“How did you-?”
“Tell you, Charlotte, you’re a very important person. Victor here has a big profile on you.”
“Yes.” She swallowed. “I took a flight from Mangonui spaceport.”
“With your patron?”
“No. I said it was a holiday. I went by myself”
“How did you pay for it?”
“I didn’t. It was a farewell gift from my last patron, all expenses paid. Baronski let me keep it. I normally have to hand the gifts over, but he could hardly sell it, so he let me go ahead.”
Victor let out a groan. “No wonder we couldn’t trace you through Amex. What was this patron’s name?”
“Ali Murdad.”
“Did he send you up there to collect the flower?” Greg asked. “Or any other kind of favour?”
“No. It was a genuine holiday for me.”
“I have confirmed the ticket,” one of Julia’s images said. “A regal-class package with Thomas Cook, booked by Aflaj Industrial Cybernetics-Ali Murdad listed as a director. A fortnight at the High Savoy, with a universal club and resort access card.”
“That’s right,” she said.
“Tell us about this priest,” Greg said. “Are you certain he was a Celestial Apostle?”
“Yes. There was a group of them working round the tourists at the fall surf beach. A couple of them spoke to me, they were about my age, they explained what the Celesnals were. They were very devout, I don’t mean silly like the Hare Krishnas or deadly dull like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, they had a sense of humour, but they really believed our destiny lies out among the stars. They asked me if I wanted to stay up in New London permanently; they said it wouldn’t be a hard life, not like the cults that exploit children down here, but it was fairly basic. That didn’t seem to bother them, they believe it’s only temporary, when this divine event of theirs finally occurs everything will change. I think they expect to receive a higher blessing than everyone else, or be the first people admitted into heaven, or something along those lines. Being a Celestial Apostle was certainly supposed to be a step up the ladder towards God.”
“But you turned them down?”
“Hell, yes-I can go up to New London any time I want. I’m not spending the rest of my life boring the pants off tourists with nutty creeds. Besides, they seemed a bit simple, you know? Dreamy types.”
“And was this priest one of the pair which spoke to you?”
“No, he came over when they left. He knew my name, though, that was the funny thing. I got the impression he was waiting for the other two to finish. He said he was sorry they had failed to show me the light, then he asked me if I’d do a friend of his a favour.”
“What was the friend’s name?” Victor asked.
“He said he couldn’t tell me for obvious reasons.”
Julia smiled as if she already knew. “Go on.”
“He asked me to deliver something to you. He said it was a gift from your lover, but that no one must know. I thought-well, you already have a husband, you see, so there was this other secret man in your life. It was romantic and exciting, me being asked to be a go-between for you. I couldn’t say no. You’re… well, you’re Julia Evans, aren’t you? I would have been involved in something delicious, I might even have been asked to do it again. So I cut short my holiday and flew back. Dmitri Baronski got me the ticket for the Newfields ball.” She stared determinedly at her finger nails, mortified. Whatever would Fabian think of her, acting like a schoolgirl.
“He knew your name,” Greg said in the silence that followed, “he knew you had the contacts necessary to get into Monaco’s social event of the year at a day’s notice, and he knew you had the savoir-faire to deliver the flower. Some Celestial Apostle.”
“You think that’s him, boy?” Philip Evans asked. “The alien?”
“Alien?” Charlotte gasped. Fabian lurched upright in his chair, staring at Philip Evans’s image.
Nobody said anything, they were all looking at Greg, waiting for him to speak, like he was some sort of guru or something, she thought. He blinked slowly, and focused on her. She shifted uncomfortably, feeling Fabian’s hand in her own, the damp smooth skin tightening its grip silently. Greg didn’t just look at you, she decided, he judged you. A psychic. The realization didn’t make her any more comfortable. There were stories – “You said you broke off your holiday to deliver the flower?” Greg asked.
“Yes.” Her throat was contracting.
“How much of it did you miss?”
“Four days, Ali’s package was for a fortnight. But I changed my ticket for an earlier flight. The agent said there was no problem. I landed at Capetown then caught a connecting flight.”
