Pandora's Star cs-2

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “It’s what I’d do,” Paula said simply.

  Paula briefed the watcher teams before the shift changeover, explaining her suspicions about the encrypted message. “It changes our priorities slightly,” she said. “If it was a cancellation then Elvin will make a break for the CST station. I need a detail of officers on permanent duty there to arrest him if he tries to leave. Detective Mares, will you organize that, please?”

  “I’ll see the captain about more personnel, sure.” During the week of the operation Don Mares had modified his attitude slightly. He didn’t contend anything, nor disagree with Paula; but neither did he put any extra effort into the operation. She could live with that; baseline competence was a depressing constant in law enforcement agencies throughout the Commonwealth.

  “Our second option,” Paula said, “is a go code. In which case we need to be ready to move. There will be no change in your assignments, but be prepared to implement immediately. The third option is not so good: he’s been warned about our observation.”

  “No way,” Don Mares said. “We’re not that sloppy.” There was a grumble of agreement from the team officers.

  “As unlikely as it sounds we have to take it into consideration,” Paula insisted. “Be very careful not to risk exposure. He’s smart. He’s been doing this for forty years. If he sees one of you twice in a week he’s going to know you’re following him. Don’t let him see you. Don’t let him see the car you’re using. We’re going to get a larger vehicle pool so we can rotate them faster. We cannot afford mistakes.” She nodded curtly at them. “I’ll join the lead team today. That’s all.”

  Don Mares and Maggie Lidsey came over to her as the other officers filed out of the operations center. “If he catches a glimpse of you, it really will be game over,” Don Mares said.

  “I know,” Paula said. “But I need to be close. There are some calls you can’t make sitting here. I’d like you to take over as general coordinator today.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you have the qualifications, you’ve taken command of raids before.”

  “Okay.” He was trying not to smile.

  “Maggie, you’re with me.”

  They caught up with Adam Elvin as he was taking a slow, seemingly random walk through Burghal Park. He did something similar most mornings, an amble through a wide-open space where it was difficult for the team to follow unobtrusively on foot.

  Paula and Maggie waited in the back of a ten-seater car that was parked at the north end of Burghal Park. The team had the rest of their vehicles spaced evenly around the perimeter, with three officers on foot using their retinal inserts to track his position, never getting closer than five hundred meters, boxing him the whole time. The Burghal was a huge area in the middle of the city, with small lakes, games pitches, tracks, and long greenways of trees brought in from over seventy different planets.

  “That’s twice he’s doubled back on his route,” Maggie said. They were watching the images relayed from the retinal inserts on a small screen in the car.

  “Standard for him,” Paula said. “He’s a creature of habit. They might be good habits, but any routine will betray you in the end.”

  “Is that how you tracked him?”

  “Uh-huh. He never uses the same planet twice. And he nearly always uses the Intersolar Socialist Party to set up the first meeting with the local dealer.”

  “So you turned Sabbah into your informant and waited.”

  “Yes.”

  “For nine years. Bloody hell. How many informants do you have, on how many planets?”

  “Classified.”

  “The way you operate, though, always arresting them for their crimes. That doesn’t make for cooperative informants. You’re taking a big risk on a case this important.”

  “They broke the law. They must go to court and take responsibility for their crimes.”

  “Hell, you really believe that, don’t you?”

  “You’ve accessed my official file. Three times now since this case started.”

  Maggie knew she was blushing.

  That day Adam Elvin finished his walk in Burghal Park and caught a taxi to a little Italian restaurant on the bank of the River Guhal, which meandered through the eastern districts of the city. While eating a large and leisurely lunch he placed a call to Rachael Lancier, which the metropolitan police had no trouble intercepting.

  ELVIN:Something’s come up. I need to talk to you again.

  LANCIER:The vehicle you wanted is almost ready for collection, Mr. North. I hope there’s no problem at your end.

  ELVIN:No, no problem about the vehicle. I just need to discuss its specifications with you.

