Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [70]
Charlotte could see that the AI searches had only just begun to get down to the real dirt. No one whose career was as long as King’s was likely to be completely clean, especially if he’d been in business, but a man in his position could keep secrets even in today’s world, just as long as no one with state-of-the-art equipment actually had a reason to probe. It was only to be expected that his murder would expose a certain amount of dirty linen, but to Charlotte’s admittedly naive eyes King’s laundry basket seemed fuller than anyone could have expected. She began to wonder whether Lowenthal had made a mistake in starting at the beginning of the King/Urashima relationship rather than the end. Even when Michi Urashima had landed in deep trouble, it seemed, his connections with King had remained intact, but they had been hidden. King had not only funded Urashima but had helped to establish all kinds of shields to hide his work and its spin-off. Hal’s silvers had only just begun to build Paul Kwiatek into the picture, but they had already uncovered some commercial links between King and Kwiatek that were as surprising in their way as the links between King and Urashima. Rappaccini’s involvement with Urashima was, by contrast, beginning to seem perfectly straightforward.
Maybe all this flimflam with Wilde, Czastka, and Rappaccini is just a smoke screen, Charlotte thought. Maybe its sole purpose is to blind the silvers with superfluity, to distract us from the real pattern. But what could that pattern possibly be? As the data tying Gabriel King to Paul Kwiatek’s allegedly esoteric and uncommercial research continued to accumulate, Charlotte saw that Gabriel King had not been quite as colorless a character as Oscar Wilde had implied. Perhaps no one was who had lived a hundred and ninety-four years and had learned along the way to despise the affectations and showmanship of men like Wilde. But if King, Urashima, and Kwiatek had been murdered for business reasons, what could those reasons be? And who was the mysterious female assassin? Charlotte broke in on the data stream and said: “Hal—is there any news of Kwiatek yet?” “Any time now,” he said. “They’re executing the entry warrant as we speak, although the building supervisor’s doing his level best to obstruct them.
Protecting the privacy of his tenants, he says. What he’s paid for. Any idea where you’re headed yet?” Charlotte glanced out of the window, but there was nothing to be seen now except the eight lanes of the superhighway. “Mexico City, for now,” she said. “Exactly how far toward it we’ll go—or how much further beyond it—is anyone’s guess. Is there any sign of the woman traveling south out of San Francisco?” “No match yet,” Hal admitted. “As I said, the money trail’s looking better than the picture trail, for the moment. Hold on… they’re in Kwiatek’s apartment now.
No sign of him, unless he’s in the cradle…” Charlotte looked up. Michael Lowenthal was peering through the gap between the headrest of his seat and the drive compartment. Oscar Wilde seemed equally rapt, although his posture was as languid as ever.
“Yes,” said Hal, evidently dividing himself between two conversations. “In the cradle. That’s confirmed. Kwiatek’s dead—same method. We already have a fourth name that may have to be added to the list, but it’s going to take time to get investigators out to the place where he’s supposed to be. Same pattern—no response even to top-priority calls.” “Who?” said Lowenthal.
“Magnus Teidemann—the ecologist. Graduated from the University of Wollongong in 2322, with Czastka—a year ahead of King, Urashima, and Kwiatek. He’s in the field, working on some kind of biodiversity project; he hasn’t checked in with his base for a week. Not particularly unusual, they say, but