Great North Road

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘A six-month contract, and you obtain full Indian citizenship for me, beginning today. I’ll need somewhere to live afterwards.’

  He blinked at her immediate response. ‘Eighteen months.’

  ‘Twelve, including a tax-free bonus. And I keep the clothes I want.’

  ‘Fourteen. The bonus. A dozen outfits, but no couture dresses. I know how much you and Shasta spend on them.’

  She gave him a nod.

  He raised a thick finger that wore several rings, and beckoned.

  Angela recognized the man who hurried through the kitchen door. Tariq, Bantri’s senior lawyer; Marlak’s equivalent.

  ‘Tariq will draw up the contract,’ Bantri told her. ‘I’m going to look at the artwork in your library. I feel I might make an offer for some of your Monets.’

  ‘Good choice.’

  His smile was unpleasantly triumphant. ‘Yes. It is.’

  ‘You don’t have to do this,’ Matthews said as soon as Bantri left the kitchen. ‘Not this, not selling yourself.’

  ‘I seem to be short of other commodities. You and the Board officers have made very sure of that, Agent Matthews.’

  ‘But this . . . You haven’t even looked at what’s out there, the possibilities.’

  ‘Oh please, you don’t really think I’m going to squeeze my own oranges for the rest of my life, do you?’

  He shook his head, anger dampened by dismay. ‘Hell, you people.’

  Angela got her e-i to review the contract file Tariq formatted. The salient points were all there, not that she cared. Being a part of Bantri’s staff was the goal. If she was going to have sex with a fat older man . . . well, it wouldn’t be the first time.

  She added her certificate to the file and went upstairs to pack. One of the Board officers supervised, making sure she didn’t try to slip any of the couture dresses or designer shoes or anything else ridiculously expensive into her one permitted valise. The washbag was never queried.

  *

  They left that afternoon, after she buried her father in a grove of newly planted terrestrial oaks, his favourite. On the plane back to Bantri’s estate she made the first elementary mistake, thinking she would be sitting in the forward cabin with him.

  ‘No no, my dear,’ he said, ‘your place is not here, not now,’ and dismissed her with an airy wave of his hand. Angela stood up and headed for the staff cabin at the rear of the plane. None of them spoke to her for the whole duration of the flight.

  *

  So Shasta did get to see Angela again. Though to her credit she kept her word and didn’t speak to her erstwhile friend. She arrived back home after another twenty-four hours partying at Prince Matiff’s mansion and found her father at breakfast in their palace’s morning room. He sat alone at the table, eating slowly, savouring each mouthful as if it were his last.

  Angela was standing placidly two paces behind his heavy carved chair, wearing what would be her typical clothing throughout the contract: a halter top and baggy pantaloons of gauzy fabric. The serving maids ignored her as they brought Bantri fresh plates and poured his coffee from a silver pot. But then everybody in the palace ignored her. She rather welcomed that.

  Shasta walked into the morning room and kissed her father dutifully, even though she was obviously cross with him. They exchanged a few pleasantries, and she announced she was going to bed for a week to recover. ‘It was that good.’

  She walked away, pausing only to thrust her face centimetres from Angela’s. Glared without speaking, then stomped off back to her own wing of the palace. As petty and pathetic as any toddler who didn’t get their way. Neither she nor Bantri saw the soft smile of contemptuous amusement that lifted Angela’s lips for a moment.

  Three weeks later, Bantri visited India at the start of yet another business tour. He spent about half the year away from New Monaco, inspecting his empire, taking meetings with managers and financiers, entertaining politicians and bureaucrats. Angela knew his routine well enough – it had been Shasta’s constant childhood complaint that Daddy was never around.

  As was standard practice, Bantri’s entourage were quickly and politely waved through New Monaco gateway control. Angela waited patiently until they reached their five-star hotel in Mumbai. Once Bantri was asleep she took her washbag out of the valise and walked out of the hotel.

  Nobody in the entourage even knew she was missing for ten hours. Why should they – she wasn’t their friend.

