In the end he’d had to admit defeat: if there was any information on Peitai out there, Will couldn’t find it. Instead he’d just ended up thinking about Jo and whether or not Janet would have liked her, wondering if his dead wife would approve of his seeing another woman.
Then he went looking for Alastair Middleton. It didn’t take long when you knew which databases to hack into.
The halfhead didn’t even look up as Will walked up to him and stood watching yet another bit of sodden rubbish disappear into the bin. There was something almost peaceful about halfheads. Something timeless and serene. There was never any rush. They had nothing left to worry about.
‘Afternoon, Alastair,’ said Will, shifting his grip on the carrier bag with his shopping in it. ‘Long time no see.’
If Alastair Middleton heard him, he didn’t give any sign, just went on picking up the trash and depositing it in his little buggy.
‘Been thinking about you a lot over the last couple of days. Your old mentor’s dead. Did you know?’
Alastair didn’t say anything, but then again he couldn’t: his mind and lower jaw had been taken away long ago.
‘Got burned to death in a Roadhugger that crashed. Just like that. No more Dr Fiona Westfield.’ He stuck his hands in his pockets and shrugged. ‘Don’t suppose that means an awful lot to you though, does it? She just used you the same way she used everyone else: wound you up and let you go.’
Water ran down the truncated features and dripped off the exposed upper teeth, making the thing that had once been Alastair Middleton glisten.
‘You know, I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t have been kinder to kill you when I had the chance: boil your chest away just like you did to Janet. What do you think? You happy as you are? No longer a menace to society?’
A group of about a dozen schoolgirls-all of them clearly stoned out of their heads-staggered across the square, giggling and tittering in their long red cloats. Will watched them jump from puddle to puddle, shrieking with the joy of being young and off their faces.
‘Yeah, well,’ he said when they’d gone. ‘Just wanted you to know she was dead.’
Will didn’t wait for a reply-there wasn’t any point-he turned his back and squelched his way to the nearest shuttle station.
Brian and Jo would be in the pub by now, having the traditional booze-up to celebrate catching their bad guy. And God knew Will could do with celebrating something.
There was no sign of the pickup team in the Dog and Diode, so Will dragged out his mobile and called Brian’s. No response, so he tried him at home.
The little screen crackled and fizzed for a bit before Brian’s face swam into focus. Will was on his best behaviour. Didn’t even obscure the camera.
‘Brian, how…God you look terrible!’
Agent Alexander’s face was pale and baggy, his eyes bloodshot, his nose red. He sighed. ‘Will.’ That was it, no niceties, no hello, no merry banter.
‘Are you all right?’
‘No.’
‘Jesus, Brian, what happened?’
He rubbed at his eyes. ‘You don’t want to know. And I really don’t want to talk about it.’ He took a couple of deep breaths. ‘I’m sorry Will. I’ll…I’ll talk to you later. I can’t do this right now.’
Someone appeared at his shoulder and Will recognized James’s voice as he wrapped Brian up in a hug. ‘Shhhh…Come on. Let it go. It’s all right.’
Then the connection went dead.
Will frowned at the flashing ‘CALL TERMINATED’ icon. It wasn’t like Brian to let things get to him. Not like that.
Will called the West George Street Bluecoat station. A harassed-sounding sergeant told him he could go screw himself if he thought they were going to hand out a DS’s private number to some wanker in a pub, before slamming the cut-off switch. Will was left with the ‘CALL TERMINATED’ icon again.
He could always dig Jo’s number out of the Bluecoats records when he got home. And anyway, he had a plastic of wine and a pizza delivery menu waiting for him. Who could ask for more?
She pushes the datapad away and stretches. It’s taken her most of the day, but she now has addresses for all her remaining children. Surprisingly, most of them live in the same place. Three stay out in the lower suburbs, but the other eighteen are all bundled up, nice and snug, in Monstrosity Square. Strange that fate made them gravitate together like that. Strange, but convenient-visiting them will be nice and easy.
She’ll have to get herself a little insurance first. Pick up a few choice items from one of her weapons caches. Wouldn’t do to fall prey to her own children. That would be too ironic.
Dr Westfield rolls out of her nest and drops to the supply room floor. Sadly, no one’s come to visit since Kris and her friend. No one to see the excellent job she’s done cleaning away the evidence. But that’s probably just as welclass="underline" they might wonder about the two jars, resting against the back wall, full of preserving fluid and body parts. She likes to take them down from their shelf and dance around the room with them. Hold them up to the light and watch as it flickers and dances between the strings of flesh. Pop open the lids and…
She stops, one hand on the lid, one on the cool plastic container. She just had to open them. Her case files should have been locked tight. Passwords. Encryption.
The jar drops from her hands. It hits the concrete floor and bounces, spilling eyes and testicles and ovaries in an explosion of bitter-smelling liquid. Bouncing back up from the floor, it spins, spraying out the last of the preserving fluid, before sinking back to dance and skitter to a halt at her feet.
She shouldn’t have been able to just open up the Harbinger files. She’d erased all open versions when that Network bastard came snooping. Everything else was hidden. Stored. Compressed. Booby-trapped. The only way those files would be accessible was if someone had unlocked and disarmed them. And she sure as hell didn’t do it.
Someone has been tampering with her work. Someone has been meddling.
Someone is going to pay.
The front door bleeped at him, and Will put down his keyboard and stretched. The twinges were back, but he only had a couple of blockers left and wasn’t going to waste them. Instead he took another sip of wine and slouched through to the hall to pay the DinoPizza delivery girl for his twelve-inch Cheat-Meat feast.
He stuffed a slice into his mouth, settled back on the couch and pulled the terminal closer. Hacking into the government network didn’t take long-their security was a joke. If he weren’t in the habit of using it to sneak into other, more suspicious, systems he would have said something. The main Bluecoat computers weren’t any better, and he spent a couple of minutes skimming their arrest records to see if any names would leap out at him. They didn’t. So he pushed on-through the firewall surrounding their personnel files-and called up Detective Sergeant Josephine Cameron’s record.
Most of it he’d seen before, but he read through it again: commendations, verbal warnings, an impressive enough arrest list. Three applications for transfer to the Network. He’d not seen those in her public file. No wonder she’d jumped at the chance to act as liaison officer, it was a back door into the service for her. Three or four knock-backs weren’t unusual; the Network liked to make sure new agents really wanted to be there.
Her disciplinary record wasn’t too bad-the most recent entry was over two years old, so it looked as if she’d learned to play the game. Politics: the bane of law enforcement agencies everywhere. It wasn’t enough to be good at your job, you also had to be sensitive to the machinations of your sup eriors.
Will took another bite of pizza. It was getting cold, the cloned pepperoni greasy, the cheese beginning to congeal.