough, keeping them bottled up in the mistaken belief that remaining unperturbed was more professional. ‘What? You mean it’s not natural?’
Rachel laughed.
Suzi started to snap at him, then grinned weakly. ‘All right. But I don’t know why we’re bothering looking for off-planet aliens. This girl isn’t anywhere near human any more.’
‘It’s just a tool of the trade, dear. You and Julia have bioware nodes, I have a gland, Fielder has beauty.’
Suzi turned the display off, and tucked the wafer into her shellsuit’s top pocket. ‘Yeah, maybe. But it’s acid weird, wouldn’t catch me doing it’
‘I’d hope not,’ he muttered.
The Pegasus was over a large town, shedding speed.
‘Is that Salzburg?’ Greg called forward to Pearse Solomons.
‘Yes, sir. And we’ve got landing clearance for the Prezda.’
‘Fine.’ They were losing height rapidly, the Pegasus pitching its nose up at a respectable angle. Outside the town, the ecological-regeneration teams had triumphed. Rivers had been given gene-tailored coral banks to halt erosion. They were lined by surge reservoirs, like small craters, to cope with the sudden floods inflicted by Europe’s monsoon season. Valley floors were a lush green again, speckled with wild flowers; llamas and goats grazing peacefully. Dark green tracts of evergreen pines were rising up the side of the slopes once more. They were a gene-tailored variety, nitrogen-fixing to cope with the meagre soil, their roots splaying out like a cobweb, clinging to exposed rock with an ivy-derived grip.
He wondered how much it would cost to repair the whole of the country in this way, a Japanese water garden treatment.
The Prezda arcology had been built into a natural amphitheatre at the head of a valley, facing south. It was as if the rock had been ground down into a smooth curved surface and polished to a mirror finish. A cliff face of a hundred thousand silvered windows looked out down the valley, he could see the mountains and lush parkland reflected in them. The image wavered as the Pegasus drew closer, as though the windows were rippling.
Between the two silver arms of the residential section was a low dome housing the inevitable shopping mall and the business community, along with the leisure facilities. The cyber-factories were buried in the rock behind the apartments. Power for the city-in-a-building came from a combination of nearby hydroelectric dams and hot rock exchange generators, bore holes drilled ten kilometres down to tap the heat of the Earth’s mantle.
‘Ant city,’ Suzi said as the Pegasus headed in for a pad above the western arm.
‘You live in a condominium,’ Greg retorted.
‘Yeah, but I get out to work and play.’
The Pegasus landed on the roof, and taxied on to a lift platform at the edge. They began to slide down the side of the silver wall to the hangar level.
‘Does Event Horizon have a contact in Prezda security?’ Greg asked the two security hardliners.
‘Not on the payroll,’ Pearse Solomons said. ‘But there is a commercial interests liaison officer, he deals with cases like data fencing, or bolt-hole suspects. He’ll allow us to tap a suspect’s communications, mount a surveillance operation, that kind of thing. You want me to call him?’
‘No. We’ll keep him in reserve.’
There was a swift rocking motion as the Pegasus rolled forwards into the hangar. Greg stood up and made his way to the front of the plane.
‘You think Baronski is going to co-operate?’ Suzi asked as she followed him.
‘According to his profile he goes out of his way not to annoy the big boys. Besides, he’s old, he’s not going to blow his chances of a golden retirement over something like a client’s identity, not when we start bludgeoning him with Julia’s name.’
The belly hatch opened, letting in a whine of machinery and the shouts of service crews.
‘Malcolm, you come with us this time,’ Greg said.
The hangar took up the entire upper floor of the Prezda, nearly two hundred metres wide, curving away into the distance. Bright sunlight poured through its glass wall, turning the planes parked along the front into black silhouettes. It was noisy and hot. Gusts of dry wind flapped Greg’s jacket as they made their way across the apron. Executive hypersonics and fifty-seater passenger jets were taxiing along the central strip, rolling on and off the lift platforms. Drone cargo trucks trundled around them, yellow lights flashing.
The back half of the hangar had been carved into living rock, the rear wall lined with offices, maintenance shops, and lounges. Biolum strips were used to beef up the fading sunlight.
Greg walked through the nearest lounge and called a lift. He held his cybofax up to the interface key in the wall beside it, requesting a data pack
age of the Prezda’s layout. ‘Baronski lives seven floors down from here, and off towards the central well,’ he said, reading from the wafer’s screen.
Suzi pressed for the floor and the lift door shut.
Greg tried to get an impression from his intuition. But all he got was that same pressure of time slipping away.
