Damian needed to be back in Toronto for another reason. Toronto was where his law offices were, and the war between Tau and InterAlia was being fought with writs and court appointments. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing: InterAlia was in a severely weakened condition, which gave us some leverage. The company’s stock had declined to record lows and there were rumors of an impending bankruptcy.
Damian and I went out for an early dinner on our last day in the city. A couple of blocks down Robson there was a restaurant that served good and reasonably affordable schnitzel. The staff had come to recognize us as regulars, and I assumed they also recognized the two Tau security guys who habitually followed us in and kept watch over us from a table of their own. The evening crowd hadn’t arrived yet, and we had enough space and privacy to speak freely.
For years Damian and his law firm had been conducting pitched battles with InterAlia over the autonomy of Tau. The corporation was jealous of its intellectual property, and the last thing they wanted was any kind of legal judgment that might recognize the Affinities as quasi-ethnicities, even invented ones. But what had lately crippled InterAlia were the legal challenges from unaffiliated sources: class action suits, discrimination cases. Most of the Affinities—Tau on the vanguard—had created institutions that served their members exclusively. We had established, for example, a network of Tau rehab clinics, staffed by Taus and catering to Taus with substance-abuse problems. The success rate of our clinics was spectacular, with a recidivism rate half that of standard treatment. But we routinely turned away non-Taus. Did that mean our clinics (or our financial services, another area Damian had pioneered) were discriminatory? InterAlia didn’t officially sanction these Affinity-specific businesses, which meant Tau had been forced to fend off similar legal attacks; in all of these cases our lawyers had attempted to subpoena InterAlia’s sorting protocols; and in every case InterAlia had resisted, which meant costly out-of-court settlements or lengthy legal challenges, several of which were currently wending their way toward Supreme Court decisions.
But that was old news. As of yesterday, Damian told me, InterAlia had folded its cards and pushed away from the table. “Partly because they found out Klein had arranged for their proprietary algorithms to be posted all over the Internet. Between that and the ongoing litigation, the writing was already on the wall.”
“I guess I understand. But then, why go to the trouble of murdering Klein?”
“Simple. They didn’t.”
I blinked. That had been our theory from the day we first heard about Klein’s death: InterAlia was behind it. Who else could it be?
Damian sat a moment, watching customers come and go through the revolving glass door. Our waiter poured fresh rounds of coffee but knew better than to hover. “Remember what Rachel Ragland told you about the tattoo on that guy’s hand?”
The Phoenician letter Het. The guy who interrogated her had belonged to the Het Affinity. Which was disturbing in itself. There was nothing about the Affinities that precluded criminal behavior. All the Affinities were, in effect, low-crime districts, but that was because our collaborative potential made crime less inviting. Within the Affinities jealousy was blunted, greed was marginalized, and basic human needs were usually met. Statistically, Tau was the most law-abiding of all the Affinities, if only by a hair. We liked to think of ourselves as good people, and that was statistically true. But we were free moral agents like everybody else, perfectly capable of committing crimes under the right circumstances. So were the Hets.
“I saw the same kind of tattoo the night Amanda was shot,” Damian said. “On the guy who fired the rifle.”
“What do you mean—it was the same guy?” In which case my career as a forensic sketch artist was over before it had begun. The Pender Island shooter had looked nothing like either of my drawings.
Damian shook his head. “Not the same guy, a similar tattoo. The shooter had it on the back of his neck, just under the collar of his shirt. So we’ve had our experts take a deeper look at Klein’s models of Affinity interactions and how that might play out when the Affinities are autonomous and self-governing. The results are surprising. Some of the smaller Affinities, like Mem and Rosh, eventually wither up and vanish. Some get bigger. Some get big enough and rich enough to exert real political and economic influence.”
“Which is why Klein gave us the information, right? He saw Tau as a potentially powerful influence. A good one.”
“Others might be powerful but maybe not so good. And that raises a huge red flag, especially concerning Het.”
“Does it? I mean, why would the Hets want to kill Klein in the first place? Why would they be stalking our people?”
“It’s not clear that the guy on Pender actually intended to shoot anyone. He was probably there for reconnaissance, carrying the weapon in case he needed to defend himself. He had his wallet in his pocket, and Gordo says that marks him as an amateur. We have his name, we know where he lived, we’ve identified his tranche. We should have better answers soon. But our best guess is that the Hets also acquired Klein’s data, and they read the same auspices in it as we did. Potential conflict, Het versus Tau. It’s possible the Hets wanted to get in the first blow by keeping Klein’s data out of our hands, and when that didn’t work, by interfering with our analysis of it.”
I thought again about the man who shot Amanda. He hadn’t been aiming at her, but he must have been willing to kill any or all of us—that was why he had come armed. Gordo had disposed of the rifle and taken charge of the shooter’s effects. But I hadn’t talked directly to Gordo since the night I had ridden with Amanda on the helicopter to the mainland. I knew the shooter was dead because I had seen Marcy deliver the lethal injection. Damian had been reluctant to say anything more about the incident until our investigation was complete, and for weeks he had discouraged questions. But since the subject had come up, I asked him what happened to the remaining evidence from that night—the shooter’s car, if he had one. The body.
“The shooter left his car parked at Tsawwassen ferry docks, but it’ll be found—if it’s ever found—on a logging road down by the US border.”
“Gordo’s people moved it?”
“Gordo and his people were extremely helpful, everything from finding spent cartridges to sluicing down the back deck. That’s something we’re going to need, by the way—a permanent Tau security force. Taus who have the appropriate skills and can be called on when we need them. Once we stop paying dues to InterAlia we’ll have to allocate revenue to set that up.”
“And the body?”
“Our helicopter pilot came back to pick up the body.”
“And?”
“And…” Damian looked at me, then looked away. “There’s a lot of water in Georgia Strait. It’s easy to lose things in it.”
We booked a flight to Toronto as soon as Amanda’s doctor cleared her to travel.
The plane arrived at Pearson International, and we caught a cab at the beginning of an early snowfall. Bright, small flakes of snow, the kind that dart up at the merest breeze and snake in narrow lines across the roads. “Just a taste of winter,” the cabbie told us. “Just a little taste.”
Damian smiled thinly but didn’t answer. Amanda wasn’t talking much, either. Her left arm was in a sling, to protect the healing musculature of her shoulder. She was somber, as she had been ever since she had woken up in an outpatient clinic in the suburbs of Vancouver. Chastened by what had happened to her, as anyone would be. But not frightened, not traumatized: I felt that, and I loved and admired her for it. No fear, but a new and tangible anger. It was as if, along with the bullet, something sharp and coldly luminous had lodged inside her.