She was going past an Aldi supermarket now, with a construction site on the other side of the busy road. And saw him, saw Fahad in his blue parka weaving across four lanes of traffic. Horns, brake squeals. Fahad reached the far side, was running across a sloping lot of bare dirt when a white van cut out of the traffic and barrelled towards him. He glanced over his shoulder and put on a spurt of speed, but the van overtook him and cut in hard, and as he changed direction a man jumped out of the back and grabbed him and hauled him backwards, struggling and kicking. The man lifted Fahad into the van and jumped in after him and the van took off, banging down the slope.
Chloe, stranded on the far side of the busy road, saw a red 4x4 swerve out of the traffic and follow the van. She thought she recognised the driver, and thought that if she was right she really had gone through the mirror.
42. Shit Becoming Real
Mangala | 30 July
‘I am happy to keep him locked up here,’ Karl Schweda said. ‘He admits he was at the scene of the shootout and also your partner’s murder. He possesses a firearm which he acquired illegally. He admits to using it…It is more than enough to detain him.’
‘I think he was telling the truth about what happened to my partner,’ Vic said. ‘He had no reason to kill him. If he did, he wouldn’t have come to ask for my help. And if he’s telling the truth about Skip, the rest of his story just might be true, too.’
They were sitting in Karl’s office. Adam Nevers was in one of the cells downstairs, demolishing a burger sent over from a café in town. The local doctor had cleaned and rebandaged his wound, and he’d told his story to Vic and Karl, putting it on the official record.
He’d come out to Idunn’s Valley, he’d said, because he had been following Danny Drury and his associates after they’d kidnapped one of the stowaways from the shipping container. And he’d followed the stowaways to Mangala because they possessed a potent artefact that came from an Elder Culture site excavated by Cal McBride’s company and wanted to find more like it or find something larger and even more potent…Nevers hadn’t been clear on that point. He’d said that Sahar Chauhan, the biochemist who’d cooked meq for the McBride family, had sent the artefact back to Earth, to his son and daughter. A little bead containing some form of eidolon that had affected the children. The son, Fahad, had begun to draw pictures of the same alien landscape, over and over. They had attracted the attention of a research group owned by Ada Morange, a biotech entrepreneur. Her company had sent Fahad and two of her employees to Mangala, inside that shipping container; Nevers and his partner had ridden on the same shuttle on corporate tickets.
‘If you had come to us about this thing instead of pulling this sneaky spy shit,’ Vic said, ‘my partner might still be alive. Yours too.’
Nevers didn’t have anything to say about that.
‘Tell me what happened outside the shuttle terminal,’ Vic said.
‘Ellis and I planned to keep watch on the traffic coming out of the terminal, hoping to intercept the stowaways,’ Nevers said. ‘But we were ambushed as soon as we turned off the main road. Ellis went in one direction; I went in the other. They chased down Ellis, and shot at me when I tried to go to his aid.’
‘Did you see who killed your partner?’
According to Little Dave, Cal McBride owned the ray gun that had killed Ellis Peters, but it would be nice to get confirmation from an eyewitness.
But Nevers was shaking his head. ‘I was too far away. I saw someone stoop over Ellis, saw a flash of blue light…’
‘And then?’
‘And then they came after me, and I got out of there. I didn’t have a gun at the time. There was nothing else I could do.’
‘No one’s blaming you for taking off,’ Vic said.
Nevers said, ‘I was hoping, now that I’ve told you everything I know about the death of your partner, that you would be willing to share any information you have about the death of mine.’
‘I don’t have anything I can take to the prosecutor,’ Vic said.
He wasn’t going to open up his investigation to a man who’d been operating on the dark side. And he didn’t like Nevers’s weak attempt to justify himself. If you do something you know is wrong, you should own it, not try to explain it away.
‘I’m not talking about facts,’ Nevers said.
‘Who do you think did it?’
‘I’m certain that it was either Cal McBride or Danny Drury. The man who used to run the company that took out the licence on Site 326, or the man who runs the company now. Whoever it was knew who we were, why we’d come here. It’s very likely that someone in the force back home has been feeding them information. Old-school criminal families like the McBrides always have an inside man. When I get back, I’m going to make it my first priority to find out who it is, and who they passed the information to.’
Vic thought it likely that the McBride family would have passed any inside information to Danny Drury, and McBride had found out because he had an informant in Drury’s crew. Like, for instance, Little Dave.
He said, ‘Someone killed your partner. You fled the scene. What did you do then?’
‘I found Danny Drury’s house. I found Cal McBride’s construction site, and the hotel where he lived. I was planning to confront McBride first. It was easier to get to him. But then I found where the stowaways were hiding. A place owned by a so-called freelance biologist. She paid for a copy of the excavation licence of that Elder Culture site, and she exports material back to Earth, to Ada Morange’s company. I’d just caught up with them when Drury’s people snatched the boy, Fahad. I followed Drury here, and so did McBride. And that’s where things started to go wrong.’
‘Did you see the shootout?’
Nevers shook his head. ‘I was watching Drury. He got into a speedboat, and took off downriver. By the time I heard about the shootout, it was all over.’
Nevers had been looking for a boat, trying and failing to buy or hire one because everyone was heading upriver, away from the dust storm, when he’d spotted three men Drury had left behind, presumably to look for any of their enemies who had escaped.
‘It wasn’t hard to keep track of what they were doing; there was always at least one of them keeping watch at the docks,’ Nevers said. ‘Sitting in a Range Rover. When all three headed out of town I followed them, saw them kidnap Skip.’
Vic said, ‘They kidnapped him?’
‘He drove out of town, towards the site of the shootout. They ran his car off the road, bundled him into the trunk of his car, took him out to a place behind a big storage shed. Perhaps they wanted to question him, but when they opened the trunk he came at them, they shot him…’
Vic felt something cold and heavy move through him. He said, ‘You didn’t intervene?’
‘Of course I did. That’s how I got shot,’ Nevers said, staring straight at Vic as if daring him to deny it.
Karl stirred and said, ‘How do you know these were Drury’s men?’
‘I staked out Drury’s house after he snatched Fahad,’ Nevers said. ‘I recognised two of them.’
‘He kept this kid in his house?’ Vic felt a little chill, wondering if the kid could have been there when he and Skip had visited the place.
‘I didn’t see Fahad,’ Nevers said. ‘But when I saw Drury and half a dozen of his crew leave in a little convoy, I followed them. And that’s how I ended up here.’
Karl said, ‘And before that, you followed these stowaways all the way from Earth. This artefact must be very valuable.’