Final Days

FIFTEEN

Orlando, Florida, 2 February 2235

Not too many hours after Donohue had walked out on him in Hong Kong, Saul woke up in the back seat of a taxi, outside the four-storey walk-up in Orlando he’d called home for the past six years, to the sound of a recorded voice asking him to please get out.

He stumbled out into the night air, feeling bone-crushingly weary, and looked down at the stained shirt and ill-fitting trousers he’d been forced to wear the whole way back from Hong Kong. A woman walking her dog gave him a quick once-over and quickly crossed over to the far side of the street.

Saul tugged the collar of his shirt close to his nose, sniffed and winced, remembering the look on the face of the man forced to sit next to him during the sub-orb fligh

Closing his front door behind him, he activated his UP just long enough to check his mail, and found a message waiting from someone he hadn’t heard from in a very long time. Saul came to an abrupt halt in the narrow hallway, and stared at the name floating next to the message icon.

He resisted the impulse to open and read it immediately. Whatever Olivia had to say, it almost certainly wasn’t anything he wanted to hear.

At least, not right now.

He instructed the house to run him a bath and meanwhile waited in the kitchen, dumping the clothes he’d been provided in the waste-disposal unit and pulling on a bathrobe. He ate half a tin of ravioli straight from the fridge, his gaze lingering on an old picture of Deanna and their daughter Gwen, until the house informed him ten minutes later that the bath was ready. He ordered a suit from a local fab-shop before easing himself into the warm water, some of the weight of the past few days sloughing away as he submerged.

He lay staring up at the bathroom ceiling, Olivia’s message occupying his thoughts far more than he wanted it to.

I could just delete it, he thought. Reading it had every chance of making his life a lot more complicated than it already was.

When he finally emerged from the bathroom half an hour later, the house informed him that a shrink-wrapped package was waiting by the front door. He opened it, pulling out a jacket and a pair of trousers cut from soft dark cloth, and also a grey silk shirt. They hadn’t been cheap but, after what he’d been through the last few days, Saul really wasn’t inclined to give a damn.

He got dressed and checked himself out in the bedroom mirror, but something still didn’t feel right. Saul felt twitchy and on edge. Maybe a little loup-garou, he thought, remembering that he had some stuffed in a coffee jar at the back of one of the kitchen cupboards . . .

No. He remembered the look of contempt on Donohue’s face, Jacob’s body slumped in a chair. He turned away from the mirror, suddenly feeling ashamed, and left the house.

As he bought himself a steak dinner at a local eatery, thoughts of Olivia continued to nag at him, making him feel lonely even at the one time he felt he needed most of all to be on his own. By the time he’d finished eating and was on his way to Christy’s to get good and drunk, he’d noticed a second message had arrived.

Saul abruptly came to a halt, realizing he was only delaying the inevitable. After reading both messages, he changed direction and headed for another bar, one he hadn’t stepped inside for several years.

Some of the tension he’d worked so hard at shedding was starting to creep back. By the time he arrived at Harry’s Bar and Diner, Olivia was already sitting waiting for him by the bar.

It was early enough for the place to still be fairly quiet, no more than a half dozen people scattered around the tables. Pebbled-glass windows splashed diffused streetlight across leather couches and dark varnished wood.

Saul climbed on to the stool next to Olivia’s. ‘This was my plan for tonight,’ he said, resting his arms on the counter. ‘I was going to get drunk and maybe make up some bullshit about the hard week I’ve just had, for the benefit of anyone who would listen, then let them call me a ride home when I couldn’t stand up any longer. A simple, yet effective strategy, and now you’ve gone and messed it all up.’

Olivia set her drink down – it came in a tall narrow glass and struck him as an unhealthy shade of pink – and glanced at him sideways in amusement. She had wide dark eyes and black hair that fell across her shoulders, and her features revealed a complex ethnic heritage that included a Seminole father and Korean grandmother.

‘As soon as I sat down here, it brought back a whole lot of memories, Saul. Not all bad ones, either, but, if it makes you feel any better, that’s not why I’m here.’

Saul ordered himself a drink. ‘So why are you here?’

‘Actually, it has to do with Jeff.’

‘Your ex-husband?’

‘Do you know any other Jeffs?’

‘I guess not.’

The barman deposited a Drambuie on the rocks in front of Saul. Even after so many years, the details of their past affair remained fresh in his mind. Olivia and Jeff Cairns had already been separated by the time she’d started sleeping with Saul – not that this had offered any great reassurance to his wife at the time. However, he’d been well on the road to patching things up with Deanna when the Galileo gate had collapsed.

‘Hey, look at you.’ She leaned forward to examine him under the overhead lights, and he could tell, from the way her eyes moved, that she was studying the bruises on his face. ‘What the hell happened to you?’

He took a sip of the Drambuie. ‘All in the line of duty, ma’am.’

Her expression by now was a mixture of pity and horror. ‘Still trying to get yourself killed?’

‘Still playing amateur psychologist?’

‘Only a couple more months, and you’ll know if Deanna and your daughter are still alive, Saul.’

