by Patty Jansen
And so we got organised.
The Pengali wanted to go to bed. I reminded them again that the court sessions would happen during the daytime and that this was when we were likely to be needed. They said they understood, and wanted to go to sleep anyway.
Amarru’s lawyers had some job to do. I went to speak to Devlin and asked him to find as much as possible about the protesters at the courthouse: who they were and why they were there. He asked if he should establish contact.
“Is that even possible?” I asked him. “I mean, without attracting too much of the wrong sort of attention?”
“Everything is possible.” He gave me a sage look.
I didn’t know where he had gotten this smug confidence, but I told him that contacting the protesters wasn’t necessary now. I’d want to see what Conrad Martens had to say about them, and then decide if I needed to take the risk.
I told Devlin to continue finding information about Sandowne Pharmaceuticals and Minke Kluysters, because a first probe had proven that information fairly elusive, and to help Reya and Mereeni, who were going to write answers to some of the potential questions that the prosecutor and the defence lawyers were going to ask Abri. They were unsure whether she would need to stand in the witness box alone—the consensus was that she probably would—and wanted to talk her through all the possible questions, including the ones about character that would mess with the karrit system.
They assured me that they didn’t need my help, and told me to go to the beach.
I just needed to make sure that everyone was looked after. Seriously, the bigger my team, the long it took us to accomplish anything as simple as leave the house.
Eirani wanted to go back to the shops, and Karana wanted to come with her. I told one of Amarru’s guards to go with them. That flustered Eirani.
“Oh, Muri, I can look after myself.”
“I know, but how well do you speak the language?”
“Oh.”
I clearly had a point there, so one of the guards it was.
Those guards, and Devlin and Evi, had a job to do as well, but the members in the party were their priority, so Devlin and one of Amarru’s guards would stay here, while Evi would come with us and the other guard would go with Eirani and Karana.
While I waited for Nicha to get Ayshada fed, I overheard Eirani and Karana talking about places where they could look at kitchen equipment.
I couldn’t restrain a smile. I might have started something by taking her a bowl from Kedras a while back. My staff was nothing if not dedicated to their task. I would have to organise the purchase of some gadgetry for Devlin, because he looked like he might want to come shopping, too, but he’d gotten roped into doing some monitoring work for Amarru’s guards, whatever security personnel were doing. It looked like even Jemiro was involved. I took one of Amarru’s guards to the hallway and warned him that Jemiro might be compromised.
“The interpreter is not one of our regular contractors, and I did hire him from one of the more dubious Earth citizens in Barresh. I cannot guarantee that this man does not work for dubious sources.” In fact, I was fairly certain that Jasper Carlson did.
The guard nodded, his obsidian face solemn. “Mashara is aware of that.”
Meaning: stop double-guessing our job, Delegate.
Oh well, at least I couldn’t be blamed for holding back information. Also, I was extremely glad that I was no longer talking to Evi and Telaris in these highly formal terms.
I wished Telaris would come back, and Sheydu, too. I missed her no-nonsense dry and sarcastic comments. Maybe she could have made a decent guess at what was going on. I missed Reida and Deyu, too. Every time I saw a seagull or a duck, I thought of her.
By now, the Pengali had all retreated into their room, including Idda; Mereeni and Reya sat in the small conference room surrounded by readers and projectors; Devlin and Jemiro were doing something else in the security room; and Eirani and Karana had left with their guard, so Thayu and I, Nicha and Ayshada, Veyada and Evi finally left the hotel.
We had rugged up pretty well, and Thayu looked cute with her face buried in a fluffy scarf. The weather had taken a turn for the worse, with low-hanging clouds and a cold wind pulling at trees and hair and clothing. Gusts of wind blew ripples across the water in the canal on the other side of the tramline.
A few people were at the tram stop, but without the Pengali we didn’t attract a lot of attention.
Thayu stood with her hands deep inside her pockets. Both Nicha and Veyada used their eye movements to scan the area. Veyada wore the tiniest of earpieces, barely visible behind his ear lobe. It would be connected to his feeder and the data would be shared with the others as soon as we left the dead zone. I was curious about what they were listening to and who they thought was watching us, but I kept quiet so that they could do their job. I trusted that they’d tell me if there was something I needed to know, but I was wondering if I should maybe try to contract Margarethe while we were out of the dead zone.
Maybe. Maybe not, if there were really that many people watching us. I’d been told in a roundabout way that Sheydu was already doing that.
The tram took us through the centre of the town, along tree-lined boulevards with historical houses that had probably not changed much in the last two hundred years. I did seem to remember that the streets were more open, but that could be because I had been so much smaller, or it could be because the trees had grown and a lot of roadways had been turned into lawns. At one point, the tram even went through a forest, where the trees burst with fresh green leaves and lush grass, and dandelions grew in open patches.
We got off at a little station with a shelter amongst multi-storey residential buildings.
The wind picked up considerably here.
We were in yet another shopping precinct, but we turned into a narrow alley that opened out onto a wide boulevard where, directly ahead, the white-tipped waves of the North Sea met the leaden grey sky. Not the greatest day for a beach outing. At least it didn’t rain.
