Wolfit peered at her. 'No need. I can tell you where he is right now.' Then he pulled up the personal Web page. It was old, last updated in April 1998 according to the date on the bottom, and there was precious little there except a few personal details — hobbies: Linux, Goth music, Nordic mythology, and beer — a brief academic resume, and a photograph. Martin Chalk, looking a lot younger than the ID shot dispatched around the internal net, stared back at them from the screen, wide-eyed, gawky.
'The Children sure picked the right guy,' Wolfit said. 'Shame he's probably lying fried on some morgue slab out there instead of unravelling this baby for us.'
'That's not the issue,' she said quickly (sometimes she thought, maybe, she could get the hang of this Operations thing). 'Not any more.'
'So what is?'
'He was here. Whether he walked or they pushed him, this guy must have been close to the Children very, very recently. Don't you see, Larry? We don't just know what they're throwing at us now. We know where from too.'
CHAPTER 42
The Farm
'I don't get it,' Lieberman said. But when he listened to Mo's tale and watched the slow, relieved way it came out of her, he realized he did. They all did, he guessed.
They sat in a small private room in the mansion. Mo curled in a big armchair, Lieberman, Irwin, and Bevan around her in a semicircle. Not pushing her at all because they all knew there was no point. Extracting this slender strand inside her called the truth was a delicate operation. It would be so easy to snap the thing and lose it forever.
'No,' she replied, and there was no easy way to explain. The past was still hazy to her sometimes. Fleeing a shattered marriage, finding refuge, when the money was about to run out, with the Children in San Diego. These events had a loose, filmy reality. What she remembered most was Daniel Sinclair, and the way his sweet, quiet face turned sour when Annie was born. And his fists. She still flinched when she thought of those. Even Bevan, Lieberman noticed, couldn't rouse the anger to turn on her. Every life had twists and turns. Mo had taken a wrong one, fallen into Charley's arms at some low ebb, when the Children just seemed to make sense. After that, it simply became hard to leave.
The news let her off the hook. The link from NASA was screaming for attention. They had followed Schulz out to the control room, sat watching the giant monitor, and felt some huge wave of relief when Bill Ruffin's friendly face came up on the screen, grinned at them, and said, 'We're there. Apologies for the delay but this is one big place to hide. Where are our government friends?'
'Off-line,' Schulz said. 'We've got some major failure in the system in Nevada for some reason. They'll be back when they can, but we can handle this now.'
'Suits me,' Ruffin agreed, and cued up the external camera from Arcadia. Now they could see Sundog in all her terrible glory. The satellite sat above the earth like some giant insect. The sun and the light from below outlined the black, sleek form of the machine. Lieberman wondered at this collection of antennae and scanning devices just visible on its underside, tried to imagine how anyone could believe you could keep the world at peace by placing this deadly, unstable collection of toys in the sky above it. And then there was his personal contribution. For years he'd dreamed of seeing the solar wings in orbit. Now, when the moment finally arrived, it made him feel ashamed. They looked like the black, equidistant blades of a giant clover leaf, sucking the invisible energy from the cosmos and turning it into something dark and deadly.
'How far have you got to run?' Schulz asked.
'Thirty kilometres,' Ruffin replied. 'We need to cut the engines real soon and drift on in there. If we time it right, we'll be in EVA within ninety minutes or so, erecting your shade thirty minutes after that, and taking that thing down within another hour.'
'That's a hell of a long time for an EVA,' Lieberman said. 'You sure you can keep the Shuttle in range during that time without using any power?'
He remembered reading about how the EVA was the most dangerous part of any mission. There were so many things that could go wrong: meteorite storms, equipment failure, harness detachment. That was why you never, ever ventured out into that big empty space without a solid line between you and the ship. Once that was cut, you could float anywhere, be lost for good in a matter of minutes.
'Yeah,' Ruffin said. 'No problem.'
Schulz beamed at the monitors. 'Great news. What do you need?'
'Nothing right now.' Ruffin had the look of a man who needed to get on with his work. 'When we get to the EVA stage we'll take a floatcam with us. You can be a second set of eyes. I'd be grateful for that.'
'You got it,' Lieberman said.
'In the meantime maybe you people should just go and pray a little. No time for that here.' Then he cut the call.
Schulz punched some keys, to no avail. 'I wish we could get through to Helen. Damn network. Till then we just have to wait.'
'We need to talk some more,' Bevan said, looking at Mo, and she didn't object. They went into Bennett's vacant office, sat awkwardly at the table, Lieberman next to her, wishing there was something he could do.
'Ask away. I didn't betray you, Michael,' she said. 'I didn't betray anyone. Except myself. And Annie. Annie most of all.'
She reached across the table, touched his hand. 'Michael, I'm sorry if I offended you. What happened wasn't what you thought. Not directly anyway. I was scared. When I saw that woman today it was like opening a grave, lifting the lid on a coffin I thought was long buried. I couldn't shake that from my head.'
'Yeah,' he said, and squeezed her hand, then let it go. 'But you see the problem?'
She stared at the table. Bevan had turned on a video recorder, taping all this for further analysis. Schulz looked miserable again; the news from the Shuttle had lost its potency. Outside, the night was alive with the buzz of insects, frantic in the close, humid air. And she was relieved, he thought. After the initial despair, the end of this deception gave her some kind of deliverance. Deceit and pretence didn't come naturally to her. Shedding this false skin was welcome, even if she knew that, in the end, it was bound to lead to some new kind of pain.
Schulz stared at the table, not wanting to look her in the face. 'You of all people, Mo. I trusted you. I thought we could make something permanent for you here.'
'Me "of all people",' she said, smiling. 'What sort of people do you think should get involved in things Uke Gaia? Crazy ones? Criminals?'
'Inadequate people,' Bevan said quickly.
'Jeez, that sure opens things up a little. What do you think the waiting list is for that particular club?' Lieberman wondered aloud. 'One million? Two? Get real.'
She touched his hand. 'Don't, Michael. It's okay. I don't mind. I don't expect you to understand. I don't want your condolences. I don't expect your forgiveness.'
He poured himself a glass of water. Until Ruffin called them back into the game, there was nothing to do but wait. 'Lots of marriages get broken, Mo. It's a long way from there to Charley.'
'You need the context. Ask Irwin.'
'Me?' Schulz answered, offended. 'I don't know.'
She shook her head. 'But you do. You just didn't take that route. Back in the early nineties, Daniel started to live inside that damn computer. The Web was real to him, more real to him than me and Annie. I thought that I could rekindle something if I joined him there. And it's so… enveloping.'
'Yeah,' he admitted. 'Okay. I know.'
'Is this some dweeb secret that gets to be shared among the rest of us?' Lieberman asked.
'Hey,' Schulz said, 'just take my — our — words on this, will you? If you grew up in the California geek community during the nineties you knew someone who lost it. This job we do, the way we do it, you can get eaten up by these things. It can swallow you.'