A Quantum Murder

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Greg's existence had collapsed to a flimsy universe five metres in diameter. Night-time flying was always bad. But night-time and fog, that was shit awful.

He was hanging in a nylon web harness below a Westland ghost wing, gossamer blade propeller humming efficiently behind him. The photon amp band across his eyes bestowed an alien blue tinge to every surface, the glow of electron orbits in decay. A column of neat chrome-yellow figures shone on the right-hand side of his vision field: time, grid reference, altitude, direction of flight, power levels, airspeed. The guido 'ware placed him eight hundred metres high, two kilometres out from Peterborough above the Fens basin.

Prior's Fen, and the Event Horizon security division tilt-fan which had ferried him and Teddy out there, was twenty minutes behind, isolated by treacherously fluctuating walls of stone-grey vapour. The loneliness which had insinuated itself into his thoughts in that time was total, tricking his brain into finding shapes among the grey-blue desolation, the grinning spectres of nightmare clamouring in on an unwary mind.

He used to be able to put his feelings on hold for missions, concentrate on details and their application to the immediate.

It was the army way, training and discipline could overcome every human frailty given time. But he'd lost it. Leaking slowly out of his psyche during endless sunny days beside the reservoir, smoothed away by Eleanor's kisses.

Now he could feel the unfamiliar and enervating stirrings of panic as the wing membrane murmured to itself in the squally air. His sole link to reality was a slim microwave beam punching up through the cloying seaborne mist to strike Event Horizon's private communication satellite in geosync orbit. Directional, scrambled, ultra-secure.

"You there, Teddy?" The modulated question slicing upwards, hitting the satellite's phased array antenna, splitting like a laser fired at a fractured mirror, bounced straight back down. Two beams: one received at the Event Horizon headquarters building in Westwood, the second targeted on another ephemeral five-metre bubble somewhere in the vast emptiness behind him.

"Where the flick else?" Teddy's gruffness carried a trace of anxiety which Greg was learning to recognize from his own voice.

"Hey, you remember when we used to get paid for this?"

"Yeah. Nothing fucking changes. Weren't no fun in them days, neither."

"True. OK, I'm one and a half klicks from the east shore now, starting to descend. Morgan? Any air traffic yet?"

"Negative, Greg," Morgan said, his voice sounding muffled in Greg's earpiece. "There's some tilt-fan activity in New Eastfield, but the fog has shut down ninety per cent of the city's usual movements."

That was one shiver of joy, he didn't have to worry about colliding with low-flying planes. "Roger. Going down." He shifted his weight slightly, feeling the angle of the slipstream change. The fog density remained the same. According to Event Horizon's Earth Resource platforms it was a belt ninety kilometres wide, extending westwards almost all the way to Leicester. They had watched it boil up out of the North Sea through most of the afternoon. Perfect cover.

The mission had taken a day to set up. Naturally, Julia had wanted to send the police in, all legal and above board. She hadn't quite grasped what they were up against. Someone—some organization? — methodical enough to guard against the remotest chance of a query being raised about the death of a girl ten years in the past. Paranoia or desperation—either way, they had it in massive quantities. And they didn't shy away from positive action to eliminate threats.

Even with the channels working themselves into hysterics over the Scottish reunion question, a police operation on a scale large enough to successfully arrest a single man in Walton would attract wide newscast coverage. The Black-shirts would resist the police incursion, there would be riots, sniper fire, a lot of people hurt. After that, leaks would be inevitable, and Julia's name would be foremost among them.

His way was much quieter, safer. Reducing the risk until it focused on just two people.

He would have been happier if Eleanor had shouted at him, put her foot down, told him he was being macho stupid. At least he would have been able to shout back, or argue, vent a bit of feeling. Instead she had stuck to being silent and sorrowful. Which made it harder. Which put him on edge. Which wasn't good.

Gabriel had been reassuringly scathing, but that had taken on the quality of a ritual, she trusted his intuition almost more than he did. Morgan was frankly sceptical about the whole notion. And Greg had to admit even he was having trouble seeing how Clarissa Wynne's vaguely suspicious drowning could be connected to Kitchener's murder.

With the cocoon of fog acting like a mild form of sensory deprivation his thoughts were free to roam through wilder realms of possibility, fantasy equivalents of Gabriel's tau lines. But even among the more fanciful possibilities he conjured up there really was no getting round that memory of Nicholas walking so calmly into Kitchener's bedroom. Maybe the ambiguity he felt so strongly was focused on the boy's motive? Everyone assumed Nicholas had murdered Kitchener because he was overwrought over Isabel. But there was the question of the method. Maybe Launde harboured some dark secret instead?

