Requiem (51 page)

A second man was coming from the den. He too was dressed in overalls. He was a Hispanic, olive-skinned with a balding head and thick moustache. He saw Dublensky about the same instant that the crouching man did. Everyone froze, the Hispanic half-way through the door, the crouching man by the wall unit, and Dublensky in no-man’s-land, three steps into the room with nowhere to go. They were frozen into a tableau, excepting that everyone’s eyes were moving.

‘Get out of my house!’ Dublensky screamed, astonished at the aggression in his voice.

It seemed that the Hispanic didn’t need a second invitation. He moved quickly, accelerating from a standing start to a smooth and rapid walk in no seconds flat. Dublensky retreated slightly, suddenly alert to the risk of attack, but the Hispanic, though coming in the general direction of the door, kept wide, taking a loop out towards the wall as if to establish his non-aggressive intentions.

‘Get out of my house!’ Dublensky repeated, his attention caught by the crouching man, who had straightened up and was also beginning to move. He came forward at an almost leisurely pace, making no attempt to pretend he was heading for anything or anybody but Dublensky.

Dublensky felt a bolt of alarm, a fresh awareness of his vulnerability, and twisted his gaze back to the other man. Too late he saw that the Hispanic’s loop had brought him close up behind him, that, far from continuing through the door, he was reaching out towards Dublensky. Dublensky’s heart leapt against his chest, he heard himself cry out, and tried to duck away. The Hispanic’s fist came punching forward, Dublensky countered with his forearm, only to find that the move had been a feint. With sickening helplessness he felt the Hispanic’s free hand close in on his wrist, grip it brutally, and twist it up behind his back. The Hispanic kept twisting until Dublensky, yelping with pain, was forced to bend forward.

The least physical of men, Dublensky had time for a fleeting reflection on the stupidity of having instigated this encounter before everything was pushed from his mind by the arrival of a fist in his guts.

The top of his body jack-knifed forward and he sank slowly to his knees. His initial astonishment was eclipsed by ferocious and overwhelming panic as he choked for breath. His lungs were banded in steel, his stomach crushed in a vice, he thought he was going to die. So desperate was he for breath, so focused on the clawing of his lungs, that for an instant his brain failed to register the arrival of the next blow, which hit the back of his head with the force of a power hammer. The impact seemed to drive his skull forward into his head, he was aware of a thunderous roaring, an astonishing weightlessness, then finally, with massive relief, the gathering balm of unconsciousness.

When his brain climbed slowly back to life, it was with a dragging reluctance. He lay motionless, his eyes and ears closed to everything but the needs of his lungs. He reached for breath, pulled at the air like a swimmer saved from drowning, yet when he finally managed to catch a long draught of air, it was only to cough it out again, along with his lunch. It was a while before he could be certain of breathing with any confidence, though it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. Then he lay still again, examining each of his senses in turn, muttering and whimpering with bewilderment and outrage, waiting for the worst of the pain and trauma to pass, half hoping he would slip back into unconsciousness again.

Somewhere outside, a bird sang. There was the hum of a car passing in the road. He opened his eyes and saw a scattering of papers, an overturned chair, an empty bookshelf and a vase of dried flowers balanced precariously on the edge of a table within an inch of falling.

No sounds came from inside the house. The intruders were long gone. He realized with a bitter sense of failure that he hadn’t even managed to get the registration number of the delivery truck.

It was another fifteen minutes before he felt strong enough to lift his head, which ached with a nauseating intensity. He had trouble keeping his balance, and it was only by leaning hard on a chair that he managed to climb unsteadily to his feet.

His first instinct, as in any crisis, was to contact Anne. Her office told him she was in case conference, and he had to wait while she was called out. The sound of her voice, tinged with concern, sent him into helpless inarticulate weeping, and it was some time before he was able to explain haltingly what had happened. Anne, who in her determination not to fall into feminine stereotypes had spent a lifetime controlling her emotional responses, couldn’t entirely suppress the quiver in her voice as she told him to sit tight.

