Regeneration (12 page)

Herran sat and rocked for a full minute. “Swearing,” he finally observed. “New. Okay.” He turned back to his monitors. “I find. Quick quick.”

“You
will
?”

“Yes. Need data.”

Gabriel felt the request to share his files as a tug through his band. Herran could have broken through with no more effort than it would have taken him to scratch his nose or shuffle his feet—no datastream that Gabriel knew of was secure enough to keep Herran out if he wanted in, and he had written the encryption code for the bands himself. But in his own strange, brusque way he was always scrupulously polite about personal digital space. Gabriel gave him access and he got to work.

As expected, it did not take long; barely long enough for Gabriel to have made them both tea.

He had drunk only a little of his when Herran announced, “Five streamers.” He was studying the machine code scrolling across one of his screens. “Many layers encryption. Good job.” He sounded faintly impressed.

“Are they working together?”

“Sequestered,” Herran said. “Invisible. Different platforms, different streams. No sharing, no messages.” He checked something. “Mostly different times.”

“You mean they've got nothing to do with each other?” That felt completely wrong; the pattern in the files he had shared was too consistent.

“Same apps, encryption, avatar generators,” Herran said. “Special. Not seen before. Built for hiding and faking.”

“So they're all using the same set of tools and doing the same things with them,” Gabriel said slowly, “but they've got different shift patterns and areas of responsibility? And they don't communicate with each other at all?”

“Same tools,” Herran confirmed, “no communication.” He cocked his head as though a surprising thought had occurred to him, and added, “Onstream.”

“Good point. Where are they, physically? Are they posting from the same location?”

“No.”

He thought about that for a moment. “Are they all in London?”

“Yes.”

“Can you give me addresses? Do they move around?”

“No.” Herran's eyes unfocused as he parsed information through the band. “Onstream from working places.”

“So we know where they work—”

“—work
from,
” Herran corrected. His face had gone vague, slightly confused, and he rapped the heel of one hand against his temple as if he might shake more useful words loose that way. “Not work
for
.” A directory listing appeared on the screen and he moved aside so Gabriel could look at it.

“Oh! ‘Working place' . . . You mean a business hub. For freelancers.” Gabriel chewed at a fingernail in frustration. “They can be used anonymously. Fake names . . .”

“Yes. Every time different.”

“But you can track the tablets, right, no matter what false ID they layer over them? Because they must go onstream from home too, or wherever they are the rest of the time—nobody's ever
not
onstream, even if they're not active.”

“Other tablets, maybe. These silent. No standby signal. No tracking.”

“So,” Gabriel said, “we've got five people who have tablets and software that go dark when they're not onstream. And they're only ever used for one purpose, and only from locations where the users can remain anonymous. They have no contact with each other via these tablets. They could be using different ones to communicate, but since they're all in the city they could also be meeting up in person, getting their instructions that way.”

“Possible,” Herran agreed.

“For people who aren't doing anything illegal, Herran, they've gone to a great deal of trouble.”

Herran blinked at him. “I watch,” he said after a while. “Maybe find more.”

“Thanks. Will you message me what you've got so far?”

“Yes. I make easy for you.” His fingers slipped over the input screen, organizing the data into a form that someone other than himself could understand, while Gabriel sat back and tried to think through what to do with the information.

They had confirmed the existence of a conspiracy, one far more clandestine and well-resourced than he had anticipated when he'd asked Herran for help. They might not know who was behind it, but the sheer slickness of the operation eliminated several possibilities.

These are professionals.
The word echoed in his mind, hollow and mocking.

They had no proof that the five anonymous streamers had broken the law, though he was far less confident about what he and Herran had done. And even if Herran did find out who the streamers were, it wouldn't be enough; they still had to find out for whom they were working.

Herran sent him the link, picked up his cup and sipped his own cooling tea. His gray eyes regarded Gabriel steadily over the rim. “Aryel ask about Zavcka,” he said.