Yeah sure. Ghosts and ghoulies and bumps in the night, he told himself mockingly. Secret monsters would be too easy. Somebody wiped all those cores. Three and a half years before Nicholas Beswick ever set eyes on Launde Abbey.

He gave up, pushing the load into the future and squarely on Maurice Knebel's shoulders. Alarmed at just how much he was coming to depend on the absconded detective to provide him with answers when they finally came face to face.

One thing, there was no going back. There never bloody was; his character flaw.

His guido put him seven hundred metres out from the city's easterly shore, height one hundred and fifty metres. Closing fast. Fog split around the leading edge of the wing, re-forming instantly behind the trailing edge. A slick coating of minute droplets was deposited on the leathery membrane, streaming backwards and shaking free in a horizontal rain.

The photon amp was boosted up to its highest resolution.

He still couldn't see anything.

"Virtual overlay," he told the guido 'ware. Translucent green and blue and red petals flipped up into the retinal feed from the photon amp. He looked out across a city built from frozen laserlight.

Morgan's people had built the virtual simulation up from the afternoon's satellite passes. Accurate to ten centimetres, more comprehensive than any memory in the city council's planning office data cores.

A flood of neutral pixels darkened and hardened below him, resolving into a solid black plane. He felt the illusion of space opening up around him again. Tremendously reassuring.

He just prayed that the simulation's alignment was correct. The shoreline buildings of the Gunthorpe district formed a flat abrupt wall of dimensionless green dead ahead. It was the only eastern district to expand since the Warming; a quirk of fate had placed it alongside a low triangular promontory jutting a couple of kilometres out into the basin. The fields and pastures which had survived the deluge had been swiftly covered in blocks of flats.

Two hundred metres off the promontory's tip was a patch of spiky indigo waveforms, as though an iceberg had endured the Warming and sought shelter in the basin. It was Eye, a village still in the process of being subsumed by the sluggish currents of the mire, reduced to an erratic formation of mud dunes and crumbling brick walls.

The guido 'ware printed a trajectory graphic for him. A tunnel of slender orange rings snaking away from him, round the north side of the urbanized promontory, and curving down to touch Walton.

Greg swung himself to one side, lining up the ghost wing in the centre of the tunnel. Orange rings flashed past silently.

Morgan had wanted to send one of his security division hardliners along on the penetration mission. Greg turned him down politely, hoping he wouldn't make an issue of it. They were tough and well trained, but there was a world of difference between corporate clashes and all-out combat. He needed someone he could rely on totally.

Back in Turkey, Greg had been in charge of a tactical raider squad when they were cut off and pinned down in a mountain village by Legion fire. Half of the men had wanted to make a break for it, but Greg made them stay put. Teddy was in charge of the back-up team.

He had spent the next three hours cowering under a dusty sky as bullets thudded into the sandstone walls of dilapidated hovels, and mortar rounds fell all around. Time had stretched out excruciatingly, but he never let go of that tenuous trust in his huge sergeant.

Teddy had eventually turned up in their ageing Belgian Air Force Black Hawk support helicopter, flown by a shaken, terrified pilot. Greg didn't learn until much later how Teddy persuaded the man to fly into the heart of a grade three fire zone. There would have been a court martial, except the pilot refused to testify.

Eleanor's right, I do dwell on Turkey too much.

But he was bloody glad it was Teddy in the second ghost wing.

The orange circles took him round the north of Gunthorpe. Here the basin mud had surged along a slight depression between Walton and Werrington, engulfing roads and buildings. It was only a metre deep, but the relentless pressure eroded bricks and concrete, exploiting every crack and crevice.

Foundations were eaten away, day by day, year by year, cement pulverized, reinforcement prongs corroded, bricks sucked out. Roofs had collapsed, the abraded walls sagged then fell. Even now the piles of rubble were still being assaulted from below, dragged down by the unstable alluvial substratum, a pressure that wouldn't end until the entire zone was levelled. Weeds and reeds choked the rolling mounds in a mouldy mat of entwined tendrils. The satellite image had shown the whole area crisscrossed by paths worn by adventurous children, glimmers of metal detritus peeking through the limp foliage.

The virtual simulation had shaded it in as a lightly nicked pink desert.

One hundred metres in altitude; and five hundred metres up ahead the tunnel of rings had dipped down at a steep angle, narrowing like a whirlwind to touch the apex of an old factory warehouse.

Greg dimmed the simulation, reducing it to a geometric lithograph. He banked the Westland to starboard, preparing to overfly the warehouse roof. The tunnel twisted into an impossible helix. He throttled back the propeller speed to idle, and glided in.