The beachside boulevard was pretty much as I remembered it. Dozens of cafes sat on top of the sea wall overlooking the beach. Most of the patrons hid inside, but some of the establishments had put up glass shelters so that they retained the outdoors feeling.
Gusts of wind blew sand drifts over the pavement. It was really not the most pleasant of days.
Ayshada didn’t care. He wanted to be let out of the pram and let us know this by squealing and arching his back.
As soon as Nicha undid the harness, he climbed out of the pram, ran across the paving and bolted down the stairs onto the beach. He actually fell the last step and landed face-first in the sand, and then rolled around squealing and laughing.
Thayu went down the steps and set him on his feet, only for him to roll over again.
She laughed. “Oh, come on, Ayshada!”
There would be sand everywhere tonight.
Nicha also came down the stairs. “Come on, let’s build a sand castle. That’s what people do, right?” He smiled at me. He knew this very well, having lived most of his younger years in Europe. He showed Ayshada what to do, and found him some shells and a washed-up sea star for decoration.
“So, what did you really think of that letter from Conrad Martens?” I asked Nicha, while Ayshada started pushing heaps of sand around at our feet.
He glanced at the boulevard above us, and the windows of the cafes. Checking for listeners.
“I don’t understand. He seems to say that our trip here was paid for by the group whose member we’ve accused of murder. Robert is in the Pretoria Cartel and therefore the Pretoria Cartel are paying for us to come so that the best witness can be at the court . . . to prove that their member committed a murder. I don’t understand it.”
“I don’t think Abri’s story is particularly convincing.”
“Better that anything else they’ve got. That’s what I don’t understand. If they wanted Robert to get off, they could have just . . . bee
n happy with Melissa’s evidence, which proves that Robert shot at her, but doesn’t involve Gusamo, so Robert could get off with a fairly light sentence, and that would have been the end of it. Instead they call out Abri, who makes a reasonably decent case that Robert has murdered Gusamo, and they’re paying for it. What’s the deal? Did Robert fall out of favour with the group? Is this his punishment? If he did something they really didn’t like, why spend all this money on the court? They could have hired an assassin and be done with it. Would have cost much less.”
That would have been the Coldi solution. A writ to the person in question, and, if no favourable compromise was forthcoming, an assassin.
Bang. Problem solved.
I let out a breath. “I can’t say I understand it either. I agree that it does look like Robert fell out with them. Maybe he threatened to reveal their secrets.”
Thayu snorted. “They would have been even quicker with the assassin if that were the case.”
True. “Maybe it has to do with his wife.”
Fiona Davidson had run against Margarethe for the presidency of Nations of Earth, but she’d been considered a lunatic fringe candidate and hadn’t come close to winning. She had been able to run because she had formally divorced her husband, but few people believed that the divorce was genuine. But what if those people were wrong and it was genuine, and she was angry at him for something and, within the marriage, she was the one most heavily involved in the Pretoria Cartel?
There were way too many open questions and I hoped that Conrad Martens would answer some of them for us when he turned up. Which he was not doing right now.
Evi and Veyada remained at the top of the stairs, watching all directions, ready to deal with any people coming to us.
I asked Thayu what they were watching.
She said, “We are getting many signals, just trying to determine which one is of interest to us is exhausting.”
“But do you know how many people are watching?”
“There are at least two groups.”
“Two? Our minders from Nations of Earth and Conrad Martens’ people?”
“We’re not sure about that. They’re very secretive and use highly advanced equipment.”
“Equipment? Locally made?” With Coldi spy routines, of course, so that was why my team could know this at all.
She shook her head. “It doesn’t look like it.”
“What do you mean? That it’s gamra technology?”
“It means that they have very effective shielding or their transmissions are highly targeted, either of those more so than we’d expect from locally made equipment.”
“And what does that mean?” I asked her.
“It could mean anything. Mainly, it means that we don’t know who they are.”
Damn.
I wanted to speak to Margarethe. I wanted to ask people what the hell was going on. I wanted to be done with the trial where I felt like we were a museum piece, a display exhibit under the control of someone else, if only we knew who.
A lone fisherman stood in the surf wearing galoshes and holding a rod. Occasionally, he would reel in his bait and toss it back out again with a swing of the rod. He didn’t seem to be catching much. I had considered telling the Pengali before we left that we would be going to a place where they could catch fish, but now I was glad I hadn’t. Pengali fished with spears and nets. I didn’t think they would catch anything here in that way. Besides, the weather was foul, I didn’t have any wet-weather gear to keep them warm and they would just be miserable as well as unsuccessful.
Nicha, Thayu and Ayshada really got into the sandcastle building. They dug moats, shaped mounds, found sea stars and shells to put on top.
Thayu’s cheeks had gone pink with the chill air. When she bent over, I could see the temperature retaining suit under her clothes, but for once, she utterly enjoyed herself. Evi offered to get drinks and came back not much later with hot chocolate—made with soy milk for himself, because Indrahui didn’t tolerate certain proteins.
