As the Cypress Island turned back out onto the Logrosan he’d said he would see what he could do about finding her a job, and offered to rent her his spare room. His last tenant had “just left” and it was very cheap. She’d accepted after a convincing show of uncertainty. Alessandra’s people would watch her apartment on Royal Avenue when they realized Dorian was never going to be reporting back. They were a complication she really didn’t need.
Murdo’s open plan apartment in the Barbican Marina condo was surprisingly large, with the curving external walls built from glass bricks making it very light and airy. The Scandinavian-style furniture was old but high quality, and every room was spotlessly clean. There were two bedrooms, and one other room that was locked and screened with a commercial e-seal generator.
He’d been the perfect gentleman, giving her a big toweling robe so she could use the bathroom. There were other clothes he happened to have, a sweatshirt and jeans near her own size that she was welcome to use until she collected her own stuff. He bid her good night as he turned in. His shift didn’t start until six that evening.
She’d taken a shower, her OCtattoos detecting sensors all around the limestone-tiled cubical. They were active, allowing Murdo to examine every millimeter of her naked body back in the sanctuary of his bedroom. When she got back to her room after the shower she found its ceiling was inlaid with a high-quality holocamera ring. Murdo certainly liked to keep watch over his possessions.
“How in heaven’s name did you get that job?” Dudley asked.
She smiled in the darkness, wondering what Murdo would make of that. “I made friends with the janitor,” she said.
Following Bernadette Halgarth was a complete nightmare. Jenny McNowak could remember the worst-case training sessions Adam had put her and the other Guardians through, keeping tabs on their designated target through dense cities and desolate countryside on a dozen different worlds, with everyone taking turns at being the target so they could get a feel for procedures on the sharp end. Those were walks in the park compared to this.
The first thing she and Kieran agreed on was that Bernadette knew she was being followed. When she finally emerged from the Octavious just after ten that morning she launched straight into a series of classic evasion maneuvers. The only buildings she went into were crowded malls with multiple exits, or skyscrapers that had vast underground levels that connected to neighboring structures with equally complex layouts. Where she walked along streets, cybersphere nodes and civic arrays suffered kaos attacks that affected any systems that were accessing at the time. She took taxis for a block, then switched as the local traffic management arrays crashed under more kaos. The monorail was a favorite, waiting until the last second as the doors closed before hopping on board.
As a result they had to stay close, which they couldn’t really afford, because that would mean getting spotted by the larger and better equipped navy team. Two times, Jenny was sure she’d caught sight of small aerobots holding station several hundred meters above a busy street. If she’d caught a couple of glimpses, there must have been a whole squadron of the things deployed to patrol the sky above the city’s street grid. They allowed the navy team to keep a long way back, while her own team had to crunch up the distance again whenever Bernadette hit the streets—another maneuver that left them susceptible to discovery by the navy.
“I’ve never known them to use so many people,” Kieran said as they were meandering around the rim of Haben Park. Bernadette was walking through the broad open grassland, staying away from the paths. There was a monorail station in the middle, which they were sure she was going to use. Jamas was loitering around the entrance, ready to scoot up to the platform ahead of her if she should double back.
“It’s unusual for them to have anyone on the ground when they’ve got aerobots covering the area,” Kieran said.
“They can hardly send the aerobots into a building after her.”
“No, but the way they’re deploying is almost as if they want to be seen.”
Jenny had provisionally tagged a couple of the navy team, who were also loafing on the periphery of the park.
“This is becoming farcical,” she said. “They’re going to spot us even if she doesn’t. We can’t keep following her like this all day. Their scrutineers will catch our encrypted traffic if nothing else. We’re trained in avoiding observation teams, not being one.”
“You’re right,” he said as Jamas walked past a woman they suspected was navy. “Everybody disengage. We’re going to change tactics.”
“What are you doing?” Jenny asked.
“I’m going to watch the watchers. It’s the logical choice.”
Jenny bit back on any criticism. It was a risky decision, but carrying on like this simply was not an option. She watched Bernadette change direction quickly, and hurry for the escalator up to the elevated platform. It was a junction station, with four possible directions for the monorail trains to take. The woman they thought might be navy was on the station’s second escalator.
“Rosamund, Jamas, we’re taking this one.” Kieran sent them the visual file of a man who was strolling along a hundred meters ahead of them. “He’s been part of the navy box for fifteen minutes. They’ll rotate him now.”
Keeping the navy operative under observation was considerably easier. Kieran was right, he was being rotated, and he clearly had no idea he was being observed. After Bernadette slipped away along the monorail the man changed direction and caught a cab. The Guardians followed in three separate taxis, grinding their way through Tridelta’s daytime congestion.
The navy was using the Dongara Harbor police precinct as their headquarters. Hanging around the police building added a certain edge to the Guardian team’s operation, but the harbor had a lot of waterside bars and restaurants. They took it in turns to sit at the outside tables, scanning the precinct with retinal inserts.
Halfway through the afternoon Jenny called Adam. “Guess who just drove down into the precinct garage?”
“Tell me,” Adam said.
“Paula Myo.”