  Tariq called her transnet address several times in the first forty-eight hours following the realization she’d deserted her patron. First with questions, then with threats. The last call he made was to inform her that the contract was now officially void, her Indian citizenship was revoked, her new bank account was frozen, and they were applying for a court order to reclaim all monies paid to her.

  It didn’t matter; that three weeks of pay Angela had accumulated had already bought her a one-way plane ticket (standard class – dear heavens!) to New York. She was standing in Central Park at the start of a new day and smiling round at the glorious old buildings by the time Tariq’s first call came through.

  Sunday 17th March 2143

  A bright sun in a cloudless sky brought a calm warmth to Newcastle’s damp streets. Night was over and the rains gone, leaving a freshness that finally promised the retreat of the fierce winter. Sid drove the short distance from Jesmond to the Arevalo Medical’s Royal Victoria Infirmary. The footings for the new oncology clinic were now dug deep across the old car park, but at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning, he didn’t have to worry too much about finding an empty space in the remaining section.

  Sid found a charity store open in the main entrance lobby and bought a bunch of flowers and a big cube of chocolates. His e-i guided him through the maze of connecting corridors that stitched the sprawling complex together, delivering him to the Hadley block after a couple of minutes. Tilly Lewis was in a private room on the seventh floor.

  She smiled up at him as he knocked on the half-open door. ‘Hey, didn’t expect to see you. Come on in.’

  Sid peered round the bright clean room; it had the decor of a mid-price hotel, certainly there wasn’t any visible medical equipment except for some blank monitor screens on one wall. ‘No family about?’

  ‘Hell no. They won’t be here for another hour or two, hopefully more. I’m enjoying the rest.’

  ‘You look okay,’ he told her in relief as he pulled a chair over to the side of the bed.

  ‘Forget that. Are those Devorn chocolates?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s only quarter past eight, though.’

  ‘In real time. In a hospital, that’s about midday. They woke me at six for breakfast. I nearly put the nurse in the next ward for that.’

  Sid laughed. ‘So when are you out?’

  Tilly started opening the cube. ‘Possibly as early as this afternoon, depending on the next scan. I’d like to make it to tomorrow. A whole two days without having to look after the kids. Bliss.’

  ‘So they’re not worried then?’

  ‘A little bit of smoke inhalation? Nah, pet, I’m fine. This is all precautionary. We managed to get out before it got too bad.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘For what? You weren’t there.’

  ‘My case. I should have known they’d try and wipe out as much evidence as possible. Ernie’s garage was an obvious target.’

  ‘Everything is with hindsight, pet.’

  ‘Those agency constables were idiots.’ It had been a classic distraction, a couple of joyriding kids racing along Western Road in a jacked car. They’d driven right into the garage’s forecourt and side-skidded into the parked squad car before charging off again. The agency constables tasked with safeguarding the forensics team had ignored every protocol in the file and taken off in pursuit – wasted as it happened, they never caught the kids. Thirty seconds after they’d left, Molotovs had come flying through the garage windows.

  ‘No real damage,’ Tilly assured him, and c
hose an orange crème from the cube’s top layer.

  Sid had to admit she didn’t look any different to usual. ‘I’m glad. So are we going to get anything useful from the garage?’

  ‘Ha! I knew it, you’re not interested in me at all. It’s always the case with you.’

  ‘That’s not—’ He saw her grin, and shrugged.

  ‘Gotcha.’

  ‘Aye, pet, you’re evil.’ He plucked a walnut whizz from the cube. ‘Jacinta says hello.’

  ‘Weren’t you moving house this weekend?’

  ‘Aye. Yesterday.’

  Tilly narrowed her eyes to give him A Look. ‘Shouldn’t you be unpacking?’

  ‘One of my friends is in hospital, pet. What can you do?’

  ‘She’ll put you in the bed next door if you’re not careful.’

  ‘I know. But the removal company was good. They didn’t break anything, and all the boxes are in the right rooms.’

  ‘Men! You never change.’

  ‘And you never give up hoping you can change us.’

  Tilly sighed and found a hazelnut truffle. ‘No, there wasn’t anything there.’

  ‘Where?’ Sid asked innocently.

  ‘Dickhead. The garage. We were going through the motions. But it was the weekend.’