‘And if they’re not?’

She sighed, and shot a glance at her reflection in the mirror behind the bar. ‘It doesn’t take a shrink to figure you out, Saul. First you let Mitchell talk you into that insane orbital jump, then you started drinking too much, like you were deliberately trying to kill yourself.&rsququo

He glared at her. ‘I was not trying to get myself killed,’ he snapped, a little too loudly. Seeing the barman glance their way, he lowered his voice. ‘It’s just . . .’

‘Just what?’

He fingered his drink and, noticing the way she looked at it, gulped it down as if in defiance. It coated his tongue with a sticky numb fieriness.

‘There was more to the jump we made than that,’ he said firmly. ‘You remember Mitch’s brother?’

She nodded. ‘Danny? I only met him once.’

‘You know he died?’

She nodded.

‘Mitchell blamed himself for it,’ Saul continued. ‘Felt he hadn’t been there for him. Do you know the actual details?’

She hesitated. ‘In the sketchiest sense, yes. But all of that happened after . . . after us. After you’d moved on from the Jupiter station.’

Saul had first met Olivia on being assigned, along with Mitchell, to security on the Jupiter orbital platform. The station had been huge even then, constantly growing as pre-assembled units were shipped there via the Inuvik gate back on Earth. Her husband, Jeff, had worked on experimental helium-dredges dropped into the Jovian atmosphere, while Olivia herself had served as the platform’s communications specialist. The sheer scale of the station made it easy for the couple to avoid each other once they’d decided to separate.

‘Mitchell and Danny both grew up near the DMZ in post-partition Chicago,’ Saul went on, and Olivia nodded to signify that this much she knew. ‘It was still a pretty rough place, even a couple of decades after the war. Mitch joined the ASI just to get away from the gangs, but . . .’

‘Danny didn’t?’

‘No.’ Saul could feel a sour taste building in the back of his throat. ‘Danny disappeared, and Mitchell was frantic. He asked me to help try and find him. I was already doing undercover work, so had an idea how to track him down. To cut a long story short, I was the one who found him.’

Olivia had that faraway look that told Saul she was accessing public records on the incident. ‘He got himself involved with traffickers,’ she said, glancing back at Saul a moment later. It was a statement, not a question.

‘I eventually found him in an illegal gene-lab that had been set up in an abandoned apartment building. The traffickers Danny had been working for were all long gone when I discovered him.’

‘They killed him?’

‘That’s whatthe coroner’s report said.’ He could clearly picture Danny’s lifeless face, still twisted up in anger. ‘The lab had been developing customized embryos for unregulated off-world labour markets. Slaves, essentially.’

‘Jesus. And you’ve no idea why they killed him?’

Saul shook his head. ‘Let’s just say it was all pretty rough on Mitchell, so when he said he wanted me to go along on that jump, six months later, I didn’t really feel up to saying no.’

‘I had no idea.’

‘Yeah, well, it’s like you said. We were all moving in different circles by then.’

Saul stood up and gazed down at her. ‘Look, I’m sorry about the way things worked out for us both, but talking to you this way brings back too many bad memories. Deanna would never have gone to live on Galileo if it hadn’t been for us two.’

‘Saul—’

‘Please,’ he insisted, ‘just hurry the hell up and tell me whatever it is you came here to say, otherwise I’m gone.’

She crumpled slightly, and he could see lines around her eyes showing how much older she’d become since he’d last set eyes on her.

‘Just give me one minute.’ She patted his vacated stool.

He slid back down on to the seat with evident reluctance, keeping one foot planted on the floor. ‘Make it quick.’

‘Like I said, I’m here because of Jeff. We had a reconciliation, just in the last year or two.’

Saul couldn’t hide his surprise. ‘Seriously?’

‘I know.’ She smiled wryly. ‘Took both of us by surprise, too. Most of that time he’s been involved in some kind of off-world research that takes him away for weeks or even months at a stretch, so it’s not like we really get to see that much of each other.’ She licked her lips and took a deep breath. ‘The thing is, now he’s disappeared.’

‘Disappeared?’

‘More than a week ago. I knew for a good long while that there was something on his mind, something to do with his work, but he wouldn’t talk about it.’

‘Maybe he couldn’t talk about it? The ASI had him working on a lot of high-security research projects, didn’t they?’

She shrugged. ‘I guess so. Thing is, we’d planned on spending some time together when he got back from his last trip out. Instead he cancelled everything and told me he was heading off somewhere on his own. He wouldn’t tell me whygood long I could tell that something bad had happened.’

Saul finally lifted his foot off the floor, and shifted himself into a more comfortable position. He was curious, despite himself. ‘And you haven’t heard from him since?’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Here’s the thing, though. Two different people contacted me since he vanished, both desperate to find him. The way they talked made me sure he was in some kind of trouble.’

‘Olivia,’ he spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness, ‘I don’t mean to sound callous, but I’m not sure what any of this has to do with me.’

She gave him an angry look. ‘Jesus, Saul, he’s your friend.’

