“Which is exactly what I have been saying all along!”
“The point is, if the murder was premeditated, then it might also have been well executed. No loose ends, nothing to lead to the killer. Don’t believe those dime-novel mysteries: the killer doesn’t always make a mistake.”
“If you believe that sincerely, then we may as well conclude our contract now.”
“It’s too early for that,” Floyd said. “I’m just saying that at some point we might have to give up.”
“Give up, or retreat in the face of danger?”
Custine coughed before Floyd could say anything he might regret. “We really shouldn’t take any more of your time this morning, monsieur,” he said smoothly. “We have a lot more to do in this room, not to mention the parallel lines of enquiry we should be pursuing.”
Blanchard considered this and nodded politely. “Very well. Monsieur Floyd, at least your associate still appears to consider the case solvable.” For a moment, his attention seemed drawn to the disturbed area of carpet in front of the wireless, and a flicker of comprehension troubled his face. Then he turned and left them alone.
“I can’t help liking the old coot,” Floyd said, “but I do wish he’d get out of our faces.”
“It’s his money. He just wants to make sure that it’s being spent wisely.” Custine paused and dug into his toolkit again, before shaking his head. “I was hoping I might have something in here I could use to splice those wires back together, but I don’t. I’ll need to return to the office.”
“You think you can fix it?”
“I can try. If we assume that nothing has been removed, then it’s only a matter of reconnecting the broken wires.”
“They all looked the same to me,” Floyd said, peering through a narrow gap in the balcony curtain. Five storeys below, the mid-morning sun had turned the wet street into a sparkling mirror. He watched passers-by stepping between puddles, and then something caught his eye.
“Of course they do,” Custine said. “Nevertheless, there should be a manageable number of permutations. If I haven’t got anywhere by the end of this afternoon, I doubt that more time will make any difference.” Custine waited a moment. “Floyd? Did you hear a word of what I just said?”
Floyd turned from the window. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re thinking about Greta again, aren’t you?”
“Actually,” Floyd said, “I was thinking about that little girl standing across the street.”
“I didn’t notice any girl when we arrived.”
“That’s because she wasn’t there. But now it looks as if she’s watching this room.”
He let the curtain slip back into the place. He’d had enough of a look at the little girl to make him doubt that she was the same one they had seen coming out of Blanchard’s apartment the evening before. But there was still something about the way light fell on her face that made him want to look elsewhere.
“You don’t seriously think a child has something to do with this murder, do you?” Custine asked.
“Of course not,” Floyd said.
They took the stairs down to the Mathis. By the time they reached the car, the watcher was gone.
EIGHT
Auger’s shuttle hauled away from the Twentieth Century Limited and aimed itself in the general direction of Mars. She pressed her face against the glass of a porthole, feeling the vibration in her bones as the shuttle stammered its steering jets in rapid, chugging sequence. Though she had little idea of where she was being taken—or how her task fitted into the story Peter had told her—she was still glad to leave the clapped-out old space liner. After five days, its charms had worn perilously thin, with even a guided tour into the ship’s bowels to view the last working antimatter engine in the solar system providing little more than an hour’s mildly diverting (and frankly terrifying) entertainment. Mars at least was ripe was possibility, and she felt a tingling sense of anticipation as the planet’s butterscotch face loomed larger. It wasn’t just lack of funds that had kept her from visiting Mars before. She reckoned there was something ghoulish about the tourists who did make the trip; some morbid craving to revel in the horror of what had happened to the planet. But now that she had been sent here on someone else’s orders, it was difficult not to want to see it for herself.
The Scoured Zone began south of the Hellas Planitia and reached as far north as Cydonia, encompassing all of the crater-pocked uplands of the Arabia Terra. Between the poles, the rest of Mars was dusted in shades of brittle blue-green: vast prairies of hardy, gene-tweaked vegetation laid down over a hundred years earlier. Canals, etched across the surface with laser precision, were twinkling back ribbons of reflected sunlight. At the hubs and junctions of the irrigation system, Auger made out the off-white sprawl of cities and townships, the tentative scratches of roads and the lines of tethered dirigibles. There were even a few wispy streaks of cloud and a handful of hexagonal lakes, clustered together like cells in a beehive.
But between Hellas Planitia and Cydonia nothing grew, nothing endured, nothing lived or moved. Even the mindless clouds exhibited a wary disregard for that whole area. It had been that way for twenty-three years, since the last days of the brief but bitter war that had erupted between the Slashers and the Threshers over rights of access to Earth.
Auger barely remembered the war. As a child, she had been cosseted from the worst of the news. But it really hadn’t been all that long ago, and there was still a sense that certain scores had yet to be settled. She thought of Caliskan, losing a brother to the Slashers in the battle to reclaim Phobos. The war must have seemed like yesterday to him. How could he accept Slasher involvement in Earth so readily, after what they had taken from him? How could he be so cold, so political?
Another series of manoeuvres followed, smoother this time, and then—quite without warning—Auger found her view of the Scoured Zone obstructed by the illuminated, machine-lined walls of a docking bay sliding slowly past. Beyond the bay, glimpsed for an instant, was a curving, airless horizon of very dark rock.
She had been misinformed about Mars. It had never been her destination.
The welcoming party on the other side of the airlock consisted of eight men and women in USNE military uniform, accompanied by two snake robots.
“I’m Aveling,” said the tallest, thinnest man in the group, observing Auger with pale aluminium-grey eyes. He had a ruined voice: a slow, parched rasp that she had to strain to understand. “You’ll be taking orders and instructions from me for the duration of your mission. If that’s a problem, get over it now.”
“And if I don’t get over it?” she asked.
“We’ll put you on the first ship back to Tanglewood and that unpleasant little tribunal you should be facing.”
“Only with half my memory missing,” she said.
“Correct.”
“If it’s all right with you, I’ll try the taking orders thing for now, see how that works out.”
“Fine,” Aveling said.
He had the look of a serious hard bastard, the kind who was even more intimidating because he appeared intelligent and cultured, while also giving off the unavoidable impression that he could kill anyone in the room before they’d taken their next breath. She had been told nothing about him, but she knew instantly that he was a veteran of the war and that he had probably killed more Slashers than she had met in her life, and that he had probably never missed a night’s sleep because of it.
“I’d still really like someone to tell me what I’m doing on Phobos,” Auger said as Aveling’s party led her away from the shuttle, with two snake robots slithering along behind.