  ‘Triple time, huh?’

  ‘Absolutely, pet.’

  ‘Nothing?’ Sid asked. She’d been right: shamefully, results formed a big part of the reason to visit her. Lab analysis of samples was important, but if someone with Tilly’s experience said there wasn’t anything useful at a scene then that was enough for him. She knew what to look for, what to take away for examination.

  It would be Wednesday before Northern Forensics produced a report on the items already taken to the lab. Wednesday was just too long.

  ‘No. Nothing that could ever tie him to the Red Shields. That garage was his legitimate front, remember. Clean as a major GE company’s accounts. I doubt you could even charge him for subbing spare parts.’

  ‘It’s not what he did so much as who he did it with.’

  ‘We did pick up a lot of residuals. The lab is running DNA analysis on them, so you’ll find out who was at the garage – some of them anyway. But it doesn’t prove anything.’

  ‘Thanks, Tilly.’

  She held up the cube. ‘You bring these, and you can visit any time.’

  *

  Sid walked into Office3 just after nine o’clock, pleased to see the team already there ahead of him. Ian and Eva were sitting next to each other, both absorbed with the data their consoles were throwing at them, not saying anything; he’d tasked them with tracking down Reinert’s secondaries. Lorelle Burdett was busy working through Reinert’s transnet calls for the last few months, identifying contacts, trying to link him with known Red Shield activity. Dedra was checking through the alibis of the nine 2Norths who lived in the St James, and covertly following up those enquiries with questions to their closest friends and colleagues about recent behaviour. Had they noticed a change in the last couple of months, perhaps? Did their friend forget topics they’d talked about? Did he suddenly have trouble performing his job? Anything that would indicate a substitution had been made.

  Aldred and Reannha were handling liaison with the agency data operatives who were compiling all the surveillance logs around the St James singletown into a zone simulation for the Friday when the murder had been committed. Meanwhile, Ari had been spending his time compiling general network data on the St James, trying to find any leads on the rip. Even rips had signatures if you knew how to scan for them.

  It was like walking into a church, Sid decided. No banter. No smiling faces. In fact the silence was absolute. He liked to think it was dedication to the case rather than sullen, Sunday morning blues.

  He saw Aldred sitting at a spare desk. Eva had checked and confirmed his alibi within a couple of hours last Wednesday. He had indeed left the St James at nine forty-five and flown down to London the day his clone brother was murdered.

  ‘I’ve just visited Tilly,’ Sid announced. ‘She’s fine. But she does think the surviving forensics material isn’t going to produce much by way of leads.’

  ‘What kind of idiots do the agencies employ these days?’ Reannha asked.

  ‘The very best idiots, clearly,’ Sid retorted. ‘Don’t worry, their failure will be featured heavily in my report. O’Rouke will crap on their supervisor from a great height. Endangering lives like that could earn them a contract suspension.’

  ‘Aye man, that’ll teach them,’ Ian growled sarcastically.

  ‘Actually, that kind of threat is the worst a company can have,’ Aldred said. ‘Hitting them in the cash flow is a lot more effective than whinging about procedures and inadequate training.’

  ‘All right.’ Sid wheeled one of the desk chairs over, and straddled it so his hands were resting on the back. ‘What have we got? Ari?’

  ‘The rip is similar to those used to screw the city surveillance. The code mutated, but it’s from the same source. Whoever did it was responsible for launching both attacks.’

  Sid couldn’t tell if Ari was pleased at announcing the utterly obvious, or if he was simply being methodical, allowing procedures to rule him. ‘Any leads on who wrote it?’

  ‘Not yet. But it was good code, the best. That implies AI involvement with the formatting. Which in turn costs money. Our Digital Counter-Intrusion Service is reviewing known free-binary radicals to see if anyone dropped out after the rip to live the highlife on their fee.’

  Sid didn’t comment, but he could see the same thing on everyone’s face. If the freebinary who wrote it was that good, they wouldn’t be on any DC-IS listing, and they’d know not to flash the cash. But then trying to pull anything factual from the transnet was always akin to eating soup with a fork. ‘Thanks. Ian?’