The lift doors opened on to a broad well-lit corridor with two moving walkways going in opposite directions. It was deserted, the only noise a low-pitched rumble from the walkways. They stepped on to the walkway going towards the centre of the arcology. There were deep side corridors every fifty metres on the right-hand side, ending in a floor-to-ceiling window that looked out across the valley.
The eighth walkway section brought them to the central well. A shaft at the apex of the amphitheatre, seventy metres wide, zigzagged with escalators. It was twenty storeys deep, Greg guessed the roof must be the hangar above. Each floor had a circular balcony, two-thirds of which was lined with small shops and bistros, the front third a gently curved window. The rails of glass-cage lifts formed an inner ribcage.
It was a busy time, the tables in front of the windows were nearly all full, smartly uniformed waitresses bustling about. People were thronging the concourse and the balconies, filling the escalators. Teenagers hung out. Strands of music drifted up from various levels, played by licensed buskers. Greg could see a team of clowns working through the window tables two storeys below, children laughing in delight.
‘Baronski is back this way,’ Greg said, and pointed back down the corridor. ‘Couple of doors.’ That was when he ordered his gland secretion, seeing a flash of black muscle-tissue jerking. His espersense unfurled, freeing his thoughts from the prison of the skull. Minds impinged on the boundary as it swept outwards, deluging him with snaps of emotion, of tedium and excitement, the tenderness of lovers, and frustration of office workers. One fragment of thought had a hard, single-minded purpose that was unique in the whirl of everyday life about him. He stopped and searched round, seeking it again, knowing from irksome memory what it spelt.
‘Wait,’ he said.
Suzi almost bumped into him as he halted. ‘Now what?’
There was a flare of interest in the mind. And again, another one on the edge of perception, a couple of floors higher up.
‘There’s a surveillance operation here,’ Greg said. ‘I’ve got two people in range. Probably more outside.’
Suzi shifted her bag. ‘Targeting Baronski, do you think?’
‘Dunno. They’re interested in us, though, the direction we’re heading.’
‘What now?’
‘Malcolm, there’s one on the other side of the well, opposite this corridor, not moving. Male. See if you can spot him.’
Malcolm Ramkartra turned slowly and leant back on the walkway, resting his elbows nonchalantly on the rail. ‘Think so. Bloke in a blue-grey shortsleeve sports shirt, late twenties, brown hair cut short. He’s outside a greengrocers, reading a cybofax.’
Greg looked down the corridor. A woman and her ten-year-old daughter were riding the walkway towards the well. Ordinary thought currents. There was no one else.
Two people in the well implied a sophisticated deal. They couldn’t stay there all the time, which meant a rotation, others held in reserve. Probably an AV spy disk covering Baronski’s door as well. More people to trail the old man if he went down the corridor to a lift.
He realized he’d subconsciously accepted that it was Baronski who was the surveillance target. Not that there’d been much conscious doubt. The chance of this being a coincidence was way too slim.
‘OK, this is how we handle it. Malcolm, you walk down the corridor to the first lift, call it, and hold it. When you’ve got it, Suzi and I will try and get in to see Baronski. If the observers start thinking hostile thoughts, we’ll run for it, if not, we go in. Meantime, you get Pearse to contact that security liaison officer, go through Victor Tyo if it’ll add more weight. But I want to know if that’s an authorized surveillance. This might just be a police drugs bust, or something.’
‘Bollocks,’ Suzi said.
‘Yeah, all right, some hope. But we check anyway.’
‘Gotcha,’ said Malcolm. He stepped on to the walkway that took him back down the corridor.
‘We’re running into a lotta heavy-duty shit for what was supposed to be a simple little track-down,’ Suzi muttered. ‘The Monaco lift, now this.’
Greg was watching Malcolm, who was talking urgently into his cybofax. ‘Yeah, Julia didn’t think this through properly.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Why did the people who took that sample from the flower bother taking it in the first place? I mean if they knew what the flower was they wouldn’t need to take a sample. If they didn’t, then there’d be no reason to do it. The flower was a specific message from Royan to Julia, he knew she’d be curious about it because flowers are special to the two of them. But for anyone else, it would be meaningless, a beautiful girl carrying a token from a lover.’
‘If they knew she was a courier they would have ripped her baggage apart to find the message. Analysed everything. Maybe even used a psychic to sniff out what she was carrying. You said the flower was giving off freaky vibes.’
‘Could be,’ he admitted. ‘Especially if they knew she was carrying a warning about the aliens, a living example would be an obvious way of providing proof. But if they are working for the aliens, then why let a message about their existence get out at all? Why not snuff her?’
