Regeneration

by Stephanie Saulter

  “It was. Are you in a secure location?”

  He looked around the residential street, quiet now the kids were all safely delivered to school, and with no one in sight except for a dog-walker far ahead. “Nobody’s within a hundred feet of me.”

  “Okay, so I figure I can tell you this because arrests are imminent and you brought us Kaboom in the first place, but I’m going to be keeping it quiet until we’ve had a chance to question them.” She hesitated, then said, “There’s another reason too, I’ll get to that in a minute. Last night two of the four streamers we’d identified visited the same address, a couple of hours apart. It’s a public venue with a lot of traffic, so the first one went in and came out without the officers being able to tell whom they were meeting. The second was spotted parting company with a man outside when the premises closed, and we added this man to the stakeout list. Just before dawn this morning, said man was seen meeting another unidentified person in a night-workers’ café. We think she’s going to turn out to be the fifth streamer, because shortly after she left, another of those we’d already identified showed up—that’s when I got the call. We’re just giving it a little longer to see if he’ll be obliging enough to meet with all five before we collar the lot.”

  “Detective Superintendent Varsi,” he said admiringly, “very well played.”

  “You haven’t heard the rest.” She sounded reluctant.

  “Which is?”

  “The first two meetings took place in the financial district, in a fashionable restaurant . . . one with a private members’ club upstairs.”

  Once again Mikal was shocked into immobility. He looked around, found the nearest wall, and leaned against it. In his ear she said, “Mik? Are you there?”

  “Sorry—I’m here. Just . . . What?”

  “I know. Remember, it might be coincidence.” She used the overly firm voice that meant she too had reached the obvious conclusion, but was determined not to fall for it too easily. “The Karma Club is busy; it’s popular and there’re a lot of comings and goings, which makes it the perfect place for this kind of rendezvous.”

  “So they met in the restaurant? The bar?”

  “We don’t know. The officer trailing the first one circled through but couldn’t spot him—and yes, that might be because he’d gone to the members’ area upstairs, but it could also just mean he was hidden by the crowd. It’s too soon to read anything conclusive into it.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Mik, if you repeat this and they use it and it doesn’t stack up—”

  “—then my new associates will be the ones who end up looking irresponsible, if not downright unscrupulous, whereupon they will deflect the blame onto me. Got it. Do you know anything about the person they were meeting? Not another old Banksider, by any chance?”

  “No.” She sounded even more reluctant. “He did work for Standard at one point—the parent company. But that was years ago. He’s had several positions since then; now he runs his own consulting business.”

  “How convenient.” Mikal pushed himself away from the wall.

  “Honey, I know. But.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell them any more than I need to. I haven’t been married to a cop for ten years for nothing.”

  By the time Mikal got to Westminster, public screens were regularly flashing up the names of the Thames terrorists. The artist’s impressions from the day before had been replaced by photos from their Bankside employment files, with the special Met comcode for sightings or other information prominently featured, along with the words DO NOT APPROACH. He paused at the corner of Parliament Square as the feed shifted to a live shot of an UrbanNews reporter standing outside a monolithic office block. The legend BANKSIDE BIOMASS was clearly in frame over her right shoulder.

  Mikal adjusted his earset to pick up the sound and listened for a few seconds, until the image transitioned to aerial footage of the wetland from three days before, when it had been crowded with police and EM vehicles, and boats had been clustered around the barricaded drainage channel. He flicked the earset back to standby and set off again, feeling grimly vindicated.

  His destination was a large office building on one of the capital’s busiest and most venerable streets. Unlike the Bankside complex, it was at least a century old: stolid, functional and architecturally undistinguished, with the slight shabbiness that comes not from disrepair or disuse but from unrelenting traffic and endless pressure for space. Though it had other tenants, it was primarily known as the headquarters of the United People’s Party.

  Mikal wondered if the entrance was being watched. He hoped so. As always, his height drew every eye on the street, and for once he did not mind. He took the steps two at a time, and walked in through the front door.

  Back in his City Hall office a couple of hours later, Mikal was unsurprised when his tablet once more signaled an incoming call from Moira Charles. This time he swiped to receive immediately. She came up against a different backdrop than before: the wall behind her was a rich crimson, and the furniture was gleaming dark wood. The bland professionalism was also gone, replaced by a pinched tension around the mouth and eyes that he found immensely cheering. “Ms. Charles,” he said heartily. “Barely a day goes by. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “Councillor Varsi,” she replied, sounding strained. “Good afternoon. Your appearance alongside the energy minister earlier was extremely . . . unexpected.”

  “Was it? You surprise me, Ms. Charles. Surely it’s the business of government to take an interest when its citizens’ lives are endangered?”

  “That might be, but it’s unacceptable for him to infer corporate involvement in a criminal enterprise . . .”

  “In my experience, corporations are entirely capable of engaging in criminal enterprises,” Mikal interrupted, idly flexing his double-thumbed hands where she could see before lacing them together atop his cocked knee. “Whether that has happened in this case is yet to be determined, but Mr. Radbo isn’t alone in noting connections and expressing concern.”

