Engineman (25 page)

Hunter imagined the colour draining from his face, or rather from half of it. He tried to remain calm. "When was this, Mr Rossilini?"

"Two days ago, at seven in the evening, German time."

Rossilini slid the envelope across the table. "I'd give the photographs a miss, sir, if you're thinking of eating."

Hunter withdrew the contents of the envelope and skimmed the operator's report. It detailed Olafson's movements on the day she died, and included the German police report which stated the cause of the accident as engine failure.

Hunter looked up. "Send someone to Hamburg to look into the accident, Mr Rossilini."

"I've already done so, sir."

"Good." Quickly, Hunter leafed through the police photographs taken at the scene of the accident. A microwave pylon had sheared the flier in two. Olafson's remains were scattered across the flat roof of a nearby building. Bosch, Hunter told himself, returning the photographs to the envelope. Definitely Hieronymus Bosch.

"Two days ago I had mentioned to no-one that I was considering employing Christiana Olafson on this mission. I had not at the time even decided myself to approach her. There can be no way this accident is connected with us."

Rossilini said, "I did consider that, sir. But I thought it best to send someone to Hamburg anyway."

"You did right, but I think they'll find that it was what it looks like; an accident." Hunter paused, considerably relieved now after his initial fright. "And anyway, if by any chance our enemies were onto us, they'd surely strike at the very heart of our operations, not at the Enginemen and -women we might employ."

Rossilini picked up the envelope. "I'll leave you to it, sir. I hope you enjoy your meal."

Hunter smiled. "Thank you, Mr Rossilini. I intend to."

He took a mouthful of brandy, the macabre photographs fading from the forefront of his mind as he reassured himself that the accident was not the work of the Organisation.

He looked at his watch. It was six-thirty. Ella was late. He would give her another thirty minutes. He ordered a third brandy and sat back, trying to regain the composure he had felt earlier. The little scare with Olafson, though, and Ella's impunctuality, had served to spoil his optimistic mood.

Did Ella still, after all these years, hate him as she had so obviously hated him as a teenager, and after what he had said on the disc he had sent her? He had made the recording on the free world of Tyler, and it had proved the hardest speech he'd ever had to make. He'd lost count of the number of times he'd had to re-record it. He told her simply of his conversion. He said that he regretted their differences in the past, and expressed the hope that they might build a meaningful relationship in the future, belated though that was. What he really wanted to tell her - the details of this mission which would surely redeem him in her eyes - he could not entrust to disc. He resolved that although he was sworn to absolute secrecy - even his aides did not know everything - he would make an exception and tell Ella what was happening, when they finally met.

He waited until seven, and only then decided that she was not going to turn up. He settled his bill and left, deep in thought. After the air-conditioned chill of the restaurant, the night air outside was sultry and cloying. The Mercedes was waiting at the kerb. Sassoon appeared from where he'd been keeping watch on the restaurant and opened the rear door. Hunter ducked into the car. Rossilini glanced at him in the rear-view mirror. "The morgue, sir?"

"No - take me to Orly. Rue Chabrol."

They set off and motored through the rapidly falling twilight. Hunter leaned forward. "Mr Rossilini..."

"Sir?"

"Am I correct in thinking that you have a daughter?"

The driver glanced at him in the mirror. "Yes, sir."

"How old is she?"

"Nine, sir."

"Have you seen her recently?"

"No, not for two years."

Hunter smiled to himself. "Well, as soon as we've finished with this business, Mr Rossilini, I suggest you take yourself off to... Benedict's world, isn't it? - and make sure you visit your daughter. Understood?"

Rossilini exchanged a glance with Sassoon. They probably thought he was going soft in the head. "Understood, sir."

"Good, Mr Rossilini. Very good." Hunter sat back and watched the passing suburbs fall into dereliction and decay the further they drove from central Paris.

They passed Orly spaceport and turned into the district where Ella lived. They passed down narrow streets between warehouses and storage units owned by the spaceport authorities. Rossilini accelerated over the last kilometre.

The alien vegetation began as a fibrous matting on the pavement, and the further they drove into the district of cheap tenement rows the more prolific the growth became, climbing the facades of the four-storey buildings, crossing the street in great rafts of gnarled and tangled ground-roots. By the time they arrived at the north end of the Rue Chabrol, only the occasional glimpse of building could be seen beneath the all-consuming plant-life: an odd patch of brickwork here, a cleared window there. Rossilini braked and Hunter peered out at the neighbourhood where his daughter had chosen to make her home. Between the overgrown rows of apartment buildings on either side, the street was a trench filled with a riotous jungle. It was hard to imagine how anyone gained access to the shrouded properties. It occurred to Hunter that perhaps Ella had moved out since his contacts had found her address. She might never have received his disc, which would explain why she had not shown up at the restaurant.

He made out the caged run which penetrated the street jungle, a dark tunnel which passed through the slick green leaves and fronds. He opened the door and climbed out, the heat and the heady scent of alien pollen hitting him in a wave. Sassoon was beside him. "Sir?"

"It's okay, Mr Sassoon. Just a little personal pilgrimage."

Sassoon glanced down the run. "Do you think it wise?"

"Stay in the car if you don't feel up to it."

"I didn't mean..." Sassoon began. "I'm coming with you. You don't know what kind of creatures live in there."

Hunter smiled to himself as he gazed up at the overgrown buildings. "Just artists and anarchists, I suspect, Mr Sassoon." He stepped into the wire-mesh corridor and entered the green-tinged twilight. At regular intervals, smaller caged runs branched off at right angles, the wire mesh bearing the numbers of the individual buildings. He strode on before Sassoon, who'd drawn his gun and was following warily.

Hunter stared about him. He could almost believe he'd been miniaturised and set down in the Amazon jungle. On all sides, great blooms and vines had grown through rents in the mesh, impeding their progress.