At last he thought he saw something through the scudding fog. Down below, a pale blur, broken by dark irregular smudges. According to the simulation he ought to be over the factory's yard. Big squares of cracked concrete with abandoned gutted lorries, a scattered cluster of railway van bogies in one corner.

With a bit of imagination the dark smudges below could be rusted cabs.

The simulated green skeletal outline of the warehouse was upon him. If it corresponded with the actual structure the Westland should take him six metres above the roof apex.

Solid surfaces suddenly materialized between the green lines, as if the building had been edged in neon tubes. Greg received a fast impression of breeze blocks smeared in rheumy ribbons of algae, and a corrugated roof, red oxide paint flaking away. He laughed as he twisted the throttle grip, shooting back up into the veil of fog.

"Morgan? Tell your programming team they've got a big drink coming. The guido virtual is perfect. I've just surveyed the landing site."

"Glad to hear it. Could you see anybody waiting?"

"No. It looks clear. I'm going around."

He made a leisurely turn, and headed back towards the warehouse. This time he came in lower. The orange tunnel stretched out ahead, perfectly level. It terminated halfway up the slope of the roof.

He saw the corrugated panels again, four seconds before he reached them. Legs running in mid-air. Then the rubber soles of his desert boots slapped down.

Every nerve was raw-edged with tension. If the panels couldn't take his weight he was in deep shit and no messing. The satellite image interpreters swore they would hold.

The noise of his running feet sounded like a drum beat after the graveyard silence of flight. He could feel the panels bending slightly under his heels. The apex was three metres ahead of him. Still the panels held.

He yanked savagely at the throttle grip, reversing the propeller pitch. Tilting the wing back up as he fought to kill his forward momentum. The sudden backward impetus nearly toppled him.

"Shitfire! Tell you, next time we do as Julia says and send in the cavalry."

"Greg?" Teddy called. "You down, boy?"

He was crouched a metre short of the apex, balancing the wing precariously. Fog swirled beyond the guttering, cutting off any view of the yard below.

"Yeah. Wait one."

He killed the virtual simulation overlay then activated the Westland's retraction catch. There was a wet slithering sound as the wing folded. The steering bar hinged up and back. He grappled with the frame, slapping the harness release. The ghost wing finished up as a fat damp cylinder three metres long, which he could just hold under one arm.

He scrambled up to the apex, and walked down to the end. When he peered over he could just make out the base of the wall, lined with tufts of grass and sickly dandelions. There was a monotonous dripping from the broken guttering. The roof would give them ample clearance for a swoop launch after they had completed the mission, a genuine running jump. Of course, they had both been trained to launch from a much lower height, and a shallower slope. But those lessons had been an uncomfortably long time ago now.

"OK, Teddy. The panels are solid, and our take-off run is clear. I'm on the southern end of the roof. Come in when you're ready."

"Gotcha."

Greg unslung his pack, and riffled through it, looking for the climbing gear. The propeller noise of Teddy's Westland was just audible as he overflew the warehouse on his guido check pass.

"Hell, Morgan, this 'ware is ultra-cool," Teddy exclaimed. "The virtual matches clean down the line."

"All Event Horizon gear works like that." Morgan sounded slightly indignant.

"Yeah? Man, I wish we'd had this in Turkey. Would've shown 'em Legion bastards."

Greg found the vibration knife, a slim black plastic handle with a telescoping blade. He crouched down and pressed it against the breeze block just below the edge of the roof. Grey dust spurted out as the blade drove in, buzzing like an ireful wasp.

"Comin' round," Teddy said. "Here we go. Jesus Lord protect your dumb-ass servant."

Greg shoved an expander crampon into the hole. It clicked solidly, locking into place.

Teddy's feet banged loudly on the roof, an elephant charging across sheet metal.

"Teddy!"

"Jeeze." Teddy was wheezing; an indistinct figure slouched over the apex. "Greg, I ain't no flicking bat."

"Yeah, right."

"Everything all right?" Morgan asked.

"We're down," Greg said. He clipped a climbing rope into the crampon's eye, and let the coil fall down the side of the wall. Behind him he could hear Teddy folding his Westland ghost wing.

"Roger," said Morgan. "The security team is on alert."

"We'll shout if we want them," Greg said. Just knowing the hard-line crash recovery team was waiting, that their tilt-fan could be with him in minutes if he hit any hazards, was a heady boost. Rule one: always sort out your escape route first.

He fed the rope through the krab attached to his belt, then swung himself out over the edge, and abseiled down to the yard.