  “Your comments give the impression that you share his opinion.”

  “That’s reassuring, since I do. The possibility that the terrorists have received support—illicitly or otherwise—from within Bankside BioMass should be investigated as a matter of extreme urgency. I trust you don’t disagree with that?”

  He trusted also that she would hear the echo of her own words thrown back at her. She grimaced, then drew herself up. “Standard BioSolutions will cooperate fully with the authorities. We will also vigorously defend our subsidiaries from any suggestion of involvement in these matters. A company is not responsible for what employees do once they leave, nor for unauthorized actions taken against company policy by those still employed.”

  “Duly noted.”

  “Councillor Varsi, we anticipated a more measured response from you on these matters. I wish to convey our profound disappointment.”

  “Consider it conveyed. Anything else?”

  “I—You don’t seem to—” She broke off and looked to one side, listening to something he could hear only as a muffled growl. Then she moved aside, out of the tablet’s field of view, and said, “Someone would like to speak with you.”

  Abraham Mitford took her place. Mikal knew immediately that wherever they were, it was his space: she had been sitting too far forward, perched uncomfortably on the edge of the chair as though she was not certain she was really allowed to be there, while Mitford dropped into it with the carelessness of ownership. The color in his face was high. He did not bother with a greeting.

  “Varsi,” he said, “what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Rejecting your offer,” Mikal replied with equanimity. “I should have thought that was obvious.”

  “It’ll never come again, do you understand? We can just about pull this back, but if you walk away now it’s over.”

  “I’m delighted to hear that. This is me, walking. I would hate to have
to have this conversation again.”

  “What do you think this stunt is going to accomplish?” Mitford asked, his voice rising. “Where can you possibly imagine it’s going to get you? You are finished, do you understand? That’s what’s obvious.”

  “Are you threatening me, Mr. Mitford?”

  “You?” he spat. “You think—? I don’t make threats, Varsi. I told you what has to happen, and some damn-fool gem turning down the chance of a lifetime is not going to change that.”

  “There are a great many chances in a lifetime,” Mikal observed peaceably. “The chance to undermine a lawful and progressive business because you don’t like the competition is not the kind I’m interested in. The chance to let a new technology develop and flourish under the stewardship of the people who invented it is the kind I like. I choose the chances I take, Mr. Mitford.”

  “This isn’t over.”

  “You just said it was.”

  “No,” Mitford said. He had his voice back under control, but his face was beet-red and he spoke slowly, as though Mikal might otherwise fail to understand. “You are. And Thames Tidal won’t be far behind.”

  There were, Sharon Varsi thought, few satisfactions equal to having suspects in custody. She would have been even more pleased if the two fugitives from the hydroponics farm were also locked up in the cells, but for now the six members of the Kaboom propaganda operation—the streamers and their handler, one Conrad Fischer—would do nicely. Every property in southern England that was owned by, leased to, or otherwise connected with Bankside BioMass or any of its subsidiaries was now subject to one of the broadest search warrants in the Met’s illustrious history, and she had no doubt that Achebe’s teams would eventually turn up something.

  “The bottom line is this,” she had said to an aggrieved deputy chief operating officer who was trying in vain to persuade her that such exhaustive scrutiny was quite unreasonable. “If you can’t even hazard a guess how your ex-employees came to know about the Pure Fuel premises, much less gain access to it, you can’t expect me to accept your assurance that it was a one-off. For all I know—for all you know—they might have found their way into any of your other properties by that same mysterious route. Surely you must want to ensure that Bankside BioMass and its affiliates are not unwittingly harboring terrorists, Mr. Han—don’t you?”

  Which had left Mr. Han even more aggrieved, and thoroughly flummoxed. He’d muttered something about challenging the warrant, which had made Sharon smile.

  “That’s your prerogative, of course,” she’d said sweetly. “Would you like to tell the press you’ll be doing that, or shall I?”

  Han had looked appropriately horrified and hurriedly ended the conversation, and Sharon was pleased to have heard nothing from the company since. She would have been happier still if her warrant had extended upstream as well as down, to allow her to dig deep into the bastions of Bankside’s parent company, but the Met’s legal team had blanched at the suggestion and advised her to stick to what could be credibly argued from existing evidence. She’d not mentioned Mikal’s clandestine conversation with Abraham Mitford to them; the likelihood that the financier was pursuing a criminal strategy alongside a corporate one would be judged too small, the link too tenuous to pursue. She could barely credit it herself. Unless Kaboom gave her something that pointed at Standard as well as Bankside, they would have to proceed on the assumption that the plot, if it had a corporate sponsor at all, was being directed from one of the limbs, not the head.

  If Kaboom did link the two, that would change everything.

  The streamers were all freelancers, specializing in the kind of unethical publicity work forbidden under that Code of Practice that Gabriel had felt so strongly about. They reacted with varying degrees of indignation and bewilderment to their arrests, all of them insisting that nothing they had done was illegal. The request to “Tell us about your last instructions from Conrad Fischer” knocked them back a bit, although a couple of them tried claiming they knew no one of that name. When vid evidence of their meetings made those denials impossible to maintain, the more seasoned clammed up and asked for lawyers, and the others started talking.

