“Are you sure it came from the farther reaches of the Solar System?” Damon asked, determined not to let the matter lie.
“Not yet,” she answered, equably. “Investigations of this kind take time, and we have to be very careful to have all the data in place before we draw conclusions.”
“Yes,” Damon said, in a neutral tone which was meant to imply far more than the words could say. “I understand that.” He really thought he did. That part, at least, he thought he had figured out.
“Please be careful, Damon,” Eveline said. “In spite of our past disagreements, we all love you. We’d really like to have you back one day, when you’ve got all the nonsense out of your system.”
I believe you would, he thought. In fact, I believe you think you will. All he said out loud was: “I’ll be careful. Don’t worry about me. You’ve got better things to do.”
He tried to reach Madoc Tamlin, but he failed. He still didn’t read anything sinister into that, until he received an incoming call from Hiru Yamanaka informing him that Diana Caisson had been arrested for questioning about her possible implication in the suspicious death of Surinder Nahal.
At first, Yamanaka refused to let Damon talk to Diana, although he admitted that she had asked repeatedly to see him. The Interpol man also refused to discuss the details of the case which he was supposedly building against her, although he confirmed that she had been captured while fleeing with a companion from a house where Nahal’s body had been found, and that the police were still searching for Madoc Tamlin, who had been conclusively identified as the companion in question. It was not until Interpol received confirmation from the Oakland police that the body discovered in the house had been dead for some considerable time before Diana and Madoc Tamlin had arrived there that he relented.
“Will you let her go now?” Damon asked, as he was taken down to the holding cells beneath Interpol’s L.A. headquarters.
“I can hold her for a while longer,” Yamanaka told him. “I’ll charge her with illegal entry if I have to. I’d like to talk to your friend Tamlin before I let her go, if only to cross-check her claim that she doesn’t know why they went there. I do wish you hadn’t involved Tamlin in this business; it’s an unhelpful complication. When you offer money for information you attract all manner of spiders—not just the clever crackers who spend all their real-time poking around the Web but the poisonous ones who prey on anyone and everyone.”
“He seems to have located Surinder Nahal before you did,” Damon pointed out. “Did he lead you to him, by any chance?”
“No, he didn’t,” Yamanaka replied, in a faintly offended tone.
“You were acting on information received, weren’t you?” Damon guessed. “The people who tipped you off were the ones who got to Nahal before Madoc did. They’re one step ahead of all of us, aren’t they? Do you have any real idea yet who they are?”
“Some of them are one-time friends of your father’s, Mr. Hart,” Yamanaka said, perhaps feeling the need to demonstrate once again that he wasn’t a fool. “I think they knew that Silas Arnett had been kidnapped before we began looking for him, but that they preferred to try to handle things on their own—just as you did. Independence of thought and action seems to run in the family—and the Eliminators are far from being the only secret society supported and sustained by the Web.”
There was no time for further talk; Yamanaka let him into the cell where Interpol was keeping Diana. She seemed to be glad to see him, even though she hadn’t forgiven him anything. There was a noticeable tension in their embrace.
“This is crazy,” she said. “They must know we didn’t kill the guy. We didn’t even know the body was there.”
“They know you didn’t kill him,” Damon reassured her. “What on earth possessed you to go there? Why was Madoc fool enough to let you?”
“He asked me to help him,” Diana said defensively. “He didn’t tell me what he was doing. He just wanted me to talk my way into the place—spin a line to persuade the guy to open his door. It wasn’t necessary; the door was open when we got there. We didn’t even have time to start stripping data from the guy’s systems. The cops must have done that after they picked us up; whatever there was, they’ve got. Can you get me out, Damon? You owe me that much.”
While she talked, Diana moved her hands nervously back and forth. Damon didn’t doubt that the walls had eyes which could see every last gesture, but he was fairly sure the patient watchers wouldn’t be able to decode the signals she was sending. In a world where any environment might be bugged, people like Madoc Tamlin were careful to develop private codes of communication, known only to their closest friends. Diana clearly wasn’t an expert in the use of this one, but she knew enough to spell out a name, repeating it to make sure he got it.
The name she was signing was “Lenny.” There was only one Lenny she could mean.
“I’ll get you a lawyer,” Damon promised. “I don’t think they’re really interested in pressing charges—they just need an excuse to talk to Madoc for a while. They want to know what he found out, just for curiosity’s sake. It’ll be OK. You’ll be out in no time.”
As expected, Yamanaka was waiting for him outside.
“What did you find out?” the policeman inquired, politely.
“Nothing you didn’t overhear,” Damon assured him, not expecting to be believed. “How are things going at your end?”
“As your girlfriend said, we stripped the data from the systems in the house in Oakland and we’re going through it with a fine-toothed comb. It’s possible that Arnett was held there, but he’s certainly not there now and we can’t be sure. The fact that Nahal died in problematic circumstances gives us carte blanche to root through everything he left behind—if he is behind this puppet-show, we’ll uncover every last detail of it eventually. It’s just a matter of time.”
Damon was alert enough to note the peculiar circumlocution. “What do you mean, problematic circumstances?he asked. “I thought he’d been murdered.”
“According to the medical examiner,” Yamanaka said, “he wasn’t—not directly, at any rate. He seems to have died of natural causes. The only mystery is why his internal technology didn’t prevent it, but it’s probable that he was simply too old. We’re so used to nanotech magic that we’ve come to expect miracles which even the cleverest machinery can’t deliver.”
My father died of natural causes too, Damon thought, and I dare say that poor Karol will turn up drowned. Rajuder Singh hasn’t recovered consciousness yet, and perhaps he never will. If Silas is dead, too, that only leaves Eveline unaccounted for. Except, of course, for me.
“We live in a very complicated world,” Damon said, matching the Interpol’s man’s oddly irritating philosophical manner. “We’re so good at creating virtual realities that we’ve almost lost the trick of distinguishing appearance from reality. Maybe we expect more of social machinery like Interpol than Interpol can possibly be expected to deliver.”
“Are you talking about truth, or justice?” Yamanaka countered.
“Both,” said Damon, drily.
When he left Interpol headquarters Damon immediately headed for the most crowded streets in the city. He was reasonably sure that Yamanaka’s taciturn companion was still looking out for him, and that he wouldn’t be easy to shake off. He bought a new suit of clothes and left the old one behind, just in case Yamanaka had planted any discreet bugs on his person, and he stopped off at a public gym for a shower, just in case there was anything in his hair that shouldn’t have been there. His internal technology was good enough to take care of anything that had got under his skin. He looked up Lenny Garon’s address on the gym’s directory-terminal.