Going Grey

  That was an awfully long time to harbour a suspicion. Dru began to see Weaver in a subtly different light. He'd always seemed unflappable, the man in control of everything, but now that relaxed manner looked like something else – an exceptional patience, the kind that could wait quietly for as long as it took to get what it wanted. It was a sniper's mind-set. It might even have been a vengeful one. This was technology with hugely lucrative patents. Yes, it was probably worth the wait.

  "I think this something for the FBI. They handle industrial espionage." Dru didn't want to talk herself out of a job, but this looked way beyond her remit. "Or the FDA, if you think he's breached research regulations."

  "Imagine how Halbauer would react if we had government agencies crawling all over us. Think about our share price."

  "Understood." Dru nodded, shifting back to sabotage as a motive. Maybe Weaver and Kinnery had parted acrimoniously and Kinnery had picked his moment to cause trouble. But that meant she'd be dealing with not one but two men who could ferment a grudge for decades. It wasn't comforting. "So you want to keep the investigation in house."

  "Exactly."

  "I still think you should touch base with the DoD. For all we know, this leak might have come from them. It's not exactly unknown."

  "I've covered the DoD."

  "Do you mind my asking how?"

  "I've spoken to a senator who was on the committee when Ringer got its funding. We kind of know one another. Leo Brayne."

  "Oh." Dru didn't keep up with politics. The name rang only a faint bell. "And?"

  "He said he'd handle the DoD. In the meantime, we start our own investigation. We can't compromise him by telling him what we're doing. You know how they like deniability."

  Dru would have been fine with investigating an employee. She knew the process inside out. But Kinnery had severed his links years ago. She didn't even know if they'd kept his HR file.

  "How about hiring a private investigator?" she asked.

  "It's one more person to tell," Weaver said. "And then it gets harder to sit on. By all means use one for compartmentalized information, but I want this run internally. HR won't blip anyone's radar."

  Any half-decent PI would do a search for Kinnery on the Internet anyway, so Dru wasn't sure how she'd keep the shape-shifter story from an agency. But it was insane. Maybe it didn't matter. She could simply laugh it off and hint at secret but legitimate reasons easily enough.

  "Are you sure about this, Mr Weaver? I'm not head of HR. I'm not even Sheelagh's deputy."

  Weaver shrugged, but it wasn't convincing. "She's not here. You are." He started tapping his touchscreen. "Anyway, you're the Olympic champion on detail. Very thorough. I took a look at some of the disciplinary cases and dismissals you've handled. You really leave no stone unturned when you're building a case, do you? You could always dig up some dirt to get rid of hard-to-remove staff."

  Dru wasn't sure if that was a compliment or an indictment. "I watched too many re-runs of The Untouchables as a kid," she said, embarrassed.

  "Sorry?"

  "Al Capone. Tax evasion. People who break rules tend to do it across a wide spectrum of activity. You can always find something."

  Weaver actually laughed. Dru realised she sounded confident. It was entirely accidental.

  "Okay, time's not on our side," he said. "Charles already knows I'll want answers. I need this knocked on the head and buried as soon as possible. We're going to be in negotiations with Halbauer through August, and I don't want any last-minute surprises."

  "Do we have any leads at all? The text of the document?"

  Weaver shook his head. "If I leaned on this journalist, it'd look like confirmation. I've give you what notes I've got. Kinnery's living in Vancouver, so spend what you have to and pass the receipts through me personally, not Finance. No written reports – verbal only. Discretion, remember. PIs don't need to see the bigger picture to function."

  "And what are you going to tell Sheelagh? Because this is going to be time consuming."

  Weaver got up and opened the blinds, standing at the window with the sun on his face. He'd come clean and seemed to want to wash himself in the light. It was interesting to watch his body language. She hoped he wasn't fully aware of that and just doing a clever act.

  "This is strictly between you and me," he said. "I'll deal with Sheelagh tomorrow. I'll tell her I need you to collate some background for Halbauer."

