Great North Road (48 page)

“Evening, Detective.”

Sid jumped. There was a dark blob in the shadows of the tiny front garden, only visible as it moved forward.

“Kaneesha! Aye, man, what the hell?” He couldn’t make out her face at all, just another shade of darkness between coat and whatever hat was pulled down over her hair. Even her wisps of breath were faint.

“Jolwel Kavane used to be my informant,” she said with a thread of anger in her voice. “I recruited him back in the day. I ran him for seven years. He was a perfect snout, he didn’t know what was going on at the top, but everything else he told me was solid gold. I owe him a couple of promotions at least.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“He was reliable, Sid. He would have told his controller whatever he knew. You don’t pressure people like Jolwel to find things out, that’s not how it’s played. You listen to what he says, you hear the names, and you turn the heat on them because they’re new nobodies, the expendable ones, not Jolwel. He’s not an expendable. They knew that, that bitch Fullerton and her crew, they knew it and they didn’t fucking care. They were too greedy, they wanted things fast. That’s not how it works in intelligence, you put a case together slowly, take years if you have to. But this mad North murder, it’s fired everyone up so hot they can’t think of anything else but the prize at the end. So they put pressure on him. They got him to ask, when it should have been them doing the asking. See, pet, everyone knew Jolwel didn’t ask about things he wasn’t involved in. He was never the curious one; he was a solid gang lad. A dependable who
didn’t fucking
ask!
And when all that changes, when he’s different, you know he’s grassing you up.”

“I don’t want to make it worse, but Hayfa’s intelligence hasn’t given me anything. I’m no closer to solving this.”

“Aye, and now everyone is ducking for cover. That stupid fatherfucking bitch. She couldn’t organize an orgy in a brothel. How the hell did she ever wind up in charge.”

Sid was getting more than a little curious why Kaneesha was here. Not just for rant therapy, that was sure. So he humored her, quietly confident this was going to be the gold he’d been praying for since the beginning. “O’Rouke. How else?”

“Aye, crap on it. When he’s gone, this city’ll see the sun again, I tell you.”

“I expect so.”

Kaneesha let out a long sigh. “Marcus Sherman.”

“Who?”

“Marcus Sherman, he’s the one you have to watch. He’s the organizer, the one with the contacts and the muscle and the money. He’s putting this together. Not that it’s his operation, he’s not that high.”

“Never heard of him. He wasn’t in any of the intelligence reports.”

“Of course not, nor will he be in any database you can access; he’s not as stupid as Fullerton. He used to be in Northumberland Interstellar security before he went freelance. That’s how come he’s the contact point, Mr. Go-To. And the corporate boys trust him because they know they can disown him faster than shit falls down a sewer. There’s no way he’ll ever turn on them if he did get charged. He’d know about a warrant being granted before the case detective, and if that ever happens he’ll disappear. He’s got the money for it, he only stays because the game is his blood.”

“Nobody is going to apply for a warrant, Kaneesha. Not with this.”

“Good man.” She held out an envelope. “This is a photograph of him.”

“Thanks. Kind of primitive there, man.”

“Kind of cautious, Detective. If you ever were stupid enough to try and build a case, his lawyer would be entitled to your log. They’d work the devil’s own backtrack. He doesn’t get my name, Sid.”

Which is why she was waiting for me here, because she knew this night would be off log. Jesus, that’s smart paranoia.
“Okay, I understand.”

“I hope so. You have to be super careful, Sid. Marcus doesn’t need proof. If he even hears your name there’s going to be trouble, big trouble.”

“None of this will go through the station. That’s not how I’m working the case.”

“All right. Final details, he’s got a lot of houses around town, and he never stays at one for more than a couple of nights at a time. But he does have a boat called the
Maybury Moon,
berthed at Dunston Marina. He’s sweet on it, maybe too sweet. Apart from that, he’s hot on smartdust and software security. If you’re going to hack him you’ll need a bytehead a lot better than anyone at Market Street.”

“Thanks, Kaneesha.”

She opened the gate and stepped out into the gloomy frozen street. “Stupid thing this. Man, I didn’t even like Jolwel. Nobody did. But then nobody deserves to die like that.”

