“Sounds like exactly the sort of thing that should be banned by any right-thinking society. How did he get hold of it?”
“From Anthony Theobald Ruskin-Sartorious, apparently. Anthony Theobald must have procured it through his black-market arms contacts. He used the nonvelope to escape from his habitat just before it was torched by Dravidian’s ship.” Aumonier frowned slightly.
“But Anthony Theobald didn’t escape. All you had to interview was his beta-level copy.”
“Gaffney knew differently, apparently. He intercepted the nonvelope before it fell into the hands of Anthony Theobald’s allies.”
“And then what?”
“He cracked it open. Then he ran a trawl on Anthony Theobald to see if he could find out where the thing Ruskin-Sartorious was sheltering had got to.”
“Voi. Gaffney trawled him?” Reading her expression, Dreyfus could imagine what was going through her mind. It was one thing to be trawled inside Panoply, where strict rules were in force. It was another to receive the same treatment elsewhere, inflicted by a man acting outside the bounds of the law who cared nothing for the consequences of his actions.
“He didn’t get as much information as he was hoping for, unfortunately.”
“I presume he kept digging until he’d burnt away Anthony Theobald’s brain?”
“That’s the odd thing,” Dreyfus said.
“He appears to have held back at the last. He got something out of the man, enough for him to stop before he burnt him out completely.”
“Why didn’t he go all the way if he thought there was something more to gain?”
“Because Gaffney doesn’t see himself as a monster. He’s a prefect, still doing his job, still sticking to his principles while the rest of us betray the cause. He killed Clepsydra because he had no other option. He killed the people in Ruskin-Sartorious for the same reason. But he’s not an indiscriminate murderer. He’s still thinking about the tens of millions he’s going to save.”
“What else did he get?”
“That was where the trawl team hit resistance. Gaffney really didn’t want to give up whatever he had learned from Anthony Theobald. But they got a word.”
“Tell me.”
“Firebrand.”
Aumonier nodded very slowly. She said the word herself, as if testing how it sounded coming from her own lips.
“Did the summary team have anything to say about this word?”
“To them it was meaningless noise. Firebrand could be a weapon, a ship, an agent, anything. Or it could be the name of the puppy he owned when he was five.”
“Do you have any theories?”
“I’m inclined to think it’s just noise: either noise that came out of Anthony Theobald, which Gaffney assumed was significant, or noise that came out of Gaffney. I ran a search on the word. Lots of priors, but nothing that raised any flags.”
“There wouldn’t have been any,” Aumonier said.
Dreyfus heard something in her tone of voice that he hadn’t been expecting.
“Because it’s meaningless?”
“No. It’s anything but. Firebrand has a very specific meaning, especially in a Panoply context.”
Dreyfus shook his head emphatically.
“Nothing came up, Jane.”
“That’s because we’re talking about an operational secret so highly classified that even Gaffney wouldn’t have known about it. It’s superblack, screened from all possible scrutiny even within the organisation.”
“Are you going to enlighten me?”
“Firebrand was a cell within Panoply,” Aumonier said.
“It was created eleven years ago to study and exploit any remaining artefacts connected with the Clockmaker affair.”
“You mean the clocks, the musical boxes?”
She answered with superhuman calm, taking no pleasure in contradicting him.
“More than that. The Clockmaker created other things during its spree. The public record holds that none of these artefacts survived, but in reality a handful of them were recovered. They were small things, of unknown purpose, but because they had been made by the Clockmaker, they were considered too unique to destroy. At least not until we’d studied them, worked out what they were and how we could apply that data to the future security of the Glitter Band.” Before he could get a word in, she said: “Don’t hate us for doing that, Tom. We had a duty to learn everything we could. We didn’t know where the Clockmaker had come from. Because we didn’t understand it, we couldn’t rule out the possibility of another one arising. If that ever happened, we owed it to the citizenry to be prepared.”
“And?” he asked.
“Are we?”
“I instigated Firebrand. The cell was answerable only to me, and for a couple of years I permitted it to operate in absolute secrecy within Panoply.”
“How come Gaffney didn’t know about it?”
“Gaffney’s predecessor knew—we couldn’t have set it up without some cooperation from Security—but when he handed over the reins there was no need to inform Gaffney. By then the cell was self-sufficient, operating within Panoply but completely isolated from the usual mechanisms of oversight and surveillance. And that was how things continued for a couple of years.”
“What happened then?”
“There was an accident: one of the seemingly dead artefacts reactivated itself. It killed half the cell before the rest brought it under control. When the news reached me, I took the decision to shut down Firebrand. I realised then that no benefits could outweigh the risks of allowing those artefacts to remain in existence. I ordered all the remains to be destroyed, all the records to be deleted and the cell itself to be disbanded. Those involved were dispersed back to normal duties, resuming the jobs they’d never officially left.”
“And?” Dreyfus asked.
“Shortly after, I received confirmation that my orders had been implemented. The cell was no more. The artefacts had been destroyed.”
“But that was nine years ago. Why would Firebrand come up again now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Someone’s stirring up old ghosts, Jane. If Firebrand is really connected with Panoply, how did Anthony Theobald know about it?”
“We don’t know for sure that he did. That could be a rogue inference from the trawl.”
“Or it could explain why Gaffney was so interested in the Ruskin-Sartorious family,” Dreyfus said.
“You shut down that cell, Jane. But what if the cell had other ideas?” Her eyes flashed nervously.
“I’m not with you.”
“Try this on for size. The people running that cell decided their work was too important to be closed down, no matter what you thought. They told you it was all over for Firebrand. But what if they just relocated their efforts?”
“I’d have known.”
“You already told me this cell was damn near untraceable,” Dreyfus said.
“Can you really be sure they couldn’t have kept it running without your knowledge?”
“They’d never have done such a thing.”
“But what if they believed they were acting in the right? You clearly thought there was a justification for Firebrand when you started it. What if the people inside thought those reasons were still valid, even after you tried to kill it?”
“They were loyal to me,” Aumonier said.
“I don’t doubt it. But you’d already set a bad example, Jane. You’d shown them that deception was acceptable, in the interests of the common good. What if they decided that they had to deceive you, to keep the cell operational?” For a long moment Aumonier said nothing, as if Dreyfus’ words had not just stunned her, but undermined her every certainty.
“I told them to put a stop to it,” she said, so quietly that Dreyfus would not have caught the words had he not already attuned himself to her voice.
“I ordered them to end Firebrand.”
“It appears they thought differently.”
“But why would all this surface now, Tom? What does any of this have to do with Anthony Theobald, or Gaffney, or Aurora?”
“There was something in the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble that had to be destroyed,” Dreyfus said.