  LANCIER:The specifications have been agreed upon. As has the price.

  ELVIN:This is not an alteration of either. I simply need to speak with you personally to clarify some details.

  LANCIER:I’m not sure that’s a good idea.

  ELVIN:It’s essential, I’m afraid.

  LANCIER:Very well. You know my favorite place. I’ll be there at the usual time today.

  ELVIN:Thank you.

  LANCIER:And it had better be as important as you say.

  Paula shook her head. “Routine,” she said disapprovingly.

  Eighteen police officers converged on the Scarred Suit club. Don Mares dispatched the first three within two minutes of the conversation. The club wasn’t open, of course, they simply had to find three observation points around it and dig in.

  Two of Lancier’s people arrived at eight o’clock that night, and performed their own surveillance checks before calling back to their boss.

  When Adam Elvin finally arrived at one o’clock in the morning, ten officers were already inside. As before, they had managed to blend in well enough to prevent him from identifying any of them for what they were. Some of them assumed the role of business types looking for some bad action after a long day in the office. Three of them hung around the stage, identical to the other losers frantically waving their grubby dollars at the glorious bodies of the Sunset Angels. One had even managed to get a job, trying out as a waiter for the night, and was making reasonable tips. Renne Kempasa was sitting in one of the booths, the hazy e-seal protecting her from view.

  The remainder of the team were outside, ready for pursuit duties when the meeting was over. Paula, Maggie, and Tarlo were parked a street away in a battered old van, with the logo of a domestic service company on the side. The two screens they’d set up in the back showed images taken by the officers inside the club. Rachael Lancier was already in her booth, a different one this time. Her skinny-looking bodyguard was with her: identified by headquarters as Simon Kavanagh, a man with a long list of petty convictions stretching back three decades, nearly all of them violence-related. When he arrived he’d swept the booth twice, scanning for any covert electronic or bioneural circuitry. The passive sensors carried by the officers nearby nearly went off the scale. He was using some very sophisticated equipment—as was to be expected from someone who worked for an arms dealer.

  Paula watched Lancier and Elvin tentatively shake hands. The arms dealer gave her buyer an inhospitable look, then the e-seal around the booth was switched on. Its screening was immediately reinforced by the units that Kavanagh activated. One of them was an illegally strong janglepulse capable of frying the cerebral ganglia of any insect within a four-meter radius.

  “Okay,” Paula said. “Let’s find out what’s so important to Mr. Elvin.”

  A meter above the booth’s table, a Bratation spindlefly was clinging to the furry plastic fabric of the wall matting. Amid the artificial purple and green fibers, its translucent, two-millimeter-long body was effectively invisible. As well as a chameleon-effect body, evolution on its planet had provided it with a unique neurone fiber that used a photo luminescent molecule as the primary transmitter, making it immune to a standard janglepulse. It had only half the expected life span of a natural spindlefly because
its genetic code had been altered by a small specialist company on a Directorate contract, replacing half of its digestion sac with a more complex organic structure of receptor cells. In its abdomen was an engorged secretion gland that threw out a superfine gossamer strand. When it had flown in from the neighboring booth, it had trailed the gossamer behind it. Gentle lambent nerve impulses from the receptor cells now flowed along the strand to a more standard semiorganic processor that Renne carried in her jacket pocket.

  In the middle of Paula’s screen a grainy gray and white image formed. She was looking down on the heads of three people sitting around the booth table.

  “So what the hell has happened?” Rachael Lancier asked. “I didn’t expect to see you until completion, Huw. I don’t like this. It makes me nervous.”

  “I got some new instructions,” Elvin said. “How else was I supposed to get them to you?”

  “All right, what sort of instructions?”

  “A couple of additions to the list. Major ones.”

  “I still don’t like it. I’m this close to calling the whole thing off.”

  “No you’re not. We’ll pay for your inconvenience.”