“What’s up?” Ian asked when Sid walked into the flat. Eva had claimed her usual place against the wall, sitting on a pillow, and holding up a shot glass. “Brennivn,” she said. “Decent Icelandic schnapps. I thought we’d toast the death of the case in style. It’s been a long time dying.”

Ian couldn’t stop staring at Sid. “What is it? What’s happened?”

“Put the bottle away,” Sid told Eva. “We just got our first break.”

He’d drunk two bottles of beer by the time he’d finished explaining everything: Umbreit, Kavane, and Scrupsis; the bureaucrat fight; Aldred’s distant worlds theory.

Sid cracked open his third beer. “So what we have is a wild connection that’ll probably be completely wrong. But it’s a connection. Like I said, I’m not interested in the reason, all I want is the bastard who stabbed the North to death.”

“And Marcus Sherman can give us that?” Ian asked dubiously.

“If my source is right, he probably organized the cover-up afterward.”

“Hey, that might explain why there was such a gap between the murder and dumping the body,” Eva explained. “If the murderer hadn’t planned on killing the North …”

“Then there wasn’t a plan in place to dispose of the body,” Sid carried on. “And it took time to set up. Saturday and Sunday to be exact.”

“So how do we tackle Sherman?” Ian asked.

“Like rancid plutonium.” Sid ripped the envelope open with his forefinger and pulled out the photo. It showed a man in his midforties, dark skin and black hair, stylish stubble on his cheeks and a tiny goatee. Sid couldn’t ever imagine a face like that smiling. “So we start with low-level observation, and that means finding him. He’s fond of his boat at the Dunston Marina, which is where we’ll begin. Once we have him in real time we can track remotely. Ian, can you set up a secure link to the police network, one that doesn’t register?”

“Leave it with me. There’s an access code I can use that can’t be traced back to me.”

Sid took a good guess why he had that, but didn’t voice it. “Fine. I’ll get us some basic equipment. Once we’re following him we build a pattern of movement, get a list of where he stays in town, find out who he’s seeing. Somewhere along the line there’s got to be some crossover. Once we have that, we can refocus the official investigation.”

S
ATURDAY,
F
EBRUARY 23, 2143

Her name was Jen. Ian knew that because her name was in the quick-memo section of his iris smartcell grid when he woke up. It took a while to get Jen out of the flat. More time than Ian normally allowed for. The normal routine was fuck as soon as he was awake, make the toast and tea while the girl was having a shower, then the phony fix-up-to-meet-up agreement, call a cab, and show her the door. That was Saturday-morning standard. Maybe Jen had started to have regrets about the night, maybe she was needy, or had issues, or maybe her place was a tip, or she couldn’t afford to heat it so she simply wasn’t in a hurry to go back there. Whatever it was, she lingered in bed after he got up, fired off casual questions, even propositioned him again while the kettle boiled—well, he wasn’t going to say no and disappoint a lady now, was he. They were doing it on the lounge floor when the toast popped up, which made them both laugh. That was bad, a shared moment. She took another hour to leave, asking him about himself, telling him stuff he didn’t want to know about her. Nothing he didn’t know anyway; he’d harvested her profile days ago.

All of which meant he was late for the gym, which was a large part of his Saturday-morning standard. Ian had membership in five gyms and health clubs strategically placed around the city; his biggest thing was for girls who were serious about keeping themselves in shape. Thanks to clingy Jen it was after ten o’clock when he arrived at Harley’s Fitness Machine on St. George’s Terrace up in Jesmond. The main hall had a decent range of modern equipment and smartdust packs that could complement a standard bodymesh to monitor heart rate, oxygen consumption, and muscle performance. Ian didn’t need the packs, as he already had an extensive suite of smartcells that constantly watched over every health aspect of his body.

He went for a full ninety-minute workout with his bodymesh linked to the equipment, making sure muscles were used to full capacity, while checking that tendons and ligaments didn’t get near a tear point. Hydration level, blood sugar, toxins, endorphins were projected into a simple multicolored graph whose sine waves danced elaborately across his grid. The patterns were second nature to him now; he could read them and adjust his body tempo at a near-autonomic level. At the end he requested a full physiology analysis, making sure body fat was down to the accepted minimum. Sid and Eva had stayed longer than expected last night, so he’d had a couple more beers than he ought. Six-pack continuity assured, he hit the shower.