  ‘Ernie’s good, I’ll give him that. We’ve got a secondary he uses for the garage; plenty of decent cars sold legitimately for low cost, so you keep your vehicle licence tax to a minimum, while you pay him the difference of the true value through a secondary payment. Standard stuff. But it’s like it was flashing red lights to show us he’s a normal second-hand car dealer. No other secondaries that we can find yet.’

  ‘Lorelle?’

  ‘Plenty of names on his contact list, but no cross-reference with known Red Shield members. I’m with Ian, he’s got a digital ghost we haven’t tracked yet, and without his e-i to break down, we probably never will.’

  ‘Looks like we’re hanging on Ralph’s interrogation for all our information,’ Sid said. ‘Dedra?’

  Dedra Foyster gave Aldred a sly glance. ‘All the alibis are confirmed. None of the nine Norths who have apartments in the St James killed our victim. The follow-up you gave me is taking a little more time. So far I’m pretty certain about five Norths; no change in behaviour, no sudden holidays or time off work, no odd memory lapses. Everyone who knows them well says they’ve stayed the same.’

  Sid wondered if she’d checked Aldred’s continuity yet. Would he be one of the people she asked? He quashed a grin. ‘Abner?’

  ‘We’re about ready to take it to the zone, boss. The AI is running a last pass on mesh memory cohesion.’

  ‘Great. I’ll go in with you.’

  *

  Taken in isolation, the St James singletown was uninspiring. A large central dome containing the commercial sections, with five residential towers, each one different; a twisted spire, elongated pyramid, squat barbican, a weird narrow tower that looked as if it had been squashed into place by other skyscrapers on either side – now missing – and the living globe stack, whose external surface bands between windows were all shrubs and vines. Standing above the structure’s projection in the theatre, Sid felt that the architectural software that had been used to produce it had been left to run without any human intervention; it lacked ambition and vision. Build big and impressive, but don’t try anything new.

  He was used to seeing the real thing, of course �
�� it sat on the other side of Barrack Road from the St James’ stadium, where many a Saturday afternoon had been spent in exultation or misery as Newcastle United slipped in and out of League One with terrible monotony.

  ‘Expand it to fill the theatre floor,’ Sid said. ‘But leave a fifty-metre boundary. We need to see everybody who comes in and out.’

  In the control room, Reannha changed the projection parameters. Sid and Abner watched the singletown expand in front of them.

  ‘Take me back to midnight, Thursday 10th January. And highlight all entrances: public doors, staff door, delivery bays, garage ramps, emergency exits, utility access hatches. The lot.’

  The roads darkened at his feet; while the vehicles rolling along them squirted low headlight beams across the snowy surfaces.

  ‘What are you searching for?’ Aldred asked. He was pressed up against the control room window, looking in on the zone theatre.

  Sid and Abner swapped a glance. ‘For the next twenty-four hours: every North that goes in, either on foot or in a car, taxi, bike, whatever,’ Sid said. ‘One of them has to be our victim.’

  Green symbols appeared on the doors and ramps down into the garage. Sid hadn’t been expecting quite so many. But then this case had acclimatized him to the amount of detail in the zone on this case. ‘Let’s go,’ he told Abner. He started to walk anti-clockwise, up Stanhope Street, examining the tiny figures on the pavement that were hunched up against the cold winter night.

  *

  Ian got back to his flat at eight o’clock that night. He’d just spent three hours in the zone theatre himself, and was tired by the endless repetition of searching the miniature people, asking for them to be expanded, for the AI to run characteristics recognition on the shadowed faces. After those thankless dreary months of backtracking taxis, to be back in the theatre qualified as cruel and unusual punishment. At the same time, the dread and despondency of the taxi backtrack was missing. They’d already found six Norths going into the St James by ten o’clock Friday morning. The case was picking up momentum now. He was impatient for Ralph to return with the results of Ernie Reinert’s interrogation. That would propel them into the final stages. Contrary to all the gloomy expectations he’d had at the start, they might actually arrest the murderer. Not the people who ordered it, mind – you had to be realistic about such things. But even so . . .