He came to the number forty-six painted on a board wired to the mesh on his left. He ducked into the narrow corridor. The collar of mesh finished before the door, and the jungle had poured into the gap as if intent on invading the building. The door was ajar, admitting vines and creepers. Hunter pushed it further open. In the dark hallway he could just make out the shadowy shape of a flight of stairs. He noticed the entrance of a lift, but decided not to trust the mechanical apparatus of such a dilapidated building.

Sassoon entered behind him.

"I'll be able to look after myself now, thank you, Mr Sassoon," Hunter said.

His bodyguard nodded. "I'll stay down here."

Hunter climbed the stairs, broken glass and perished linoleum crunching underfoot. Spectacular drifts of fungus covered the walls, flock-textured. Hunter came to the first landing and climbed the second flight of stairs. By the time he reached the fourth floor he was out of breath and more than a little nervous. Dying sunlight slanted through a window, illuminating damp and unpainted walls. Hunter approached a door daubed with the number twenty-four. The words of greeting he had rehearsed over and over were a jumble in his head. Heart hammering, he knocked. At his first touch the door swung open. He found a light switch on the wall and turned it on. For a second he feared that she had indeed moved out, but then revised his opinion. Had she moved out, she would surely have taken her possessions. The narrow hall was stacked with cardboard boxes full of clothes, in lieu of wardrobes; wooden cartons containing chipped cups and plates, pristine canvasses and plastic back-boards for plasma-graphics. He cleared his throat, called out, "Ella?" He moved down the corridor, squeezing past the boxes. Dust covered every horizontal surface, but he suspected that this was more the artist's aversion to housework than any indication that she'd moved out, for whatever reason, and left her possessions - at least, he hoped so. Of course, there were always other possibilities in a neighbourhood like this...

"Ella!" His call lingered in the sultry air.

He pushed open the first door on the left and entered a lounge. It was furnished with an ancient four-piece suite, none of the pieces matching. No carpet, just bare floorboards. The walls were daubed with a yellow and green psychedelic mural. In the corner of the room was a small area of wall-paper, carpet, and a new-looking recliner, situated before a power point and the antenna of a communications vid-screen, but there was no sign of a set. The pathetic show of respectability brought tears to his good eye. He wondered if the screen had been stolen - certainly it would be the only thing in the room worth taking.

Then he saw the stack of photographs wedged between the cushion and the back-rest of the settee. He sat down, sorted through the thick drift. There were a few pictures of Ella before she left home, at school, on holiday; a slim, pretty olive-skinned girl with long black hair, so painfully like her mother. Most of the photographs were of Ella since arriving on Earth: with a crowd of her bizarre artist friends, at parties and street performances, with the solid, stolid Engineman she lived with. In these pictures, she was a pale, starved-looking shaveskull, and in none of them was she smiling.

At the very bottom of the pile, Hunter found a picture of Marie, his wife...

Its sudden appearance, after so many photos of Ella standing seriously beside her work, caused him to gasp. He stared at the photograph. It showed Marie leaning over a sea-wall on braced arms, her shoulders hunched, her gamin's face mischievous and grinning. So young - Christ, she was so young... He calculated that it had been taken at Zephyr, on the Rim world of New Syria, during one of his too few leave periods. Marie must have been just twenty-two - three years younger than Ella was now - and they had been married just a year. Fernandez, they had been in love. He had known no emotion like it, before or ever since. He'd been consumed at their first meeting, and all through the time of their courtship and marriage, consumed with a love for her that during the next five years had never abated, and consumed with an incommunicable sense of loss, of soul-harrowing grief, when she died giving birth to Ella at the ridiculously young age of twenty-seven.

He quickly slipped Marie's picture into the inside pocket of his jacket, and shuffled to a photograph showing Ella standing on a rock in the centre of a lagoon at Zambique. He wondered who had taken it, for he knew for certain that he had not. It showed her with her arms held outstretched behind her, her head back, but the serious posture was belied by her expression: she was laughing despite her best efforts not to, and her resemblance to her mother was painful.

Fernandez, he had so much to make up for, so much irrational hatred in the early years, so much apathy as she was growing up, so much disaffection that must have seemed to her like casual cruelty, which perhaps it was.

He had been happily, madly, in love with Marie and looking forward to the birth of a son... and then in the space of minutes Marie was dead and he was presented with the cause of it - a disgustingly healthy baby girl - and though he found it hard to imagine now, looking back with shame, he'd been unable to feel anything but resentment towards his daughter.

He had mellowed, or so he thought, in his later years, when his grief for Marie abated and Ella grew into a person in her own right; an attractive, intelligent teenager, even personable when in company, but always mistrustful and reluctant when alone with him. Around the time of her fifteenth birthday, before she'd left the Reach, he began to recognise the mistakes he'd made; though he was totally unable to open up to Ella and apologise or make amends. He had tried to treat her with more understanding, even compassion, hard though that was after so many years of resentment.

Hunter recalled the time when Conway had suspected that Ella was consorting with the alien tribe which had encamped that summer on the plateau. On reluctantly reading her diary, he had discovered her friendship with a certain alien, and knew that he'd have to end the liaison. The Lho were going down with a devastating plague, and at the time he had not known that humans were unaffected. He felt he had to send her away for her own good, and he recalled the scene in his study when he broke the news to her, relived again his inability to express sympathy or regret.

He had so, so much to make up for...

He selected half a dozen photographs of Ella and slipped them into his jacket beside the one of Marie.

He left the lounge and made his way down the hall. He came to the open door of a small bedroom, so bereft of personal possessions he guessed it must belong to the Engineman. The next door was locked. It could only be Ella's bedroom. He knocked. "Ella?" he called, his heart racing. "Ella!"