Teddy landed lightly on the nicked concrete and unclipped the rope. He was dressed in matt-black combat leathers, a tiny Trinities emblem on his epaulette, 'ware modules attached to his belt, the slim metallic-silver photon amp band around his eyes, navy blue skull helmet. There was an AK carbine strapped tightly to his chest, an Uzi hand laser in a shoulder holster.

Greg was dressed the same, except he was carrying an Armscor stunshot instead of an AK. He wondered what the pair of them would look like to some poor unsuspecting sod who saw them emerge out of the fog.

He had considered wearing civilian clothes, but decided they were impractical; there was too much gear to carry. Besides which, the fog and the night should provide enough cover. The Blackshirts guarded their territory's boundaries tightly, but inside Walton they could move about with a reasonable degree of freedom. And his espersense would warn them of any random patrols.

"OK, Morgan, we're on the ground," Greg said. "Put Colin on, please."

Colin had insisted on being included, even though he really was too ill for an operation which required sustained gland use. But Greg didn't have it in him to say no, not to that brave, silently pleading face. More bloody guilt.

"I'm here, Greg." Colin's voice was reedy, anxious and eager.

He imagined them all in Morgan's ops room: Eleanor silently worried, Gabriel staring grimly at the communications console, Morgan keen-eyed and serious, Colin sitting in front of a flatscreen displaying the satellite image of Walton, technical support staff hovering around. The hard-line security team commander secretly hoping to be ordered into the fray.

"Where's our man?" Greg asked.

"He hasn't moved. It must be his house."

"Right, thanks, Colin." Greg requested the virtual simulation again. Featureless green toytown houses blinked in, marking the perimeter of the factory yard sixty metres away. He tilted the display to vertical, and reduced it until it was a panoramic model of the whole district. The house where Colin had said Knebel was staying flashed a bright amber. It was seven hundred metres away, due south. A route graphic slid out from their warehouse, an orange serpent bending and twisting down the smaller streets and constricted alleys.

"Let's go," Greg said. The display reverted to its real-scale superimposition, the route a path of tangerine glass.

"I'll keep you updated," Colin said.

Greg saw Teddy's face turn towards him, blank band concealing his expression.

"No, Colin, just give us another scan when we're a hundred metres away to confirm he's still there."

"I can manage, Greg."

"Yeah, but if he starts to go walkabout you're going to have to track him for us. I don't want you overstressed."

"Yes. Sorry, I wasn't thinking."

"OK, call you when we're in place." he summoned up a secretion from his gland, then set off down the orange line, feet sinking into the placid current of photons up to the ankles.

The fog was sparser out on the streets, broken by walls and a light breeze coming off the basin. Visibility had increased to fifteen metres. Greg switched the virtual simulation back to outlines, the photon amp image shaded in the actual walls and roads a smoky grey and blue.

Spook town, and no messing.

There were no streetlights. Public utilities in Walton didn't receive much priority from the city council these days. Chinks of biolum light escaped from some houses, glimmers from shuttered windows. The amp showed them as near-solid blades probing out across the street.

Pro-PSP graffiti was splattered on every wall. They walked down one alley with an elaborate mural of People's Constables and socialist-stereotypical workers sprayed on the fence, bold uplifted faces and stout poses; rotting wood had left vacant jagged gashes, mocking the artist's vision.

Black bags like swollen pumpkins and kelpboard boxes full of rubbish formed a humpbacked tide-line along the pavements. The corrupt smell of putrefying vegetation was strong in the air, mingling with the brine from the basin.

Greg saw rats crawling around the bags, gnawing at soggy tidbits. Tiny black glass eyes turned to watch him and Teddy pass, quite unafraid.

They had to sink back into the shadows and gaps between buildings several times as Greg perceived people walking towards them. Walton's residents invariably stuck to the centre of the road, as if they were afraid of the buildings and what they contained. They never once heard or saw any kind of powered transport, though bicycles nearly caught them out a couple of times, rushing up silently from behind.

A street-corner pub produced the biggest obstacle. Bright fans of light shone out of its windows and open door, illuminating a broad section of the road. Men were lounging against its walls, drinking in small groups. Jukebox music reverberated oddly across the street, country rap, hoarse vocals booming against a background of a solitary steel guitar.

Greg halted on the fringe of the light field consulting his virtual simulation. He pointed at the entry of a narrow alley on the other side of the road from the pub, and they edged off the street.

"Recognized some active Blackshirts back there," Teddy muttered.

"Mark it off for the future," Greg said.

"Sure."

One of the reasons Teddy agreed to accompany him was because the opportunity to scout round enemy territory was too great to pass up. Greg knew the detailed satellite images stored in the guido's memory would be handed over to Royan who would integrate them with the Trinities' existing intelligence bytes. Lieutenants would pore over the resulting package, fine-tuning tactics for the final assault. Teddy hadn't said anything, but he knew the fight wasn't far away now.

