The Mandel Files

by Peter F. Hamilton

  We were the first to use that road after the storm finished,” Nevin said, “and we had a lot of trouble. It was covered in fresh mud from the rains, and it was absolutely pristine. No tyre tracks. I was very careful to check. And you couldn’t cut across country, not with the ground in that state, it was saturated; even your EMC Ranger would sink in up to the hubcaps. The only people in that valley when Kitchener was killed were his students.”

  Greg checked the map again, and decided they were probably right about the roads. He thought about how he would go about killing Kitchener. There had been enough similar missions in Turkey. Covert penetrations, tracking down enemy officers, eliminating them without fuss, stealing away afterwards, leaving the Legion troops unnerved by their blatant vulnerability. An old man confined in a verified location would be an easy target.

  “What about aircraft?” he asked.

  Langley let out a soft snort. “I checked with the CAA and the RAE. There was nothing flying around the Chater valley early Friday morning, nor Thursday evening for that matter.”

  “Can we shift this focus to show the rest of the Chater valley?” Greg asked.

  “Yes,” Langley said. He waved permission to Nevin. The detective started to tap out instructions on a desk terminal. After a minute the map blinked out altogether, and he cursed.

  Amanda Paterson joined him at the terminal.

  “This is how it goes here,” Langley said, half to himself. “I don’t suppose your Home Office contact considered allocating us a decent equipment budget as well?”

  “I doubt it.”

  He curled up a corner of his mouth in resignation.

  The map reappeared, flickering for a moment, then steadied and slowly traversed east to west until Launde Park touched the left-hand edge of the flatscreen.

  “Is that all right?” Paterson asked.

  “Yeah, thanks,” Greg said. He tracked the River Chater out of Launde Park towards the east. It was almost a straight course. Further down from Launde, the floor of the valley was crossed by a few minor roads, but essentially it was empty until he reached Ketton, twenty kilometres away. “If it was me,” Greg said, his eyes still on the map, “I would use a military microlight to fly in. You could launch anywhere west of Ketton, and cruise up the river, keeping your altitude below the top of the valley to avoid radar.”

  The detectives glanced about uncertainly.

  “A microlight?” Langley said. His mild tone betrayed a strong scepticism.

  “No messing. The Westland ghost wing was the best ever made, by my reckoning anyway. They had a high reliability, a minute radar return, and they manoeuvred like a dream. Nobody could hear it from the ground once you were above a hundred metres; and you glided down to a landing.” His fingernail made a light click as he touched the screen above Launde Park. “The gradient of the slopes around the Abbey would be ideal for an unpowered launch afterwards.”

  They were all staring at him, humour and contempt leached away.

  “The winds,” Eleanor said matter-of-factly into the silence.

  “Yeah. They could be a problem, certainly right after that storm. We’d have to check with RAF Cottesmore, see what speeds they were around here.”

  “This is somewhat fanciful, isn’t it?” Langley asked mildly.

  “Somebody killed him, and you say it wasn’t any of the people who were there.”

  “We haven’t proved any of them did it,” Nevin countered.

  “But we’re still interviewing them.”

  “Even if someone did fly in like you say,” Paterson said, ‘they still had to get past the Abbey’s security system.”

  “If a hardline tekmerc had been contracted to snuff Kitchener, he would go in loaded with enough ‘ware to burn through the security system without leaving a trace.”

  “A tekmerc?” Langley asked. Disbelief was thick in his voice.

  “Yeah. I take it you have drawn up a list of people who disliked Kitchener? From what I remember, he was a prickly character.”

  “There are a few academics who have clashed with him publicly,” Nevin said cautiously. “But I don’t think a grudge over different physics theories would extend to this. Everyone acknowledged he was a genius, they made allowances for his behaviour.”

  Greg looked round at the stony faces circling him. He had entertained the notion, absurdly guileless now, he realized, that he would be welcomed by a team who would be delighted to have his psi faculty at their disposal. He wasn’t expecting to be taken out for beers and a meal afterwards, but at least that way he could have approached the case with some enthusiasm. All Langley’s dispirited squad could offer was a long uphill yomp.

