5
WITNESS
Making a mental note to return Marianna’s call as soon as he found a moment, Knox slipped his cellphone back in his pocket, stepped away from the helipad, and surveyed his surroundings.
As crime scenes go, this was a lovely spot: a high hilltop retreat, a luminous expanse of emerald lawn, a palatial California Mission-style manor house whose glassed-in arches and parapets gave out on panoramas of the Coastal Range and a blue Pacific sparkling under the noon sun, a light breeze chasing a few wisps of cloud across the seaward sky.
The sightseeing would have to keep. Unless Knox missed his guess, that was his reception committee striding across the greensward.
Seen against the backdrop of the house, the man approaching him looked to be of average height and build. Knox blinked, looked again. A trick of perspective: the house was huge, and so was the man. The white linen suit had to have been specially tailored to fit that linebacker frame. Knox had to crane his neck as the man drew nearer, just to keep looking him in the eye. At six-foot-something himself, Knox didn’t encounter all that many people all that much taller than he was. This guy must have half a head on him, easy. The face looking down from that height was deep tanned, dark bearded, and unsmiling, its black eyes boring into Knox’s own.
The man stuck out a paw the size of a catcher’s mitt. “Mr. Knox?” he rumbled, “I am Hamza Nassiri, Chief of Psyche Corporate Security, at your service.”
“Jonathan Knox. Pleased to meet you.” Knox watched his hand disappear into Hamza’s handclasp, hoped he’d get it back none the worse for wear.
He needn’t have worried: Hamza’s grip was as gentle as his voice. “Anything I can do,” he said, “anything at all to assist you in returning Fatimah to her home and family, you have but to ask and it shall be done.”
But all the while he was talking, Hamza’s dark eyes probed him, as if he were peering into the depths of Knox’s soul and not liking what he saw there. That intense, almost reproachful stare seemed familiar somehow … Nope, couldn’t place it.
Knox realized Hamza was asking him something. About where he would like to begin.
“Oh, uh, could I take a look at the place where it happened?” Prior to choppering down from Psyche Central, he’d spent an hour or so reviewing what little Ansari had by way of data on the crime, including three-sixty-degree shots of the house and grounds. But why rely on images when the real thing’s right in front of you?
“The garden? Yes, of course. Right this way.”
Hamza led Knox across the lawn and into a formal gardenscape whose central fountain and axial paths recalled the mission courtyards of the eighteenth century, only without the water-conserving horticulture practiced by the early Franciscan friars: Here, even at midday, every tree and shrub and flowering hedge glistened as with morning dew. The regular fogs in off the Pacific doubtless helped some, but Ansari must still be paying God’s own utilities bill to keep the place this lush in California’s semi-desert climate.
Knox paused at the fountain, glimpsed golden fishes flashing beneath the rippling surface. “This is very nice,” he said.
“No home is complete without a garden, Mr. Knox. Why, your English word ‘paradise’ comes from the Persian word for garden, Pairidaeza, which is also the name of this estate.”
Knox looked around him again. “So, paradise is a garden,” he mused. “More correctly, an enclosed garden. The Persian refers to a garden encircled by a high wall,” Hamza said, “—as this one is.”
“Wall?” Knox wondered if he’d heard right. “I don’t see any wall.” He could, in fact, see all the way out to the horizon in every direction, though the view was wavering slightly, as if from the midday heat.
“Your pardon, I assumed this would have been explained.” Hamza withdrew a remote from his pocket, fiddled with it, and suddenly—
There it was, a shimmering silvery barrier easily ten feet high, rearing up all along the perimeter and blocking off any view of mountains or sea.
“Metamaterial,” Hamza explained. “Strong yet surprisingly malleable. Simply by varying an electrical field, its refractive index can be adjusted to give it any color, or none at all—as now.” Hamza ran a finger across the remote’s touch surface and the wall disappeared again.
“Neat trick, that,” Knox walked up to where the wall was last seen. “And it runs all around the compound? No openings anywhere?”
“None, save the front gate.”
Knox rapped his knuckles on the surface, invisible once more, and was rewarded with a reverberating boom. “It seems solid enough—”
“As well it should: The individual panels have a tensile strength five times that of steel, and the molecular bonds that interlock them are, if anything, stronger.”
“Uh-huh. So, given all that, how could your conjectured kidnappers have broken in?”
“In point of fact, they could not have. Not without applying such force as would have resulted in massive structural damage. Of which, as you see, there is none.”
“Well, what then?”
Hamza again favored Knox with that penetrating stare. “I am not sure how this bears on your assignment, which, I remind you, is to find Fatimah Ansari, and not to determine the fine details of how she was taken.”
“Humor me,” Knox said. “I may be new at this crime-scene investigation stuff, but I seem to recall those kinds of ‘fine details’ are what are called ‘clues.’”
