Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [99]
Either way, Madoc and everyone else figured that it was a privilege to work with the Old Lady. That, as much as her efficiency, was why she was so expensive.
Harriet finally finished her scrutiny of the VE tape and ducked out from under the hood. Her face was richly grooved with the deepest wrinkles Madoc had ever seen and her hair was reduced to the merest wisps of white, but her dark eyes were sharp and her gaze could cut like a knife.
“The body had been burned, you say?” she questioned him—not because she didn’t remember what he’d said but because she wanted it all set out in neat array while she put the puzzle together.
“Thoroughly,” he confirmed. “It must have been covered in something that burned even hotter than gasoline, then torched.” It was easy enough to see what Harriet was getting at. Whoever had committed the murder had had time. They could have torched the VE pack along with the body if they’d wanted to, or they could simply have picked it up and put it in a pocket. If they’d left it behind they had done so deliberately, in order that it would be found. The only hitch in that plan, Madoc assumed, had been that it was he and Diana who had found it instead of the police. Madoc, naturally enough, had brought it to the Old Lady instead of to Interpol.
“We’re supposed to believe that the tape explains why the guy was killed,” Harriet concluded.
“That’s the way I figure it,” Madoc admitted. “If that really is the original tape that was used as a base to synthesize Silas Arnett’s confessions—or the first of them, at any rate, it identifies Surinder Nahal as the kidnapper in chief.”
Madoc had inspected the tape himself before giving it to Harriet for more expert analysis. It contained a taped conversation between the captive Silas Arnett and another man, easily identifiable in the raw footage by voice as well as appearance as Surinder Nahal. Various phrases spoken by both men—but especially those spoken by Nahal, carefully distorted to make recognition difficult—had been used in the first of Arnett’s two “confessions,” but nothing Arnett had said on this tape amounted to an admission of guilt regarding any crime, past or present. On the other hand, there was no evidence on this tape that he had been tortured, or even fiercely interrogated.
“Insofar as the discovery points a finger at anyone,” Harriet went on, “it implies that Arnett’s friends took swift and certain revenge against Surinder Nahal because he tried to set them up, and left the VE pak on his body to explain why they killed him.”
“Thus setting themselves up all over again,” Madoc pointed out. “I think it stinks, but I’m not sure where the odor originates. How about you? Is the tape genuine? Is it really raw footage, or is it just a slightly less transparent lie than the one they dumped on the Web?”
“That’s an interesting question,” Harriet said.
“I know it is,” Madoc said, trying not to let his exasperation show. “What’s the answer?”
“I’ll be honest with you, Madoc,” Harriet said. “The tape’s a fake. It’s not a crude fake, but it’s definitely a fake. Even Interpol could have determined that—probably. The fact that Silas Arnett still hasn’t turned up would have alerted them to the same stink that reached your sensitive nostrils.”
“So why the hesitation?” Madoc wanted to know.
“The thing is,” the Old Lady said, “that I’m not sure how much deeper we ought to dig into this. You see, if Arnett’s friends didn’t kill the man whose body you found, then someone else did—and it certainly wasn’t some dilettante Eliminator.”
“I don’t get it,” Madoc said. “You’re supposed