But his old life had at least provided the comradeship he no longer had, and he was almost nostalgic when he walked in through the doors to be greeted by the sense of purposeful activity. The building was just as run-down and decrepit as it had been the day he left, three years previously; the same mountains of files, paint peeling from the walls, overflowing rubbish bins, probably even the same dust over the stained floors. Many of the inhabitants were the same as well; he recognised several but it was strange — and annoying — to realise how easily he had been forgotten. One man, whom he had worked with on a complicated case of smuggling years back, walked past him in the corridor, stared at him with a puzzled expression, then said, ‘Hello, Jack. Been on nights?’
Others — young and new — simply had no idea who he was.
So, in a bad mood that only a sense of irrelevance can bring on, Jack wandered through the building until he came to the office which had once been his own. In fact, he had shared it with six others, all undercover operators. These were wilder, less disciplined, more irreverent, less enamoured of rules. They knew how to keep their opinions to themselves, and made fun of the authorities behind their backs even as they served them loyally. They had to understand those they lived with, and often enough came to sympathise with them. Their job was to catch subversives; frequently they ended up protecting them as well.
He spent an hour in there, talking about old times, asking after old acquaintances before getting down to business. He needed a favour, he said. A missing woman. Nothing official. No public announcements, no broadcasts of the have-you-seen-this-woman variety. Discreet. Not a word.
‘Urgent?’
‘Very.’
‘Explanation?’
He shook his head. ‘Not yet.’
They did not query, bargain, set conditions. Of course they would help. Jack handed over Angela’s basic information — all identifying qualities, numbers and back history, financial information, health data.
‘Photo?’
He handed it over.
‘Cute.’
‘She’s seventy-eight, and a psychomathematician.’
‘Ah. A nutter.’
‘So it seems, but a very intelligent one. During her training she never once scored less than 99.9 per cent on any exam. Also extravagant, emotional and high-risk. She has never held a job for more than two years, until she ended up in this institute on Mull, where she has been placated and perhaps sedated enough to function.’
‘Criminal activities?’
‘None that we know of. No history of violence beyond once threatening her employer with a broken bottle, although, from what I know of him, that might well have been entirely justifiable. She’s gone missing, and she won’t be easily found. There may be a connection to renegade groupings. Retreats. Leave that to me. Don’t go near them or alarm them. I do want the current inventory of people in Retreats near here, though.’
‘Why?’
‘Just in case something strikes me.’
‘Then you might as well do the work yourself. You know where the files are. Most haven’t even been touched since you left.’
He read carefully for four hours, both the dossier on Emily Strang and the reports on the Retreat where she was registered. It was routine stuff, for the most part. The Retreat was about thirty years old, a breakaway from another one because of internal faction fighting. They probably split into warring fragments, he thought, over the best way of baking bread or something like that. Few Retreats lasted for very long before they broke into pieces over some minor dispute. It was one reason why they were tolerated — you see what freedom of expression gets you? Chaos. You want to be like these people, wasting your energies in pointless argument over trivia?
What this one did was not mentioned, as any activities the inmates were likely to indulge in were, almost by definition, pointless. The only question was whether they were dangerous in any way. In this case the answer was no. No more needed to be said, which was a pity; it would have been useful to have had some idea of their internal philosophy before he approached.
The inmates were the usual collection of misfits. Some had been born in Retreats and scarcely knew what they were missing; others had gone there of their own accord after some display of egotistical individuality — refusing drugs, venturing opinions, discontent or semi-criminal activity. To Jack’s practised eye, none seemed either remarkable or difficult to deal with. Merely people who thought their opinion was better than the collective wisdom of the best scientific minds on the planet. The nominal head, Sylvia Glass, was a woman with the prospect of a great career in administration until, one day, she simply walked out when disciplined for singing to herself. A few others had been promising scientists or managers. All had rebelled and been isolated and barred from contact with others in case they spread the infection.
As for Emily Strang, the record was much too simple to be convincing. If she was indeed the daughter of Angela Meerson, then someone had evidently doctored the records very carefully. She appeared as the child of two renegades, flagged as unremarkable but — and this was the interesting bit — given the highest rating at the assessment all infants were subjected to at the age of six weeks. It was, so they said, an infallible way of determining intelligence and future usefulness to society. Emily was assessed at level one, which would ordinarily have meant instant accept ance into the elite training system. She would have been taken off and put into special schools, given every comfort and resource to develop her mind and skills. Jack had been assessed at level six and he knew — because he had looked — that even Hanslip himself had been assigned only level two status. But there she was in a Retreat, and nothing in the dossier suggested this was in any way remarkable.
Jack finished reading in the comfort of his room, as he had decided that he would stay in the sort of accommodation suitable to his new rank, just to see what it was like. The journey from the police headquarters through the filthy streets, never-ending in their squalor, took nearly an hour, until he got to the heavily guarded outer perimeter of the compound and was allowed through after a detailed check of his credentials. They worked flawlessly.
The room he was given was grand. He was impressed; he had never been in such a place before. The luxury was extraordinary. He could go out into the open, under the huge glass dome which stretched as far as he could see, and breathe in the carefully filtered and cleaned air almost as though it was natural. He could walk without protection and have no fear of being shot or kidnapped. There wasn’t even any overhead surveillance. The security guards were placed discreetly so they wouldn’t be seen, and there were no billboards or loudspeakers to encourage loyalty and effort. There was grass, and a tree. Most wouldn’t care for trees, but they symbolised space and luxury and safety. There was a lot to be said for making it into the elite. He wasn’t sure whether the security was to protect the guests or to make sure that the outside world had no idea how well their masters lived.
He ordered a meal, showered and relaxed. He decided against signalling his intentions of going to the National Depository, just in case someone was listening in, and finished his evening by reading about the place instead.
The chances of finding anything in there without specialised knowledge was minimal. It only existed because of a dispute between various committees of scientists; one wanted to destroy all records of the past entirely on the grounds of redundancy, the other wished to preserve them for the same reason that plants were preserved, in case future generations found a use for the information.