  Weaver definitely wasn't a spur of the moment man. Dru decided to check the timeline. "Just so I know how much ground I've got to make up, when did The Slide call?"

  "Yesterday," Weaver said, not even blinking. So he'd waited a day. He could have taken it up with Sheelagh after all. "Just as well you were around today, wasn't it?"

  So Sheelagh was never meant to know this was happening. Maybe she was out of favour. Tough luck; this was survival, about keeping a wage coming in, about not ending up like other respectable, responsible, middle class people who suddenly found themselves without a job, then without a house, and finally fell so far that they could never get back up again. Dru wasn't proud of it, but she now saw Sheelagh as collateral damage.

  She once wondered how kapos had slept at night. She realised that they were too focused on surviving another day to afford a luxury like pity.

  WASHINGTON, DC

  JULY.

  Kinnery realised he wasn't as good as he thought at staying off officialdom's radar as soon as he walked down the steps of the hotel.

  He wasn't too worried about his logged, photographed, ticketed, scanned flight from Vancouver. There were a hundred reasons for a man in his position to fly to Washington. But there was a security camera in the hotel lift, another in the lobby, and two looking up and down the street outside. Those were just the privately-operated ones that he could easily see. As soon as he looked up at the office block across the road, he spotted another unblinking glassy eye mounted on a metal rail, which could have been another private camera or a police installation. It didn't matter. Any agency could get access to any footage they wanted, legally or otherwise. He was observed somehow, somewhere, from the moment he closed his front door.

  And probably in my own home, if I count my wireless connection, my streamed TV, and my phone.

  For a moment, Kinnery saw the world as Maggie had seen it. It was a cold, alien, sinister place. Then he saw himself through her eyes as well, and he was a component of its menace.

  If all this monitoring had been in place twenty years ago, could I have created Ian and gotten away with it?

  He walked the eight blocks to the restaurant as casually as he could, past tourists openly recording their trip with phone cams, and a bespectacled girl wearing those clunky recording glasses, head moving in that telltale way that suggested she was new to it. He tried not to worry whether this trip would be vacuumed up, analysed, and distilled into the information that Charles Kinnery had come to Washington to lunch with Leo Brayne. He could have caught a bus or a cab, but they had on-board cameras too. Did he ever really say that those with nothing to hide had nothing to fear? He'd forgotten to add the qualifier that it was only true if those doing the watching were benevolent, honest, and competent enough to draw the right conclusions from the data.

  He did have something to hide. But it was Ian who had something to fear.

  I never even got the chance to test facial recognition on him.

  Kinnery didn't have much of a plan for the meeting with Leo Brayne beyond a kind of mutually assured destruction. If Kinnery's sins were made public, Leo might want to avoid being mentioned in the same sentence. He'd opposed Ringer, He hadn't been willing to go to the wall over it, though, and human embryo research, legal or otherwise, was still politically fraught. Kinnery wondered if he could use that lever.

  But Leo was one of those staggeringly wealthy men from a bygone era who took their politics as a serious public duty. Kinnery suspected he made no profit from it and wielded more power outside it, and that made him dangerous. Peo
ple with a sense of mission weren't motivated or scared by the same things as ordinary men.

  But this has to be about Ian. I have to make sure this is what's best for him. I'm not just saving my own ass, am I?

  Kinnery didn't know. That was the worst of it.

  He had to accept that he was already out of his depth, tossed in the deep end by Maggie's goddamn stupid, stupid letter. He was left with two options; to cut off all contact with Ian and leave him to fend for himself, because he was the one remaining lead that could enable them to hunt the boy down, or to take a chance on Leo's ability to think a lot further ahead than most politicians.

  Nobody else knew where Ian was. If the worst happened, Kinnery would make one call and warn him to go to ground.

  Run, Ian. Run and hide.

  The restaurant was a haven of smoked glass and discreet signage that was illegible from across the road. When Kinnery put his hand on the door, it opened without any effort and he found himself chest to chest with a member of staff who looked well trained in the art of identifying and ejecting the wrong kind of customer. The hum of the traffic died the moment the door closed. Kinnery was in another world. He almost expected to step into snow. It was that kind of quiet.