While he waited for her, he sat in the lounge, staring at the sea of paper, shivering occasionally, murmuring and sighing to himself. When Anne arrived, he cried again and talked incoherently in a great stream of indignant rage. She gave him coffee and headache tablets, dried his tears and over his objections called the doctor and the police. The doctor wanted him straight down to the hospital for a skull X-ray, while the police, who seemed to think a bang on the head quite fortunate compared to some of the alternatives, were more interested in getting the suspects’ descriptions and an idea of what was missing.

Anne led the police on a tour of the house. The upstairs was untouched, but the den, like the lounge, was a terrible mess, with overturned table and strewn papers. There were also broken lamps and damaged furniture, almost as if the Hispanic had had a more ambitious burglary in mind.

Even before Anne with her customary thoroughness started to check each item off in her mind Dublensky knew that nothing of monetary value had been taken. The fancy carriage clock Anne had given him one birthday was still on the windowsill. His four-hundred-dollar camera sat in full view on a shelf. Some cash in the top drawer of his desk was untouched.

Rapidly losing interest, the police took down the brief descriptions Dublensky was able to give them and, putting the incident down to a failed burglary attempt, said they’d come back when the inventory was complete.

Dublensky was relieved when they were gone. His outpourings had drained him of speech, his head throbbed mercilessly. At the same time his mind had taken on a curious lucidity. Armed with more coffee and aspirin, and a pile of cookies which Anne insisted he eat for their energy value, he knelt on the den floor and began to sort through the scatterings of papers, books, journals and notes. The shock had worn off, to be replaced by a gathering anxiety, something akin to dread. He had a suspicion that, in one sense at least, the worst of the day was yet to come.

It took him almost an hour to sort the loose papers into rough batches and reorder the files, and another half hour before he was absolutely certain of what was missing. Then it was all he could do not to weep again.

His scientific notebooks going back to his student days were gone – all twelve of them – as well as a number of scientific papers, several diaries and his main correspondence file. A hurtful loss, but bearable.

More difficult to bear was the loss of the Aurora dossier, with its data on the sick workers and the safety procedures at the works. Although, when he really thought about it, it was not perhaps a complete disaster, since much of it duplicated Burt’s work.

What was far, far worse than any of these was the loss of the slim unmarked file which he had hidden inside a folder of scientific papers at the back of a lower drawer of his desk. He kept on searching, but there was no doubt.

The secret file on the Silveron toxicology trials, with its ten irreplaceable photocopied pages, was gone.

T
HEY SAT BY
the window, separated from the oppressive midday heat by a chill wall of air-conditioning. The restaurant was Ethiopian, the drinks American, and the food somewhere in between. Daisy ate spiced lamb and couscous, and an unashamedly American salad served with Roquefort dressing. Paul Erlinger was stabbing at some charcoal-grilled chick-pea rissoles with yoghurt sauce.

‘Pity you couldn’t make it to the conference,’ he said between mouthfuls. ‘There were some really useful people there, some great new initiatives. What was it, you couldn’t get away in time?’

‘Something like that.’ Something like the fact that Catch was not funding this trip and that she’d got a bucket-shop ticket for a four-day trip sandwiched around a weekend.

‘Any other time and I could have shown you a bit more of the town,’ he said. ‘Washington has great food – Mexican, Cuban, Creole – you name it.’ He gave her a lopsided grin. ‘Food’s my weakness.’

‘I would never have guessed.’ She grinned at him. He was far from good-looking, with his round face, snub nose and small mouth, and he was decidedly heavy round the jaw and over the belt, but his looks were redeemed by a beaming affectionate smile and a conspicuous sincerity.

‘I could have shown you the Chesapeake,’ he said warmly. ‘Or the Appalachians. But like I told you, I’ve an appointment Sunday.’