  Fischer himself was a different story. Sharon had suspected as much from the moment she scanned the Met’s dossier on him, with its long list of top-tier companies he had once worked for and which had since become his clients. As the hours went by, it became clear that her initial assessment of him had been correct. Though he had never been arrested before, Fischer obviously understood the basic rule: if you said nothing, nothing you said could be used against you. Moreover, he was disciplined enough to be able to stick to his silence through increasingly frustrating sessions with her and Achebe, both singly and together. Even after his solicitor showed up he refused either to confirm or to deny that he had ever known, met, spoken with, or instructed anyone, on any matter, at any point in his life.

  “You realize,” Sharon said wearily, as she went back in for the third time, “that we have recorded evidence of your meetings with these people, and that they are currently relating to us the details of those meetings? If you don’t speak, we will have only their side of the story.”

  “My client has no comment to make at this time,” Ms. Marcos, the lawyer, repeated for the umpteenth time.

  Sharon ignored her and stared at Fischer until he looked up, his face expressionless, as it had been from the moment he was arrested. “Let me make this clear to you: because of the nature of the crimes, because of the confessions, and because of the evidence we already have against you, we have more than enough to hold you. We have located the account you used to pay for the streamers’ services and it is only a matter of time before we trace the origin of those funds. It will go far better for you, Mr. Fischer, if you tell us now on whose behalf you have been acting.”

  “My client has no comment to make at this time.”

  “I don’t think you appreciate the serious nature of the crimes here, Mr. Fischer. We are not talking about conspiracy to slander, unpleasant though that is. We are talking about terrorism, do you understand that? We’re talking about aiding and abetting a terrorist attack. We’re talking about attempted murder. Those are not charges that you—or your business—can just shrug off.”

  “My client has no comment—”

  Without another word, Sharon got up and left the interview room. Outside, she spoke to Achebe, then called Mikal.

  “I’ve advised the investigation that you were at the Karma Club for a business meeting the evening before several suspects were tracked there,” she told her husband. “It would be helpful if you could look at some photos, tell us whether you recognize anyone.” She stayed firmly in official-speak and he picked up his cues smoothly.

  “Of course. Anything I can do to assist.”

  “I’m handing you over to Constable Danladi, who will take you through the photographs.”

  Sharon sat in the background, listening silently as the young PC asked a few questions to establish place, date, and time. Then she piggybacked a file link onto the connection and took him through the lineup, one at a time.

  “No,” he said apologetically, “I’m afraid I don’t recognize any of them. Although—” He stopped, frowning.

  “We need you to be as certain as you can, Councillor. Would you like to see them again?”

  “Just the last one, please.”

  It was the handler, Conrad Fischer. Sharon waited with bated breath as Mikal studied the photograph, but at last he sighed and shook his head. “No, that’s definitely not the man I saw talking to Moira Charles; he was shorter, with darker hair and skin. It’s just that this guy looks like someone who’d fit in perfectly in the private area upstairs—there’s something about his clothes, his expression; that kind of senior-executive look. I wondered if maybe I’d glimpsed him in the background.”

  “Did you?”

  “I don’t think so—but I was whisked through pretty quickly so I wouldn’t swear to it one way or t
he other.”

  Sharon scowled as Constable Danladi broke the file link with Mikal’s tablet. He caught sight of her expression over Danladi’s shoulder as the photo disappeared from his screen and said, “Sorry. That’s not very helpful.”

  “Don’t be,” Sharon replied, adding, “A false positive would be even less helpful. As Constable Danladi says, it’s important to know that the information provided is completely reliable.”

  “Under the circumstances,” said Mikal, “I believe it would be advisable for me to make a full statement about my visit to the club—what I was doing there, and who I saw.” He blinked solemnly at her.

  Sharon had been thinking exactly that, and trying to decide how to tell him so; now it struck her that his mention of Moira Charles’s name had probably been intended to signal her that this was what he was about to do. She shot him a brilliant smile and in her best detective-superintendent voice said, “Obviously I can’t take your statement myself; Constable Danladi can take it from here.”

  “Me?” the young woman said in surprise as her senior officer stood up to leave the room. She was a recent arrival, and Sharon barely knew her; she trusted that after a moment’s thought PC Danladi would realize why that made her a good choice.

  “It might prove completely irrelevant,” Mikal was saying, looming large on the tablet as he leaned forward, “but I’d like to put it on the record, just in case. Shall I come in—?”

  Danladi turned back to him, and Sharon slipped out. She wondered if something had happened in the aftermath of Mikal’s meeting with the UPP, and his subsequent press conference alongside a thunderous Jack Radbo. Maybe Mitford or the Trads had tried to turn the screw somehow? She didn’t doubt that very public display of which alliance he had chosen must have ratcheted up the stakes considerably.

  She met Achebe in the corridor, coming up from the interview rooms below. The normally phlegmatic detective was looking rumpled and tired, still peering at his tablet as he walked.