  Leo, a tall, lean man in an immaculate navy blue suit, sat in a booth inspecting the menu. The years since Kinnery had last seen him in person hadn't treated him too badly. His hair was more grey than brown these days, but he still didn't look his age. Kinnery envied him that.

  Kinnery let the waiter take his coat and walked across a carpet so thick that it felt like a sprung dance floor. Leo didn't get up. He shook Kinnery's hand from a seated position.

  "Glad you could make it," he said. Kinnery watched him snap a breadstick into three pieces and place two on the plate while he chomped on the third. He wasn't the kind of man to casually nibble the entire stick from one end. Leo broke things, and broke them into the exact size that he wanted. "This is as private as it gets without some curious intern seeing you arrive at my office."

  The Jacquard fabric whispered against the seat of Kinnery's pants as he slid into the booth. He glanced up to check for security cameras. He couldn't see any.

  "So you heard," Kinnery said.

  "I got a call from your former partner. I suppose he was heading off his most likely source of trouble." Leo tapped his breadstick on the side of his plate like a conductor whipping the woodwind section into shape. "Or maybe he just missed our little chats."

  Kinnery didn't need reminding. Leo had grilled KWA ferociously. This lunch was starting to give Kinnery that same sensation of waiting for Torquemada to ask him the time.

  "Shaun was always more political than me," he said. "With a small P. I hope he doesn't know we're meeting."

  "Of course not. But just be aware he's watching you. He's a keep-your-enemies-close kind of man, I think. You probably know that better than me."

  You bastard, Shaun. All Kinnery's hopes of finding a way to put some pressure on Leo evaporated. He was hopelessly outgunned, an unarmed child who'd wandered onto a battlefield. He was savvy enough to realise that nobody opened negotiations with a concession, though, least of all a politician. Leo was sharing that information to show Kinnery just how deep in the shit he was.

  "So I'm not being paranoid, then," Kinnery said. "It's hard to decide which question to ask first. Okay – how do you know?"

  "Well, I'm good at watching people watching others, for the most part, so your surveillance from the airport was spotted. That probably means you've been tracked from Vancouver, which isn't hard. And we'll both keep this meeting private from Shaun, because I don't like not being told about things like that. It makes me wonder what else is being kept from me."

  "What else is being kept from me?"

  "I don't know. What have you been keeping from him?"

  "Are you willing to tell me what he said?"

  "I'd like to hear your side of it first."

  "Are you planning to use this to take a shot at the biotech industry?"

  "Why would I do that?"

  "Apart from the fact that you think it's the work of Beelzebub?"

  Leo didn't blink. "Apart from that."

  Kinnery had no choice but to bend over and take it. "If this blows up, you're on record as opposing the project. You'll point out that you're the clairvoyant guy who said no good would come of it. So why else would you get involved now, except to hammer us?"

  "Mud's indiscriminately adhesive once flung." Leo looked weary for a moment. "But I do have a raw nerve where this is concerned. My son served. A lot of his comrades came back broken or in body bags. I think defence funding's primary purpose is to give our military personnel the best chance of winning and coming home intact, not to create civilian jobs or shareholder dividends. It's good if it does, but it's a bonus, not a reason. So is it true?"

  "Which part?"

  "The most extreme allegations made by a certain alternative news site."

  What have I got to lose? I'm still the only one who knows where Ian is. And Leo's the only person I know with enough real power to salvage something.

  "I wouldn't be here if we were just talking about embryos," Kinnery said. "Or if the subject was dead."

  Leo carried on chewing the breadstick. There weren't many men who could eat and still maintain an icy dignity, but he was one of them. It didn't humanize him one bit. He took some time to respond.

  "Good grief." It was just a rumble in his throat. "Really?"

  "I know it takes some believing."

  "And is this person in a secure place under your control?"

  "No."

  "That's unfortunate."