  “Did any of you know that Kitchener was working on a research project for Event Horizon?” he asked.

  The reaction was more or less what he expected; flashes of disgust, quickly hidden, tight faces, hard eyes. Langley dropped his head into his hands, fingertips massaging his temple.

  “Oh shit,” he said thickly. “Greg and Eleanor Mandel, who had Julia Evans as their bridesmaid. How stupid of me. She had you sent here. And there I was thinking that it was just the Home Office panicking for a quick arrest.”

  “Did you know about the contract?” Eleanor asked waspishly. Her face had reddened under her tan.

  “No, we didn’t,” Langley replied, equally truculent.

  Greg touched her shoulder, trying to reassure her. She flashed him a grateful smile. “Well, I suggest that corporate rivalry is now a motive for you to consider,” he said. “Does that make any of the students a likely candidate?”

  “No, of course not.” Langley was struggling to come to terms with Event Horizon’s involvement. Greg guessed he was trying to work how this would affect his career prospects. Maybe a quiet word when the rest of the CID wasn’t looking on would help smooth the way. It certainly couldn’t make, the situation any worse.

  “Does Event Horizon have any idea who might have murdered Kitchener? Which rival would benefit from having him snuffed by a tekmerc?” Langley asked.

  “No. No idea.”

  “They don’t know? Or they don’t want us to know?” Paterson asked.

  “That’ll do,” Langley said quickly.

  She gave Greg and Eleanor a sullen glare, then turned and went back to her desk.

  “What sort of research was Kitchener doing for Event Horizon?” Jon Nevin asked.

  “Something to do with spatial interstices,” Greg said. Julia hadn’t managed to explain much about it to him. He didn’t think she entirely understood it herself.

  “What are they?”

  “I’m not entirely sure. Small black holes from what I gather. It all goes a long way over my head.”

  “Are they worth much?” Langley asked.

  “They might be eventually. Apparently you can use them to travel to other stars.”

  This time the silence stretched out painfully. The detectives clearly didn’t know what to make of the idea.

  Join the club, Greg thought.

  “All right, Mandel,” Langley said. “What is it you wish to advise me to do now? Because I’m buggered if I know where to go from here.”

  Greg paused, attempting to put his thoughts in some kind of logical sequence. Most of the training he’d received in preparation for Mindatar had been data correlation exercises.

  “Firstly, I want to visit Launde Abbey, have a look round. Then I want to interview the students. Where are they?”

  “We’re still holding them.”

  “After four days?”

  “Their lawyers advised them to co-operate. For the moment, anyway. It wouldn’t look good if they start throwing their legal rights around too much. But we had to agree that six days is the maximum limit, after that we’ll either have to apply to a magistrate for them to be taken into police custody or let them go.”

  “OK. I want to see their statements before I meet them. And the forensic and pathology reports as well, please.”

  “All right, w
e’ll assign you an authority code so you can access the files on this case. And I’ll take you out to Launde myself.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Three more uniformed bobbies had been drafted in to help keep the channel crews back from the police station gate. Ribbons of sweat stained the spines of their white shirts as they shouted and pushed at the incursive horde. Eleanor drove out into the road, and turned hard right, heading down towards the railway station. The way to do it, she discovered, was imagine the road to be empty, and just drive. Reporters and camera operators nipped out of the way sharpish.

  She had been right about them tracking down Greg’s personal data profile, though.

  “Mr Mandel, is it true you’re helping the police with the Kitchener murder?”

  “You don’t farm sheep, Greg, what are you here for?”

  “Did Julia Evans send you?”

  “Is it true you used to serve in Mindstar?”

  “Eleanor, where are you going?”

  “Come on, Greg, say something.”

  “Can we have a statement?”

  She passed the last of them level with the fast-food caravans, and pressed her foot down. The hectic shouts faded away. A smell of fried onions and spicy meat blew into the EMC Ranger through the dashboard vents.