Hamza sighed. “We have been assuming the abductors came in over the metawall.”
“You’re saying the bad guys rappel down the wall, find Fatimah standing in the middle of the garden walk—that’s where she was, right?”
Hamza shrugged. “Our security cameras last placed her here, before they died.”
“Right. So, then they scoop her up and climb back over the wall with a kid in their arms, maybe even a struggling kid? Not easy.”
“Perhaps they were sky-hooked out by balloon. Why, what would you propose?”
“Well, admittedly it’s a long shot, but—are we even sure there’s been a kidnapping? I mean, look at this place.” Knox swept an arm out across all of Pairidaeza. “It’s huge. And with no hard evidence of foul play, who’s to say Fatimah isn’t still on the grounds somewhere?”
“You theorize she might be playing hide-and-seek with us?” Hamza snorted. “—for the better part of twenty-four hours?”
“Not really, but—” Knox hesitated, unsure how much of what Ansari had told him was privileged information, then decided to go ahead. “It’s just that it seems possible she may have suffered a, uh, mishap. Be lying injured and unconscious in some out-of-the-way corner.”
Hamza frowned then, but nodded. “That possibility had occurred to us also. It is for this reason that we have conducted three separate infrared sweeps of the entire compound since yesterday afternoon.”
“Just the immediate grounds?”
“No, as of first light we gridded off the ten square miles of countryside surrounding the estate as well, and sent in both ground-based search teams and unmanned aerial vehicles. I fear, however, that all such efforts are superfluous. If, as you suggest, the girl had merely wandered off, we could have found her again almost immediately.”
“How’s that?”
“With this.” Hamza fished in a pocket, pulled out a silver wristband imprinted with a stylized caduceus. “Fatimah’s med-alert bracelet: It is equipped with a radio-frequency locator for precisely that purpose.”
“She wasn’t wearing it?”
“No, Mr. Knox. It was found snipped off and left in the dirt at the scene of what, I maintain, was her kidnapping.”
☯
This time it wasn’t a spit-and-polish escort, but the fatigue-clad guards she’d met in the parking lot who frog marched Marianna back to the Advanced Curational Technologies conference room. Nor had they left her side after ushering her once again into the presence of the ACT steering committee, the members of which looked, if possible, even less pleased to see her than they had on the first go-round.
Screw them! Marianna had enjoyed as much of this as she could stand.
She turned to Donegan and looked him in the eye. “Mind telling me what in hell’s going on here, Brad?”
Donegan nodded to her escort and the two men edged in closer on either side, to where they could reach out and restrain her in case of need.
“Strangely enough, I was just going to ask you that same question, Ms. Bonaventure.”
“Come again?”
“You didn’t seriously think it would escape notice that not ten minutes ago you made a call from our parking lot—to a crime scene?”
“Crime scene?” Marianna forgot about the guards and took a couple steps in Donegan’s direction. “Crime scene? What on earth are you talking about?” Donegan didn’t seem all that comfortable with her in his face; he was stroking that hidden gewgaw of his so hard it slipped out from under his shirt. From the brief glimpse afforded her before he tucked it back in, the thing looked to Marianna like a tiny iridescent teardrop on a silver chain. Very New Age-y, and not at all how she’d have expected Brad-man to accessorize. She forgot all about male fashion fetishes, though, when Donegan’s two guards grabbed her arms and forcibly backed her out of their boss’s fight-or-flight radius.
“Please,” Donegan said, straightening his tie, “Don’t pretend you don’t know Dave Ansari’s daughter Fatimah is missing, presumed kidnapped. Above all, don’t pretend you’ve never heard of the Pairidaeza estate the little girl is missing from—because that’s where you just placed a call to!”
“Estate? I didn’t place any calls to any estate. The only call I made was to—”
Marianna bit her tongue. “—was to my friend Jon back in New York,” she’d been about to say. But was Jon actually back in New York, or somewhere else entirely? This Pairi-whatsis place, for instance? You could just never tell with these cellphone calls.
And it was starting to sound as if Jon was not only somewhere else, but in some kind of trouble there. Under the circumstances it might be better to err on the side of caution.
“—I guess I’d prefer not to say who I was calling,” she finished lamely.
Donegan sighed. “I wish I could say I was surprised.” He gave the appearance of pondering a moment. “I think you’d better plan on staying with us for a while, until you are ready to tell us who you were talking to. Not to mention telling us, as you just now so succinctly put it, what in hell’s going on here.”
A second nod from Donegan and Marianna sensed her guards tensing to grab her.
☯
Brad Donegan sat there in the ACT meeting room rubbing his amulet, trying his best to reconstruct what had just taken place.