“Indeed? What with that and the Almada hotel fracas, I’m almost sorry I left.”
“But surely this is important? The navy is chasing a Starflyer agent. They must know it exists.”
“Paula is Senate Security, not navy, but yes, senior echelons of the Commonwealth political class must be at least aware of the possibility now. I’ll inform Bradley.”
“What do you want us to do?”
“Stay close to the navy team without compromising yourselves, and observe as much as you can. There’s obviously no way you can break into the Starflyer agent network through Bernadette anymore, but I would like to know what she’s doing on Illuminatus. I suspect the planet is where a lot of the Starflyer’s agents are wetwired; heaven knows we use it often enough. If Myo exposes one of their cells it can only act to our advantage.”
“Okay, we’ll follow if we can. Kieran’s hired some cars for us.”
“Good luck in that traffic.”
The sun was starting to sink below the horizon when eight large cars came out of the precinct garage, traveling in fast convoy. They didn’t have sirens and strobes on, but the civic traffic management arrays were obviously shunting cars and trucks out of their way.
Jenny drained the last of her iced tea. “Let’s go,” she told the others.
It was a warm evening again, though the vanishing sun seemed to take the humidity with it. Mellanie traveled with Murdo on the monorail to a station just half a block away from Greenford Tower. The bars and clubs along Allwyn Street were just setting up for the night trade, as yet they had few customers. Even the traffic seemed lighter than usual.
Murdo led her across the Greenford’s plaza where the fountains were pumping their jets high into the darkening sky. Far above them, the airship docked to the top of the tower was preparing for its flight; the lights on the observation deck were shining brightly as servicebots and waiters laid the tables read
y for the Michelin-starred meal to be served as it soared over the jungle.
The Saffron Clinic’s private door opened for Murdo as soon as he put his hand on the sensor. It was a small narrow lobby inside, with a single elevator.
Mellanie started to key some inserts as they rose up to the thirty-eighth floor, allowing her to review the electronic environment she was moving through. The elevator had several systems, none of them new or elaborate, dating back to the tower net’s last refurbishment fifteen years ago. Above her, she could sense the clinic’s sophisticated and powerful e-shield. She deactivated all but the most elementary OCtattoos and inserts; the SI’s systems were very hard to detect when they were inert, so it had promised her.
The elevator rose through the e-shield. It stopped and the doors slid open. Mellanie was abruptly the center of a deep scan. It was a bare hallway outside, with pipes running along the walls and bright polyphoto strips on the ceiling. A couple of bored human guards, both of them armed, sat at a desk beside the elevator doors.
“Who’s this?” one of them asked curtly, nodding at Mellanie. He didn’t bother getting up. The deep scan couldn’t have revealed anything about her.
“New trainee,” Murdo said. “I cleared her with personnel this afternoon.”
The guard grunted. “You’re Saskia?”
“Yes,” she said anxiously.
“Okay.” He propelled a handheld array across the top of the desk. “Put your palm on that, we need a biometric. You’re not cleared for the medical levels yet, understand? You don’t go off this floor.”
“Yes.”
“If you try to go up there we shoot you. You do not discuss anything you see in here with anybody from outside. If you do, we shoot you. You do not bring anything into the clinic other than yourself and the clothes you are wearing. You will be issued with a uniform. If you bring anything in, like a sensor, we shoot you.”
Mellanie nodded anxiously. The guards grinned at each other.
“Ignore this lame-ass bullshit,” Murdo said. “These two dickbrains couldn’t hit the side of a skyscraper from twenty paces.”
The guard showed him a vigorous hand gesture.
Murdo gave him the finger in return; he and Mellanie walked off down the corridor. He steered her into a locker room. Three nurses were getting changed to go on shift. They stopped talking at the sight of Murdo and one of them scowled.
“Most of the staff use this place to change,” Murdo said. “Except for the doctors and management; they just wear their own suits.” He walked along one of the locker rows. “This one’s yours. Use your thumb on the scanner to open it. Those morons on the desk should have updated the network by now.”
Mellanie pressed her thumb to the small scanner patch, and the locker opened. It was empty. “I thought I got a uniform?”
“I’ll requisition one from supply. Just wait a minute.” He walked away around the end of the row.
Mellanie took a good look around the locker room while Murdo got changed, bringing her inserts on-line one at a time. There was no active sensor, only a couple of cameras looking down from the ceiling. She fed a scrutineer program into the locker room’s array, cautiously examining the structure of the clinic’s internal net. There were an impressive number of security systems and programs, especially on the upper floors. They were all protected by encrypted gates that she didn’t have the skill to circumvent. However, the reception array with its open connection to the Illuminatus cybersphere was easy to access. Her e-butler rode in on a Trojan finance transfer, and began to search admission records for five days on either side of the date that Michelangelo said the lawyers had arrived.
The three nurses all left. Mellanie instructed the scrutineer to follow their progress and record what it could of the security protocols as they went upstairs.
“Hey, Saskia, come around here, I’ve got your uniform,” Murdo said. “I knew I had a spare somewhere.”