  Kinnery was starting to wonder if Leo had dismissed the whole thing as a hoax. "Do you think I'm a sane and rational man?"

  "I'll give you a conditional yes."

  "Well, I've seen it with my own eyes."

  "Do go on."

  "I still don't understand how I achieved it. But I've seen him do it. And it isn't going to go away."

  Leo nodded. "Pronoun noted."

  "What?"

  "I. All your own genius, then. Did Shaun know? Did he have a hand in the Petri dish?"

  Kinnery could have spread the blame, but the denial was out of his mouth before he'd even thought about it. He'd achieved this. Nobody else. He was telling the truth but for all the wrong reasons. Where did that fall in the moral spectrum?

  "No," he said. "Shaun had no idea at all."

  "Well, he knows now, even if he doesn't believe most of it. I suspect he thinks you've wandered off with some intellectual property that's his."

  A waiter approached silently from the back of the room and hovered at a discreet distance behind Leo. The senator just lifted a casual finger, his arm still resting on the table. He must have had the wraparound vision of a fly to see the man. The waiter took his cue to approach.

  "I'll have the vongole, please. Charles?"

  "Risotto." It was the first thing that came into Kinnery's head, even without looking at the menu. "Mushroom, or whatever's good today. Thank you." The waiter dissolved into the quiet gloom at the back of the restaurant. "I haven't discussed this with anyone. But I'm going to be very surprised if my students and my employers don't get to hear about The Slide eventually."

  "And you're telling me that there really is a live subject. Where is he?"

  "I'd rather we fully explored the consequences of this before I go into detail."

  "Is that plea bargaining?"

  "This is a human being we're talking about. I don't want any agencies with a fluid sense of legal rights getting involved."

  "Quick test," Leo said quietly. "Do you think government is, A, one happy, patriotic family with a common purpose, gladly sharing information for the good of the country? Or is it B, just another sub-set of human society, made up of the inevitable cliques, backstabbing empire builders, conflicting agendas, and petty, mediocre assholes collecting dirt on each other?"

  It was odd to hear assholes
said in that patrician accent. "That's a tough one. Can I phone a friend?"

  "I don't care for unelected public servants deciding how we run the country." Leo seemed to be almost relishing this in a quiet, leave-it-to-me kind of way. "So this stays informal for as long as I'm able to keep it so."

  He sipped a glass of water in silence. He might even have been growing a smile. It was a little late for Kinnery to scramble for the moral high ground. Leo hadn't asked why he'd done it – perhaps that question would come later – but Kinnery had the feeling that Leo thought he already knew, and had put Kinnery in the file marked amoral know-it-all with sociopathic or narcissistic tendencies.

  The meal arrived much sooner than Kinnery expected, fragrant and exquisite. He wished he'd had an appetite.

  "Assuming that I believe any of this," Leo said, "let's split the problem into two. One is perception, and the other is actuality. I won't say reality, because both are real in their own way. Let's take perception first. God bless the Internet, Charles. It's all that stands between the powers that be and actual accountability."

  "I realise The Slide isn't exactly regarded as the organ of record."

  "Ah, it goes beyond the site and even the medium. Have you had a call from any other media? I'm guessing not."

  "I've not been taking calls."

  "Well, I doubt you'll get any. If I do, I'll laugh heartily. Because information has been utterly devalued. Most people neither know nor care what's true now. There's only opinion. It's all transmit and no receive, as my son's friend would say." Leo attacked the vongole in saffron sauce with the controlled precision of a spear fisher. "Everyone's got a front page via the Internet."

  "You're not talking about democracy or freedom, I imagine. Whatever that means."

  "Charles, when the Times or the Post broke a scandal in the good old days, it had real consequences, real resigning consequences, but now we have a volunteer misinformation army doing the cover-ups by accident. You can upload God's own documented truth about every black ops job we ever pulled, every diplomatic indiscretion, and after a while it just sinks in the sea of apathy. The more it happens, the deeper it sinks. Net change to the way the world runs or who runs it – zero."