Ayshada had been fast to cotton onto the idea of hot chocolate, and he came running when he spotted Evi with the cups.
We gathered in a group on the sand, wind-blown, red-cheeked, covered in sand. It was a joy to see their faces.
“Is this as you remembered this place?” Nicha asked.
“Mostly. My father and I came on the tram and then we walked along the waterfront. I remember going to a museum about a pier that used to be here but that got so badly damaged in a big storm that it had to be taken down. The weather was a lot nicer, and it was busy. We had to line up for a long time to buy chips.”
Fish and chips, apparently, were still a thing, even if the chips now had to be hot-air fried by law, and the blustery weather had closed most of the beachfront booths. We traipsed off to one of the eating houses, where Ayshada stood on a chair looking into the kitchen where the cook tossed a basket of uncooked chips into the chamber where searing air blew them around in little eddies until they were golden.
It smelled so good that we all attacked when the big basket, steaming hot, was brought to the table.
By now, the sky was starting to darken. I figured we had better start making our way back soon, because the others would wonder where we were. Nicha wanted to put Ayshada to bed. Most importantly, our Nations of Earth minders would wonder where we were, and that might include some people we did not want to alert to the fact that I was in contact with Conrad Martens.
But someone should have contacted us here, and if they were going to show up, they’d better get on with it.
Chapter 11
* * *
WE HAD JUST ABOUT eaten all the chips and Ayshada was picking the last crumbs out of the fish basket when a middle-aged man entered the cafe.
He sat down at a table behind me. The waitress came to bring him water and take his order. I glanced at him over my shoulder. I had spoken to Conrad Martens on a vid link a few times and didn’t think that this was what he looked like. I’d have thought he was older than this man, but maybe this was an agent. Or maybe they were playing a game with us and this was just a member of the public.
In the window in front of me—behind which the sky darkened ominously, and in which I could see the reflection of the interior of the cafe—I spotted him picking up a reader and flicking through a few pages before looking at something in more detail.
Thay’? Is that him? I asked through the feeder.
She didn’t know. He didn’t have any particular devices on him that suggested so. Devices? Since when did they tell people’s intentions by the devices they carried? That was Amarru’s information through the little Coldi built-in routines again.
One day, I was going to have to delve into exactly what information the Exchange in Athens had about people and their electronic devices with computer chips, and, most importantly, the level of control they had over these devices. I strongly suspected that I wasn’t going to like the answer, much as all that knowledge suited me at times, and much as it had never been a secret that they did have a lot of information.
But by now we had finished our meal, and we should be heading back. Ayshada was getting sleepy, and even allowed Nicha to strap him in the pram, as long as he had his blanket. I went to the counter to pay for the meals.
The man behind me didn’t move or look at us. A member of the public then.
On our way to the door, we walked past his table. First Evi and then Veyada and then me. As I passed his table, he said, looking up at me, “Be careful when you go out there, especially with the kid. A lot of police are in the streets, especially at the tram terminal. They’re obviously looking for some miscreant.”
“Thanks for the warning. We’ll avoid the terminal.” It was further to the north, not where we had gotten off, and I didn’t think we needed to go there anyway. But my heart jumped. Had something happened?
We filed out of the cafe, into the biting wind that whipped along the boulevard. It was fast starting to go dark. The
ocean was black and the crashing waves sounded like thunder.
“What now?” I asked Thayu.
I shrugged. Whatever had happened, we’d obviously missed our contact.
“We need to go back to the hotel,” Nicha said. “Devlin says there are some developments.”
Thayu snorted. She looked at her reader, flicking through messages and news services. “There has been a shooting not far from here.”
She showed me the screen with the news item. It was most handy that she had learned to read Isla to a functional level, even if she didn’t speak it.
The news item spoke about a broad daylight murder of a prominent figure. There was no name mentioned, but my blood ran cold. How much would I bet that this was about Conrad Martens?
“Yes,” I said. “We need to go back to the hotel.”
In fact, it might have been exceedingly stupid to come here. I didn’t need to voice my concerns, because the others had already been informed through my feeder. They shared my concern. Thayu quickly confirmed through Devlin that this was indeed about Conrad Martens. He had been killed when leaving his apartment building. The police were investigating. The news said nothing about the type of weapon. They had no suspect and no motive. I could give them some suggestions.
But . . . the Pretoria Cartel? Really? These were rich, smart business people with a lot to lose. They weren’t going around shooting judges about to reveal things they didn’t like.
Unless they really didn’t like what he was about to tell me. Which was about those protesters in front of the court building, right?
We started walking down the boulevard to the street where the tram station was. Veyada and Evi walked at the front, then me and Nicha and then Thayu. I didn’t like having her behind me, but I knew she had a weapon somewhere, and I had none. Besides, she was much better with a weapon, and she’d be safer at the back of the group than the front. I still didn’t like it.
We were dealing with very dangerous people and we had no idea who they were, and whether the Pretoria Cartel was involved in any of it, and if so, how. Had Nations of Earth set up the dead zone for our safety but neglected to give us the accompanying warnings about leaving it?
