“Good point,” Greg said. “It could be easily the same organization. But then where does Jason Whitehurst fit in? He was obviously acting independently. Yet he knew how valuable Fielder was, that she was linked with atomic structuring, but not the nature of that link. He certainly hadn’t heard about the alien. So how did he find out she was valuable?”
“Jesus!” The word came out like a bark from Rick. He looked round the table, his neck jerking mechanically. “I’m sorry, but you people… You’re making it all so complicated. Who’s this bloke working for, these two are plugged in together, where does she fit in? It doesn’t matter! There’s an alien here, in our own solar system, making contact. God knows, it’s a strange kind of contact, but it wants to talk to us. Just ask this Fielder girl where Royan is, and go. Where’s the problem?”
“Atta, boy,” Philip Evans said. “You tell ‘em.”
Julia at the table, and the Julias on the screens all scowled together. “Behave, Grandpa,” they chorused.
Philip Evans rolled his synthesized eyes.
Greg looked at Rick, knowing exactly how he felt. Itching to do something positive, to see some action. He’d been like that himself when he joined the Army. Physical got everything solved, and you could see it happening. That particular fallacy took a long time and a lot of grief to unlearn. “It’s like this,” he said sympathetically. “Charlotte Fielder’s in a bad way. She’s a twenty-three-year-old girl who’s known nothing but the good life for the last five years. All that got shattered today; she’s been threatened, chased, shot at, had her fingers broken, seen her patron killed, and found out someone’s snuffed her sponsor. Right now she just wants to curl up into a ball and shut out the outside world. If I start interrogating her now, she isn’t going to co-operate, her mind will close up like a night-time flower. I’ll miss things; good as I am, I’m not infallible. But if we wait until tomorrow, she’ll have started to bounce back. She’ll want to help, she’ll want revenge on whoever terrorized her, she’ll open right up to us. And when that happens, I need to know the right questions to ask her.”
“Listen to him, Rick,” Philip Evans said. “He knows more about how people’s minds work than a pub full of shrinks.”
Julia gave Greg an impish glance. “And the fact that she’s devastatingly beautiful has nothing at all to do with wanting to go easy on her.”
Greg flashed her a feline smile, and snatched another sandwich. Victor was chuckling.
The tight fabric of Rick’s jacket rippled as he offered a shrug. “Sorry, I’m not used to this.”
“We need to go through it, Rick,” Julia said. “I’ve got to have the complete picture before I decide what responses to initiate. And right now there are too many unknowns involved. There will be a common thread linking these faceless dealers. If we can correlate the data we’ve amassed so far we should be able to find it.”
Greg smiled inwardly. Julia was doing the same thing as him. Tearing into the problem from all sides until she came up with a solution. The only difference was that she used the logic her nodes supplied, he used intuition.
He ordered a tiny secretion from his gland, not enough for an espersense effusion, but just animating his grey cells, tweaking them above the ordinary. A dreamy calmness settled round him, almost a physical veil, dimming the conference room, muting the voices. He let the images of the day slipstream through his mind. There were faces and places, vaporous collages. An overwhelming sense of certainty rose.
“Russia,” he said. “Russia is the connection.”
“How?” Julia asked.
“Tell you, intuition is always better than logic.” He cancelled the gland secretion.
“Greg!” she snapped.
“Spit it out, boy,” Philip Evans said.
“Nia Korovilla and Dmitri Baronski.”
Victor clicked his fingers. “Bloody hell, they’re both Russian emigres.”
“No messing,” Greg swung his chair round to face the three teleconference screens. “Run a search program,” he told the NN cores. “Every profile you’ve assembled today, every person, place, and company involved. I want to know every and any link they have with Russia, however tenuous.”
“We’re on it,” Julia’s NN core two image said. She and Philip Evans froze.
“Thank you, Greg,” Julia said.
“I want Royan back too.”
A horizontal flicker line ran down the teleconference screens. The images returned to life. “Greg was right. There are two more references, possibly three.”
“Go ahead,” Julia said.
“Thirty-two per cent of the Mutizen kombinate is owned by Moscow’s Narodny Bank. And nearly twenty-five per cent of Jason Whitehurst’s trade is with the East Europe Federation, half of that with Russia itself.”
“And the third connection?” Victor asked.
“It is somewhat more speculative, but the Colonel Maitland had originally filed a flight plan from Monaco to Odessa, it was changed the night Charlotte Fielder was lifted from the principality. Odessa is in Ukraine, also part of the East Europe Federation.”
“That fits,” Greg said. “I should have thought of that one myself. Baronski mentioned it.”
“Fits how, exactly?” Julia asked.
“Tell you, we’re up against a premier-grade Russian dealer here, right?”
“Yes.”
“OK, so he finds out about the Fielder girl somehow, that she’s a courier of some kind, so he takes a sample of the flower and discovers it’s extraterrestrial. Assume Jason Whitehurst does business with him-God knows the kind of trading Jason does is complicated enough to need dodgy contacts-he owes the dealer a few favours. The dealer tells Jason Whitehurst to lift Charlotte Fielder from Monaco after she’s completed the delivery to you, and bring her to Odessa where he can take over. That’s where Baronski thought she was going, he arranged it, he was the go-between. But then Jason Whitehurst realizes how big a deal this is, and decides to play his own game. So he puts Charlotte Fielder up for sale. That’s why there were watchers in the Prezda; our Russian dealer didn’t know where she was either. And Baronski was the obvious link, we all wound up going to him, If there was anybody who knew where she was, it was going to be him. A pimp always keeps track of his girls.”
“Sounds feasible,” Victor said.
“What about Mutizen?” Julia asked.
“Dunno. Maybe that’s where our Russian dealer found out about the alien.”
“Could be,” she said.
“Nia Korovilla still bothers me,” Victor said. “Eight years is a hell of a long time in the hardline game. Any deal over a year is a long time for us.”
“You think she was a government intelligence agency sleeper?” Greg asked.
“Bloody Reds,” Philip Evans said. “Never did trust the little buggers. Reagan was quite right.”
“Oh, Grandpa, don’t be so paranoid; Russia doesn’t even have a strong Socialist party in parliament any more, let alone represent a military threat. If anything they’re more entrepreneurial than us these days.”
“This is what happens when you have thought routines that are formulated and frozen in the twentieth century,” Julia’s NN core two image remarked, amused.
“Ha bloody ha, girl. Maybe they’re not Commies, but they’re still clannish, still hold the ideal of the Motherland close to their hearts. How far do you think they’d go to secure atomic structuring technology for themselves, eh? Every asset would be thrown in, corporate and state. Eight-year sleepers included.”
Julia sucked in a deep breath, obviously undecided. She looked at Greg. “Well?”
“It could go either way,” Greg said. “It’s all down to Jason Whitehurst’s trading. Somebody in Russia wanted to keep an eye on him. What did he export?”
“Gold, silver, and timber were the main cargoes from the East Europe Federation, along with some bulk chemicals, and ores,” Julia’s NN core one image said. “He tended to trade them for industrial cybernetics.”