‘Another time,’ Daisy said.

‘I’ll hold you to it.’ His eyes sent unmistakable signals.

‘That would be nice,’ she said, trying to match his affability without offering open encouragement.

Guiding the conversation gently back onto the right track, she ventured: ‘This source of yours – he never gave you his name?’

Paul lowered his voice theatrically. ‘He calls himself Alan Breck.’

‘But it’s not his real name?’

‘I doubt it. When he wrote us, he put it in quotes. I assume he’s a Robert Louis Stevenson fan. It’s a while since I read
Kidnapped
– like twenty years. I don’t even remember if Alan Breck was a good guy.’

‘And you’ve no idea who he really is?’

‘Nope.’ The waiter cleared the dishes and gave them dessert menus. Paul made a point of waiting for the waiter to go before continuing in the same confidential tones: ‘But he has to be with Morton-Kreiger or TroChem – that was the laboratory Morton-Kreiger used to carry out the official toxicology trials on Silveron. It’s just possible he could be with the Environmental Protection Agency, I suppose, but somehow I don’t think so. We have our contacts there and – well, we’d have heard if they had something that hot on a big one like Silveron.’

‘Why don’t they have any suspicions? It seems incredible.’

‘Not incredible – oh no. Not when the EPA have just had their funding cut, not when they only have the manufacturer’s data to go on.’

‘What will it take then, for the EPA to start an investigation?’

He spread his hands. ‘Alan Breck’s data, maybe.’

‘That would be enough?’

‘You bet. More than enough.’ He picked up the menu. ‘You want a dessert?’

She shook her head. With an obvious effort of will, he pushed the menu aside.

‘He didn’t send you the data itself?’ she asked.

‘No, I think he wanted to see if we’d treat the information seriously first.’ He signalled the waiter for the tab.

‘Why didn’t he send it direct to the EPA?’

‘Listen, the EPA’s a government agency. They’d want names, dates, sworn affidavits – I mean, a heavy deal. And this guy may be in a real hot spot. Going public could lay him open to serious trouble. By sending the stuff through us he gets to lie low while we get to put ten times the political pressure on the EPA than he could ever achieve solo.’ He paid the bill and they made their way to the door.

Outside, the heat closed around them like a blanket. The air was very still and a heavy bronze light hung over the street, as if there were a storm coming.

The EarthForce office was five blocks away, a broad red-brick converted warehouse on three storeys, between a used-furniture store and a Lebanese deli. The windows were heavily barred, the door faced with sheet metal.

‘We take no chances,’ Paul explained as he tapped a pass code into the security panel. ‘A break-in would be seriously bad news.’

‘You have a lot of break-ins round here?’

‘Sure.’

‘The drug problem?’

Paul led the way in and closed the door. ‘Addicts? Oh, they’re a problem, sure – but not so much for us. No cash here, you see, no valuables.’

‘But you still get burgled?’

‘You bet we do,’ he said mysteriously. ‘We’ve had a few kids try to hack their way through the windows – you know, just to show that no place in the neighbourhood is beyond their skills. But that’s amateur stuff.’ He paused, squeezing the suspense dry. ‘No, we’ve had two professional break-ins in the last two years, and both times we’ve asked ourselves, now why would they bother?’

He led the way up the stairs, panting slightly, climbing crabwise so as not to lose a moment’s conversation time. ‘And we always came to the same unpleasant conclusion.’

‘And what was that?’

‘They came to get their secrets back,’ he said with dramatic emphasis. ‘Oh, they made it look like it was robbery – you know, spread everything around – but when we came to do an inventory, it was very particular kinds of documents that were missing. Since the first robbery we’ve made duplicates of all the important stuff and stored them in a secret hideaway.’

She followed him into the offices of EarthForce’s Land Pollution Division. The layout was open-plan, the decor hi-tech rustic, with bare brick, tropical plants and six Meccano-style work stations.