Chapter Twenty-Six

THOUGH I BEGGED and grew angry, Ashil and his colleagues would not let me call Corwi or Dhatt.

“Why the hell not?” I said. “They could do this. Alright then, do whatever the hell it is you do, find out. Yorjavic’s still our best connection, him or some of his partners. We know he’s involved. Try to get the exact  dates Mahalia locked up, and if possible we need to know where Yorjavic was every one of those evenings. We want to work out if he picked up. The policzai  watch the TC; they might know. Maybe the leaders’ll even tell, if they’re that disgruntled. And check out where Syedr was too—someone with access to stuff from Copula Hall’s involved.”

“We’re not going to be able to get every day Mahalia did the keys. You heard Buidze: half of them weren’t planned.”

“Let me call Corwi and Dhatt; they’d know how to sift them.”

“You.” Ashil spoke hard. “Are in Breach here. Don’t forget. You don’t get to demand things. Everything we’re doing is an investigation into your  breach. Do you understand?”

They would not give me a computer in the cell. I watched the sun rising, the air beyond my window growing light. I had not realised how late it was. I fell asleep at last, and woke with Ashil back in the room with me. He drank something—it was the first time I had seen him eat or drink anything. I rubbed my eyes. It was morning enough to be day. Ashil did not seem an iota tired. He tossed papers onto my lap, indicated a coffee and a pill by my bed.

“Wasn’t as hard as that,” he said. “They sign off when they put the keys back, so we got all the dates. You’ve got the original schedules there, that changed, and the signings sheets themselves. But there are loads. We can’t put a bead on Yorjavic let alone Syedr or any other nat for this many nights. This stretches over more than two years.”

“Hold on.” I held the two lists against each other. “Forget when she was scheduled in advance—she was obeying orders, don’t forget, from her mysterious contact. When she wasn’t  down to take the keys but did it anyway, that’s what we should be looking at. No one loves the job—you have to stay late—so those are the days she suddenly turns around and says to whoever’s turn it is ‘I’ll do it.’ These are the days she got a message. She got told to deliver. So let’s see who was doing what then . Those are the dates. And there aren’t nearly so many.”

Ashil nodded—counted the evenings in question. “Four, five. Three pieces are missing.”

“So a couple of those days nothing happened. Maybe they were legitimate changes, no instructions at all. They’re still the ones to chase.” Ashil nodded again. “That’s when we’re going to see the nats moving.”

“How did they organise this? Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Wait here.”

“This would be easier if you’d just let me come with you. Why are you shy now?”

“Wait.”

More waiting, and though I did not shout at the unseen camera, I glared at all the walls in turn, so it would see me.

“No.” Ashil’s voice came from a loudspeaker I could not see. “Yorjavic was under policzai  observation at least two of those nights. He didn’t go near the park.”

“What about Syedr?” I addressed the emptiness.

“No. Accounted for on four of the nights. Could be another of the nat bigwigs, but we’ve seen what Besźel has on them all, and there’s nothing red-flagging.”

“Shit. What do you mean Syedr’s ‘accounted for’?”

“We know where he was, and he was nowhere near. He was in meetings those evenings and the days after them.”

“Meetings with whom?”

“He’s on the Chamber of Commerce. They had trade events those days.” Silence. When I did not speak a long time he said, “What? What?”

“We’ve been thinking wrong.” I pincered my fingers in the air, trying to catch something. “Just because it was Yorjavic who shot, and because we know Mahalia pissed off the nats. But doesn’t it seem like a hell of a coincidence that those trade things would happen on the very nights that Mahalia volunteers to lock up?” Another long quiet. I remembered the delay before I could see the Oversight Committee, for one of those events. “There are receptions afterwards, for the guests, aren’t there?”

“Guests.”

“The companies. The ones Besźel’s schmoozing—that’s what those things are for, when they bicker for contracts. Ashil, find out who was there on those dates.”

“At the Chamber of Commerce …”

“Check the guest lists for the parties afterwards. Check press releases a few days afterwards and you’ll see who got what contract. Come on.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I said minutes later in silence, when I still stalked back and forth in my room without him. “Why the fuck don’t you just let me out? I’m policzai , god damn it, this is what I do. You’re good at being bogeymen but you’re shit at this.”

“You’re a breacher,” Ashil said, pushing open the door. “It’s you we’re investigating.”

“Right. Did you wait outside till I said something you could make an entrance to?”

“This is the list.” I took the paper.

Companies—Canadian, French, Italian and British, a couple of smaller American ones—next to the various dates. Five names were ringed in red.

“The rest were there on one or other fair, but the ones in red, those ones are the ones that were there on every one of the nights Mahalia did the keys,” Ashil said.

“ReddiTek’s software. Burnley—what do they do?”

“Consultancy.”

“CorIntech are electronics components. What’s this written next to them?” Ashil looked.

“The man heading their delegation was Gorse, from their parent company, Sear and Core. Came to meet up with the local head of CorIntech, guy runs the division in Besźel. They both went to the parties with Nyisemu and Buric and the rest of the chamber.”

“Shit,” I said. “We … Which time was he here?”

“All of them.”

“All? The CEO  of the parent company? Sear and Core? Shit …”

“Tell me,” he said, eventually.

“The nats couldn’t pull this off. Wait.” I thought. “We know there’s an insider in Copula Hall but… what the hell could Syedr do for these guys? Corwi’s right—he’s a clown. And what would be his angle?” I shook my head. “Ashil, how does this work? You can just siphon this information, right, from either city. Can you … What’s your status internationally? Breach, I mean.

“We need to go for the company.”

I’M AN AVATAR OF BREACH, Ashil said. Where breach has occurred I can do whatever. But he made me run through it a long time. His manner ossified, that opacity, the glimmerlessness of any sense of what he thought—it was hard to tell if he even heard me. He did not argue nor agree. He stood, while I told him what I claimed.

No, they can’t sell it, I said, that’s not what this is about. We had all heard rumours about Precursor artefacts. Their questionable physics. Their properties. They want to see what’s true. They’ve got Mahalia to supply them. And to do it they’ve got her thinking she’s in touch with Orciny. But she realised.

Corwi had said something once about the visitors’ tours of Besźel those companies’ representatives endured. Their chauffeurs might take them anywhere total or crosshatched, any pretty park to stretch their legs.

Sear and Core had been doing R&D.

Ashil stared at me. “This doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Who’d put money into superstitious nonsense …?”

“How sure are you? That there’s nothing to the stories? And even if you’re right, the CIA paid millions of dollars to men trying to kill goats by staring at them,” I said. “Sear and Core pay, what, a few thousand dollars to set this up? They don’t have to believe a word of it: it’s worth that kind of money just on the off chance  that any of the stories turn out to have anything at all to them. It’s worth that for curiosity.”