Christopher Brookmyre (56 page)

'You leaked it, didn't you,' Ross said, a statement rather than a question. Willis gazed out of the window for a moment, procrastinating. Then he turned back to Ross and nodded.

'I did.'

'There is no Segnier.'

'No.'

'And you never really asked Bett what that girl Alexis was doing with my computer that night, did you?'

'No.'

Ross shook his head.

'If I hadn't seen enough violence of late, I'd be kicking your fucking head in right now, you know that?'

'I do, and I am truly sorry, Ross. I had no idea it would work out this way.'

'They came after my family, for Christ's sake, not just me. That's what you exposed me to.'

Willis nodded, taking his licks, but Ross didn't have the energy to dole out too many of them. They sat in silence for a while, listening to the muted sound of the rotorblades and the engines. Then Willis sat up straighter and folded his arms, the penitence erased from his expression, replaced by a piercing stare of which Ross would never have imagined him capable.

'You're right to be angry, Ross, absolutely right. But I'm not the only one with a confession to make, am I?'

Bett pulled his hand away rather stiffly, using it to lift his mug as an attempted disguise for his discomfort.

'How is your husband?' he asked, by way of emphasising the source. Jane sighed, folding her arms.

'He's okay. They had to operate to remove the bullet. The operation went fine, but he was still unconscious when I left. They're going to keep him there for observation.'

'You speak to him much before he went under?'

'Yeah, as much conversation as I'd normally have out of him in a month; once he was convinced he wasn't hallucinating from the pain, that is. Shit, that reminds me, he gave me something to give to Ross and I forgot about it.'

'What?'

'Weird. He thought he was hallucinating and I thought he was delirious. He said it was something Ross had given him to be used as a last resort, which he wouldn't be needing any more.'

'And what was it?'

She paused, realising how crazy it was going to sound.

'A tube of lip balm.'

Bett's face remained admirably free of mirth. He seemed curious, in fact.

'Lip balm? Can I see it?'

'Sure,' she said, and reached into her jacket pocket. She handed it to him. He examined the tube as it lay flat on his palm, then opened it and twisted the end to project the pearly white shaft.

'As I said, Tom could have been havering; after all, he . . . '

She broke off as Bett snapped the soft cylinder and revealed something metallic to be concealed underneath. His fingers pulled the clinging balm away in chunks until they were left holding a solitary bullet.

'Tom said Ross wouldn't tell him what it was, for both their protection. I don't get it. It's just a bullet.'

'Less baffling than lip balm, granted,' Bett said. 'But I must confess I'm at a loss.'

He placed it gently upright on the table, pinched between his thumb and forefinger. She saw a tiny twitch furrow his brow, then he lifted his hand. The bullet jumped from his grasp of its own accord and hit the milk jug with a clang, eliciting a small shriek of fright from Jane.

Bett picked the bullet off of the side of the jug, exerting some force to do so, then looked at it closer. 'It's magnetised,' he said, sounding perplexed.

'Except, as we discussed the other day, you can't magnetise lead. This slug is made of steel. Wait a second. I think . . . Come on,' he said, getting up.

'Where?'

'The firing range. I've got a hunch about something.'

She followed him, the pair of them all but running to get to the basement. Bett selected a pistol of the appropriate calibre and slid the bullet into the breech. He flipped a switch on the controls and sent the target dummy in front of him all the way to the back of the range. Then he held the gun in both hands and fired.

Bett nodded as soon as the shot went off - unusually quiet, Jane thought -

then hurdled the barrier and began walking towards the target. Once he reached the dummy, he bent down to pick something up. When he stood upright again, he was holding the slug in his right hand.

'It didn't even penetrate the cloth,' he reported. 'Barely enough powder in the jacket to get it across the range. He must have had these specially manufactured, maybe even made them himself. I'm betting the dummy he used in the video was made of balsa, something you could rip to splinters with a pea shooter and a healthy pair of lungs. And that nailbomb - it wasn't held together by cellophane just because it's transparent, it was because cellophane wouldn't need much of a charge for the magnetised nails to rip through it.'