Mellanie was intrigued by the way he’d waited until the nurses had left. She held her hand up, palm outward toward the locker doors as she walked along the row. Her basic scan revealed some very interesting items stored inside.
Murdo was wearing a dark red boiler suit with his name on the chest pocket. “Put this on,” he said. One hand held up a small garment of some shiny black fabric, while the other had a frilly white apron.
French maid’s outfit, Mellanie realized. She almost laughed. Murdo wasn’t just a stereotype, he was an absolute cliché.
“I have located three possible admissions compatible with your search parameters,” her e-butler said. The files popped up into her virtual vision; there was no reference to the nature of the treatments they were receiving, only the cost, which surprised even her. Each file did include the room they’d been allocated, for billing purposes.
“Come on, my dear, this is what all cleaning staff trainees wear,” Murdo said in a reasonable tone.
Mellanie activated a second batch of OCtattoos, then infiltrated a restriction order into the room’s array, preventing anyone from using its communications function. “Humm. I don’t think so.”
She clicked her fingers. One of the lockers she’d just passed popped open.
The scenic cable car station was at the eastern end of the Northern Crossquay. Alic, Lucius Lee, and Marhol escorted Robin Beard through the ticket hall and onto the embarkation platform. They didn’t manhandle him, nor did they say a word, but he was always in the center of the little triangle they formed. If the Agent was as good as Beard claimed, he would have observers in the crowds heading out to Treetops restaurant.
The platform was raised several meters above the top of Northern Crossquay, a simple metal mesh with the cables running above, which intruded against a huge tree whose boughs curved overhead. Alic could look back and see Tridelta City gleaming a few kilometers away on the other side of the river.
A cable car slid out of the radiant jungle, pausing briefly on the disembarkation platform opposite, where a couple of staff hopped out. Then it disappeared into the engine house that loomed above the station, before reappearing a few moments later and coming to a halt in front of the little group of passengers. It swung in slow pendulum motion from the carbon cable as the door slid open. Then the stewards were ushering everyone inside.
There were seats for ten people arranged in a ring around the central load girder. Alic took the one closest to the door. Beard sat next to him.
When all ten seats were filled the steward shut the door, and gave a thumbs-up. The carrier wheels above engaged the cable with a loud grumbling, and the car lurched away into the jungle.
There had been a lot of protests from local environmental groups when the cable car operators were applying for permits. Noninterference with the jungles was actually a part of the Illuminatus constitution, and no matter how much they bent other rules, the citizens of Tridelta respected their unique environment. It was very hard to grow an Illuminatus plant anywhere else due to the complex soil bacteria the trees needed in order to flourish. Potted saplings could be sold in sealed display cases for botanical enthusiasts, but no one was ever going to reproduce the woodlands on another world. So the environmentalists didn’t want big construction machinery chopping down trees to put up the cable car posts, and chainsawing off branches to give the cars free passage through the elaborate canopy.
After a decade of legal battles the operators won their permit, after proving a minimal damage impact assessment. What the environmentalists grudgingly accepted once the cable car was up and running was that the environmental damage was actually reduced. People who used to illicitly walk off the Crossquay and plunge through the jungle, breaking small branches and trampling new shoots underfoot to gain the raw experience, now took the cable car. It was cheap, and allowed them to get a lot closer in considerably more comfort. The jungle along the side of both Northern and Southern Crossquays began to thicken up again after a century of injury and abuse.
There was no glass in the cable car’s wi
ndows. Alic could see the glowing leaves skimming past barely a meter away. He did his best not to gawp at the panorama, making sure he checked Beard every thirty seconds. There were also updates from the police team back at the Northern Crossquay, reporting on everyone who got onto a cable car after them. None of them matched Beard’s description of the Agent. Alic had seen the cable car route through the jungle earlier that afternoon, when he and the rest of the team had come out to Treetops to scout around and set up their positions. Jim Nwan was heading up the five-strong arrest team that were waiting around the restaurant, all of them navy officers in full armor suits. Even if the Agent brought wetwired bodyguards there was no way they could stand up to that kind of firepower. Nor was there anywhere to run. The scenic cable car run was ten kilometers long.
It took twenty-five minutes to reach Treetops. Their cable car slid up against a platform that was identical to the one back on Northern Crossquays, and the smiling passengers trooped off. The restaurant and bar was built out of imported wood, big sturdy oak beams from European forests pegged together to form a long raft four meters off the ground. There was no roof, everyone sat directly under the jungle canopy. One side of it was the bar, while the other half was taken up by the restaurant where the tables were booked up weeks in advance.
As agreed, Beard went over to an empty table in the bar and ordered a beer from the waitress. Alic, Lucius, and Marhol sat on stools up at the small bar counter that circled one of the broad tree trunks. Marhol ordered the most expensive imported beer they had. Alic ignored the oafish detective, and sipped a mineral water.
He called Paula and said, “We’re in. Beard’s waiting for contact. The police helicopters are on standby to extract us as soon as we’ve made the arrest. I’ve got Vic with them; he didn’t like it but I made it clear the alternative was to go back to Paris.”
The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle Page 171