  “Christ,” she murmured. When she lived on the kibbutz she had often accompanied her father and the other men when they took the hounds out hunting. She had seen what happened to foxes, wild cats, and even other dogs when the hounds ran them down. They would keep on worrying the bloody carcass until there was nothing left but shreds. The press, she reflected sagely, had an identical behaviour pattern. For the first time she began to feel sorry for Langley, having to conduct his inquiry with them braying relentlessly on his heels.

  If she had known about them as well as the way the police would treat her and Greg, she might well have played the part of shrewish wife and told him no. Too late now.

  A quick check in the rear-view mirror showed her the police Panda car carrying Vernon Langley and Jon Nevin was following them. Langley had assigned Amanda Paterson to accompany her and Greg in the EMC Ranger. Eleanor wasn’t quite sure who was supposed to be chastised by the arrangement. Amanda was sitting in the rear of the big car, hands folded across her lap, a sullen expression on her face as she watched the detached houses of Station Road whizz past.

  So defensive, Eleanor thought, as if the Kitchener inquiry was some shabby secret she was guarding. And now the barbarians were hammering on the gate, demanding access.

  “You OK?” Greg asked.

  “Sure.”

  He held her gaze for a moment. “How about you, Amanda?” he asked.

  Startled, the woman looked up. “Yes, fine, thank you.”

  “Have they been like that the whole time?” Eleanor asked her.

  “Yes.” She paused. “It hasn’t helped when we went round the villages collecting statements. They often got the residents’ stories before we did.” Her mouth tightened. “They shouldn’t have done that.”

  Eleanor drove over the level crossing and took the Braunston road. The clouds were darkening overhead, a uniform neutral veil. It would rain soon, she knew, a thunderstorm. Weather sense was something everybody cultivated these days.

  Greg inclined his head fractionally towards her, then flipped open his cybofax and started to run through the statements he’d loaded into the memory. Grey-green data trundled down the small LCD screen, rearranging itself each time he muttered an instruction.

  Devious man, she thought, holding back a smile. Among his other qualities. She could read him so easily, something she’d been able to do right from the start; and vice versa, of course, him with his gland. Greg always said she had psychic traits, although he didn’t want her to take the psi-assessment tests. Not putting his foot down, they didn’t have that kind of relationship, but heavily opposed to her having a gland. He was more protective about it than anything else, wanting to spare her the ordeal. Several Mindstar veterans had proved incapable of making the psychological adjustment necessary to cope with their expanded psi ability.

  There were so few people who saw that aspect of Greg: his concern, the oh so human failings. Gland prejudice was too strong, an undiluted paranoia virus; nobody saw past the warlock power, they were dazzled by it.

  Countless times she had watched people flinch when they were introduced to him, and she could never decide quite why. Perhaps it was all the time he’d spent in the army and the Trinities. He had the air of someone terribly intimate with violence; not an obvious bruiser type, like those idiots Andrew Foster and Frankie Owen, more like the calm reserve martial arts experts possessed.

  The first time they met, the day she ran away from the kibbutz, her father had come looking for her. He backed down so fast when Greg intervened; it was the first time she had ever seen her father give way over anything. He always had God’s righteousness on his side, so he claimed. More like incurable peasant obstinacy, she thought, the cantankerous old Bible-thumper. The whole of her life until then, or so it seemed, had been filled with his impassioned skeletal face craning out of the pulpit in the wooden chapel, broken purple capillaries on his rough cheeks showing up tobacco-brown in the pale light which filtered through the turquoise-glass window behind the altar. That face would harangue and cajole even in her dreams, promising God’s justice would pursue her always.

  But all it had taken was a few quiet-spoken resolute words from Greg and he had retreated, walking out of her life for good. Him, the kibbutz’s spiritual leader, abandoning his only daughter to one of Satan’s technological corruptions.