The alleyway they had skipped down brought them out into a cul-de-sac. One side was a brick wall backing on to some gardens, the other was a row of garages, their metal swing-up doors were either broken open or missing entirely. Walton's perpetual tide of rubbish had swollen to form a rancid mattress underfoot, bags rose like lumpy organic buttresses against the bricks. Rats scampered about everywhere.

Greg's espersense found the cluster of minds, just as he heard the low bubbling laughter up ahead. Something about the minds wasn't quite right, their thought currents wavered giddily, emotions burning fiercely. One of them was emitting a mental keening, gibbering with psychotic distress.

"Shit. Teddy, it's a bunch of synthoheads. And they're juiced up high."

"Where?"

"Ten metres. One of the garages." He drew his Armscor stunshot, a simple ash-grey pistol with a solid thirty-centimetre-long barrel. "I'll take them, cover for any runaways."

"Gotcha."

The stunshot was only accurate up to twenty metres. If one of the synthoheads got away, Teddy would have to use the Uzi on them, providing the target laser worked in the fog.

Tension clamped down hard; this was supposed to be a stealth infiltration. People being killed just for getting in his way wasn't part of the deal.

It was the third garage from the end of the cul-de-sac, a dim yellow glow spilling out on to the sludge of rubbish. Greg flattened himself against the wall, checked the stunshot, then spun round the corner.

There were five of them. Kids, still in their teens, two girls, three boys. Filthy, greasy jeans, frayed black leather jackets, denim waistcoats with studs, long straggly hair. The garage walls were slick with condensation, junk furniture—broken settees and armchairs—lined up around the walls, and an oil lamp hung from the ceiling.

Greg's photon amp threw the whole scene into starkly etched focus. Two of the kids were screwing on the floor, grunting like pigs. Another two stood on either side, watching, giggling. The fifth was huddled in a corner, arms over his head, weeping quietly.

Greg shot the one closest to him. A girl, about seventeen, her neck freckled with dark infuser marks. The stunshot spat out a bullet-sized pulse of blue-white lightning. It hit her on the side of her ribcage. Her squeal was choked off as she reeled round. There was an impossibly serene smile on her face as she crumpled on to the legs of the rutting couple.

Pulling the trigger was incredibly hard. They weren't innocent, not even close. Just profoundly ignorant, pitiable. He had to keep on reminding himself the stunshot wasn't lethal, though God alone knew what it would do to a metabolism fucked up so badly by syntho.

He turned slightly. Aim and fire, nothing else matters.

The second kid gurgled as the pulse hit him in the stomach, curling up and falling forwards. Aim and fire. The girl on the floor was struggling to get up as her partner collapsed on top of her. Aim and fire.

The boy in the corner was looking straight at Greg, face ecstatic, tears streaming down. "Thank you, oh thank you."

Aim and fire.

The kid slumped down again, head bowed.

"Lord, what a waste," Teddy said. "Someplace else they could've been real people."

Greg stepped over the prone bodies and extinguished the oil lamp, letting the night claim its own. "You can get syntho anywhere."

"Not in Mucklands, you flicking couldn't. I look after my kids. Anyone tries peddling that shit near me an' they end up swinging by the balls. Blackshirts don't even look after their own."

"You're preaching to the converted. Come on."

According to the bright yellow co-ordinates the guido was flashing up, he was standing fifty metres from the target house. Its green template glowed lambently, the walls and roof remaining outside the photon amp's resolution.

"Colin, how are we doing?"

"He's still there, Greg."

"OK, we're closing in now."

He trotted down the road, watching the house gaining substance. It was a large detached three-storey affair, with bow windows on either side of the front door, built from a pale yellow brick with blue-grey slates. Nothing fancy, virtually a cube. Diamond shapes made from blue bricks set between the first-floor windows were the only visible ornamentation. A tall chimney stack was leaning at a worrying angle, a number of bricks from its top were missing. The chimney pots themselves ended in elaborate crowns, all of them playing host to tussocks of spindly weeds.

A metre-high wall enclosed a broad strip of garden at the front. Greg stopped just outside; it took him a moment to realize there were no solar panels. The house's residents must be right at the bottom of the human pile, and in Walton the bottom was as far down as you could get. All the windows had their curtains drawn; the photon amp revealed vague splinters of light round the edges. There was no gate, its absence marked by rusty metal hinge pins protruding from the wall.

