Neal Asher: The Departure

‘Ahkmed Argul – but I suspect the proper form of address in this case is ‘‘Director’’.’

‘Yes, quite. Route him to my fone, and give me voice overlay.’

‘Where have you been, Coran?’ Argul immediately enquired.

‘My apologies, Director,’ Saul replied. ‘The mapping basement of the gene bank here is a fone deadspot.’

‘I see. I’ve also been informed that your bodyguard is out of contact, too. I do hope you aren’t having problems there . . .’

‘Aiden King was being a little unhelpful, so I left Sheila down there to have a chat with him. Beside that, everything is proceeding as per schedule.’

The car’s aerofans up to speed now, he raised the joystick up one notch, to take the machine about a metre off the deck, then eased the car back and round towards the cargo lift, which lay just behind the tail fan of the helicopter.

‘Good. Oversight is anxious to get this done, as resources need to be redistributed fast.’

Interesting . Saul decided to fish for information. ‘Such a tight schedule,’ he observed as he settled the car down again.

Argul made a hacking sound of irritation. ‘Coran, we don’t discuss the schedule over the air, and I think you know why I’m really calling.’

‘My apologies. I haven’t been feeling so good since eating a sandwich from King’s vending machine.’

‘Remiss of you,’ said Argul, ‘but I’m not accepting any excuses. Where is that distribution report for the Straven Conference? You’ve got three days before that’s due to be the main topic of discussion, so make damned sure it’s in.’

‘Yes, sir, at once. I’ve been a bit snowed under . . .’ Saul shut down the car, and climbed out, heading round to the cargo lift.

‘And Coran, if you do another of your disappearing acts, that’ll be another two points taken off your status. That’s not something you can afford right now – you know how difficult it is staying on the shortlist.’

‘Disappearing acts?’ Saul echoed. How very interesting, and what was this shortlist?

There came a long pause. Even though, with the overlay, his voice sounded to Argul like Coran’s, just as earlier, along with a visual overlay, it had appeared to be Aiden King’s to Director Thader, Saul again wasn’t using Coran’s normal speech patterns and perhaps Argul sensed this. In a way this might all be quite useful, because Coran’s apparently odd behaviour now might go some way towards explaining what was to come. Not that Saul intended any such explanation to be necessary.

‘Well, just get things sorted out and go back to that report,’ demanded Argul, and cut the connection.

Standing beside the cargo lift, Saul jabbed a button and the doors slid open, revealing the crate inside.

‘We okay with the cams up here?’ he enquired.

‘The cams will show Coran walking out, with his bodyguard close behind him. However, there will be an extensive investigation and they will get round to studying images from the Argus Network, which I cannot change.’

‘Which is why,’ Saul replied, ‘I’m not looking up.’

With not one centimetre of Earth’s surface – unless covered by cloud – being missed by the satellite cameras, the Argus Network should have been a tool of oppression to exceed the shepherds, spiderguns, razorbirds, static readerguns, inducers and the armed might of the Inspectorate military. But, even now, computer processing was still insufficient to handle all the image data. Comlife run in the main Argus Station could perhaps eventually solve that problem for the Committee, then they’d be able to put all the HF lasers online to punch down through the atmosphere with pinpoint precision, and any form of rebellion would be driven literally underground. Sometimes, when Saul considered what he was planning, his arrogance astounded him, since after he established who he really was and enjoyed a very personal meeting with his interrogator, he intended to remove the Committee’s biggest and most potent toy.

Operating the cargo-lift control so it would slide out its floor, bringing the crate right up to the hatch back of the car, he then unfastened the lid and tipped the crate over. Sheila spilled most of the way into the back of the car, and he spent some minutes and worked up quite a sweat manoeuvring her forward into the driver’s seat. Coran was much lighter, so easier to heave into the back seat of the car. Both tasks were smelly, since both had voided their bowels the moment they died – he just hadn’t noticed the stench down in the chill of the storeroom. Returning the crate to the lift he sent it back down, where one of the handlerbots, controlled by Janus, would repack it with sample cylinders and stow it back in the rack.

Shortly after this, he climbed in the back along with Coran, extracting the surgical saw from his waterproof holdall. Coran’s head came off easily, though messily, and digging the ID implant out of his arm wasn’t much of a problem either. Head and saw then went into the holdall, shortly followed by Coran’s palmtop and the contents of his pockets, but Saul retained the ID implant as he stepped out of the rear of the vehicle, depositing the holdall on the ground before closing the back door and climbing into the front alongside Sheila.

With her ID implant operating in near-proximity, the car’s console was still running. He programmed a course into the autopilot, out and away from Brussels and over towards London, then took one final item from his pocket – a short black cylinder with a timer nestling in a recess in one end. He placed it on the floor below the console, just over the forward aerofan, and set the timer running. Next he took her ID implant out of the tester and replaced it with Coran’s, and dropped the tester into his pocket. Her chip he dropped on the seat beside her. It would shut down in a short while, but that would not affect the autopilot.

Again starting up the aerofans, he jerked up the joystick and applied its lock. He had just enough time to step out of the vehicle, slamming the door behind him, before the fans got up enough speed to develop lift. He stepped back, dust blasting all around him as the car rose into the sky. About twenty metres above him, the autopilot kicked in and guided the vehicle off over the cityscape.

When the Hyex grenade detonated, about midway across the English Channel, its devastating effect would be complemented by the aerofans flying apart. The car and the two bodies inside would be shredded, to rain down in tiny fragments. Most of those fragments, being bubblemetal, would float, but the rest would simply disappear. Since he’d cut off Coran’s head inside the car they wouldn’t know he now had it, even after studying the satellite images, and they’d never recover enough for proper forensic reconstruction, at least not in sufficient time. Staff files took over two weeks to update, so no one but those directly involved would know that Coran was dead.

He now headed over to the personnel lift, called it and waited, head bowed, then stepped inside as soon as it arrived. The moment the doors had closed, he dropped the holdall, stripped off his jacket and turned it inside-out to present its blue lining, then took a matching baseball cap out of his pocket and jammed it on his head. Next he took up the holdall, stripped off its outer layer of plastic, which he scrunched up and shoved in his pocket, then inverted the handles to turn it into a backpack, and shrugged that on to his shoulders. Shortly afterwards he exited the lift on the ground floor and departed the gene bank, his appearance now somewhat different from the one the satellites would have recorded up on the roof.

‘They will almost certainly obtain samples of your DNA,’ Janus noted.