‘Was my friend, until I started sleeping with his ex-wife.’

She stared back at him in silence.

‘All right,’ he raised his hands, ‘I’m sorry. Don’t you have any idea where he might have gone?’

Olivia shook her head. ‘Before I tell you anything else, there’s something you need to see.’

Saul’s UP informed him that she had just sent him a video file.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Just take a look.’ She rolled her eyes.

Saul pushed his glass to one side, then tapped the four corners of an imaginary square on the bar counter with one finger. His contacts responded by projecting the clip she had sent within the confines of the same square.

It turned out to be something snatched from one of the main news feeds. He saw men in diving suits falling backwards off a boat into the waters of a lake, snow-capped hills dense with pine visible beyond the shore.

He glanced at Olivia, as the video clip remained locked to the counter. ‘What is this?’ he asked.

‘They dredged Jeff’s body out of that lake yesterday morning. We have a cabin up in Montana, where we used to spend our summers. There was a local news report saying it was suicide.’

Saul swallowed. ‘Shit, Olivia, I’m so sorry.’

‘No, don’t be. I don’t believe it.’

‘Don’t believe what?’

‘That it was suicide.’

He gave her an appraising stare.

‘I’m not out of my head, all right?’ she snapped. ‘It just . . . not something he would do.’

‘You can’t possibly know that, Olivia.’

Tendons stood out on her neck as she replied. ‘I know him, Saul, and I know he wouldn’t drown himself deliberately. I think somebody killed him.’

‘Does this have anything to do with the people that were looking for him? Who exactly were they?’

‘One was a guy called Dan Rush who’d worked with Jeff. The other was Mitch.’

Saul shook his head. ‘Mitch?’

‘Mitchell Stone.’ She peered at him like he’d lost his mind. ‘We were just talking about him, remember?’

Saul froze, with one hand clasped around his second Drambuie. He nodded slowly, his expression impassive.

‘He called you during the last couple of days? What day was it exactly?’

She thought for a moment. ‘It would have been the 29th.’

‘Of January?’

She nodded. ‘The other man, Rush, called me a few days before that.’

Four days ago, Saul realized. ‘I need you to be sure about that.’

She gave him a reproachful glare. ‘Jesus, Saul, of course I’m sure.’

He picked up his drink and took his time with it in order to give himself some more room to think. Donohue and Sanders had told him about Mitchell’s supposed death on the 20th – which was more than a week ago.

‘This guy, Rush, you ever met him?’

‘Just once, not long after I and Jeff got back together. So I already knew they were colleagues. When he called, he told me Jeff was in some kind of trouble.’ She pushed her hair back from her face. ‘I had a feeling Jeff might have gone up to the cabin, but he never replied to my messages. I was going to drive up there to try and see if I could find him for myself, but then I heard about him on the news.’

‘About Mitchell,’ said Saul, ‘I don’t want to sound like I’m doubting you, but are you sure it was really him?’

She looked at him. ‘Why wouldn’t I be? Besides, I know his voice. Why?’

Saul thought for a moment. ‘Okay, let me ask you this. Is there a reason you’re talking to me, and not the police?’

&lsquI already spoke to them, soon as I heard about Jeff being dredged out of the lake. They said there was no evidence of foul play and they didn’t even sound very interested in what I had to say. In fact, they treated me,’ she said, with a touch of venom, ‘like they thought I was crazy.’

‘But did you explain to them that you thought he might have been in some kind of trouble?’

‘Sure, except as soon as I mentioned that he worked for ASI’s research wing, they said I had to talk to the ASI instead.’

‘And?’

She shrugged. ‘So I talked to them as well, and they gave me exactly the same kind of brush-off.’ She smiled uncertainly. ‘After that, I figured that if anyone was in a position to look into things, it would be you.’

Saul nodded and smiled to hide the tension gripping him like steel. If what Olivia was telling him was true, then not only had Hanover lied about Mitch being dead, but Donohue and Sanders had done so also.

He guessed Olivia must have misinterpreted his sudden silence as reluctance, as she reached out and laid a hand over his. ‘I know you think I’m out of my mind, Saul, but I’ve never been more sane. I know I can’t ask this of you lightly.’ She smiled again, and he realized her confidence in him was genuine.

If only you knew the mess I’ve been making of things, he thought.

His mind whirred with possible connections. Mitchell had originally been a member of Hanover’s team, and Saul could see no direct connection between his reported death and the shipment hijack, but if he could be lied to about Mitchell’s death, what else might have been kept from him?

He thought back on the failures of the past several days – Jacob’s death, Hsiu-Chuan, Hanover – and felt the same anger that had been simmering inside him all throughout the long flight home start to rise up again like a hot tide. Donohue had used Galileo to bait him into volunteering for a risky mission, then discarded him without explanation as soon as he’d ceased to be of any use.

He’d find out why – whatever it took.

Saul reached out, touching two fingers to Olivia’s elbow. ‘I’ll check it out,’ he said, struggling to keep his voice level. ‘It’s the least I can do.’