“Yes,” Iris said shortly. She glanced round. Mhara was standing, frozen, her pistol angled slightly upwards and a confused look in her eyes. “Mhara? Child?”
The young woman shook her head. “I’m sorry.” She picked up the shoulder bag and carefully stowed her pistol inside, using hook-and-eye strips to secure it. “Never done that before.”
“You’ve attended executions, surely. . . .”
“Yes, milady. But it’s different when you do it yourself.”
“You’ll get used to it,” Iris reassured her. “Griben, he knew too damned much. Family Trade are on our tail and he’s not Outer Family or personal retainer. He had to go. You’ve got the disks. Mhara, the other device, please.”
“Other—oh.” Ven Hjalmar looked at the PC in distaste. “You don’t expect me to”—
“I surely do.” Iris held up a pair of latex gloves. “You’ll want these.”
None of them were particularly experienced at black-bag jobs; it took them nearly ten minutes to unscrew the casing of the PC and position the bulk eraser’s electromagnet above the hard disk drive. Finally, Iris hit the power switch. “Ah, good,” she said, as the disk error warning came up on the blood-specked screen. “Mhara, you see the filing cabinets yonder? You take the right one, Griben can take the middle, and I shall take the left. Start at the top and work down. You are looking for anything pertaining to Applied Genomics Corporation, the W-316 clinical trial, Angbard Lofstrom, Griben ven Hjalmar here, or adoption papers relating to children.”
“Adoption papers?” Mhara sounded confused.
“Legal documents,” Iris said blandly.
“Iris.” Griben looked worried. “This is going to take some time. What if someone—”
Iris snorted. “You have your locket, yes? I had the site prepared.”
“But we’re on the fourth floor!”
“So there’s a net. Try not to break your nose with your kneecaps. It’ll be harder for me if we have to take it, so let us start searching right away, no?” She levered herself out of her wheelchair and shuffled cautiously towards the wall of cabinets.
The office was overheated, and the smells of burned powder and spilled blood hung over them as they pored over the file drawers. After ten minutes Griben finally hit pay dirt. “He had a file on Applied Genomics,” he announced.
“Ah, excellent.” Iris gestured at her wheelchair. “In there.”
“Milady.” Mhara gestured politely at another drawer. “Is this important?”
Iris leaned over to look. “Well, how interesting.” She lifted the fat, spiral-bound document out of its hanger. “Names and addresses. It seems you’re not the only doctor who doesn’t trust computers to remember everything for you, Griben.”
“Dash it! We specifically told him not to do that!”
Iris sighed. “I ordered someone to black-bag his house this morning. His divorce came through nine months ago, so I think there is no need to trouble his ex-wife and children.” She frowned, pensive. “What have I forgotten?”
Griben nodded across the room. “I should check the bookcase. And the desk drawers. Just to be sure.”
“An excellent idea. Perhaps you’d like to see me out, afterwards?”
Ven Hjalmar raised an eyebrow. “Why—”
Iris nodded at Mhara. “She has other tasks.”
“Ah, jolly good.” He nodded. Mhara picked up the files and waited attentively as he scoured the bookcases and finally the desk drawers—working carefully around Dr. Darling’s body—then nodded again. “That’s all,” he announced. Darling’s desk was mostly for show; beyond the usual collection of stationery items, the pedestal unit was empty.
Iris shuffled back to her wheelchair. “Good. Mhara?”
“Milady.” She bobbed her head, holding the files two-handed.
“I want these files burned before we leave the building. Afterwards, make your way back to the house when you are ready.”
“Yes, milady.” Mhara smiled, a brief flash of expression crossing her face. Then she tilted her left wrist to expose the face of a wristwatch, and vanished.
“You’re sure about the net,” Griben said reflectively.
“She’s sure about it, and that’s what matters.” Iris lowered herself carefully into the wheelchair. “Mind you, she was there when I ordered its construction.”
A thoughtful pause, then: “I think I can see where your daughter gets it from.”
“Oh dear.” Iris whirred towards the door, then glanced over her shoulder with a fey expression. “Come on, Griben! We have a conspiracy to conceal and if you keep thinking about it we’ll be here until suppertime.”
They left the room with the conviction of a job well done, and no inkling of the significance of the encrypted memory stick attached to the key ring in the corpse’s coat pocket.
In a muddy field outside Concord, behind a sign declaring it to be a HISTORY FAIRE, the circus-sized tent was swarming with spooks.
Colonel Smith’s driver stopped outside the gate. A pair of police cars, their lights strobing, blocked the entrance; beyond the uniformed officers Smith could see parked buses and the tents of the forensic crews. Serious-looking officers in black windbreakers bearing the letters DEA paced around under the watchful eyes of guards in body armor and helmets. Casual rubberneckers might mistake them for a police SWAT team, but Smith was under no such illusion.
“Give me that badge.” Smith waited as the cop checked his name against a clipboard, carefully compared his face to the photograph, then nodded. “Go ahead, sir. HQ is the third tent on the left.”
“You heard him.” Smith leaned back and closed his eyes for a minute as his driver crept across the rutted ground. Too many vehicles had come this way too recently. A familiar drumming noise prompted him to open his eyes. Sure enough, a big helicopter was thuttering across the sky, descending towards the field. It’s not black; just very, very, dark gray. Smith suppressed a grin. What had happened at this site was no laughing matter. How the hell did they manage it? he asked himself as he opened the door and climbed out of the back of the car.
The mood in the headquarters tent was gray, too, as he discovered the moment he walked through the door. “Sir? How up to date are you?” Judith Herz, latterly of the FBI but currently answering to Smith, had been on-site when the shit hit the fan. Now she looked drained, hollows under her eyes from close to twenty-four hours supervising the site cleanup.
“I’ve been too busy fighting brushfires and keeping the press off your neck to track everything. Have you got time to give me a guided tour?”
Herz rubbed the side of her face then glanced at one of the men sitting in front of a rack of radios and laptop computers. “John, you want to take over for an hour? I need to bring the colonel up to speed.”
“Okay, I’ll do that.” John—heavily built, wearing one of the ubiquitous DEA windbreakers, nodded briefly before turning back to his screen.
“This way, Colonel.” Herz gestured back to the front awning of the tent. “Let me show you what we found.”
Forensics had already finished with the big top before Herz beckoned Smith past the incident tape and into the open space within. Smith glanced around curiously. Like any big top, its roof was held up by a pair of huge posts. But the resemblance stopped at that point; there were no seats, no trapezes or safety nets, and nothing in this particular ring could be described as a laughing matter.
“It’s a regular headquarters setup, we think,” Herz commented as she walked towards a row of tables at one side of the huge tent. “Look.” The tables showed every sign of having been abandoned in a hurry: folding chairs tipped over, equipment crates lying on their sides. One of the tables was covered completely by a large relief map, various implements strewn across it—notepads, pens, protractors, and folded pieces of card.