Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [109]
Damon was silent for a few moments, absorbing this news.
“Does the tape show the shooter?” he asked.
“Yes, but he’s unidentifiable. His suitskin had a face mask. He had a companion, similarly masked.”
“But you think they’re Eliminators—and you suspect that the VE pak left on the burned body will be a similar record of an execution.”
“The body bag was presumably placed in the road in order to draw attention to the house, and to the tape,” Yamanaka said. “That seems consonant with the hypothesis that the shooting was the work of Eliminators.”
Damon couldn’t be sure whether the careful wording was routine scrupulousness, or whether Yamanaka was laying down a red carpet for any alternative explanation Damon might have to offer. Damon had already laid the groundwork for a rival account by suggesting that the burned body Madoc had found wasn’t Nahal’s at all but merely some dummy tricked out to seem like Nakal’s, possibly designed by Nahal himself—but Silas Arnett’s body hadn’t been burned to a crisp.
We haven’t killed anyone, the mirror man had said—but he had certainly exposed the people he had named to the danger of Eliminator attack. Now Karol’s boat had been blown up, and Silas Arnett had been shot. If Conrad Helier had faked his own death, perhaps he had faked those incidents too—but that if was looming larger by the minute. Nor was Silas the only one who had been exposed to possible Eliminator wrath by the mirror man’s stupid broadcasts. Damon was the only one alive who had been forthrightly condemned as an “enemy of mankind.”
There was still a possibility, Damon told himself, that this was all a game, all a matter of carefully contrived illusions piled up tit-for-tat—but if it weren’t, he could be in big trouble. The question was: what did he intend to do about it?
“Your people always seem to be one step behind, Mr. Yamanaka,” he observed, by way of making time to think.
“So it seems,” the inspector agreed. “I think it might help if you were to tell us everything you know, don’t you? Surely even you must see that the time has come to give us the VE pak.”
It was the “even you” that did it. Damon felt that he had troubles enough without insult being added to injury.
“I don’t have it,” he snapped. “I don’t have anything that you could count as evidence.”
Yamanaka’s image didn’t register any overt trace of disappointment or annoyance, but the lack of display had to be a matter of pride. Yamanaka still had one card up his sleeve, and he didn’t hesitate to play it in spite of its meager value. “Miss Caisson is very anxious to contact you, Mr. Hart,” he said. “I’m sure she’d be grateful if you’d return her calls.”
“Thanks for your concern,” Damon said drily. “I’ll do that. Please call me if you have any more news.” He broke the connection and immediately called the number Diana had inscribed on his answering machine in letters of fire that were only a little less clamorous than Interpol’s formal demand.
The LAPD’s switchboard shunted him into a VE very different from the one Hiru Yamanaka had employed: a pseudophotographic image in which Diana was seated in a jail cell behind a wall of virtual glass. Fortunately, she seemed more relieved than angry to see him. She hadn’t forgiven him anything, but she was desperate for contact with the outside world.
“I’ve just been talking to Yamanaka,” Damon said, by way of preemptive self-protection. “I told him to charge you and bail you if he wasn’t prepared simply to release you, but he won’t do it. He’s got dead bodies piling up all over the place, and he wants Madoc