Mappa Mundi (39 page)

She hitched a lift with a salesman, coming home after a tour of the state, and Ian followed her at a distance, several levels below, waiting, conserving what he could for the moment when he would get his chance to do something that mattered.

Natalie made straight for Jude's address in Eastern Market, surprised to find him within a stone's throw of the Capitol itself, amid handsome streets where mature trees had buckled the paving around them into hills and fissures with their roots. In a pale stone apartment building, on the top floor, his windows had a view of the old city heart. Dusk was coming on and the white buildings shone, with lights illuminating them from the ground. Importance and power were written deep in their architecture. In the homes and rooms close to her Natalie felt other energies moving: the blurred, vague impressions of people shone weakly like reflections in running water.

She shivered as she stood on the curb and calculated how long it would take them to find her by tracing her taxi-payment transaction. She'd used the best encryption, but there was always a way. She estimated a few hours at the outside and if they'd any brains they might already be here, waiting for her to make an appearance.

The heat and the smells were exotic. They almost nullified the nightmare of Dan's death with their newness to her. She lingered in the shadow of a ginkgo tree whose leaves trembled on an unfelt breeze, and absorbed the calm of change for an instant, looking unobtrusively around her for spies. There was no one loitering, apart from herself. Without waiting any longer she trotted up the steps to the foyer entrance and buzzed the doorman's attention.

Her false ID worked on the building AI and she was admitted without any of the simpering interference she'd half dreaded from a place like this—but the doorman didn't believe in snobbery. He liked the idea that human beings could come and go without the third degree. He liked the look of her, even if she was a touch on the goofy side. She smiled at him politely through her exhaustion. Polite he liked, and he opened the lift doors for her and sent her on her way.

The white corridor was hospital stark, Natalie thought as she stepped out and made for the fourth door along. All it was missing were some tiles, a lino floor, and the eternal stink of urine and it would have been a dead ringer for her psychiatric ward. Apart from its doors and lights it was featureless. It said to anyone—you are in a dead zone between lives, take a door at your peril, but for the sake of sanity, take one. She hadn't come for peril, although she knew now that Jude was certainly deeply in it if he was still here.

His door had a touchpad service on the jamb and she brushed it with one finger. A beam scanned her face and she heard a chime sound inside.

She waited almost a minute. Then the door opened and she was about to fall in with relief and anguish and the desperate need to collapse somewhere secure when she saw Jude.

Although he was trying to appear normal as he held the door it was obvious he was in deep shock. His gaze was slow to fix on her, it wavered erratically and the hand in his hair had stopped midbrush through and seemed to be supporting his skull. His face was haggard his eyes looked sticky and red. More than that, inside his mind she didn't see Jude the competent detective but two other people: a man who was full of rage and despair, and someone who wanted to curl up in a corner and regress to the point where he didn't even know his own name.

Whatever had happened to him in the days since they'd parted, it must be as bad or worse than what had happened to her. She knew it. Much as she wanted to, now was not her time to unlock her feelings
about Dan and Selfware. She was the stronger one and she had to take this on the chin for longer.

“Come in,” he said, blinking as though the light hurt his eyes.

When the door was shut she put her hand out to his arm and held it as he was turning away from her, slumping with shoulders forward in a semiprotective posture. He rotated towards her, still closed up, and she said, quietly, “What happened?”

“My sister …” he began, but then forgot how to continue and simply stared at her with the flat dullness of imbecility.

If she hadn't known otherwise from his breath and the absence of any giveaway smell she would have thought he'd been drinking heavily. She realized she had to help him.

“Come on, let's sit down.” After the entryway the apartment branched out into a big white room with what looked like comfortable furniture. Jude let her guide him and sat passively on the edge of a couch, resting his elbows on his knees.

He rallied to say, “I should be asking you, shouldn't I? I heard about something. An accident at the Clinic. Was that you?”

She was gratified for the instant that he searched her face with real sensitivity, trying to listen for her answer.

“It was, but that's not important right this minute. I'm still here, see?” She spoke in her professional voice, the calm, warm tone she used to use for trauma patients and victims of violent crime. His whole behaviour suggested that he'd seen or been involved in something like that very recently. She thought about what he'd said—his sister—and became convinced that there was a horrible and fatal story in the offing.

“Can I get you a drink?” she asked, crouching down at his side, all the time assessing him. He took a moment to answer.

“Tea,” he said and made an effort to smile. “That's what the English do, right? Tea for all problems.”

“Universal cure,” she agreed. “I'll be right back.”

The white lounge, vast and airy, studded with diamond energy-saver
lights, narrowed on one side and became a small kitchen, again full of white marble, shiny metal, and brilliance. The effect was like living inside Tiffany's front window, she thought, and shivered—how very odd to find him in a place like this. It didn't fit him. It was a show home, a designer “poof's palace” as Dan would have called it. But then, she wasn't thinking about Dan.

She opened and shut cupboards until she'd located cups and the red pack of Twining's English Breakfast tea bags. It was very light and when she looked inside only tea dust remained. There were no other boxes in sight.

“Shit,” she said, “you're all out of tea.”

“No, there was one left,” he said and, exhausted, got up to show her.

He took the box and confidently turned it, only to stop dead as he saw the inside.

“That's odd,” he said. “I could have sworn I had … I must have.” He paused and swayed so suddenly that Natalie grabbed his arm to stop him falling. She thought he was fainting but he shot a hand out to the breakfast bar and steadied himself.