It had all happened so fast: One moment Fornoff and Rubello had been reaching out to take the Bonaventure woman in hand. The next, they were both down, Rubello doubled over with the wind knocked out of him, Fornoff rolling around on the floor clutching his groin. And Bonaventure, not even breathing hard, standing over them, covering them both with Fornoff’s service revolver.
“Okay,” she said over her shoulder to the room at large, “I want some answers. Who the hell is this Fatimah? What the hell is Pairidaeza? And what in hell has any of this got to do with that damned QuMRANN file?”
“Now, young lady,” Henry Wiscomb was rising from his seat, hands held out placatingly, “I can see that you’re upset—”
“Upset?” Bonaventure turned to face the old man. She took a deep breath, visibly composed herself, and brought the gun up to port arms, to where it was no longer directly threatening anybody, not exactly.
She shook her head. “Sorry, folks, it’s just been one of those days.”
“So,” Brad said slowly. “What do you propose we do now?”
The woman shrugged. “I don’t suppose we could back up and start over again?”
Brad was about to reply, when a calm, quiet baritone came from behind him. “If you’ll permit me, Bradford, I think I can help find a way out of this impasse.”
Brad swiveled around in his chair at the unaccustomed interruption, and saw something even more unaccustomed: The monitor on the back wall, heretofore always dead and dark, was brightening—brightening to reveal a medium-height, graying black man, dressed in somber formal attire, not quite looking into the keyhole cam that was narrowcasting his image. That is to say, not quite meeting their eyes.
“You see,” said the man who’d come out into the open, “I believe I can establish Deputy Director Bonaventure’s bona fides, and her innocence of involvement in Fatimah Ansari’s putative abduction, beyond any reasonable doubt.”
Brad turned back to the Bonaventure woman, to see how she was taking this unexpected turn of events.
For a moment, she stood there frozen, too surprised to speak—too surprised even to remember she was holding everyone in the room more or less at gunpoint.
Then she carefully set the revolver down on the conference table and waited unresisting as Fornoff and Rubello rushed in to grapple her again, none too gently this time.
It didn’t seem to matter to her: relief was written all over her face. “Hi, Mycroft,” she said.
☯
A real-life deus ex machina, that’s what Marianna’s classicist father would have called her friend’s sudden arrival on the scene. Though, truth to tell, it would be hard to imagine anyone less like a Greek god than Dr. Finley “Mycroft” Laurence. Short, dark, and almost pathologically reclusive, the Archon Group’s Senior Vice President for Intractables was a study in contrasts: razor-sharp intellect, IQ north of one-eighty, a prodigious, not to say eidetic, memory—combined with all the social graces of an introverted wombat.
It was, in fact, this curious mélange of traits that had earned Mycroft his office nickname: The similarities to Sherlock Holmes’s equally brilliant, equally agoraphobic elder brother were just too spot-on for Archon’s watercooler wags to pass up, though few were so bold as to call him “Mycroft” to his face. For that matter, few ever got to see his face these days, outside a small circle of close friends—of whom Jon Knox was numero uno.
She herself hadn’t seen much of Mycroft since the Grishin gig. He didn’t seem to have been caught up in CEO Richard Moses’s relentless campaign to leverage the Archonites’ current entrée with CROM and colonize the intelligence establishment en large. But then, there were vanishingly few intel organizations with the budget to engage Archon’s senior most analyst on any kind of a regular basis … the NSA being one of them.
Regardless of why he was here, Marianna was glad to see him, and would have been even if he weren’t at this very moment deftly exculpating her of any role in, or knowledge of, the as-yet-unconfirmed kidnapping that had Donegan and company’s pants in an uproar.
“So, the call-logs are incontrovertible,” Mycroft was saying. “When Deputy Director Bonaventure placed that call ten minutes ago, it was merely in an attempt to contact Jonathan Knox of my office. She could have had no inkling as to his actual whereabouts at that time.”
Donegan turned to her. “Is that true, um, Deputy Director?”
“Yes, Brad,” she replied and followed up with the best smile she could muster, given that ACT’s guards still had their guns trained on her. “What with the raid and the post-mortem and this, uh, episode here, I haven’t been back home since yesterday afternoon. I had no idea Jon was out on the West Coast.”
She’d made that last statement a question and pointed it at Mycroft. “Since very early this morning, Marianna,” he said. “Jonathan had to fly out to Psyche headquarters rather suddenly last night, in response to an urgent request from Archon’s on-site engagement manager, Jazmine McGovern. Now I begin to wonder whether Jazmine’s emergency might not be related to this Fatimah situation in some manner.”
“Assume it is,” Donegan cut in. “Where does that leave us? There’s more at stake here than one little girl, people. Delphi launches in three days. I’m going to need more than guesswork—sorry, Finley—before I pull that plug. I’m going to need a game plan.”