The change of subject was so abrupt that Gabriel felt momentarily disoriented. “Because she's getting out of prison?”

“Yes. Worry for Eve.”

“But Zavcka Klist doesn't know about Eve.” He suddenly realized why Herran might have brought it up. “She
doesn't,
does she?” he asked in alarm.

“No,” said Herran. “Bad access from prison. Also, looking wrong places.”

“That's a relief. But when she gets out—”

“I watch.”

“Thank you, Herran. Thank you very, very much.”

Sharon Varsi paused just inside the door of the incident room assigned to the Thames toxin investigation, surveying the three people already gathered around the table. After a silent moment she sat down and looked expectantly across at DI Achebe. She'd felt a twinge of sympathy for him when she'd put him in charge of the case, knowing from experience how disagreeable it was to conduct an inquiry with a senior officer peering over your shoulder. Now, as his worried brown eyes met hers, her heart sank. Achebe was a competent officer and he'd worked on tricky cases before. Asking her to join a conference this early on was unlikely to be a good sign.

It comforted her somewhat that Rhys was there. Achebe introduced the other attendee, Fayole, a field supervisor from Environmental Management. She was a gem woman about Sharon's age with vivid blue hair braided and coiled on top of her head, casting a faint sapphire glow all around her face.

“We've met before, I think,” Sharon said, reaching across to shake hands. “There was a recruitment drive a few years ago, about encouraging more diverse applicants to the public sector—”

“That's right,” the woman replied. “And there was a reception at City Hall after the last election.” She dipped her head with a mixture of pride and resignation. “They like sending me to things like that.”

Rhys snickered in amused recognition and Sharon's mouth quirked too, an acknowledgment of all that Fayole's remark implied. They were all members of the vanguard, and knew only too well the dubious honor of being forever trotted out as an example for others to follow. Sharon thought it unlikely that Fayole's normal area of responsibility included this part of the city; if it did, she suspected they'd have encountered each other more often. It was quite possible that her superiors, sensitive to criticism of the department and now under particular scrutiny from Mikal, had assigned her as liaison purely for public relations reasons.

Achebe looked perplexed, but apparently decided that whatever undercurrent was passing between the others was beside the point of his investigation. “We've come to some conclusions,” he said. “Unfortunately, they raise some new and disturbing questions.”

Rhys smiled wryly, and Sharon could see the strain. “In other words, the mystery deepens.”

She glowered at him. “That's possibly my least favorite phrase. Ever.”

“Sorry, but it does.” He turned politely back to Achebe.

“The incidence of toxicity in Sinkat Basin correlates with the presence of an algae,” the detective inspector said. “As I understand it, that's not unusual—all sorts of microorganisms live in the river, but they're in relatively low concentrations and in balance with each other.” He looked over at Fayole for confirmation. When she nodded, he continued, “What's allowed as runoff from farms and so on is highly regulated, mostly to keep the Thames from being flooded with the kind of nutrients that can make things grow out of control and cause a bloom. But some variation is normal and expected, and within limits it doesn't trigger an alert from the monitoring system.”

“So was there enough of this algae to do that or not?” Sharon asked. There was value in Achebe's slow, methodical explanation, but knowing that didn't increase her patience.

“There wasn't,” said Fayole, “because it's normally harmless. There was a spike that we can't explain, but the amount was still below the level that would generate an alarm.”

“Then why is it important?”

“Because it was altered,” Fayole said. “This one was engineered. Our teams recovered samples from various spots along the river—to be honest, we didn't realize that there was anything different about them at first. The change is very subtle; it wasn't until they looked at this one particular sample, collected where Sinkat Basin joins the main channel, that they noticed it was secreting something . . .” She trailed off, looking at Rhys.

“It'd been hacked to produce the toxin,” he said bluntly, “but it doesn't do it all the time, or at least, not at high enough levels to be a problem. The samples from further upstream are virtually dormant—they look and act just like the ordinary, unmodified organism. The samples from downstream are also dormant, but they are fewer, and they're degraded and dying: they look just the way the active sample Fayole's people sent to toxicology looked by the time we got it. The reaction had stopped. It was the concentration of toxin that allowed us to deduce what had happened. In the river it would've become so diluted I doubt we'd've been able to detect it.”