“What is it? Don't worry. We can have something else.”

“No,” he said, forcefully. He pushed himself off from the bar and staggered into the lounge, the box still in his hand. She didn't understand why he was fixated on it, but he didn't seem to have lost the plot entirely, so he probably wasn't suffering a paranoid delusion.

He turned and balanced, speaking carefully, in control again, “White Horse doesn't drink anything except tarpit coffee and herbal tea. I don't drink tea. You do. Mary does. Last time that Mary was here she made herself a cup and said there was only one left and not to forget it next time I went to the store.”

Natalie waited for him to conclude. Her own desperation and tiredness threatened to fight her to the floor but she stood nonchalantly and looked interested.

Jude looked around him and Natalie followed his gaze that lingered
on a handsomely mounted piece of Native American art and some kind of jewellery or beaded shirt display. “Mary must have been here when I wasn't. White Horse said she'd spoken to her and that Mary had told her about a lawyer. But I thought … I thought she meant they'd spoken on the phone, I don't know why. But she was here, and she didn't mention it.”

“Who's Mary?” Natalie asked. Behind her the kettle chimed and switched itself off.

“Mary, my partner,” Jude said, distracted. He sat down and turned the cardboard tea box in his hands, letting the dust sift out onto the immaculate carpet. “We've worked together four, five years.”

“Friends?” She had the strangest impression, in what she was coming to recognize as the true Selfware style of magical knowledge from nowhere, that the person he was talking about was someone she'd met. But that was ridiculous.

“Yeah. The best.” But he didn't sound certain.

Natalie tried not to wonder why he'd chosen never to mention her before, but she did wonder. Yes, his trip to England had been covert, but even so. Wouldn't this friend be helping him to investigate this? Natalie tried to shake off the feeling that Jude was rapidly becoming more of an enigma as her knowledge about him increased.

“You mean, you were friends, and now you're not?” She tried to get him to clarify.

“I don't know.” He looked across at her and just like a switch being flicked the Jude she did remember seemed to come back on. “Sorry. This must sound like a crock to you, but this box …” He held it in his hand and then, without warning, grimaced and crushed it up into a small grey and red ball. Then, when he turned back to her, his face was calm.

“A lot's happened.”

“To me, too,” she said, and then her decision was made about whether she could or should trust him, could or should involve him
further. “Come on. We can't stay here. Get whatever you need and let's go.” But it was hard to say it. All she wanted to do was sink down on one of those couches and curl up and sleep, not go out into a country and city she didn't know with nowhere to hide.

He stared blankly at her as though he didn't understand a word of it but then got to his feet. Back to dull again, hesitant and pained, he nodded.

“Give me a minute or two.”

He disappeared into one of the other rooms and she heard the sound of wardrobes opening. She poured herself a cup of hot water and sipped it as she made a closer inspection of the room. Its neatness and order made her feel even more ravaged and helpless.

“What did she do with the machine?” Natalie called through, without really thinking about the question.

“It was taken off her,” he said, grim-faced as he returned. He took the beaded thing off the wall and removed the back of it, taking the necklaces and other things out from their pinnings and packing them carefully in rolled T-shirts, which he placed in a briefcase. He explained, in clipped terms, what had happened, the kidnap and the threats.

“Your cornflakes packet is all chopped up,” she said, not sure herself why it was important, only that nobody here looked like they had the time or inclination to play with cardboard and glue for fun.

Jude looked blank. He obviously wasn't someone who ate at home very much. It seemed like news to him.

“You said she was determined to find hard evidence. The scanner was it. But she carried it round in her bag all the time, you said, even after you warned her. She must have thought it would expose her to danger. Wouldn't it have been better to put it in a safety deposit?”

Jude shrugged, but his expression showed that his thinking was suddenly starting to follow hers. “She didn't trust big institutions, banks included.”

“Do you think she might have left it here?”

“What, and made a convincing replica out of that?”

“No. But it's like any other device. It's got a fancy outside and working insides. The outside isn't important, and, more to the point, it's the kind of thing that you couldn't tell didn't work unless you had some active NervePath to test it on. She didn't. She may have realized that and taken the case with her in case she was caught, to use as a bargaining chip for her safety. Others would have no reason not to believe it was the real thing and she got to protect her evidence.” Natalie knew she was right.

“She might not have told you, so you wouldn't be able to give it away if you were questioned. You've got to expect that whoever did this to her isn't going to stop at raiding this place and—”

“Did what to her?” He was cold and direct as his stare arrowed at her across the room.

“Drowned her in the—”

“I didn't say anything about that.”

The temperature in the room seemed to drop to absolute zero. Natalie at once realized that she had no idea how she knew the details of what had happened to Jude's sister, except that she did, and he was now looking at her with piercing suspicion and a simmering, violent hostility. She was glad the breakfast bar was between them again.

“No,” she said, reaching for her treatment voice and letting her own shock show with it. “You didn't. But she did drown in the Potomac, didn't she? And—” she didn't understand what came into her mind next, but she said it aloud “—she was drunk on champagne.”

Jude left his briefcase and stalked across until their faces were only a foot apart, the bar between them. He leaned closer, his dark eyes scrutinizing hers and brimming with the beginnings of tears that she could see were due more to anger than to grief at this moment. His voice was quiet and more controlled than she expected.

“You'd better tell me what the hell happened to you in that accident or we are going our very separate ways.”

In as few words as she could, keeping it simple, she told him what had happened and how she believed she was changing.