Regeneration (18 page)

“You expect that to happen?”

“It'll have to happen. Quantum-energy storage is going to revolutionize every industry there is. One small group cannot be allowed to control a technology that powerful—especially when they have so
little in common with ordinary folk. The risks are too great. People won't stand for it.”

I doubt it's too much power if the small group is one that you're part of, but it's obviously unthinkable if it's anyone else.
There was nothing to be gained by making such an observation out loud. He wondered how many of the senior figures in the Trads understood the degree to which Abraham Mitford, financier, party stalwart, major shareholder in Standard BioSolutions, was leveraging their brightening prospects to make himself an even greater fortune. Maybe they did know, considering how much of that fortune was spent on them. Maybe they had agreed, tacitly or otherwise, to this grand strategy; maybe they had helped cook it up.

Or maybe when he spun them a line, they believed it.

“So,” Mikal said, musingly, remembering his last conversation with Moira Charles, “you're fairly certain this safety review that Bankside is lobbying for will go ahead?”

“I'm completely certain of it.”

“And will end up recommending major changes, which I would then help to push through? For the good of the company and its employees?”

“Thus cementing your own reputation as an honest broker who does the right thing, regardless of the consequences.”

My reputation with whom?
Mikal thought acidly.
Certainly not the people who think well of me now.

“The consequences in this case being that Thames Tidal will end up having to accept significant outside investment,” he said. “Amounting to a controlling interest? It's a cooperative. How are you planning to deal with that?”

Mitford waved a hand dismissively. “The structure will have to be revised, but by the time that becomes an issue those in charge will be amenable. Following the restructuring, it's reasonable to assume the new owners will start to develop a wide range of quantum-tech applications.”

“Something I would need to make okay with the wider gillung and gem communities. Got it.” Mikal had been ignoring his glass. He picked it up and swirled the remaining liquor while looking Mitford
in the face. “I take it I can expect to get more out of this than an office in Whitehall and a parliamentarian's salary.”

“You can expect a lot more—including shares in the successor firm.” He tapped another order into the tablet, looking grimly pleased with himself. “This has been a more straightforward conversation than I anticipated, Varsi. I'm glad you understand how these things work.”

“Oh, I do,” said Mikal. “Believe me, I do.”

By the time Mikal got home, his children had been asleep for hours. He stood in their bedroom, in the dim glow of the starfish-shaped nightlight Lapsa had given them, looking down at the two little bodies in their little beds and listening to them breathe. Misha was a sprawler, arms and legs flung at all angles. He already looked too big for his bed; in another year his feet would be sticking off one end and his hands mashed against the wall at the other. Sural was curled up on his side like a plump, happy caterpillar, knees and elbows tucked tidily away under a neat little rumple of blankets. He might roll from left to right several times throughout the night, but the pose would never change.

Mikal might have stood there until morning, barely aware of the miserly tears leaking one by one down his face, had Sharon not come up quietly behind and put her arms around his waist. “Don't wake them,” she whispered.

“I won't.”

Something in his voice made her twist around so she could look up at his face. He could feel the muscles in her arms tense at what she saw, and she tugged at him to come away. He did not want to leave that room with its gentle light and the peacefully sleeping children but he let her pull him into the living room, where he sank onto the sofa, dropped his face into his hands and rubbed as though he might rub it into oblivion. Sharon sat beside him, arm as far around his shoulders as she could reach, and stroked his head and kissed his neck, and after a while he pulled himself together and told her about his evening with Abraham Mitford.

“And here I was thinking I'd had the bad day today.”

“Bal said he knew who I was,” Mikal told her dully. “After you left. He said it was okay, the way things had gone with Gabriel. He said he knew.”

“He does know you. So do I.”

“Do you, Shar? I'm glad, because I'm not sure I do right now.”

“You did the right thing, honey.”

“I can remember when the right thing didn't leave me feeling like I needed to take a shower. For the rest of my life.” He sat back wearily. “There are so very many ways for this to go wrong.”

“My mother used to say that things only
go
wrong if you
do
wrong.”

“Is this the mother who hasn't spoken to you since you started going out with me?”

“She was wrong about that.” Sharon tucked herself into the curve of Mikal's arm. “But not about everything.”

The next day brought the first of the breakthroughs Sharon and Achebe had been hoping for, although, as Sharon grumpily observed, every answer seemed to lead to more questions. The cyclist questioned by Achebe had gone on to describe the experience in a nearby pub where there had been much annoyed talk about the continuing police presence in their sleepy, soggy neck of the woods. Over what sounded to Achebe like more than a few pints, the cyclist had heard tell of a disused hydroponics facility recently taken over by a pair of bright young engineers aiming to relaunch the business. They'd brought in lab equipment and started on refurbishing the tanks before bothering with the rest of the place, but they had big plans to turn it around, put the district on the map.

How, demanded the locals, were they supposed to attract more of that sort—people with plans and ambition, people who would generate jobs and industry—if the police were giving the impression that they were a haven for terrorists? Didn't they understand the
damage
that could do? Were they
trying
to drive out new businesses, as well as undermine the old ones?

