‘How the hell can you know about that?’
‘You don’t have high enough clearance even to ask me that fucking question,’ Donohue replied angrily.
‘Before you sent me after Hanover, you told me I had a chance of finding out who blew the Galileo link – and that whoever did it was linked to Hsiu-Chuan. Or was all of that just so much bullshit?’
A Black Dog clumped past them, followed by two sonar tanks, only blurrily visible through the opaqued glass. The car trembled under the impact of their passing.
Donohue pulled himself more upright, one corner of his mouth twitching up into the same sneer Saul remembered from Hong Kong. ‘I don’t have to tell you,’ he said, enunciating the words carefully, ‘One. Fucking. Thing.’
Saul shot him in the thigh, taking a chance that the din of surrounding machinery would drown out the sound of the gun firing. Donohue screamed and jerked back against the door, his face turning alabaster white as he grabbed at his wounded leg. He seemed to grow suddenly smaller, his breath hissing in and out in small, tight gasps between his clenched teeth.
Saul leaned in closer, his gun now angled towards Donohue’s crotch. ‘I just want you to understand exactly how I’m feeling,’ he said coldly. ‘I’ve been waiting ten long, miserable fucking years just so I can find out if my wife and daughter are even alive. I want to know who did this thing – what person is responsible for putting my life on hold for all this time. So I want you, Agent Donohue, to tell me every last fucking thing you know. I’ve been arrested, held prisoner, tortured, had guns pointed at me, you name it – and if there’s one person around here who seems to have a better grasp of whatever the fuck is really going on, it’s you.’
‘Or what?’ Donohue gasped. ‘Or you’ll kill me?’
Saul shook his head. ‘No, I’m a lot more imaginative than that. First I’ll blow your right arm off.’ He gestured with the gun. ‘Then the left. Then I’ll drill a hole through your balls. Then—’
‘All right,’ said Donohue. ‘All right. Jesus, I’ll tell you.’
Saul leaned back and waited, the loup-garou making him feel superhuman, invulnerable.
‘It was never really about Galileo,’ said Donohue. ‘When we sent you after Hanover, I mean. It was just about the shipment.’
‘The artefacts from the far future? What exactly were they carrying in that shipment?’
Donohue laughed weakly and rolled his eyes. ‘What the hell do you think was in that shipment? It was something that triggered the growths, left behind by whatever it was that built the Founder Network. But we got careless.’ He winced in pain and shifted slightly. ‘Turns out that shipment went to the bottom of the Pacific before it even managed to reach Taiwan.’
‘And that’s the cause of all this?’
‘Looks like it,’ said Donohue. His skin had by now taken on a pale and waxen appearance.
‘And Galileo?’
‘We figured you needed an added incentive to find that shipment.’
Saul fought the urge to place the gun between Donohue’s eyes and pull the trigger. ‘And Hsiu-Chuan? Where does he come into it?’
‘No.’ Donohue shook his head, and looked back at Saul with wide, frightened eyes.
Saul pushed the gun barrel against Donohue’s uninjured leg. ‘Five seconds.’
Panicked, Donohue put out a hand. ‘Wait! Okay, all right.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Hsiu-Chuan was just one link in a very long chain of Sphere politicos that wanted the shipment hijacked.’
‘Why did they want it so badly? Because of whatever triggered the growths?’
‘No, we didn’t have any idea what the artefacts were or what they could do. The Sphere couldn’t have known either.’
‘But there has to be some reason they wanted that particular shipment. They wouldn’t have planned things that carefully just for the hell of it.’
‘They got wind of the fact that we had discovered wormhole generators the size of your fist.’ Donohue coughed. ‘They were right, but they didn’t realize it was an alien technology. Maybe they suspected it . . . all I know is, they wound up grabbing the wrong shipment.’ Donohue groaned, clutching at his injured leg. ‘For Christ’s sake, let me go. I need to see a doctor.’
Saul shook his head in astonishment. ‘I can’t believe this. Billions of people are going to die, all because you people fucked up. Did you ever think it might have been better just to let the Sphere have their own damn wormholes?’
Donohue grunted, baring his teeth from the onslaught of the pain. ‘You really think technology like that would have been better in the hands of men like Hsiu-Chuan? Then you’re a fucking idiot.’
‘Tell me what you know about Hanover. Where does he come into it?’
‘We found out that he was taking bribes from organized smuggling gangs on Kepler. We kept him in business on the understanding that he could stay out of jail as long as he funnelled information back to us, but it backfired.’
‘Backfired? How?’
‘Hsiu-Chuan’s people found out he was playing both sides, and threatned to kill his entire family in front of him if he didn’t give them what they wanted. That meant access codes, times and places, delivery dates and security hacks. Everything they needed to send a team into Florida, and walk right back out with the shipment.’
‘Jesus.’ Saul had a mental picture of Donohue running up and down a leaking dam, trying to plug up hundreds of ever-widening cracks. ‘You really made a mess of this, didn’t you?’
‘Listen to me,’ rasped Donohue, his voice growing weaker. ‘About Mitchell Stone.’
‘He’s still alive, isn’t he?’
‘Yes, he is, and whatever you do with me, you need to help us find him. And stop him.’
‘Why? What’s he got to do with this?’
‘We interrogated him. Put him under, and asked him questions. The things he told us, he’s . . . he’s not even goddamn human any more.’
‘What?’
‘That shipment we sent you to look for?’ Donohue coughed. ‘There’s no reason why the Sphere drone carrying it should have gone out of control the way it did. Those things are near as damn fail-proof. Then we found out that the Sphere lost contact with it at exactly the same instant Stone—’
The shot came from nowhere, blowing out the car’s front windscreen. Saul ducked instinctively, slamming the accelerator down, without pause for thought. The car surged forward.
More shots followed, and Saul grabbed hold of the steering wheel as it emerged from the dashboard. Donohue scrabbled at him with claw-like fingers, attempting to wrest the wheel from his grasp.
Somewhere amid the din and fury, Saul realized the terrible mistake he had made in not forcing Donohue to remove his contacts. The whole time they’d been talking, rescue had already been on the way.
Troopers scattered as the car hurtled towards them, their outlines shimmering. Donohue wrenched at the wheel and the car side-swiped a Black Dog, ripping the passenger-side door away. Donohue screamed and held on tight, as Saul managed to accelerate away again. Saul let go of the wheel just long enough to raise one leg and boot Donohue hard enough to send him tumbling out of the car.
He then grabbed hold of the wheel again, glancing in the rear-view mirror to see Donohue rolling to a halt behind him. Saul nailed the accelerator to the floor, gunning the vehicle for a ramp down which daylight filtered from above. He twisted the wheel wildly, skirting another Black Dog making its way down the same ramp, and cursing as troopers darted out of his way with only centimetres to spare.
Suddenly, miraculously, he was outside, the early morning sun pale and wan behind clouds. A cordon of tanks and Dogs surrounded the Array directly ahead of him. He kept his fot on the accelerator, swerving past several vehicles heading towards the ramp from the direction of a hopper, then past the armoured cordon and on into the no man’s land separating it from the crowds. The car ploughed through a dense tangle of barbed wire before jarring to a sudden halt.