  She had moved in to Greg’s chalet that night. The two of them had been together ever since. The other residents at the Berrybut time-share estate warned her that Greg could be moody, but it never manifested with her. She could sense when he was down, when he needed sympathy, when he needed to be left alone. Those long anarchistic years in the Trinities, the cheapness of life on Peterborough’s streets, were bound to affect him. He needed time to recover, that was all. Couldn’t people see that?

  She always felt sorry for couples who were unable to plug into each other’s basic emotions. They didn’t know what they were missing; she’d never trusted anyone quite like she did Greg. That and the sex, of course.

  “Kitchener was fairly rich, wasn’t he?” she asked Amanda.

  “Yes. He had several patents bringing in royalties. His molecular interaction equations all had commercial applications, crystals and ‘ware chips, that kind of thing. It was mostly kombinates who took out licences, they paid him a couple of million New Sterling a year.”

  Eleanor let out an impressed whistle. “Who stands to inherit?”

  Amanda’s features were briefly illuminated with a recalcitrant grin when she realized how smoothly they had breached her guard. “We examined that angle. No one person benefits. Kitchener had no immediate family, the closest are a couple of younger cousins, twice removed. He left a million New Sterling to their children; there are seven of them, so split between them it doesn’t come to that much. The money goes into a trust fund anyway, and they’re limited to how much can be withdrawn each year. But the bulk of the estate goes to Cambridge University. It will be used for science scholarships to enable underprivileged students to go to the university; and funding two of the physics faculties, with the proviso that it’s only to be spent on laboratory equipment. He didn’t want the dons to feather their nests with it.”

  “What about Launde Abbey, who gets that?”

  “The university. It’s to be a holiday retreat for the most promising physics students. He wanted them to have somewhere they could go to escape the pressure of exams and college life, and just sit and think. It’s all in his will.”

  “That doesn’t sound like the Edward Kitchener we hear about,” Eleanor observed.

  “That was his public image,” Amanda said. “Once you’ve talked to the students, you’ll find out that it really was mostly image. They all w
orshipped him.”

  The EMC Ranger started up the hill which led out of town. A new housing estate was under construction on both sides of the road, the first in Oakham for fifteen years. The houses had a pre-Warming Mediterranean look, thick white-painted walls to keep out the heat, silvered windows, solar-cell panel roofs made to look like red clay tiles, broad overhanging eaves. And garages, she noted, the architects must share a confidence about the future.

  She had been relieved when the council passed the planning application. Considering all they’d been through when they lost their homes, and the cramped conditions of the school campus, the Fens refugees deserved somewhere for themselves. After the economy started to pick up, she had worried that they would develop into a permanent underclass, resentful and resented. A lot of them had actually been employed to build the houses, but despite that and the cacao plantations the numbers of unemployed in the Oakham district was still too large. The town urgently needed more factories to bring jobs into the area. The transport network wasn’t up to supporting commuters yet, allowing people to work in the cities like they used to. She often wondered if she should ask Julia to establish an Event Horizon division in the industrial estate. Would that be an abuse of privilege? Julia could be overbearingly generous to her friends. And there were a lot of towns which needed jobs just as badly as Oakham. Of course, if the Event Horizon factory had to be built anyway, why not use what influence she had? At the moment she was just waiting to see if the council development officers could do what they were paid to, and attract industrial investment. If they hadn’t interested a kombinate after another six months or so, she probably would have a word.

  A favour for a favour, she thought, because God knows this Kitchener case is tougher than either of us expected. Julia would have to site a whole cyber precinct next to the town to be quits.

  She took the west road out of Braunston. It was a long straight stretch up to the recently replanted Cheseldyne Spinney. The turning down to Launde Park was five hundred metres past the end of the tanbark oak saplings. There was a row of yellow police cones blocking it off, tyre-deflation spikes jutting out of their bases like chrome-plated rhino horns. One of Oakham’s Panda cars, with two uniformed constables inside, was on duty in front of them. Eleanor counted ten reporters camped opposite, their cars parked on the thistle-tangled verge.