“We’ll have the money,” Spanner repeated to Hyn and Zimmer. “Just let us know when and where, and you’ll have it.”
I had never seen them look so unhappy, but they nodded and stood. They left their unfinished drinks on the table.
Hyn and Zimmer were scared, but danger was just an adventure to Spanner. It put her in a good mood. We sipped at our beer in silence. This was not the only kind of danger I was in. If Magyar decided to use some budget on a backcheck of Bird’s record, she would see straightaway that I knew more than I had a right to. And then she might be able to justify a deeper search. And that meant she would find out Bird had died a while ago. And then I was in real trouble. Might as well take advantage of Spanner’s good mood.
“I changed my mind about the PIDA records. I need that information substituting as soon as possible.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
“No problem.”
Silence again. This time it lengthened until I couldn’t bear it any longer. “Where will you get the money?”
“Does it matter?”
No, not really. I already knew.
When I got back to my flat, the air seemed stale and lifeless. There was no message from Ruth.
I heated soup, glad of the machine sounds and the occasional soft pop as the liquid bubbled. I ate slowly.
Once the bowl was empty and washed, I had to face the silent, empty flat. I could sleep, of course, but then what would I do in the morning? I sat in front of the screen, checked to make sure that a power hit had not wiped out any message that might have been left. I drummed my fingers on the desk, then pulled up my projects file.
When I first left Spanner I had spent days at the keyboard, inputting all I could remember about the Kirghizi project, then triple-copied the file, and extrapolated from each: one was the perfect scenario, with no setbacks of any kind; one involved random minor difficulties—a failing of one of Marley’s bugs, the occasional breakage of the UV pipeline; the third was the catastrophe file—every breakdown, human, environmental, and mechanical, that I could envisage. It was the one I played with most. It usually reached the point of no return after about three months simulated time—two hours realtime. When that happened I wiped it back to the point where I had left it, nearly three years ago.
Tonight, when I pulled up the digital image of the pipeline stretched like a blazing crystal snake across the desert, I knew that was not what I wanted to see.
I changed the image to night, the perspective to the view a small nocturnal rodent might have from the desert floor. The ceramic support pylons and the vitrine troughs became huge, menacing. I darkened the sky to an eerie indigo-black, brought out the stars. Northern constellations burned like specks of magnesium. Better. I added cloud cover. The smeary, milky hint of a moon. I wondered what it would be like to sit out there, with the water overhead hissing endlessly. I wondered if a small rodent might mistake the hissing for the rasp of scale against sand, run terrified into the night from a snake that was not there. The whole world changed if you just altered your perspective a little.
I shook my head. For all I knew, the pipelines could lie like a broken dinosaur skeleton, crashed onto the sand, dry as dust, the victim of some interethnic conflict or other.
For the hundredth time I contemplated, then rejected, calling up information on the project from the net. There was always the possibility of someone smart—my family, or the kidnappers—having a trace out for that kind of inquiry. I had no doubt that they were still looking for me.
I turned the screen off and went to the fridge. I pulled a beer free of the four-pack, then changed my mind and dragged the whole thing from the fridge.
One of the reasons I had taken this flat was because the living-room window opened outward onto the fire escape. From the fire escape, I could get to the roof. It was an old building, with a complicated roofline. There was one place, near the middle chimney stack—which had been blocked off years ago and served now to vent gas appliances—where the roofs rose in steep pitches on either side and I could lie on my back, face to the sky, hidden from the world. I had built six