The cyclist, no doubt mindful of the opportunity for further tales to drink out on, had then contacted Achebe: he'd been told the researchers were decent, upstanding people—he certainly wasn't suggesting otherwise—but the detective inspector had said he was interested in any new activity in the area. He probably knew all about them already. But just in case . . .

The DI did not know all about them and was very interested indeed, since the property the engineers were allegedly occupying had been mothballed a decade earlier by the owners, a large agricultural concern. A police drive-by confirmed that it looked just as padlocked as it should have been, and just as deserted . . . save for a familiar treadmark impressed in the soft earth by the gate. Leaving stakeouts in place for the agents provocateurs of Kaboom, Achebe descended on the place, warrant in hand, and with a team of officers and technicians at his back.

As soon as they got inside it was obvious that the facility had only recently been abandoned: the lab had been stripped and the tanks drained, but the electricity and running water were still connected. And in the sump of one tank and the spillage tray beneath another, in the water-filled treads where a heavy vehicle had backed in and loaded up, there were traces of the toxin-producing algae, dead now, and decomposing.

“We found it,” Achebe told Sharon, earset to earset on a secure channel, “but they've disappeared. Looks like they've been gone at least a week—probably cleared out once the payload was delivered. No fingerprints, no security system to interrogate, and the cleanup's so good I doubt we'll find anything we can pull DNA from. Our only hard evidence is the algae, and if we'd arrived a few days later I don't think we'd have gotten that.”

Sharon ground her teeth in frustration, but an hour later Achebe had another lead. Neighbors along the potholed road were scarce, but the police found a farmer guiding a massive motor-plow over fields half a mile away.

He was perplexed by their interest in the place. “I don't get why you're bothering them,” he declared angrily. “They're already
tight with your lot—not police, the other ones. Those Environmental Management knobheads. Don't you people talk to each other?”

Fayole quickly identified the EM field officer who had visited the site and found among her pending items the only apparent record of the operation: a standard impact appraisal, signed off but not yet filed. The officer was by turns defensive and contrite.

“I didn't want to get them in trouble,” she said. “They didn't know they were supposed to file an application before they started work. It happens. They were very apologetic. I was just holding off a bit so they could get it in. They didn't want it to look like they were doing anything out of order.”

“I questioned you three days ago,” Achebe pointed out. “I asked
specifically
if anything unusual had happened recently, or if you were aware of any new activity in the area.”

“I didn't . . . You were talking about the reserve; this is ten miles away . . .”

“But still in your area, correct?”

“Well, yes . . .”

“Did they mention the reserve at all?”

“They wondered whether it was safe to visit. If we patroled it or anything like that.”

“What else did they ask you?”

“Just about the river, tidal flows and things. They said maybe they'd go kayaking when they weren't so busy . . .”

“There are times,” Achebe said in his next conversation with Sharon, “when I wish we could lock up people for stupidity.”

“You don't think she knew what was going on?”

“She didn't try to cover her tracks, and I suppose their questions wouldn't have sounded suspicious at the time. On the other hand, we've just turned up a couple of transfers from the same gray account that was used to pay the utility bills. It looks like she took a payoff to delay the filing, which she naturally didn't want to draw attention to when I interviewed her. But by then she must have realized that her nice new patrons fit the profile.”

“Collusion and obstruction. Arrest her,” said Sharon. “I'll set up another press briefing. We'll say we've found the terrorists' operational base and have detained a suspect. If all that does is get a rise out of Kaboom, it'll be worth it. Who opened the water and electricity accounts?”

“The same fake company that's on the EM documentation that was never filed. The individuals named on the documents were the two who ran the site, but their identities are also false and we have no visuals. Our suspect is on her way into town in the back of a transport. I was planning to have her work up some images with one of our artists.”

“Good. Do that first, then arrest her. We'll include the images in the briefing. Are the property's owners still claiming to know nothing about any of this?”

“So they say, but there's no sign of forced entry—if our terrorists broke in, they'd've had to change the locks, but the ones we found on the gates and buildings don't look new at all. They look the age they should look.”

“So they were given access. Someone on the inside.”

“Given, or stolen—it might have been one of them on the inside. We're getting the owners' employment records, and the facilities manager is on his way here now with a full set of keys and combinations to help us determine precisely which areas have been compromised.” Achebe said it straight, but Sharon could hear the grin in his voice.

“Achebe, you are turning into a properly sneaky copper. Let me know what he says when you point out they must have had keys to his locks.”

“Thank you, boss. I only take lessons from the best.”

“So who does this guy work for? You said the place is owned by an agribusiness?”

“Pure Fuel Farmers.”

“Sounds cozy. Are they private?”

“I don't think so.” There was a pause while Achebe checked. “
Oh!
Oh my.”

“What?”

“They're owned by Southern Warmth, which is a biofuel aggregator which is in turn owned by . . . Bankside BioMass.”

They were both silent for a long while.

“Well,” said Sharon finally. “Isn't that interesting.”

“Bankside was behind that petition, wasn't it?”

“It was. It funds the Estuary Preservation Society, which fronted it.”

