“What?”
“Let me go check something.” He turned and left the shack. Reeve and Cantona followed him outside, but he turned back to them, holding up his hands. “Now, let me do this by myself. That car’s not something you should be seeing.”
Reeve nodded, and watched Trasker go. Then he told Cantona to stay where he was, and began to follow the old man.
Around the back of the shack, and past heaps of wrecked cars, Reeve saw that there was another low-slung building, double-garage size. Half a dozen tall gas cylinders stood like metal sentries outside a wide door, which stood open. There was a car jacked up inside, but Trasker squeezed past it. Reeve looked around him. He was five or six miles outside San Diego, inland towards the hills. The air was stiller here, not quite so fresh. He had to decide now, right now. He took a deep breath and made for the garage.
“What is it?” he asked Trasker.
The old man shot up from his crouching position and swiveled on his heels. “Nearly gave me a damned heart attack,” he complained.
“Sorry.” Reeve came forward. Trasker had opened the door of the car and was studying it. The car James Reeve had died in. It was smarter than Reeve had expected, a good deal newer, as good certainly as anything in the Mexican’s lot. He approached it slowly. The seats were leather or Leatherette, and had been wiped clean. But as he bent down to peer inside, he could see stains against the roof. A rust-colored trajectory, fanning out towards the back of the car. He thought of touching the blood, maybe it was still damp. But he tore his gaze away from it. Trasker was looking at him.
“I told you to stay put,” the old man said quietly.
“I had to see.”
Trasker nodded, understanding. “You want a moment to yourself?”
Reeve shook his head. “I want to know what you were looking at.”
Trasker pointed to the interior door-lock on the driver’s side. “See there?” he said, touching it. “Can you see a little notch, low down on the lock?”
Reeve looked more closely. “Yes,” he said.
“There’s one on the passenger door-lock too.”
“Yes?”
“They’re sensors, son. They sense a beam from a remote-control key ring.”
“You mean you can lock and unlock the doors from a distance?”
“That’s right.”
“So what?”
“So,” said Trasker, digging into his overall pockets and pulling out a key on a chain, “here’s what came with the car. This is the key that was in the ignition when the police found the car. Now, this is obviously the spare key.”
Reeve looked at it. “Because there’s no button to activate the locks?”
“Exactly.” Trasker took the key back. “You only usually get the one remote-control key ring with a car like this. The spare key they give you is plain, like the one I’m holding.”
Reeve thought about it. Then, without saying anything, he walked back to Cantona’s car. Cantona was standing in the shade provided by the shack.
“Eddie,” Reeve said, “I want you to do something for me.”
By the time Daniel Trasker caught up with Reeve, Cantona’s car was already reversing out of the yard.
“I want to wait here a few minutes,” Reeve said.
Trasker shrugged. “Then what?”
“Then, if I may, I’d like to use your phone.”
Carlos Perez was sucking on a fresh cigar when his telephone rang. It was the brother Gordon Reeve again.
“Yes, Gordon, my friend,” Perez said pleasantly. “Did you forget something?”
“I just wondered about the car key,” Reeve said.
“The car key?” This Reeve was incredible, the way his mind worked. “What about the key?”
“Do you give your customers a spare set, or just the one?”
“That depends on the model of vehicle, Gordon, and other considerations, too.” Perez put his cigar down. It tipped from the edge of the ashtray and rolled off the desk to the floor. He walked around the side of his desk and crouched down, the telephone gripped to his ear.
“Did my brother’s car have remote locking?”
Perez made a noise like he was thinking. The cigar was be-neath his desk. He felt for it, and received a burn on the side of his hand. Swearing silently, he finally drew the cigar out and re-turned to his chair, examining the damage to his left hand.
“Ah,” he said into the telephone, a man who has just remembered. “Yes, that vehicle did have remote locking.”
“And it had the key ring, the push-button?”
“Yes, yes.” Perez couldn’t see where this was leading. He felt sweat glisten on his forehead, tingling his scalp.
“Then where is it now?” Reeve said coldly.
“What?”
“I’m at the garage. There’s no such key here.”
Key, key, key. “I see what you mean,” Perez improvised. “But that key was lost by a previous client. I did not understand you at first. No, there was no remote by the time your brother…” But Perez was speaking into a dead telephone. Reeve had cut the connection. Perez put the receiver back in its cradle and chewed on his cigar so hard he snapped the end off.
He got his jacket from the back of his chair, locked the office and set the alarm, and got into his car. Out on the road, he stopped long enough to chain the gates shut, double-checking the padlock.
If he’d checked everything with the same care, he’d have seen the large green car that followed him as he left.
SIX
KOSIGIN WALKED DOWN TO North Harbor Drive. A huge cruise ship had just docked at the terminal. He stood leaning against the rail, looking down at the water. Sailboats scudded along in the distance, angled so that they appeared to have no mass at all. When they turned they became invisible for a moment; it was not an optical illusion, it was a shortcoming of the eye itself. You just had to stare at nothing, trusting that the boat would reappear. Trust standing in for vision. Kosigin would have preferred better eyesight. He didn’t know why it had been deemed preferable that some birds should be able to pick out the movements of a mouse while hovering high over a field, and mankind should not. The consolation, of course, was that man was an inventor, a maker of tools. Man could examine atoms and electrons. He might not be able to see them, but he could examine them.
Kosigin liked to leave as little as possible to chance. Even if he couldn’t see something with his naked eye, he had ways of finding out about it. He had his own set of tools. He was due to meet the most ruthless and complex of them here.
Kosigin did not regard himself as a particularly complex individual. If you’d asked him what made him tick, and he’d been willing to answer, then he could have given a very full answer indeed. He did not often think of himself as an individual at all. He was part of something larger, a compound of intelligences and tools. He was part of Co-World Chemicals, a corporation man down to the hand-stitched soles of his Savile Row shoes. It wasn’t just that what was good for the company was good for him-he’d heard that pitch before and didn’t wholly believe it-Kosigin’s thinking went further: what is good for CWC is good for the whole of the Western world. Chemicals are an absolute necessity. If you grow food, you need chemicals; if you process food, you need chemicals; if you work at saving lives in a hospital or out in the African bush, you need chemicals. Our bodies are full of them, and keep on producing them. Chemicals and water, that’s what a body is. He reckoned the problems of famine in Africa and Asia could be ended if you tore down the barriers and let agrichemical businesses loose. Locusts? Gas them. Crop yields? Spray them. There was little you couldn’t cure with chemicals.
Of course, he knew of side effects. He kept up with the latest scientific papers and media scare stories. He knew there were kids out there who weren’t being vaccinated against measles because the original vaccine was produced after research on tissue from unborn fetuses. Stories like that made him sad. Not angry, just sad. Humanity had a lot still to learn.