But instead, the face and shoulders that appeared in the elevator’s window belonged to Red Hand Vasquez. Somewhere in the room a camera must have been capturing me and adjusting my image to make it seem as if we were standing face to face, for he looked me straight in the eye.
‘Tanner. Listen to me, man.’
‘I’m listening,’ I said, wondering if the irritation I felt was obvious in my voice. ‘What was so important that you needed to reach me here, Red?’
‘Fuck you, Mirabel. You won’t be smiling in about thirty seconds. ’ But the way he said it made it seem less like a threat than a warning to prepare for bad news.
‘What is it? Reivich pulled another fast one on us?’
‘I don’t know. I had some guys make some more enquiries and I’m damn sure he’s on that thread, the way you think he is — a car or two ahead of you.’
‘Then that isn’t why you’re calling.’
‘No. I’m calling because someone’s killed Snake.’
I answered reflexively, ‘Dieterling?’
As if it could be anyone else.
Vasquez nodded. ‘Yeah. One of my guys found him about an hour ago, but he didn’t know who he was dealing with, so it took a while for the news to get back to me.’
My mouth seemed to form the words without conscious input from my mind. ‘Where was he? What had happened?’
‘He was in your car, the wheeler — still parked on Norquinco. You couldn’t see there was anyone in it from the street; you had to look inside deliberately. My guy was just checking out the machine. He found Dieterling slumped down inside. He was still breathing.’
‘What happened?’
‘Someone shot him. Must’ve waited near where the wheeler was parked, then hung around until Dieterling got back from the bridge. Dieterling must have just got in the wheeler, getting ready to leave.’
‘How was he shot?’
‘I don’t know man; it’s not like I’m running an autopsy clinic here, you know?’ Vasquez bit his lip before continuing, ‘Some kind of beam job, I think. Close range into the chest.’
I glanced down at the guindado I still held. It felt absurd to be standing here talking about my friend’s death with a cocktail drink in one hand, as if the matter was only a piece of easy smalltalk. But there was nowhere nearby to put the drink down.
I took a sip and answered him with a coldness that surprised me. ‘I prefer beam weapons myself, but they’re not what I’d use if I wanted to kill someone without making a fuss. A beam weapon creates more flash than most projectile weapons.’
‘Unless it’s very close range; like a stabbing. Look, I’m sorry, man, but it looks like that’s how it happened. The barrel must’ve been pushed right into his clothes. Hardly any light or noise — and what there was would’ve been hidden by the wheeler. There was a lot of partying going on anyway tonight. Somebody started a fire near the bridge, and that was all the excuse the locals needed for a wild night. I don’t think anyone would’ve noticed a beam discharge, Tanner.’
‘Dieterling wouldn’t have just sat back and let someone do that.’
‘Maybe he didn’t get much warning.’
I thought about that. On some level the fact of his death was beginning to register, but the implications — not to mention the emotional shock — would take a lot longer. But I could at least force myself to ask the right questions now. ‘If he didn’t get much warning, either he wasn’t paying attention or he thought the person who killed him was someone he knew. He was still breathing, did you say?’
‘Yeah, but he wasn’t conscious. I don’t think we could have done much for him, Tanner.’
‘You’re sure he didn’t say anything?’
‘Not to me or the guy who found him.’
‘The guy — the man — who found him. Was he someone we’d met tonight?’
‘No; he was one of the men I had tailing Reivich all day.’
This was how it was going to carry on, I thought: Vasquez just didn’t have the initiative to expand on an answer unless it was dragged kicking and screaming out of him. ‘And? How long had this man been in your service? Had Dieterling ever met him before?’
It was painfully slow, but he must have seen the way my questioning was running. ‘Hey, no way, man. No way did my guy have anything to do with this. I swear to you, Tanner.’
‘He’s still a suspect. That goes for anyone we met tonight — including you, Red.’
‘I wouldn’t have killed him. I wanted him to take me snake hunting.’
There was something so pathetically selfish about that answer that there was a good chance it was true.
‘Well, I guess you’ve blown your chance.’
‘I didn’t have anything to do with it, Tanner.’
‘But it happened on your turf, didn’t it?’
He was about to answer, and I was about to ask him what he had done with the body and what he intended to do about it when Vasquez’s image dissolved into static. At the same instant there was a powerful flash that seemed to come from everywhere at once, bathing every surface in a sickly white radiance.
It lasted for only a fraction of a second.
It was enough, though. There was something unforgettable about that hard burst of tarnished light; something I had seen once before. Or was it more than once? For a moment I wondered: remembering carnations of white light blossoming against stellar blackness.
Nuclear explosions.
The elevator’s illumination dimmed for a few seconds, and I felt my weight grow less and then return to normal.
Someone had let off a nuke.
The electromagnetic pulse must have swept over us, momentarily interfering with the elevator. I hadn’t seen a nuke flash since my childhood, one of the war’s small sanities being that for the most part it had stayed in the conventional realm. I couldn’t estimate the burst yield without knowing how far away the flash had been, but the lack of a mushroom cloud suggested that the explosion had taken place well above the planet’s surface. It didn’t make much sense: a nuke deployment could only have been the prelude to a conventional assault, and this was the wrong season for it. Elevated bursts made even less sense — military communications networks were hardened against electromagnetic pulse warfare.
An accident, perhaps?
I thought about it for a few more seconds, then heard footsteps racing up the spiral staircase between the elevator’s vertically stacked compartments. I saw one of the aristocrats I had just been dining with. I hadn’t bothered remembering his name, but the man’s levantine bone structure and golden-brown skin almost certainly identified him as a northerner. He was dressed opulently, his knee-length coat dripping shades of emerald and aquamarine. But he was agitated. Behind him, his foxlike wife paused on the last step, eyeing both of us warily.
‘Did you see that?’ the man asked. ‘We came up here to get a better look; you’ve got the best view from here. It looked pretty big. It almost looked like a…’
‘A nuke?’ I said. ‘I think it was.’ There were retinal ghosts, pink shapes etched across my vision.
‘Thank God it wasn’t any closer.’
‘Let me see what the public nets say,’ said the woman, glancing at a bracelet-shaped display device. It must have tapped into a less vulnerable data network than the one which Vasquez had been using, because she connected immediately. Images and text spilled across the device’s discreet little screen.
‘Well?’ said her husband. ‘Do they have any theories yet?’
‘I don’t know, but…’ She hesitated, her eyes lingering over something, then frowning. ‘No. That can’t be true. It just can’t be true.’
‘What? What are they saying?’
She looked to the man and then to me. ‘They’re saying they’ve attacked the bridge. They’re saying that the explosion’s severed the thread.’