“This operation had to have been in place for a fair old time,” Achebe pointed out. “They were here for a couple of months, and engineering the algae would have started earlier than that.”

“Bankside was working against Thames Tidal from long before the petition gambit—ever since they weren't allowed to buy in.”

“Would they be doing all of that officially, trying to get shares and everything, while also running an operation like this?” Achebe wondered. “I mean, big public companies don't generally go in for terrorism.”

“Maybe it's just a coincidence that the company belongs to Bankside. It's three tiers of possession, and goodness knows how many layers of management away. Maybe the terrorists chose it because they knew the connection might throw us if we managed to track them this far.” But Sharon was thinking that Bankside was a subsidiary of Standard BioSolutions, and that Standard was elbow-deep in political maneuvering to take over Thames Tidal, and that there was a limit to how many coincidences she could bring herself to believe in. “We still need to look into it.”

“I'm with you, boss, but my money's on these guys having a local connection.”

“My worry,” said Sharon, “is that this whole business'll end up having a lot of connections.”

The bulletin from Detective Superintendent Varsi was succinct, and she declined to take questions from the press. “You'll appreciate that this remains an active investigation,” she said tersely. “There are things we cannot discuss for operational reasons. If anyone recognizes either of the men in these images, please contact the police immediately. Neither man should be approached. If any member of the public has information that might be relevant, they should get in touch with us right away. Thank you.”

As always when the streams had little to go on, they made up the difference in backstory and conjecture. It took them no time at all to determine that the suspect in custody was an Environmental Management officer, and to discover her identity.

“I'm really sorry,” Achebe said to Fayole, and left her to run interference with her bosses. Public records relating to the hydroponics site were likewise picked over, and the connections between it and multiple players in the energy game were made almost before the press briefing had concluded. Could this, several journalists wondered aloud, be the reason for the Met's reluctance to elaborate? Was this the active line of inquiry to which Detective Superintendent Varsi had alluded? It was too juicy a prospect to ignore. They went off to lay siege to the press offices of Pure Fuel, Southern Warmth, and Bankside BioMass itself.

Sharon, looking at streamfeeds a couple of hours later, was moved to even deeper levels of cynicism by how so little actual information could generate so much erroneous content. There was no immediate response from Kaboom, but the stakeout teams had done their job: the identities of four of the five streamers were now known and they were under constant surveillance. At some point they would receive new instructions, and when that happened Sharon would have both them and their handler. In the meantime, all the froth and friction on the streams would serve to confuse, occupy, and misdirect. She awaited with interest the reaction of the Bankside corporate hierarchy, had a screaming match with her counterpart in Environmental Management, and then a few more quiet words with Achebe.

Among the profusion of reports, commentary, and “New Developments!” that weren't, the evening newstreams carried a brief but tangentially related announcement. It was tagged “politics” and was therefore of little interest to many subscribers, though it raised eyebrows and fed speculation in both the halls of power and humbler homes throughout the land. The managing director of Thames Tidal, a divisive figure closely associated with talk of a new political movement within the gem community, had comprehensively put those rumors to bed.

Released as a personal statement, Pilan candidly admitted that forming a new party to focus attention on gem issues had been much discussed. He, for one, was now stepping away from the idea, and he was urging others to do the same.

“Recent events have convinced me of two things,” his statement read. “First: we're still in danger from people who don't think we have as much right to life and freedom as they do, but they'd sooner poison us in secret than stand up and say so. They know what the public reaction would be if they showed themselves. Second: withdrawing from the mainstream won't help us defend ourselves against these forces. It would do more for their cause than ours. I know the majority of people, both gems and norms, truly believe in equality and inclusion, and so do I. We mustn't become distracted by our differences. We're lucky enough to have institutions that are committed to protecting all of us, and we need to focus on strengthening them.”

Anyone who knew Pilan well—or at all—would have detected a more conciliatory mind at work in the crafting of this message. “Nothing to do with me,” Mikal told a reporter when asked, which was more or less the truth: he had seen the post before it had gone onstream, and been unable to suggest improvements. He assumed Lapsa must have helped her partner write it, as did most others, but they were wrong: Pilan had gone straight to Gabriel.

“This isn't a Thames Tidal job, obviously,” he'd said, “and you can tell me to go and jump in the basin if you want. It's just that you're the expert at finding the right way to say things onstream. I need this to sound like me, only not . . .” Pilan trailed off, groping for a way to explain.

“Not,” said Gabriel, hazarding a guess, “to piss anybody off?”

“Exactly. Did you pick up that language from me? Your mom'll kill me.”

“I picked it up when people started poisoning my friends. Of course I'll help.”

He listened while Pilan outlined what he wanted to say, looked at what he'd already written, then said, “I have some questions.”

“Okay.”

Gabriel pointed at the cranial band. “Can I turn this off while I ask them?”

“Can you . . . oh.” He hesitated. “Okay.”

It took Gabriel ten minutes of unfiltered conversation and half an hour of drafting to come up with the statement. He put in things that Pilan hadn't thought to say out loud but that he sensed were part of what the Thames Tidal boss wanted to communicate. Pilan read the text with visible amazement.

“Did I tell you all that?”