Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [120]
“Are you sure they killed him?” Damon asked sharply.
The tall man hesitated before he shrugged again, which suggested to Damon that it was a recognized possibility that Silas hadn’t been killed and that the body dumped in the road might have been the same kind of substitute as the body left for Madoc to find. “His nanotech had all been flushed,” the man with the bruise said eventually. “They must have known that if they watched the tape we put out on the Web. Maybe they were just knocking him out—but they had no reason to do that if they were your people. Who’d ever have thought Eliminators could be that smart, that well organized?”
“Who are my people supposed to be?” Damon asked him. “You mean Conrad Helier’s people—except that Conrad Helier’s dead. So is Karol Kachellek, except that you probably don’t believe that either. So who’s supposed to be running things, given that Eveline Hywood’s a quarter of a million miles away in lunar orbit? Me?”
The tall man shook his head sadly. “All I wanted was a quiet talk,” he repeated, as if he simply could not believe that such an innocent intention had led to brawling, shooting, and kidnapping—all of it dutifully registered on spy eyes that the police would have debriefed by now.
“Where are we going?” Damon asked.
“Out of town,” the tall man informed him gruffly. “Your fault, not mine. We could have sorted it out back home if you hadn’t blown it. Now, we have to take it somewhere really private.”
The Sespe and Sequoia Wilderness reserves had supposedly been rendered trackless in the wake of the Second Plague War—by which time its chances of ever getting back to an authentic wilderness state were only a little better than zero—but Damon knew that closure against wheeled vehicles didn’t signify much when helicopters like this one could land in a clearing thirty meters across.
“You can’t get more private than Olympus,” Damon said—but as he looked out again at the nonvirtual mountains which were now surrounding the helicopter he realized that he had actually contrived to force his adversaries to take a step they had not intended. This time, there was a record of his abduction in Interpol’s hands. This time, Interpol could put faces and names to his captors, or at least to their foot soldiers. He knew that he could claim no credit for the coup—it was all the result of a chapter of accidents and misconceptions—but the fact remained that the game players had finally been taken beyond the limits of their game plan. They had been forced to improvise. For the first time, PicoCon—assuming that it was PicoCon—was losing its grip.
“Your boss is scared,” Damon said, working through the train of thought. “He thinks it really might have been the Eliminators who got to Silas, after the people he expected to collect him never showed up. One minute he was convinced the message Silas was supposed to deliver was home and dry, the next he was unconvinced again. You’re right—if Silas is dead you could be in real trouble, especially now that Interpol has two faces in the frame. Mr. Yamanaka doesn’t like the way you’ve been running rings around him. He’ll come after you with such ferocity that you’ll be very lucky indeed to get away with only losing your job. How much damage could you do to PicoCon, do you think, if you and your partner decided to talk?”
The tall man didn’t react to the mention of PicoCon. “All you had to do was listen,” he complained. “You could have saved us all a hell of a lot of trouble.”
“If you were the ones who took Silas in the first place,” Damon pointed out, “and posted that stupid provocative note under my door, you went to a hell of a lot of trouble yourselves, all because you wouldn’t listen when we told you that Conrad Helier is dead.”
“Sure,” said the tall man scornfully.