Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

“He knew your name,” Greg said in the silence that followed, “he knew you had the contacts necessary to get into Monaco’s social event of the year at a day’s notice, and he knew you had the savoir-faire to deliver the flower. Some Celestial Apostle.”

“You think that’s him, boy?” Philip Evans asked. “The alien?”

“Alien?” Charlotte gasped. Fabian lurched upright in his chair, staring at Philip Evans’s image.

Nobody said anything, they were all looking at Greg, waiting for him to speak, like he was some sort of guru or something, she thought. He blinked slowly, and focused on her. She shifted uncomfortably, feeling Fabian’s hand in her own, the damp smooth skin tightening its grip silently. Greg didn’t just look at you, she decided, he judged you. A psychic. The realization didn’t make her any more comfortable. There were stories – “You said you broke off your holiday to deliver the flower?” Greg asked.

“Yes.” Her throat was contracting.

“How much of it did you miss?”

“Four days, Ali’s package was for a fortnight. But I changed my ticket for an earlier flight. The agent said there was no problem. I landed at Capetown then caught a connecting flight.”

“Ah.” A smile spread across his face. “I think we’d better fill you in on a few points.”

Suzi sat dumb while everyone had their say. First Charlotte telling how some Celestial Apostle handed her the alien flower. And just what the flick was a Celestial Apostle anyway? Then Greg on his Russian general mate, and how the Dolgoprudnensky were probably plugged in somewhere down the line. At least she knew about the Dolgoprudnensky, tough bastards. Julia started rapping about her starship supertechnology, and the heat she was getting from kombinates and microbes, and Royan being his usual monomaniac self. Royan always had to take apart anything new; split it open, figure it out, and put it back together so that it worked smoother. If Julia didn’t know that about him then they weren’t as close as she thought.

All heavy duty shit…

Charlotte and Fabian were sitting up straight like a couple of kids at school who’d been lumbered with the toughest master for a lesson, hanging on to every word. Charlotte’s gorgeous face was crinkling from the effort of following details. Suzi glanced casually at the girl’s profile. Not bad at all. Which reminded Suzi of Andria, who she hadn’t phoned since the airship.

The rap went on relentlessly around her. It was something she hated, and she couldn’t let them know. Silence implied wisdom, some bulishit like that. Let them think she was lost in deep thoughts, fully plugged in. This was Greg’s scene, not hers. She could plan ahead, sort a deal down to the last detail. Good at it, too. But she could never pin the past down the way Greg could. He listened to what people said they believed had happened, thought about it, then explained what had really been going on. And it all made sense, like he was fitting a big jigsaw of events together in his mind, a map through what had been. Him and his warlock intuition.

She grinned at him.

He gave her a knowing look, then broke away. “You see, Charlotte,” he said, “you didn’t know it, but you’ve actually been working for the Dolgoprudnensky since you left the orphanage. According to General Kamoskin, Baronski was plugged into them at a high level. That’s why he always sent you and the other girls looking for financial gossip. He made some money out of it, certainly; but all the really smart data was squirted back to this Pavel Kirilov character. He’s in a position to make a lot more use of it than Baronski ever could.”

The girl looked crestfallen. Suzi could see Fabian’s hand locked in hers under the table, his thumb stroking gently.

“And you think it was the Dolgoprudnensky who asked Jason Whitehurst to lift her from Monaco?” Victor asked.

“Yeah.”

“Father did business with them,” Fabian said unexpectedly. “It was sneaky stuff. Made us a heck of a lot of money, though.”

“Are you sure?” Julia asked.

The boy grimaced. “Absolutely. Father explained it to me.” He smiled at Charlotte, flipping a lock of hair from his eyes. “I said he told me everything.”

“Yes, you did,” Charlotte said. “So how did it work?”

“It was the Dolgoprudnensky who made sure we were granted all our import-export licences with the Eastern Federation states. Licences are really tricky to get most of the time, unless you know the right people; those Eastern European states are still lumbered with huge civil service bureaucracies. All we had to do in return for the licences was use ships which the Dolgoprudnensky owned to carry our cargoes in and out of Odessa. It’s simple really, most of our trade with Russia involves exchanging their timber for household gear and industrial cybernetics. So say if a Russian company comes to us and asks us for a particular piece of foreign hardware, we look round the global timber market and come back with a weight of wood which is equal to the cost of that hardware. Next, the Russian government’s Timber Export Directorate authorizes the release of that weight from their stocks. They have millions of tonnes of dead deciduous trees left over from the Warming, it’s a big national resource for them. The timber is shipped out of Odessa at ten per cent above the normal commercial carriage rate, and in return the company gets its hardware. Nobody queries the amount of wood being sold abroad which pays for that extra ten per cent in the shipping costs, because the Dolgoprudnensky have consolidated their control of the Timber Export Directorate. From the Director herself right down to the office cleaners, the entire staff is made up of Dolgoprudnensky members; it’s like a closed shop, the personnel department will only employ their nominees. And the only merchants who are admitted to the Directorate’s approved list to barter timber are the ones in on the deal. Like Father.”

“And timber is bulky,” Julia said. “You need a lot of ships to transport it.”

“That’s right. Only father didn’t just supply single pieces of hardware to Russia, he shipped in entire factories.”

Charlotte reached out and smoothed the remaining strands of hair from Fabian’s forehead. They both smiled at each other.

“OK,” said Greg. “That confirms it. Jason Whitehurst was working for the Dolgoprudnensky, at least to start with. When he began to realize how valuable Charlotte was he decided he didn’t need them any more. It explains why Nia Korovilla was on board, to keep a close watch on the Dolgoprudnensky’s most valuable timber deal partner. And they were also the ones who mounted the observation on Baronski’s apartment after the Colonel Maitland failed to show at Odessa.”

“But how did they know I was carrying the flower for Julia?” Charlotte asked.

“They wouldn’t have known it was the flower specifically, not at first,” Greg said; he pursed his lips, gazing at the ceiling. “Let’s see. How long had it been since your last genuine by-yourself holiday?”

“I’m not sure, a couple of years at least, maybe longer.”

“OK, and where were you when you asked Baronski to get you in to the Newfields ball?”

“I was still up at New London. If he couldn’t get me a ticket there wouldn’t have been much point in coming back to Earth early.”

“And you specifically told him it was Julia you wanted to see?”

“Yes.”

“Good. That would make Baronski very suspicious. You break off a pre-paid holiday of a lifetime, all because you want to physically meet the woman who owns one of the largest companies in the world. There must have been a compelling reason, yet you didn’t tell him, which is not only out of character, it goes against your whole arrangement with him. If I was Baronski, someone who lived off the kind of byte scraps dropped by people like Julia, I’d want to know exactly what you were up to.