Bett grinned, utterly delighted. 'Your boy is even more of a genius than I thought.'

'Why?'

'Because he's pulled off a two-hundred-million-euro fake.'

'It wasn't always my intention,' Ross told Willis. 'In the beginning, when I first had the idea, I genuinely did believe it might be possible, that there might be some way, even if the technology was decades off. But by the time I'd accepted it couldn't be done, I'd already envisaged the knock-on effects. I'd imagined how merely the knowledge that it was in the pipeline might scare people in the industry into thinking about other technologies, make governments, make
everybody
think about ways to defend ourselves that wouldn't involve blowing holes in people. And in the short term, I'd envisaged how the project might make Phobos think they had a reason to keep Deimos as a going concern. There were always rumours that they were pulling the plug on us and you were going to retire. I thought if I could make you believe in the Gravity Well, it would protect all the other projects we've worked on.'

'They were more than rumours, Ross. I
was
thinking about retiring; I still plan to, and soon. I've grown to hate this business. A little late in the day, you might argue, but I got there in the end. Once upon a time, perhaps it was diff . . . no, once upon a time, perhaps
I
was different. In recent years I've not been so easy with what we're about. That's why I created Deimos. It was my brainchild, or rather the salve to my conscience, to back the parallel development of non-lethal enforcement weapons. Do you want to know how cynical this business really is?'

'I think I spent the last couple of weeks finding out.'

'In a nutshell, it can be summed up by the fact that when you mention non-lethal weapons to most people in this game, they understand it as a euphemism for torture devices. Truth is, I was kidding myself. I was never going to be able to persuade my fellow directors at Phobos to keep pumping money into Deimos, not the kind of investment it really needs. But then came your Project F.'

'When did you suss it was a fake?'

'Oh, fairly early, Ross,' he said with a laugh. '
Resistance Paradox Effect
?

You're an inspired engineer and a brilliant designer, but a rotten physicist and an even worse liar. Our visions weren't too far apart, however, or our methods: scare the industry into investing in new technologies - and that's exactly what we've done.'

'But once they've got access to Marledoq, it won't take them long to find out the Gravity Well is just a fucking big magnet. And then they'll close us down and asset-strip the place, not to mention suing Phobos out of existence.'

Willis was smiling, that newly revealed hardened edge to his apparent happiness.

'No they bloody won't. I've been negotiating this deal for weeks now, with several interested parties. OSE were never really in the frame, incidentally. They just thought they were, but I was using Parrier because I needed someone sufficiently greedy and corrupt to take the bait in the first place. I was never going to sell Deimos. BDE/CMK offered less than most but they got the nod because they agreed to the terms I was offering: an investment, not a purchase, and a ringfenced investment at that. They are investing in our development of non-lethal technologies. They get a corresponding share in the rights to those technologies and a very generous share in the back-end, but we retain control. Of course, the technology they're really interested in doesn't exist, but nor are they ever supposed to have heard about it.'

Ross smiled back, couldn't help himself laughing. 'Because the files were stolen,' he said.

'The Gravity Well was never mentioned in any discussions, negotiations or documents. For them to have done so would be to admit complicity in industrial espionage and latterly a whole raft of more serious crimes. We've got our investment, Ross. Deimos has a bright future. Well, as bright as it gets down a big hole under a mountain.'

'Willis,' Bett said, shaking his head, 'that fly old bastard.'

'You said it to me yourself,' Jane reminded him. 'Act awkward and clumsy and people write you off as no threat. He plays the bumbling old fool . . . '

'And no one sees him coming until his knife is in up to the hilt. They thought he was there for the taking but he played them all, even me.'

'He played
you
, how?'

'Oh, a small but crucial role. The real con was in making people believe in the technology, which he did by making it the most jealously guarded secret. Expensively guarded, too: he contracted me as consultant to overhaul Marledoq's security, and my recommendations weren't cheap, nor were my services. But that was all crucial to the deception.'