Two girls were signing in when he left the changing room. Joyce, who was marathon-runner thin, and tall with it, asking the receptionist about the midday disco workout.

“Aye, man, I’ve missed that,” Ian complained in cheeky dismay.

Joyce smiled back, and they started the flirt talk about favorite pieces of gym equipment and city jogging routes. She was a dancer with the Sage tour group, he found out. Her friend, Sammi, became all sullen when Ian told them he was a policeman. Genuine police, not agency, he promised. That made no difference to the sulk. He liked that; a challenge made success so much sweeter. He wished them both a good time at the disco workout and caught the metro back down to Monument.

Ian’s shift started at midday. He went to the locker room to change into a suit. Sid was in there, also changing. They had the same dark green shoulder bags, and when their lockers were open side by side they made the switch like a pair of pro dealers working a club full of celebs.

It was an effort to walk into Office3 these days. He and Sid had spent time discussing what to do about the despondency crystallizing around the case team, and hadn’t produced much of a strategy to reverse it. With the taxi backtrack still ongoing and barren, they now thought the whole idea was a complete waste of time. All so very different from the crackle of excitement when the whole-city simulation came online the first time. Now it was just a drudge routine, performed evenings and weekends purely for the overtime.

Ian sat behind his desk and waited as the console screen curved around him. Sparkly laserlight synchronized, producing sharp 3-D images. Once again he called up the Kenny Ansetal case. His e-i loaded a small file into the office network; it was coded as his follow-up on the investigation, officially declaring that all avenues of inquiry had been followed and exhausted. He certified the case as closed, but when his virtual hand reached for the program status icon he flipped it to inactive. The data shrank back into the network, but didn’t close. Ian called up the North case, and ran a quick overview. Nothing new.
Of course
. He closed down his console, went down to the zone theater on the second floor where Abner, Lorelle, and Reannha were spending a miserable Saturday afternoon, and joined in backtracking taxi number 116.

He signed out at six thirty, handing over taxi 117 to the evening shift with all the enthusiasm of a janitor facing a flooded bathroom. Ten minutes later he was back in his flat.

The green shoulder bag contained a brand-new Apple console, with a huge memory and processing capacity. Sid had assured him last night it wouldn’t be a traceable purchase. Ian admired the smooth white rectangle with its tiny purple and green LEDs, wondering just what kind of contacts Sid actually had to be able to afford something like that on a secondary. He pulled a cranberry-flavored water from the fridge and sat on the edge of the bed, plugging the gadget in. The boot-up and owner interface took a couple of minutes, a process run by his e-i. He didn’t have a screen or a zone booth in the flat—no use for them. Instead he put on a pair of old-style netlens glasses; they were late-model, with a very high resolution. Ian pursed his lips in appreciation: The image was just as sharp as anything a modern zone could produce.

His e-i connected him to the Market Street station network by a long complex route with trace-proof cutoffs at each cell. Once he was in, he used Vance Elston’s code to request a secure link to the Office3 network. Ian had acquired it the first morning Elston had turned up to lord it over the investigation, using a simple phishing mask over the network’s interface protocol when the spook had registered himself in Office3. Secure networks were set up to prevent illegal access from the outside; they weren’t geared up to protect themselves from illegal patches to be inserted from inside the firewall—at least not on a system as cheap as the one used in Market Street.

With Elston’s authority established, he set up a new section of the network with full visual recognition and AI tracking. Next was location; the police network accessed all the surveillance meshes in and around Dunston Marina. Sherman’s image he had to scan in from the photo, which was so unbelievably Old World, but once it was in the software would be able to catch him in the marina. That was all he needed to begin the operation. Once the software tagged Sherman it would harvest the transnet code from his bodymesh and run an orthodox follow-observe program that would track him across town. Probably not very well—Ian had loaded in a lot of restrictions given how Sherman was supposed to have plenty of digital security. They would be have to be cautious, accepting that the software would lose him pretty quickly after he left the marina the first few times. But it would slowly learn and improve, allowing them to harvest a profile of movements and associates. Once they had something concrete they could start to take over monitoring Sherman themselves, running the surveillance like a proper operation.