He paused a moment, then turned to Marianna’s guards and added, almost as an afterthought, “You two can stand down now.”
The guards needed no second invitation. They holstered their firearms and, with unseemly haste and ill-concealed relief, about-faced and exited the room.
Donegan gave her a half-hearted smile, as if to say that, with this little misunderstanding now behind them, they could all be just one big, happy intel community once again.
The smile held a moment longer, turned a little warmer, acquired a hint of premeditation. Marianna recognized the look: Brad-man was getting a bright idea. “So, Deputy Director,” he said, “how well did you say you knew this Jonathan Knox?”
☯
The Jonathan Knox in question sat at Hamza’s commandeered desk, wearily eying the dumpster loads of paperwork all but obscuring its surface—the fruit of but one day’s labor by Ansari’s vaunted “detail man.” He’d like to talk to that guy, if he ever showed his face, if only to explain that not every duty roster and power-utilization graph for the past three weeks was necessarily germane to the case at hand.
Having grudgingly surrendered his office for use as the investigation’s improvised command center, Hamza stood ramrod straight in one corner of what had been his personal space, arms folded, his trademark scowl deepening as he watched.
Sorting through pile after mind-numbing pile of minutiae was hard enough without the weight of that gaze upon him. Finally, Knox looked up and said, “What?”
“If you would but tell me what you are searching for, I might be of some assistance in locating it.”
“Well, since you ask, I’m looking for records of your contacts with the kidnappers. Call transcripts, emails, images of Fatimah holding the front page of today’s newspaper—whatever.”
“Ah, therein lies a problem. You see, we have received no communication from Fatimah’s abductors whatsoever.”
“It’s been over twenty-four hours, and you’ve heard nothing?”
“Our theory is that the abductors are deliberately leaving us in suspense, hoping that the more anxious we grow, the more amenable we will be to their demands once they do contact us.”
“Letting you sweat, huh?” Knox pondered a moment. “Yeah, I could believe that. Still, they’ll have to get in touch with you about ransoming Fatimah sooner or later. That’s what it comes down to in the end, the money. What other motive for kidnapping her could there be?”
As he spoke, he was idly riffling through stacks of papers. Suddenly he stopped, picked up a sheet and waved it in the air. “Whoa, what’s this?”
Hamza plucked the page from Knox’s hand. He studied it for a moment, then handed it back. “It is exactly what the heading says it is—a deposition.”
“Yeah, that much I got. But whose? You never mentioned anything about a witness.”
“I would have told you, had I thought it remotely useful.”
“Well, I want to talk to this guy, this—” Knox squinted at the identification bloc on the printed form. Some kind of alias to preserve anonymity, perhaps? “—Alpha-Alpha-somebody.”
“This ‘witness,’ as you call it, has already been processed,” Hamza said. “I myself was present at the examination, and I can assure you that the paper you are holding contains all the information you are likely to obtain.”
“Let me be the judge of that, okay?”
Hamza favored him again with that curiously intense, curiously familiar looking stare, but said nothing.
“Now then,” Knox went on, “is this Alpha person still on the premises?”
Hamza sighed and gestured toward the office door. “Come,” he said, “I shall take you.”
He didn’t really want the big guy tagging along and pressuring his only eyewitness, but what could he do? This was Hamza’s turf, his show. Knox rose and followed him out the door.
Together, they left the Corporate Security offices in the main house, walked across another swath of improbably lush lawn, and entered a two-story utility building of some sort. Hamza pressed a switch and the lights came on, illuminating a windowless, high-ceilinged bay. Recycled air smelled faintly of petro-lubricants and static discharge, a bank of generators throbbed a low, pervasive hum to the accompaniment of occasional high-pitched squeals and screeches. The total effect was like a machine shop out of some earlier industrial revolution.
And here were the machines to go with it. Both sides of the raised walkway were lined with open stalls or pens, each housing an elaborate assemblage of tooled metal—gleaming, sculpted abstractions aspiring to the likenesses of birds and beasts.
Hamza halted before one such objet d’arte, and snapped his fingers. In an instant, what Knox had taken for a haphazard sprawl of steel tubing and armatures had risen and reconfigured itself into a caricature of a canine. Roughly the size and shape of a Rottweiler it looked to be, only without the sunny disposition.
Hamza walked up to it. “Attend: verify release number and unit identification,” he said.
“Mark V Security Module release seven-dot-twelve, unit Alpha-Alpha-Delta-Six-Five-Beta,” the clipped reply echoed off the ceiling.
Knox involuntarily took a step back.
Hamza turned to him, dark eyes aglitter with suppressed amusement. “Mr. Knox? You wished to meet with the witness. Permit me to introduce you.”
Knox just stared, totally at a loss for words. His “witness” was a machine!