'If he'd paraded them around at an exhibition, people would have been more sceptical,' Jane surmised. 'But instead they believed the videos were real because they thought they'd been stolen, and stolen with some difficulty. This Segnier - whoever he really is, and if he really exists - gave Parrier the impression that he didn't even know
what
the big secret was. I suppose it might have set off alarm bells if he just handed over the files, so not only did he make out a third party got hold of them during some one-off opportunity, but he got everyone to pay through the nose for them too.'

'People are always more valuing of things that cost them dear, and information is no different.'

'Any guesses who this third party might have been?' Jane asked.

'Oh, I'm starting to get an idea.'

'You okay, girl?' Rebekah enquired as Air Bett prepared to touch down inside the Marledoq facility's recently electrified perimeter fence. Lex had been staring transfixed at the compound throughout their approach, this place the occasion of an unease that had never quite left her. She'd been on tenterhooks the whole time Ross Fleming was around Maison Bla, but her fear of what he might say wasn't the sole reason she'd felt compelled to take this flight. Having been the fool whose betrayal set this whole thing in motion, she needed the closure of seeing him returned, safe and sound, where it all began, the scene of the crime.

'I'm good,' she said, as the wheels gently took the chopper's weight.

'You looked kinda spaced.'

'Just weird being back here, you know?'

'Yeah. This was my first real exercise. Looks different in the daylight. Less threatening - though I guess we constituted the real threat that night.'

You got that right, Lex thought.

It did look different, and not just because of the time of day. Bett's recommendations had all been implemented, such as the removal of the aboveground, sabotage-friendly electrical substation and the construction of a highsecurity tamper-proof housing for the facility's previously vulnerable ventilation intakes, pumps and filters. (Bett had opted against pumping the place full of sleep agent during the Tiger-Team raid on the tripartite grounds that it was too expensive, too easy and 'just no bloody fun') Inside the deliberately innocuous-looking warehouses there were now retinal scanners controlling the lifts, with inter-level access (and even certain individual rooms) also protected by optical-recognition equipment. If they were to stage a raid on this place again, somebody really would have to lose an eye. Lex jumped out of the cockpit door while Rebekah killed the engines and reached, vigilantly as ever, for her maintenance paperwork. With the rotor sound dying off, she heard a keening noise from behind and looked over her shoulder to see someone approach in an electric buggy, coming to pick up the VIPs. She slid open the cabin door and offered both passengers a hand down on to the tarmac. They both looked pretty pleased about something. Willis emerged first, Fleming at his back. The labgeek stopped in front of her and kept hold of her hand a moment.

'Thanks,' he said. 'For everything.'

'Don't mention it. Can I just say, your mom's an incredible woman.'

'You're telling me.'

He walked off towards the approaching buggy, which was now only yards away, close enough for her to see the driver.

'Oh shit,' she muttered to herself. She was looking once more into the face of the nameless man who'd seduced her all those months ago with his talk of influence, of contacts, and his bullshit promises. He got out of the buggy and shook hands with Willis and Fleming, laughing, ushering them aboard. All pals. Then, before he got back into the driver's seat, he turned to look at Lex, smiled and put a finger to his lips.

'Son of a bitch.'

Lex watched the buggy drive off. She heard the slam of the pilot-side door, then Rebekah appeared alongside her.

'What the hell was that about?' Rebekah asked.

'What?'

'That finger-on-the-lips deal? Who was that guy?'

Lex was about to plead ignorance when her cellular began ringing. She fished it out of her pocket and looked at the LCD, saw the name scroll across the panel.

Bett.

She pressed talk. 'Sir?'

'I know,' he said simply.

She swallowed, tried to think of a response, felt as though her throat was swollen, blocking her words.

'Fool me once, shame on you, they say. Fool me twice, shame on me. You're about the only person I believe
could
fool me twice, Alexis, and I can't afford to let that happen. You're fired.'

She gasped, the sudden intake of breath about the only sound she felt capable of making. A thousand thoughts rushed around her head, none of them lucid.