Suzi rubbed her forehead. ‘Christ, Greg. I’m just here to hardline for you, remember?’
‘I don’t expect answers. All I’m saying is that this is weirder than it looks.’
‘That’s what I’ve just fucking told you!’
‘I’m trying to think what kind of allies these aliens might have plugged in with. For a start, whoever it is has got to be rich enough to afford these kind of deals.’
‘A kombinate, finance house, someone like Julia; Christ, take your pick.’
‘There’s no one else like Julia.’
‘Independently wealthy, arsehole.’
‘But why?’
‘Like I said to Julia yesterday. Starship technology is worth a bundle. Antimatter drives, boron hydride fusion, high-velocity dust shields. Any one of those would be instant trillionairedom.’
‘Right.’ He was amused by her reaction. Suzi, a starship buff. He knew the English Insterstellar Society sponsored regular conventions, covering topics from propulsion systems down to the practicality of pioneers setting up homesteads in alien biospheres. And there was a large chapter active in Peterborough, naturally, the heart of England’s high-tech industry. The thought of Suzi attending didn’t fit his world view.
The observer on the other side of the well emitted a burst of annoyance. He began to walk away from his position, thought currents feverishly active.
Looking the other way, Greg saw Malcolm Ramkartra was holding the lift. The hardliner gave Greg a short nod.
Two new minds moved into his perception range, that same steely intent as the first observer prominent amongst their thought currents.
‘Bugger.’
‘What?’ Suzi asked.
‘The observation team have realized we’ve seen them. Come on.’
At least Baronski was at home. Greg could sense his mind. Thought currents moving normally, their tension slacker than the people in the well, the way it always was with older people. Another mind close by was denser, brighter, filled with expectancy, a streak of suspense.
‘He’s got someone in there with him,’ Greg said. ‘One of his girls, at a guess.’ He pressed the call button. The suspicion and interest of the observers rose.
‘Yes?’ Baronski’s voice asked from the grille.
‘Dmitri Baronski? Could we come in, please? We’d like a word.’
‘I’m not seeing anyone today.’
‘It is important.’
‘No.’
‘J
ust a couple of questions, I won’t take a minute.’
‘No, I said. If you don’t go away, I shall call arcology security.’
Greg sighed. ‘Baronski, unless you open this door right now, I’ll come back with arcology security, and they’ll smash it down for me. OK?’
‘Who are you?’
Greg showed his Event Horizon security card to the key, there was a near invisible flash of red laser light. ‘I’m Greg Mandel. Now can I come in? After all, you’re not on our shit list … yet.’
‘You’re from Event Horizon?’
‘Yeah, and one of your girls met with our boss in Monaco the other night. Are you getting my drift?’
‘I … Yes, very well.’ The door lock clicked.
Baronski’s lounge was huge, its colour scheme navy-blue and royal purple. The chairs and settee were sculpted to look like open sea shells. Antique furniture cluttered the wall, delicate tables holding various art treasures, a genuine samovar, an ikon panel of the Virgin Mary that was dark with age, what looked suspiciously like a Fabergé egg, which Greg decided had to be a copy. The paintings were chosen for their erotica, old oils and modern fluoro sprays side by side. They were illuminated by biolum lamps in the shape of a tulip, grey smoked glass with elaborate gold-leaf curlicues. Vivaldi was playing quietly out of hidden speakers.
Suzi whistled softly as they walked in. Greg’s suede desert boots sank into the pile carpet. He was conscious of his leather jacket again, Eleanor’s disapproval.
Baronski and the girl were both in silk kimonos. There was a pile of glossy art books on a low coffee table in front of the settee. Two tall glasses full of crushed ice on Tuborg beer mats standing beside the open volumes.
The girl was black, about sixteen, with that same athlete’s build that instantly reminded him of Charlotte Fielder. She was obviously going to be beautiful; her cheeks and nose were covered in blue dermal seal, but her features were so finely drawn it almost didn’t matter. She stood beside the settee, perfectly composed, looking at him with wide liquid eyes, unafraid.
Baronski was backdropped by the Alps beyond the picture window, a thin man with a thin face, nothing near Greg’s simple mental image of burly red-faced Russian grandfathers. He was dainty, birdlike, longish snow-white hair brushed back, resembling a plume. But stress had marred his face, leaving bruised circles round his eyes, creases across his cheeks. His mind had such an air of weariness that it evoked a strong sense of sympathy. Greg wanted to urge him to sit down.