Chapter Eleven
Washington DC
USA, Day 20
“I’m afraid I can’t let you go any further.”
Jayne nodded at the policeman as she halted in front of the tape someone had thoughtfully stretched across the doorway. POLICE LINE — KEEP OUT it read, as if anyone would just run past the burly policeman and into the cramped apartment. From her vantage point, she could see a handful of stuffed bookcases, a sofa that had clearly been dragged halfway across the room — and a chalk outline on the ground where the dead body had fallen. A handful of police photographers were wandering around, taking photos with monotonous regularity, but little else seemed to be going on. Washington had too many murders per month and not all of them, whatever the Washington PD claimed, were solved.
There was little spectacular about the death of Albert Grossman, honours student at Caltech and current wage slave in a company that cared more for brute labour than it did for the hopes and aspirations of the young men and women who were entering the job market. Jayne was honest enough to admit that under ordinary circumstances, she would never have given the murder a second thought — but Albert Grossman was also Arnie Pie of the Blogger Association Network. His murder was odd enough, but a handful of bloggers had checked the details and raised a disturbing question. What were the odds of at least eight anti-alien personages being killed within the same few days? Six bloggers, a newspaper reporter and a fact-finder for CNN’s website had all died within days of one another — and the only thing they had in common was that they had all raised concerns about the Snakes.
She looked up at the policeman. He wasn’t someone used to the streets, really; he’d admitted that he was more of a glorified dispatcher. Someone who owed the BAN a favour had arranged for him to escort Jayne to the murder scene; Jayne had been privately amused to watch his eyes straying from her breasts to her rear end, as if he’d never been given any training in how to interact with the media. Not that she cared, really; if he was attracted to her, he might be more willing to answer her questions.
“He didn’t deserve to die,” she said, bluntly. It was easy to inject a note of sorrow into her voice. Death was never amusing, even when the person in question deserved to die. And who was she to make such a judgement anyway? “Do you know who did it?”
She hoped that it would be taken for a naïve question. “I’m afraid we have little to go on,” the policeman admitted, finally. “No one saw anything; no one knows anything; no one is prepared to admit to anything without a lawyer. This is one of the places where everyone minds their own business and doesn’t speak to the police, which turns it into a very satisfactory place for anyone engaged in criminal activity. There are at least ten druggies in this area, along with five prostitutes and at least one suspected robber. But we can’t pin anything on him and if we rounded up the prostitutes, they would be replaced within the day.”
Jayne nodded. She’d covered human interest stories back in the days when she’d been a cub reporter. Even the honest and decent folks living in poor areas tended to view the police as their natural enemy, tools of a shadowy government that was prepared to interfere in their lives, but not to do anything to actually help them. There were a dozen theories as to why that was the case — Jayne believed that it had something to do with low sentences and lack of discipline — yet it hardly mattered. The bottom line was that the murderer would probably go unnoticed.
“He worked for the BAN,” she said, changing the subject slightly. Most policemen loved the BAN; hell, a number of bloggers were policemen. That was technically a violation of their service agreements, but they’re done excellent work exposing the stupidities of rules and regulations imposed by men who never walked the streets while wearing their uniforms. “Would we be able to get access to his computer files?”
“I’d have to check,” the policeman said. Jayne moved, just slightly, to show him another centimetre of cleavage, but it didn’t change his mind. “The stiff left behind no will; we wouldn’t even have known about his death if he hadn’t left a key with his former girlfriend. She came to pick up some of her stuff from his flat and found his dead body. I’m afraid that she had hysterics and we had to remove her to a hospital. I think his parents will wind up with his gear; perhaps they could let you have access…”
Jayne thanked him and walked away, heading down the stairs to the streets below. It was a blustery cold day in Washington, with hints of rain falling from the sky to the ground. She shivered and pulled her coat around her as the wind blew stronger, pushing against her. As a child, she’d feared the wind; now, she looked up into the gloomy sky and wondered what was lurking high overhead. The observatories said that the alien starships could be seen with the naked eye, but Washington was too bright a city for anyone to have any hope of picking out a single light high overhead.
Every reporter dreamed of stumbling onto a story that would make their names famous over the entire world. Journalists still studied the Watergate story, where a team of journalists had discovered a trail that led all the way back to President Nixon himself. America had lost her innocence that day, Jayne considered; the day when they’d discovered that even the highest in the land could be brought low by the media. It had been the day when the media had started to shift from reporting the truth to scrutinising everything the government said, convinced that the government had to be lying to cover up dark intentions…
There was no conspiracy, she knew. Nine times out of ten, there was no conspiracy; the government truly was as incompetent as it had seemed. And yet people still believed in the most insane conspiracy theories, from the American government having known about the 9/11 plot and doing nothing to the American government actually carrying out the bombing itself. It seemed to her that the people who chose to believe such insane theories were actually looking for a kind of reassurance, a sense that even if something had gone wrong, someone was still in control. The idea that screw-ups happened anyway terrified them.
But maybe there was a conspiracy after all. A number of people who happened to hold anti-alien views were dead — and no one had been arrested or seemed likely to be arrested for the crime. And that suggested that the killers were professional assassins, trying to disguise the murders behind simple ‘robberies gone wrong.’ And who benefited from that? Only one answer came to mind.
Stepping into a shop entrance to escape the wind, she pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and called an old friend. He was curious, but agreed to meet her without asking any more questions. If she was right — and if cell phone networks were being monitored — saying the words out loud might just make her the next statistic in a murder investigation.
They met at Kent’s Bar and Grill, a deafeningly loud eatery that catered to Washington’s students and junior workers. It was difficult to hold any kind of civil conversation over the music, but it should have the effect of making it very difficult for anyone to overhear their words. Besides, there were enough distractions in the crowded bar to make it very difficult for someone to peer into their corner without being blindingly obvious.
Vincent Felt had shared a journalism class with her, back before they’d both graduated and he’d gone to work for the New York Times. He’d always had a little crush on her, which Jayne had exploited ruthlessly from time to time. The BAN might be growing, but it didn’t have the same level of access possessed by the Grey Lady — and besides, many people thought that the internet wasn’t quite real. He was a tall man tending towards obesity, a trend encouraged by the large plate of nachos and salsa he was devouring while talking to her.