He walked down the algae-slimed path. Dog roses had run wild in the garden, reducing into a thorny wilderness sprinkled with small pale flowers. A panel with eight bell buttons was set into the wall at the side of the door. Very primitive, there was no camera lens as far as he could see. He took the sensor wand from its slot on his ECM 'ware module, and ran it round the door frame. Apart from the lock system, it was clean.

"We're at the front door now," Greg said. He was surprised by the 'ware lock, a tiny glass lens flush with the wood. He already had the vibration knife in his hand ready to cope with a mechanical lock.

"I can feel you," Colin said. "Yes, you're very close now. He's above you, Greg. Definitely higher up."

"OK." He showed his card to the lock, using his little finger to activate it rather than the usual thumbprint. A Royan special was loaded in the card, a crash-wipe virus designed to flush lock circuitry clean. There was a subdued snick from the lock. He pushed the door open a crack, and slipped the sensor wand in.

"It's clear," he told Teddy.

The hall went straight through to the back of the house.

He saw a set of stairs halfway along. A candle was burning in a dish on a small table just inside the door. Its flame flickered madly until Teddy closed the door shut behind him. The lock refused to engage.

Greg let his espersense expand. There were four people on the ground floor, none of them showing any awareness that the front door had been opened.

They went up the stairs fast. The first-floor landing had five doors. One was open; he could just make out an ancient iron bath inside. His espersense picked out seven minds, two of them children. Murmurs of music from channel shows were coming through some of the doors.

"Which way, Colin?"

"Walk forward, Greg."

He took three paces down the worn ochre carpet. Teddy stayed at the top of the stairs, watching the other doors.

"Stop," Colin said. "He's on your left." The strain in his voice was quite clear, even through the satellite link.

"Thanks, Colin. Now you shut your gland down, right now, you hear?"

"Greg, my dear chap, there's no need to shout."

Greg let his espersense flow through the door. There were two people inside, one male, one female, sitting together.

Judging by the relaxed timbre of their minds he guessed they were watching a channel.

The door lock was mechanical, an old Yale. With Teddy standing behind him he. shoved the blade clean through the wood just above the keyhole and sliced out a semicircle.

Knebel's room was just as seedy as he had been expecting: damp wallpaper, cheap furniture, laminated chipboard table and sideboard, plain wooden chairs, a settee covered in woolly brown and grey fabric, its cushioning sagging and worn; thin blue carpet. The light was coming from some kind of salvaged lorry headlamp on the table, shining at the ceiling, powered from a cluster of spherical polymer batteries on the floor. An English Electric flatscreen, with shoddy colour contrast, was showing a channel current affairs 'cast.

Greg didn't know the woman, a blowzy thirty-year-old, flat washed-out face, straw hair, wearing a man's green shirt and a short red skirt.

Knebel had grown a pointed beard, but Greg would have recognized him anywhere. The apparatchik was wearing jeans and a thick mauve sweater, buckled sandals on bare feet. He had aged perceptibly; he was only forty, almost Greg's contemporary, but the flesh had wasted from his face producing sunken cheeks, deep eyes, thin lips. Mouse-brown hair with a centre parting hung lankly down to his ears.

The two of them were sitting on the settee, facing the flatscreen, heads turning at the clatter of the lock hitting the floor. Greg aimed the stunshot at the woman and fired. It sounded dreadfully loud in the confined space. The pulse caught her on the shoulder. She spasmed, nearly slewing off the settee. Her eyes rolled up as she emitted a strangled cry.

Greg shifted the stunshot fractionally.

Knebel stared at him, his mouth parted, jaw quivering softly. His startled thoughts reflected utter despair. He closed his eyes, screwing up his face wretchedly.

"One sound, and you won't be dead, you will simply wish you were," Greg said. "Now turn the flatscreen off."

Teddy closed the door behind him.

Knebel opened his eyes, showing the frantic disbelief of a condemned man given a reprieve. A shaking hand pawed at the remote.

Greg ignored him, his espersense hovering around the other minds on the first floor. Two of them had heard the commotion. Curiosity rose, they waited for something else to happen. When nothing did their attention wavered, and they were drawn back into the mundane routine of the evening.

He waited another minute to make sure, then pulled the photon amp band from his eyes.

Knebel managed to crumple without actually moving. "Oh my God. Greg Mandel, the Thunderchild himself."

It had been quite some time since Greg had heard anyone use his army callsign. Not since he left the Trinities, in fact.

But of course, the PSP had access to all the army's personnel files. "I'm flattered. I wasn't aware Oakham's Lord Protector had taken an interest in me."

"You were believed to be an active member of the Trinities, and you live in the Berrybut estate. No close family, no special woman as far as we knew. Very high ESP rating. Plenty of combat experience. I took notice all right."

"Lived. Lived in Berrybut. I've moved now."

