‘You smart cookie, Mister Mirabel. Dominika’s operations, they no give you brain damage.’
‘Enthralled to hear it.’ With a long-suffering sigh I reached into my pockets again and asked her to tell me what it was Quirrenbach had not wanted me to know. I was unsure exactly what it was I was expecting — very little, perhaps, since my mind had not really had time to dwell on the idea that Quirrenbach had ever had something to hide.
‘He come in with you,’ Dominika said. ‘Dressed like you, Mendicant clothes. Ask for implants out.’
‘Tell me something I don’t know.’
Dominika smiled then, a salacious smile, and I knew that whatever it was she was about to inflict on me, she was going to enjoy it.
‘He no have implants, Mister Mirabel.’
‘What do you mean? I saw him on your couch. You were operating on him. You’d shaved his hair.’
‘He tell me make it look good. Dominika, she no ask questions. Just do what client says. Client always right. ’Specially when client pay good, like Mister Quirrenbach. Client say fake surgery. Shave hair, go through motion. But I never open his head. No need. I scan him anyway — nothing in there. Him already clean.’
‘Then why the hell would—’
And then suddenly it all made sense. Quirrenbach did not need to have his implants removed because — if he had ever had any to start with — they had been removed years earlier, during the plague. Quirrenbach was not from Grand Teton at all. He was not even from outside the system. He was local talent, and he had been recruited to follow me down and find out what was making me tick.
He had been working for Reivich.
Reivich had reached Chasm City ahead of me, travelling down while I was still having my memories reassembled by the Ice Mendicants. A few days’ lead was not much, but it had obviously been sufficient time to recruit some help. Quirrenbach might have been his first point of contact. And then Quirrenbach had returned to orbit and mingled with the immigrants who had just arrived from beyond the system. His mission would have been simple enough. Investigate the people revived from the Orvieto and find someone who might just possibly be a hired killer.
I thought back to how it had all happened.
First I had been accosted by Vadim in the commons of the Strelnikov. I had shrugged off Vadim, but a few minutes later I had seen him beating up Quirrenbach. I had crossed the commons sphere, forcing Vadim to give up on Quirrenbach, and then I had beaten up Vadim myself. I remembered well how it had been Quirrenbach who urged me not to kill him.
At the time, I put it down to forgiveness on his part.
Afterwards Quirrenbach and I had then crawled to Vadim’s quarters. I remembered again how Quirrenbach had at first seemed uneasy as we rifled through his belongings — Quirrenbach questioning the morality of what I was doing. I had argued with him, and then Quirrenbach had been forced to go along with the theft.
All along, I hadn’t seen the obvious: that Quirrenbach and Vadim were working together.
Quirrenbach had needed a way to get close to me without rousing my suspicions; a way to find out more about me. The two of them had set me up; Vadim undoubtedly hurting Quirrenbach in the commons, but only because they needed that realism. They must have known I would be unable to resist intervening, especially after my earlier brush with Vadim. Later, when we had been attacked in the carousel, I remembered how I had seen Quirrenbach standing to one side, restrained by the other man, while I took the brunt of Vadim’s punishment.
I should have seen it then.
Quirrenbach had latched onto me, which implied that he was very good at his job; that he had singled me out amongst all the passengers on the ship — but it was not necessarily like that. Reivich might have employed half a dozen other agents to tail other passengers, all using different strategems to get close to their targets. The difference was, the others were all shadowing the wrong person, and Quirrenbach — by luck or intuition or deduction — had hit the bullseye. But there was no way he could have known for sure. In all the conversations we had had, I had still been careful enough not to give away anything which would have established my identity as Cahuella’s security man.
I tried to put myself in Quirrenbach’s position.
It must have been very tempting for him and Vadim to kill me. But they could not do that; not until they had become totally certain that I was the real assassin. If they had killed me then, they would never know for sure that they had got the man they were after — and that doubt would always shadow them.
So Quirrenbach had probably been planning to tail me for as long as it took; as long as it took to establish a pattern; that I was after a man called Reivich for some purpose unspecified. Visiting Dominika’s was an essential part of his disguise. He must not have realised that as a soldier I would lack implants and would therefore not require the good Madame’s talents. But he had taken it calmly — trusting me with his belongings while he was under the knife. Nice touch, Quirrenbach, I thought. The goods had served to reinforce his story.
Except again, in hindsight, I should have realised. The broker had complained that Quirrenbach’s experientials were bootlegged; that they were copies of originals he had handled weeks earlier. And yet Quirrenbach said he had only just arrived. If I checked the manifests of lighthuggers arriving in the last week, would I even find that a ship had come in from Grand Teton? Perhaps, or perhaps not. It depended on how fastidious Quirrenbach had been in the manufacturing of his cover. I doubted that it went very deep, since he would have had only a day or two to manufacture the whole thing from scratch.
All things considered, he hadn’t done an entirely bad job.
It was sometime after noon, when I had finished with Dominika, that the next Haussmann episode happened. I was standing with my back against the wall of Grand Central Station, idly watching a skilled puppeteer entertain a small group of children. The puppeteer worked above a miniature booth, operating a tiny model of Marco Ferris, making the delicately jointed, spacesuited figurine descend a rockface formed from a heap of crumbled masonry. Ferris was supposed to be climbing into the chasm, because there was a pile of jewels at the base of the slope guarded by a fierce, nine-headed alien monster. The children clapped and screamed as the puppeteer made the monster lunge at Ferris.
That was when my thoughts stalled and the episode inserted itself, fully-formed.
Afterwards — when I’d had time to digest what had been revealed to me — I thought about the one that had come before it. The Haussmann episodes had begun innocently enough, reiterating Sky’s life according to the facts as I knew them. But they’d begun to diverge, at first in small details and then with increasing obviousness. The references to the sixth ship didn’t belong in any orthodox history that I’d ever heard of, and nor did the fact that Sky had kept alive the assassin who had murdered, or been given the means to murder, his father. But those were minor aspects of the story compared with the idea that Sky had actually murdered Captain Balcazar. Balcazar was just a footnote in our history; one of Sky’s predecessors — but no one had ever intimated that Sky had actually killed him.
Clenching my fist, blood raining against the floor of the concourse, I began to wonder what I’d really been infected with.
‘There wasn’t anything I could do about it. He was sleeping there, not making a sound — I never suspected anything was wrong.’
The two medics examining Balcazar had come aboard the instant the ship was secure, after Sky had raised the alarm about the old man. Valdivia and Rengo had closed the airlock behind them so that they had space to work. Sky watched them intently. They both looked weary and sallow, with bags under their eyes from overwork.