He had to remember.
Remember!
Juneau, Alaska, USA
Loreena Keowa was irritated. On the day of the boat-trip, Palstein had agreed to let the film crew come along, and had delivered a series of powerful quotes, although without giving her that sense of familiarity that she usually developed with her interviewees. By now she knew that Palstein loved the crystalline aesthetic of numbers, with which he rationalised everything and everyone, himself included, although without losing the emotional dimension in his dealings with people. He esteemed the sound-mathematics of a composer like Johann Sebastian Bach, the fractal Minimalism of Steve Reich, and he was also fascinated by the breakdown of all structures and narrative arcs in the music of György Ligeti. He had a Steinway grand, he played well if a bit mechanically, not classics, as Loreena would have expected, but the Beatles, Burt Bacharach, Billy Joel and Elvis Costello. He owned prints by Mondrian, but also an incredibly intense original by Pollock, which looked as if its creator had screamed at the canvas in paint.
Curious to meet Palstein’s wife, Loreena had finally shaken the hand of a gracious creature who commandeered her, dragged her through the Japanese garden she had designed herself for a quarter of an hour and laughed like a bell every now and again for no perceptible reason. Mrs Palstein was an architect, she learned, and had laid out most of the grounds herself. Determined to use the currency of her newly acquired training in small talk, Loreena asked her about Mies van der Rohe, receiving a mysterious smile in return. Suddenly Mrs Palstein was treating her as a co-conspirator. Van der Rohe, oh, yes! Did she want to stay to dinner? While she was considering whether or not to agree, the lady’s phone rang, and she went off in a conversation about migraine, forgetting Loreena so completely that she found her own way back to the house and, because Palstein had issued no similar invitation, left without dinner.
Afterwards, in Juneau, she had admitted to herself that she liked the oil manager, his kindness, his good manners, his melancholy expression, which made her feel strangely exposed, and at the same time made him seem a little weird – and yet she still found him very alien, for reasons she couldn’t quite explain. Instead of devoting herself to her report, she had plunged into research, had flown from Texas to Calgary, Alberta, dropping in unannounced on the police station there. With her Native-American face and her peculiar charm, she managed to get to the office of the police lieutenant, who promised to keep her informed about any progress in investigations. Loreena extended her antennae for undertones, and established that there had been no progress, thanked him, took the next flight back to Juneau and, on the way, told her editorial team she wanted them to collect all available footage about what had happened in Calgary. After she landed, she called an intern to her office and told him what they had to look for.
‘I realise,’ she said, ‘that the police have viewed and analysed all the pictures a hundred times. So let’s look at them another hundred times. Or two hundred if it helps.’
On her desk she spread out a few prints showing the square in front of Imperial Oil headquarters. At the time of the shooting, the complex of buildings opposite had lain empty for months, after the open-cast mining company based there had come to a miserable end.
‘The police conclude for a whole host of reasons that the shot was fired from the middle one of the three buildings, which are, incidentally, all interconnected. Probably from one of the upper storeys. The complex has entrances to the front, the sides and the back, so there are several possible ways of getting in and out again.’
‘You really think we’ll discover something that the cops have missed?’
‘Be optimistic,’ said Loreena. ‘Always look on the bright side.’
‘I’ve taken a look at the material, Loreena. Almost all the cameras were trained on the crowd and the podium. It was only after the shooting that some of them were clever enough to swing around to the complex, but you don’t see anyone coming out.’
‘So who says we have to concentrate on the complex? The police are doing that. I want us to concentrate on the crowd in the square.’
‘You mean the guy who did it went from there into the building?’
‘I mean that you’re a bit of a male chauvinist. It could have been a girl, couldn’t it?’
‘A killer chick, huh?’ giggled the intern.
‘Carry on like that and you’ll meet one in person. Look at every individual figure in the square. I want to know if anyone filmed the building before, during and after the attack.’
‘Oh, God! This is slave labour!’
‘Stop whining. Jump to it. I’ll take care of Youtube, Facebook, Smallworld and so on.’
After the intern had started viewing the material, she had set about compiling a list of all significant decisions that Palstein had made or advocated over the past six months. She also recorded his resistance to the interests of others. She logged on to forums and blogs, followed the internet debate about closures, acquiescence on the one hand, helpless rage on the other, along with the desire to give the oilmen a good kicking, ideally to put them up against the wall right away, but none of these entries raised a suspicion that its author was in any way connected with the attack. The people involved in open-cast mining were bitter about it, but glad that it was coming to an end, particularly in the Indian communities. It struck her that the Chinese had been taking a great interest in Canadian oil sand over the past two decades, and had put a lot of money into open-cast mining, which they were now losing, and that regardless of the helium-3 revolution they were still, albeit to a waning degree, dependent on oil and gas. On the other hand there was now so much cheap oil available that anything else seemed more sensible than extracting it in the most unprofitable way imaginable. When, in the early hours of the morning, she finally found no more press information and no more postings, she compiled a file about Orley Enterprises, or more precisely about Palstein’s attempts to become involved with Orley Energy and Orley Space.
And suddenly she had an idea.
Dog-tired, she set about backing up her newly fledged theory with arguments. They weren’t particularly new: someone was trying to undermine Palstein’s involvement with Orley. Except that she suddenly realised, clear as day, that the purpose of the attack had been to keep Palstein from travelling to the Moon.
If that was so—
But why? What would Palstein have had to discuss with Julian Orley on the Moon that they couldn’t have sorted out on Earth? Or did it have something to do with other people he was supposed to meet there?
She needed the list of participants.
Her eyes stung. Palstein wasn’t supposed to fly to the Moon. The thought stayed with her. It continued in confused dreams, the kind you get when you fall asleep in office chairs, it produced visions in her alarmingly cracked brain, of people in spacesuits shooting at each other from designer buildings, with her caught in the middle.
‘Hey, Loreena.’
‘Mies is very popular on the Moon,’ she mumbled.
‘Meeces? Love ’em to pieces.’ Someone laughed. She’d been talking nonsense. Blinking and stiff-limbed, she came to. The intern was leaning on the edge of the desk and looked as pleased as punch.