"Of course," Knebel said with bitter irony, "do excuse me, I haven't accessed your file lately. My mistake."

"If you knew all that, how come you never came hunting for me, you and your Constables?"

Knebel stroked the hair of the unconscious woman, gazing tenderly at her shivering face. "And if we'd missed? Which was more than likely with that freaky Thompson woman guarding your future. I had enough trouble keeping the ranks in order as it was. You were busy here in Peterborough. The last thing I needed was a fully trained, fully armed Mindstar monster gunning for us when we left the station to go home at night."

"Figures. You people never did try anything physical unless the odds were ten to one in your favour."

"Could you spare me this ritual of insults, and just get it over with, please?"

Greg gave him a frigid grin. "Tell you, Knebel, this is the luckiest day of your entire shitty little life. I'm not here to snuff you."

Knebel's hand stopped. "What?"

"True. I only want some bytes you've got."

"An' you gonna give 'em to us, boy," Teddy growled.

Swellings of terror and hope disrupted the surface thoughts of Knebel's mind. "Are you serious? Just information?"

"Yeah."

He licked his upper lip, glancing nervously at Teddy. "What about afterwards?"

"You join her in dreamland, we leave. And that's a fucking sight more than you deserve."

"God, you must be loving this, seeing what I've been brought down to." The eyes darkened with pain. "Yes, I'll plead with you for my life, I'll tell you anything you want, answer any question, I don't care. Dignity isn't something I have any more, your kind broke that. But you gave me something in return; I've found there's a great deal of peace to be had once every pretension has been stripped out. Did you know that Mandel, can you see it? I don't worry about the ways things are any more, I don't worry about the future. That's all down to you now. Your worries, your power politics. And you've wasted your time coming here, because I don't know anything about the Blackshirts' weapons stocks, they never tell me anything. I'm not a part of that."

"Not what we're here for."

"Speak for yourself," Teddy muttered.

"What then?" Knebel asked.

"Launde Abbey."

"What?" Knebel blurted loudly. He shrank back when Greg motioned with the stunshot. "Sorry. Really, I'm sorry. But… is that it? You came to ask me about Launde Abbey?"

"Yeah. Now I've come a long way, and gone to a lot of trouble to rap with you. So believe me, you don't want to piss me off. You know I'm empathic, so just answer the questions truthfully."

"All right. I saw you on the newscast the other night. You were appointed to the Kitchener murder, something to do with Julia Evans." His eyes lingered on the 'ware modules hanging from Greg's belt.

Greg switched in the communication module's external mike. "Tell me about Clarissa Wynne."

"Clarissa? God, that was years and years ago. I'd almost forgotten about her until the other day. That newscast brought a lot of memories back."

"Ten years ago. What can you remember?"

Knebel closed his eyes, slim eyebrows bunching up. "Ten? Are you sure? I thought it was eleven."

"It could have been."

"Well, what does it say in her file?"

"That is the reason I'm here, Knebel. Someone has erased every byte of Clarissa Wynne from Rutland's memory cores; police, council, local newspapers, you name it, the lot."

"God."

"Do you know who?"

"No."

"Right. You say you thought she died eleven years ago?"

"Yes, I'm sure it was eleven."

"OK, what orders did you get from the Ministry of Public Order about her death?"

"To wrap it up immediately, make the coroner enter a verdict of accidental death, not to cause any ripples, especially not to antagonize Kitchener and the other students."

"Why not? Why was the PSP so anxious to hush the girl's death up? What made her so important?"

Knebel gave him a humourless smile. "Important? Clarissa Wynne wasn't important. God, the Ministry didn't even know her name. She was an embarrassment. You see, eleven years ago, the PSP was applying to the World Bank for a very large loan, billions. You remember that time, Mandel; the seas were reaching their peak, we'd got hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring inland from flooded coastal areas, we didn't have any food, we didn't have any industry, we didn't have any hard currency. It was a fucking great mess. We needed that loan to get the economy started again. And the Americans didn't want to help a bunch of Reds. No matter we were elected—"

Teddy growled dangerously. Greg held up a hand, sensing just how hostile Teddy's mind was.

"OK. All right. I'm sorry," Knebel said. "No politics. But look, the point was, the PSP couldn't afford a human rights issue. The Americans would have leapt on it as an excuse to block the loan, destabilize the Party. Kitchener, for all he was bloody obnoxious personally, was internationally renowned, someone whose name people knew all over the world. Can you see the disinformation campaign the Americans would have mounted if I'd started questioning the students and Kitchener thoroughly? Their friend and colleague has been tragically drowned, and all the PSP does is persecute them with inquiries and allegations. It would have been Sakharov all over again. We needed that money, Mandel, people were starting to starve. In England, for God's sake! Pensioners. Children. So I did what I was told, and I kept my mouth shut afterwards. Because it was necessary. And to hell with you and your rich bitch mistress. I don't care how wise after the event you are."