“Ah.” A smile spread across his face. “I think we’d better fill you in on a few points.”
CHAPTER 26
Suzi sat dumb while everyone had their say. First Charlotte telling how some Celestial Apostle handed her the alien flower. And just what the flick was a Celestial Apostle anyway? Then Greg on his Russian general mate, and how the Dolgoprudnensky were probably plugged in somewhere down the line. At least she knew about the Dolgoprudnensky, tough bastards. Julia started rapping about her starship supertechnology, and the heat she was getting from kombinates and microbes, and Royan being his usual monomaniac self. Royan always had to take apart anything new; split it open, figure it out, and put it back together so that it worked smoother. If Julia didn’t know that about him then they weren’t as close as she thought.
All heavy duty shit…
Charlotte and Fabian were sitting up straight like a couple of kids at school who’d been lumbered with the toughest master for a lesson, hanging on to every word. Charlotte’s gorgeous face was crinkling from the effort of following details. Suzi glanced casually at the girl’s profile. Not bad at all. Which reminded Suzi of Andria, who she hadn’t phoned since the airship.
The rap went on relentlessly around her. It was something she hated, and she couldn’t let them know. Silence implied wisdom, some bulishit like that. Let them think she was lost in deep thoughts, fully plugged in. This was Greg’s scene, not hers. She could plan ahead, sort a deal down to the last detail. Good at it, too. But she could never pin the past down the way Greg could. He listened to what people said they believed had happened, thought about it, then explained what had really been going on. And it all made sense, like he was fitting a big jigsaw of events together in his mind, a map through what had been. Him and his warlock intuition.
She grinned at him.
He gave her a knowing look, then broke away. “You see, Charlotte,” he said, “you didn’t know it, but you’ve actually been working for the Dolgoprudnensky since you left the orphanage. According to General Kamoskin, Baronski was plugged into them at a high level. That’s why he always sent you and the other girls looking for financial gossip. He made some money out of it, certainly; but all the really smart data was squirted back to this Pavel Kirilov character. He’s in a position to make a lot more use of it than Baronski ever could.”
The girl looked crestfallen. Suzi could see Fabian’s hand locked in hers under the table, his thumb stroking gently.
“And you think it was the Dolgoprudnensky who asked Jason Whitehurst to lift her from Monaco?” Victor asked.
“Yeah.”
“Father did business with them,” Fabian said unexpectedly. “It was sneaky stuff. Made us a heck of a lot of money, though.”
“Are you sure?” Julia asked.
The boy grimaced. “Absolutely. Father explained it to me.” He smiled at Charlotte, flipping a lock of hair from his eyes. “I said he told me everything.”
“Yes, you did,” Charlotte said. “So how did it work?”
“It was the Dolgoprudnensky who made sure we were granted all our import-export licences with the Eastern Federation states. Licences are really tricky to get most of the time, unless you know the right people; those Eastern European states are still lumbered with huge civil service bureaucracies. All we had to do in return for the licences was use ships which the Dolgoprudnensky owned to carry our cargoes in and out of Odessa. It’s simple really, most of our trade with Russia involves exchanging their timber for household gear and industrial cybernetics. So say if a Russian company comes to us and asks us for a particular piece of foreign hardware, we look round the global timber market and come back with a weight of wood which is equal to the cost of that hardware. Next, the Russian government’s Timber Export Directorate authorizes the release of that weight from their stocks. They have millions of tonnes of dead deciduous trees left over from the Warming, it’s a big national resource for them. The timber is shipped out of Odessa at ten per cent above the normal commercial carriage rate, and in return the company gets its hardware. Nobody queries the amount of wood being sold abroad which pays for that extra ten per cent in the shipping costs, because the Dolgoprudnensky have consolidated their control of the Timber Export Directorate. From the Director herself right down to the office cleaners, the entire staff is made up of Dolgoprudnensky members; it’s like a closed shop, the personnel department will only employ their nominees. And the only merchants who are admitted to the Directorate’s approved list to barter timber are the ones in on the deal. Like Father.”