  “I don’t know. The inconvenience is getting pretty fucking huge. All it’s going to take is one suspicious policeman walking into my dealership, and I’m totally screwed. There’s a lot of hardware stacking up there. Expensive hardware.”

  Elvin sighed and reached into a pocket. “To ease the inconvenience.” He put a brick-sized wad of notes on the table and pushed them over to Simon Kavanagh.

  The bodyguard glanced at Lancier, who nodded permission. He put the notes into his own jacket pocket.

  “All right, Huw, what sort of goodies do you need now?”

  Elvin held up the small black disk of a memory crystal, which she took from him.

  “This is the last time,” she said. “Nothing else changes. I don’t care what you want, or how much you pay, understood? This is the end of this deal. If you want anything else, it has to wait until next time. Got that?”

  “Sure.”

  Paula sat back in the thin aging cushioning of the van’s seat. On the screen, Adam Elvin had stood up to leave. The booth’s e-seal flickered to let him out.

  “That was wrong,” she said.

  Maggie frowned at her. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, that was nothing to do with additions to the list. Whatever’s really in that memory crystal, it won’t be an inventory.”

  “What then?”

  “Some kind of instructions.”

  “How do you know? I thought it fitted what happened.”

  “You saw his reaction to the message at breakfast. The camera caught his expression spot on. It shocked the hell out of him. First rule on a deal like this is you don’t change things this late in the game. It makes people very nervous. Rachel Lancier’s reaction is a perfect example. And it’s not a good thing to make arms dealers nervous. A deal this size, everybody is quite edgy enough already. Elvin knows that.”

  “So? He was shocked his bosses wanted to change things.”

  “I don’t buy it.”

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “Nothing we can do. Keep watching. Keep waiting. But I think he’s on to us.”

  The news about Dyson Alpha’s enclosure broke midmorning two days later. It dominated all the news streams and current events shows. A surprisingly large number of Velaines citizens had opinions on the revelation, and what should be done about it.

  Maggie kept half her attention on the pundits, both the serious and the mad, who appeared on the news streams while she was sitting around the underground operations center. Time and again, the shows kept repeating the moment when the star disappeared from view. Diagrams sprang up simplifying what had happened for the general public.

  “Do you think Elvin was rattled by that?” Maggie asked. “After all, the Guardians of Selfhood are supposed to be protecting us from aliens.”

  Paula glanced at the portal where Dudley Bose was being interviewed. The old astronomer simply couldn’t stop smiling. “No. I checked. The message was sent half a day before Bose confirmed the event. In any case, I don’t see how the Dyson enclosure concerns the Guardians. Their primary concern is the Starflyer alien and how it manipulates the government.”

  “Yeah, I get their propaganda. Damnit, I fall for the message authorship every time.”

  “Think yourself lucky you’re not the author. I pick up the pieces on those scams as well.”

  “You know a lot about them, don’t you?”

  “Just about everything you can without actually signing on.”

  “So how does someone like Adam Elvin wind up working for a terrorist faction?”

  “You must understand that Bradley Johansson is basically a charismatic lunatic. The whole Guardians of Selfhood movement is simply his private personality cult. It calls itself a political cause, but that’s just part of the deception. The sad thing is, he’s lured hundreds of people into it, and not just on Far Away.”

  “Including Adam Elvin,” Maggie muttered.

  “Yes, including Elvin.”

  “From what I’ve seen of Elvin, he’s smart. And according to his file he is a genuine committed radical Socialist. Surely he’s not gullible enough to believe Johansson’s propaganda?”

  “I can only assume he’s humoring Johansson. Elvin needs the kind of protection which Johansson provides, and his beloved Party does benefit to some small degree from the association. Then again, maybe he’s just trying to revive past glories. Don’t forget he’s a psychotic; his terrorist activities have already killed hundreds, and every one of these arms shipments introduces the potential for more death. Don’t expect his motivation to be based in logic.”