“You're telling me,” Sharon said, “that not only has an ordinary river microbe been turned into a gillung poison factory, but that it doesn't start making said poison until it's actually in the place where they
live
?” Her insides felt cold. “And then it dies?”

“Basically, yes.”

She stared at Rhys, aghast, and then at the others. “How is that even possible?”

“It reacts to something,” Rhys said. “We don't know what, but it's the only explanation that makes sense. It traveled downriver, photosynthesizing and reproducing and generally behaving the way a boring little brown algae is supposed to behave. It appears to have been quite efficient because it hadn't been too diluted by the larger volume of water, and that suggests that it was rapidly making more of itself—but as Fayole says, not enough to set off the monitors. By midday it started to arrive just where the river washes through
Sinkat, and there it encountered something that acted as a catalyst. It triggered our innocent little algae to start pumping out toxin at an enormous rate, burning itself out in the process.”

Pausing for breath, Rhys met Sharon's eyes with a grimness she had not seen in him for years. “If you think that's impressive, here's where it gets
really
clever: the other thing that happened when this algae arrived in Sinkat was that the tide was coming in. It peaked in the early afternoon. Do you remember when we met up for lunch? And all the visitors were clustered around watching the energy infographics? Well, at that point the water had essentially stopped flowing downstream. It pooled, and so did the algae, and so, of course, did the toxin.”

Sharon clenched her teeth to stop herself swearing. She looked down at the table for a moment, letting the full malevolence of what Rhys was describing wash over her. When she looked back up, she could see her own full-blown horror mirrored on everyone else's faces, as if to say now that she knew the truth, they no longer had to put on a brave show.

“And then?” she asked steadily.

“And then it all washed away on the ebbing tide, dying and becoming diluted as it went. A few people from the Limedog area have reported feeling poorly, and the timing of their symptoms matches up with when the toxin would have flowed past them. But there aren't many, and their symptoms are much milder: the toxin had become so diffused by then that it didn't have much impact.”

“I see.” Her own voice sounded alien to her, quiet and dangerously calm.

Rhys and Achebe knew what that meant; they shifted and glanced at each other as she turned to Fayole. “You said there was a spike you can't explain.”

“Yes . . .”

“Try.”

Fayole met her gaze. Her eyes were, a little to Sharon's surprise, just as angry as her own.

“Can we put this back up?” Fayole asked Achebe as she swiped her tablet awake, but her gaze stayed on Sharon.

A map appeared on the screen on the back wall of the incident room: the Thames, centered on Sinkat and bracketed by City Hall and the bridge to the left and the long southern sweep of the river as it curved past Limedog on the right. Fayole flicked at the tablet and the map shifted with dizzying speed, scrolling sideways and upriver—but not far, Sharon realized. They were still in the city.

“These are the western suburbs,” Fayole said. “There's a lot of green space, as you can see—some parts are quite densely populated, but there are many derelict neighborhoods, especially south of the river.” She expanded a segment of the map marked out in different shades of green, crossed with meandering streams and the lines of drainage ditches. “This whole area is wetland. Our monitoring station just upriver didn't detect any spike, and nor did most of those within the swamp itself. But there's one in this channel”—she tapped at a gently curving water-course, as blue as her hair, that led into the river—“which did register a big increase in microflora count earlier that morning.”

Sharon studied the map. The white line of an access road ran near the channel, touching it at one point. “So you knew there was a problem,” she said.

“No, we didn't,” Fayole replied. “The system flagged it up, but there was no reason for the colleagues who received that alert to think there was anything wrong—”

“Why not?”

