Willet was droning on about Maurice Knebel and his fondness for Indian food when Colin leant forwards and deftly pressed his open palm against the flatscreen. The map image shifted instantly, expanding the area around his hand. It was centred on Peterborough, she noticed with a start. The vivid featureless turquoise of the Fens Basin had bitten into a third of the screen.
Willet had stopped talking.
"Keep going," Colin instructed.
"Sir. Curries were his favourite…"
Eleanor could see a lone yellow dot in the basin, just east of Peterborough. Prior's Fen, she realized. Colin must keep the map scrupulously updated. He had spent most of the PSP years in France, charging kombinates a small fortune for his services. "Too old to join the fight against Armstrong," he had told her bitterly.
He touched the map again. This time Peterborough jumped up to occupy half of the flatscreen, leaving a ten kilometre band of countryside visible around the outside.
Willet flashed Greg a despairing glance. Greg gave him a fast gesture: carry on.
"The woman he was living with left him when he was appointed station political officer. There was talk of him and one of the appararchik women on the town's PSP committee…"
"Here," Colin said. His forefinger touched the map in a positive jab. A district turned a shade lighter, its scarlet boundary line flashing insistently. He stood right up against the screen, face coated in a backwash of artificial blue and yellow radiance, deepening the folds of flesh. "That's where he is. I can't get any more precise than that. Not from this distance."
Eleanor could feel a groan of dismay building in her gullet. She was afraid to let it out in case it sounded too much like a whimper.
"Figures," Greg said. "He's PSP, where else would he be perfectly safe right now?"
Colin's forefinger was pointing at Walton.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Greg's existence had collapsed to a flimsy universe five metres in diameter. Night-time flying was always bad. But night-time and fog, that was shit awful.
He was hanging in a nylon web harness below a Westland ghost wing, gossamer blade propeller humming efficiently behind him. The photon amp band across his eyes bestowed an alien blue tinge to every surface, the glow of electron orbits in decay. A column of neat chrome-yellow figures shone on the right-hand side of his vision field: time, grid reference, altitude, direction of flight, power levels, airspeed. The guido 'ware placed him eight hundred metres high, two kilometres out from Peterborough above the Fens basin.
Prior's Fen, and the Event Horizon security division tilt-fan which had ferried him and Teddy out there, was twenty minutes behind, isolated by treacherously fluctuating walls of stone-grey vapour. The loneliness which had insinuated itself into his thoughts in that time was total, tricking his brain into finding shapes among the grey-blue desolation, the grinning spectres of nightmare clamouring in on an unwary mind.
He used to be able to put his feelings on hold for missions, concentrate on details and their application to the immediate.
It was the army way, training and discipline could overcome every human frailty given time. But he'd lost it. Leaking slowly out of his psyche during endless sunny days beside the reservoir, smoothed away by Eleanor's kisses.
Now he could feel the unfamiliar and enervating stirrings of panic as the wing membrane murmured to itself in the squally air. His sole link to reality was a slim microwave beam punching up through the cloying seaborne mist to strike Event Horizon's private communication satellite in geosync orbit. Directional, scrambled, ultra-secure.
"You there, Teddy?" The modulated question slicing upwards, hitting the satellite's phased array antenna, splitting like a laser fired at a fractured mirror, bounced straight back down. Two beams: one received at the Event Horizon headquarters building in Westwood, the second targeted on another ephemeral five-metre bubble somewhere in the vast emptiness behind him.
"Where the flick else?" Teddy's gruffness carried a trace of anxiety which Greg was learning to recognize from his own voice.
"Hey, you remember when we used to get paid for this?"
"Yeah. Nothing fucking changes. Weren't no fun in them days, neither."
"True. OK, I'm one and a half klicks from the east shore now, starting to descend. Morgan? Any air traffic yet?"
"Negative, Greg," Morgan said, his voice sounding muffled in Greg's earpiece. "There's some tilt-fan activity in New Eastfield, but the fog has shut down ninety per cent of the city's usual movements."
That was one shiver of joy, he didn't have to worry about colliding with low-flying planes. "Roger. Going down." He shifted his weight slightly, feeling the angle of the slipstream change. The fog density remained the same. According to Event Horizon's Earth Resource platforms it was a belt ninety kilometres wide, extending westwards almost all the way to Leicester. They had watched it boil up out of the North Sea through most of the afternoon. Perfect cover.
The mission had taken a day to set up. Naturally, Julia had wanted to send the police in, all legal and above board. She hadn't quite grasped what they were up against. Someone—some organization? — methodical enough to guard against the remotest chance of a query being raised about the death of a girl ten years in the past. Paranoia or desperation—either way, they had it in massive quantities. And they didn't shy away from positive action to eliminate threats.
Even with the channels working themselves into hysterics over the Scottish reunion question, a police operation on a scale large enough to successfully arrest a single man in Walton would attract wide newscast coverage. The Black-shirts would resist the police incursion, there would be riots, sniper fire, a lot of people hurt. After that, leaks would be inevitable, and Julia's name would be foremost among them.
His way was much quieter, safer. Reducing the risk until it focused on just two people.
He would have been happier if Eleanor had shouted at him, put her foot down, told him he was being macho stupid. At least he would have been able to shout back, or argue, vent a bit of feeling. Instead she had stuck to being silent and sorrowful. Which made it harder. Which put him on edge. Which wasn't good.
Gabriel had been reassuringly scathing, but that had taken on the quality of a ritual, she trusted his intuition almost more than he did. Morgan was frankly sceptical about the whole notion. And Greg had to admit even he was having trouble seeing how Clarissa Wynne's vaguely suspicious drowning could be connected to Kitchener's murder.
With the cocoon of fog acting like a mild form of sensory deprivation his thoughts were free to roam through wilder realms of possibility, fantasy equivalents of Gabriel's tau lines. But even among the more fanciful possibilities he conjured up there really was no getting round that memory of Nicholas walking so calmly into Kitchener's bedroom. Maybe the ambiguity he felt so strongly was focused on the boy's motive? Everyone assumed Nicholas had murdered Kitchener because he was overwrought over Isabel. But there was the question of the method. Maybe Launde harboured some dark secret instead?
Yeah sure. Ghosts and ghoulies and bumps in the night, he told himself mockingly. Secret monsters would be too easy. Somebody wiped all those cores. Three and a half years before Nicholas Beswick ever set eyes on Launde Abbey.
He gave up, pushing the load into the future and squarely on Maurice Knebel's shoulders. Alarmed at just how much he was coming to depend on the absconded detective to provide him with answers when they finally came face to face.