  The observation carried on for a further eleven days. Whatever additional items Adam Elvin had requested, they appeared to be difficult for Rachel Lancier to acquire. Various nefarious contacts arrived for quick private meetings with her in the back office. Despite their best attempts, the Tokat metropolitan police technical support team was unable to place any kind of infiltration device inside. Lancier’s office was too effectively screened. Not even the spindleflies could penetrate the combat-rated force field that surrounded it. Her warehouses, too, were well shielded. Although the team had managed to confirm the two where the weapons were being held. Several modified insects had gotten through to take a quick look around before succumbing to either janglepulse emitters or electron webs.

  Secondary observation teams followed the suppliers as they left, watching them assemble their cache of weapons and equipment before delivering it to the dealership. A whole underground network of Valences’s iniquitous black-market arms traders was carefully recorded and filed, ready for the bust that would end the whole operation.

  On the eleventh day, the observers logged a call that Adam Elvin made to a warehouse in town, authorizing them to forward an assignment of agricultural machinery to Lancier’s dealership.

  “This is it,” Tarlo declared. “They’re getting them ready for shipment.”

  “Could be,” Paula admitted.

  On the other side of the operations office, Mares just sighed. But she did ask for the arrest teams to be put on standby.

  Maggie was in one of the cars parked close to the dealership. When the eight trucks arrived, stacked high with crates of agricultural machinery, she relayed the pictures to the operations center. Wide gates in the fence surrounding the dealership compound were hurriedly opened to let them through. There was a brief holdup as yet another of Lancier’s cars went out on a test run. The lawful business had been doing well for the whole duration of the observation, with up to a dozen cars a day taken out by legitimate customers. Sales were brisk.

  All eight trucks drove into the largest of Lancier’s warehouses. The doors rolled down as soon as the last one parked inside. Sensors that the observation team had ringing the site reported screening systems coming on immediately.

&nbs
p; “Where’s Elvin now?” Paula asked.

  Tarlo showed her the images of their prime target finishing his lunch in a downtown restaurant. Paula settled down at the side of the console to follow him, using the sensors carried by the observation teams.

  After lunch, Elvin walked around one of the shopping streets, using his usual tactics to try to spot any tails. When he got back to the hotel he started packing his suitcase. Late that afternoon he went down to the bar and ordered a beer. He drank it while watching the portal at the end of the counter, which was showing Alessandra Baron interviewing Dudley Bose. In the early evening, just as the sun was falling below the horizon, his suitcase followed him downstairs, and he checked out.

  “All right,” Paula announced to the teams. “It looks like this is it. Everybody: stage one positions please.”

  Don Mares was in one of the four cars assigned to follow Elvin. He waited a hundred meters from the hotel, seeing the big man emerge from the lobby. A taxi drew up at the request of Elvin’s PL. His suitcase trundled up onto the rear luggage platform as he climbed in.

  “Stand by, Don,” Paula said. “We’re placing a scrutineer in the taxi drive array. Ah, here we go, he’s told it to take him to Thirty-second Street.”

  “That’s nowhere near the dealership,” Don Mares protested as their car took off in pursuit.

  “I know. Just wait.” Paula turned to the visual and data feeds coming from the dealership. Rachael Lancier and ten of her people were now inside the sealed-up warehouse with the trucks. The rest of the work force had been sent home as usual at the end of the day.

  On the console in front of Paula, data displays began flashing urgent warnings at her. “Hello, this is interesting. Elvin is loading some infiltration software into the taxi’s drive array.” She watched as the police scrutineer program wiped itself before the new interloper could establish itself and run an inventory on the operating system.

  “He’s changing direction,” Don Mares reported. There was an excited note in his voice.

  “Just stay calm and stay with him,” Paula said. “But don’t get too close, we’ve got him covered.” Out of the six images of the taxi that the console’s big portal offered her, only one was coming from a pursuit car. The others were all feeds from the civic security cameras that covered every street and avenue of the city. They showed the taxi sliding smoothly through the rush-hour traffic.