“Because it's a wetland,” Fayole said tiredly, “and algal blooms are quite common in that environment. It's also common for readings to fluctuate after heavy rain when runoff goes into the catchment area—that's part of what it's for. And there had been storms the day before, if you remember. So yes, there was a spike, but it wasn't alarming, and resources were stretched really thin because of the rain: we have to prioritize alerts from areas of human habitation, places where there might be hazardous materials, sewage overflows, that sort of thing. If the readings had
stayed
high, they would have known something strange was happening and someone would have gone out to take a look, but they dropped back to normal, which is exactly what you'd expect when you
don't
have a problem.” She looked Sharon in
the eye again. “I'm not trying to make excuses, Detective Superintendent. This was a major public-health threat that our systems failed to spot. But you need to understand that the
way
it was done . . .”

“They gamed the system,” said Achebe.

Sharon nodded, looking back at the map. “Where does that lead?” She pointed at the access road.

Fayole moved the image again, following the line. “Back out to the main arterial road through the area and from there to the southern bypass.”

“Do we have eyes on it?” Sharon asked Achebe, then, “Do you?” She looked at Fayole.

The blue-haired woman shook her head. “There's no reason to,” she said. “At least we didn't think there was, and budgets are tight. There aren't any access restrictions—they close the road if there's a bad flood, but that's about it. I'm told people go out there, fishing, walking, kayaking, and so on.”

Achebe was peering at his own tablet. “We don't have eyes on it either,” he said. “There're no cams in the immediate area—there's a few at the main junctions on the arterial, and of course on the bypass.”

She acknowledged the information with a nod; she didn't need to tell Achebe to pull the feeds from those distant cams anyway. They might get lucky, but she was not inclined to bet on it.

“You said you're
told
people visit the site?” she asked Fayole. “This isn't your area, then.”

“I'm on the other side of the river,” she replied. “The northwest quadrant of the city.” The map swept into motion again.

“Any idea why you've been assigned to work with us on this?”

“Probably because I'm a gem and they thought it would look good,” she replied tersely. “It would've made more sense for it to be the district manager for the Sinkat area, but they told me they wanted someone with fresh eyes. Now that we know about this site, if you'd rather have someone from there—”

“No!” Sharon and Achebe said together. Their vehemence made Fayole start. Rhys's lips twitched.

“No,” Sharon repeated, more calmly, “we absolutely wouldn't. What I'm getting at is: when did Environmental Management know
or suspect that the algae in the wetland was connected to the Sinkat illness?”

“We've only just worked it out—it wasn't until last night that the hospital confirmed the algae as the source of the toxin, so then I started looking specifically at algae levels and noticed the wetland readings. Inspector Achebe, Dr. Morgan, and I correlated that with the other data, calculated the river's flow rate and realized that the toxin would have washed down to Sinkat at precisely the right time. And then Inspector Achebe called you.” She tapped nervously at her tablet. “I still need to let my managers know. We've got to collect samples, but most of all we need to make sure whatever's still in there doesn't proliferate and wash downstream again.”

“Understood.” Sharon rested her chin on her fists. Her eyes flicked up at Rhys. “Am I right in thinking there was no purpose to the bioengineering of this algae other than to make it produce the toxin?”

“Not as far as we can tell.”

“And the toxin itself isn't good for anything other than to poison gillungs?”

“Not as far as we can tell,” Rhys repeated. “Can I absolutely swear to you that it was not developed for some legitimate industrial process, that it isn't just an unhappy coincidence that it does what it does to them? I can't, obviously, but the way it activates, and the timing . . .”

“Is as solid as any evidence I've ever seen,” Sharon said. She sat up straight, drumming her hands sharply on the table top, a signal that decisions had been made and that action was about to be taken.

“Fayole, I'm going to have to be part of that conversation with your bosses. Securing the site is a priority, but it can't be done by the local EM team. The area is a crime scene and at this stage we can't assume that none of your colleagues are involved. Achebe, you'll need to question the staff who normally manage it—which is why I'm glad you're not one of them, Fayole. We'll be getting forensics in too. I'm going to ask that you remain assigned to us, if that's all right with you.”