Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [64]
Finally, he led her to the door of the apartment and let her follow him out. He signaled once again that he couldn’t speak, for fear of the eyes and ears with which the walls were undoubtedly sown, and she had perforce to wait until they got into the car. Even then, he insisted on bringing the vehicle out into the street before relaxing slightly.
It was midmorning and the traffic was well below its daytime peak, but it didn’t matter—he wasn’t headed downtown.
When Diana was certain that he had run out of excuses she repeated her last question, richly salted with seething impatience.
“An address way out east,” he told her. “It’s not a million miles away from the alleys, but it’s not gang turf. Above the ground it still looks derelict, but the word is that some heavy gantzing’s been done underneath by way of excavation. The hole’s been set up for use as a black-box drop site, supposedly untraceable. Nothing’s authentically untraceable, but no one’s had a reason yet to send hooks into this one. Harriet’s boys tipped her off that something was on, though, and she dug up some background on it, working back from the cowboy contractors who did the gantzing.”
“I thought the idea of gantzing was to raise buildings up,” Diana objected, “not to dig holes.”
“The neobacteria that cement walls together are only part of the gantzing set,” Madoc told her wearily. “You have to have others that can unstick things, else you wouldn’t be able to shape the product. Moleminers use the unstickers to burrow through solid rock. It’s not the ideal way to dig out a permanent cellar or tunnel but it does the trick—and you can use the cementers to harden the walls and ceilings, making sure they’ll bear the load. Anyway, that’s not the point. Even moonlight labor has to be paid for. The title deeds to the property are locked up tight, but there’s a trail leading back from the people who worked on it to one of the people Damon told me to ask about: the one who can’t be located in San Diego, Surinder Nahal.”
“You think these underground workings might be where Silas Arnett’s being held? The Praill girl too?”
“Maybe. Maybe it’s something else entirely. All I know is that I need to take a look, and there aren’t any spy eyes I can use. The Old Lady dug up some information about the security they installed, but being gantzers rather than silicon men it’s mostly solid. Not much of a challenge to a man of my talents, but I guess they didn’t want to bring in state-of-the-art stuff because putting a top-quality electronic fence around a supposedly derelict building would look suspicious in itself.”
“So we’re going to break in and look around?” Diana said, stressing the we to make sure that he understood that she had no intention of waiting in the car.
“If we can.”
“Suppose we get into trouble? Is anybody going to come looking for us? Will anyone know where to look?”
“It’s not that kind of deal, Di—but if we were to vanish from human ken, the Old Lady would put two and two together. She’d tell Damon.”
“Damon? Not the police.”
“He’s the man who’s paying us—and one of the things he’s paying for is discretion.”
“What else have you found out?”
“Like I said,” Madoc retorted obstinately, “one of the things he’s paying for is discretion.”
“If he’d been discreet enough not to use my body in his porno-tapes, I wouldn’t be here,” Diana said, “but he did and I am. When he talked to me he said it was no big secret, but that was probably a lie. Is Damon really Conrad Helier, like the last notice said?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Madoc said. “I knew him when he was barely starting to shave and I nursed him practically day by day from his first fight to his last. Believe me, I’ve seen enough of him over the last ten years to know that he isn’t a hundred and thirty-seven years old trying to pass for twenty-six. He’s exactly what he appears to be—and that includes the fact that he’s Damon Hart and not Damon Helier anymore. If Operator one-oh-one wants some lunatic to take a shot at Damon,