So much anger, Greg thought, and just from one question. Will we ever heal the rift? "Morgan? Did you hear all that?"

"Yes, Greg."

"OK, check the date for that World Bank loan application, please. I'd like some verification."

"Right."

Knebel had cocked his head to one side, listening to Greg's side of the conversation intently. He still had his arms around the woman, cradling her. A ribbon of saliva was leaking from the corner of her mouth, eyelids fluttering erratically.

"Now," Greg said. "Why were you so upset about having to close down the inquiry? I was told Clarissa drowned in the lake after some sort of drinking session. Was it an accident?"

"I'm not sure. At the time I didn't think so. You get an instinct, you know? After you've been on the job long enough you can tell if something's not quite right. And I was a good detective, back then. Before it all… I cared," he said defensively.

"Yeah. Keith Willet told me."

"Keith?" Knebel brightened for an instant. "God, is he still at Oakham? How is he?"

"Just get on with it, Knebel."

"All right." He shot Teddy another twitchy glance, then cleared his throat. "I wasn't happy with the circumstances around Clarissa Wynne's death. The students said they found her floating in the lake first thing in the morning, that she must have gone for a swim sometime in the night. Apparently the students always went swimming there."

"Still do," Greg said.

"Yes? Well, anyway, on the surface it was pretty clear cut. She'd been drinking, she'd infused some syntho. That was the first time we'd ever come across the stuff at Oakham. She must have got into difficulty in the water. Those lakes aren't particularly deep, but you only need five centimetres to drown in."

"So what was wrong about it?"

Knebel sighed. "She hadn't drunk much that evening, a couple of glasses of wine. And the syntho, we couldn't be sure, we didn't know much about it back then, but it looked as though it was infused very close to the time she died. Almost as if she took it and dived straight in. Which I don't believe anybody would do, certainly not a bright girl like that. I was going to have the pathology samples sent to Cambridge for a more detailed examination, then the shut-down order came through."

"Suicide?" Greg suggested.

"Nope. First thing I thought of. We did get to ask the students and Kitchener a few preliminary questions. Clarissa Wynne was one happy girl. She enjoyed being at Launde. Her parents confirmed there were no family problems. In any case, there was some light bruising on the back of her neck." He shrugged limply. "It could have been caused by bumping in to something in the water."

"Or it could have been caused by someone holding her under," Greg concluded.

"Yes. if the attacker had put her in a Nelson lock on the side of the lake, the bruising would have been consistent with her head being forced under the surface. Especially if she was conscious. She was young, strong, apparently she was in the woman's hockey team at university, a sports type, she could have put up quite a struggle. The attacker would have had to use a lot of force."

"Any sign of a struggle?"

"No. The grass around the side of the lake was all beaten down. Like I said, the students used it each day."

A dire chill slithered through the combat leathers to prickle Greg's skin as he thought about Clarissa Wynne's death. She would have struggled, that night eleven years ago, fighting her attacker under the silent, beautiful stars, without any hope of success or help. Terribly alone as her head was shoved under the cold muddy water. She would feel her body weakening, be conscious of the syntho breaking her mind apart. And all the while the red ache in her lungs grew and grew.

No fucking wonder he'd been drawn to the lake. It was a focal node of horror and anguish.

Did her soul haunt it? Was that what I sensed?

But whatever the source of the misery, it still didn't explain how her death tied in with Nicholas Beswick.

"Who did you suspect?" he asked Knebel.

"God, I never had time to find a possible suspect. That Ministry order came through in less than a day."

"Well, start thinking about it now, Knebel. What about Kitchener himself? I mean, he was sleeping with his female students the night he died. Sixty-seven years old. Eleven years ago he would have been even more capable sexually."

"No, I don't think so. He was reasonably fit, but not really what I'd call physically powerful. And if Clarissa was held down, it was done by someone stronger than her."

"One of the other students, then?"

"Yes, possibly."

"Was there anyone else staying at the Abbey that night?"

"No. And Clarissa was still alive when the housekeeper and the maid left, we confirmed that."

"OK, can you remember the names of the other students?"

"I think so. There was five of them. Let's see: Tumber, Donaldson, MacLennan, Spencer—"

"Wait! MacLennan? James MacLennan? Dr James MacLennan?"

"Yes. That was his first name, James. I didn't know he was a doctor."

"Shitfire," Greg whispered.