Daylight Runner (17 page)

“What do you know about the crane wreck last month?” he asked in a gruff voice he hoped did not sound like his own.

“The crane wreck?” Ragnarsson frowned. “I…nothing. I don't know anything about it—other than what was reported.”

“You didn't know Francis Walden?”

“Yes,” Ragnarsson said hesitantly. “He was a former employee of mine. He quit, transferred to Schaeffer.”

“Did you have him killed?” Sol asked.

“What? Of course not!” Ragnarsson responded indignantly.

Without warning, Maslow hit him hard on the nose. Sol jumped, taken aback by the suddenness of the blow.

“Did you have him killed?” The Clockworker repeated the question.

“Aaauggh…” Ragnarsson groaned, his mouth open, blood pouring from one nostril.

Sol raised his fingers to the bridge of his nose, where he'd been hit so long ago.

“Did you have him killed?” Maslow raised his fist to punch the man again, but Sol caught his arm.

“
No!
” Ragnarsson yelled. “No, I did not have him killed! What is this? Are you playing games with me? Who are you? Who sent you?”

“Who do you think we are?” Sol asked.

Ragnarsson scowled in his direction, but didn't answer.

“Who do you think we are?” Sol asked again.

The businessman raised his chin, his jaw set with determined defiance. “Who do I think you are? I think you're Clockworkers who've just crossed the line, that's what I think. You've gone too far—way too far. Do
you
know who
I
am?”

“Who runs the Clockworkers?” Sol moved closer to him. “Do they take their orders from you? Did you order the death of a man named Gregor Wheat?”

Ragnarsson cast his head around, as if trying to see through the blindfold. His expression had changed from controlled fear to one of puzzlement.

“Who the hell are you?” he demanded.

Maslow reached between his knees and turned the dial that switched on one of the rings on the stove. Beneath Ragnarsson's bare thigh, the ring started to heat up.

“Did you order the death of Gregor Wheat?” Maslow repeated.

“
No!
Jesus, no! I've never heard of the guy.” Ragnarsson's composure slipped as he felt the heat under his leg. “Please, God. Turn it off. Please!”

Maslow turned on another ring.

“I don't know who he is, I swear!” Ragnarsson was panicking, his teeth gritted as his leg started to burn. “I'll give you anything, just please turn it off!”

“What about the fire in the apartment block?” Maslow persisted. “Did you order that too? What other operations have you ordered? How many teams are there? Who else gives the orders? Is there anybody over you? This doesn't end until you start giving us some answers!”

Sol watched in horror. Maslow was serious; he was going to burn the guy. His face was set in an implacable
glare. He was not trying to help Sol now; he just wanted to break Ragnarsson. Something hissed, and their captive started screaming. Sol was frozen, his mind back in that small gray room with a man lifting the bag over his head to show him a pair of pliers.

He darted forward, pushing Maslow out of the way, and switched off the rings of the stove. His stomach was heaving, but he kept the vomit down. He grabbed Maslow's arm and pulled him away. Maslow shook his head, staring at him in confusion. Sol bared his teeth and dragged the bigger man with him. When they got to the hallway, Sol turned on him with a tight, hysterical whisper.

“Are you freakin' insane? We didn't come here to
torture
him!”

“Then why did we come here?” Maslow asked, looking genuinely puzzled.

Sol stared at him helplessly, wishing he could explain: how seeing Ragnarsson tortured sickened him, and he was afraid that if he saw enough torture, there might come a time when it didn't sicken him; how it made them as bad as the killers who were after them; how it was unreliable, because anybody in pain would say anything to make the pain stop. Anything at all. But he could see from Maslow's face that none of this would make any difference to him. To him it was just a job to be done.

“I've had enough,” Sol said at last. “Let's get out of here.”

 

On the way to the library, Cleo told Ana about Sol, swearing her to secrecy but knowing that there was no way she could be sure the teacher wouldn't go straight to the police. Ana told Cleo about her interrogation by Ponderosa and assured her student that as far as she was concerned, the police could go to hell. The library was nearly empty: three other people sat in front of webscreens; a fourth sat at a table reading a real book. The room was poorly lit, its cream and mauve décor worn and ageing, the furniture badly in need of recycling. Like most public services in the city, its maintenance budget had been cut to the bone. Cleo and Ana walked past the climate-controlled bookcases to the rows of web tables and sat down at a screen.

“Okay,” Ana began. “If the fire wasn't an accident, then the purpose was either to kill a lot of people or destroy the building. Let's assume for the moment that we're not dealing with mass-murdering psychopaths. So why would someone want the building out of the way?”

“To build something else on the site?” Cleo suggested.

“Sol said he thinks it was the Clockworkers, and that they set up the crane accident too. And we think Ragnarsson ordered that.”

“Right, well, Sol's hunch notwithstanding, let's see who owned the building to start with—see if they've applied for planning permission or rezoning.”

The building was owned by Racine Developments. They sat, flicking through the city-planning web site, searching to see if the company had made any suspicious applications.

“What's going on here?” Cleo murmured. “Why are so many of these files locked? This stuff is supposed to be public.”

“Corporate privacy,” Ana told her. “Corporations can keep their applications secret if they can prove it's important for their business. Which they always can. We need to go through each company's shareholder web site. We can buy a single share in a company for next to nothing, then get access to their sites.”

Cleo could feel herself getting bored already. This was too much like schoolwork; she wanted to do something active. Sol was out there somewhere, prowling the under-city, gun in hand, taking extreme measures. It sounded so much more dramatic—and she had to admit to herself that she found this new, dangerous side to him something of a turn-on. But he had a professional hit man to help him, whereas she had…a teacher. She reminded herself that she had spent too long talking the talk and not walking the walk. It was time to knuckle down and make herself useful. She pulled her chair over to the screen next to Ana's and started searching for leads.

S
OL HAD ARRANGED
to catch up with Cleo on the fire escape at the hospital, but they weren't to meet until seven—after dark—and it was only four thirty. So Sol sat on the cluttered rooftop of a nearby salt refinery, the air warm and humid from the huge distillers beneath, which removed the much-needed salt from seawater pumped in from the frozen coast for drinking water. There was a growing sense of emptiness inside him—the feeling that he was never going to see his father again. After the episode at Ragnarsson's, it seemed as if he had run out of options. There was nothing left for him to do.

“I thought you were ready for that,” Maslow said from behind him. “You have that edge, I know you have—you just need to forget all the sentimental rubbish you've
picked up in your old life. In the alley, when you shot that man, I
knew
you had it in you to do that. But I knew you'd hesitate with the woman. That's why I took her first and left the man to you.”

Sol was barely listening. He had been having nightmares about the killings in the alley—more about the woman with her twisted neck, but also of the man with the hole in his face. The thought sent a shiver through him. But he could reconcile himself to that and deal with the nightmares, it had been self-defense: them or him. Not with Ragnarsson. At his instigation, they had broken into the man's house and tortured him. Sol knew there would be people who would have no problem even with that. The end justified the means. It was how these things played out. It was what being hard was all about. But always there was the figure of his father, shaking his head, disgusted at what his son was becoming. Gregor, who was hard without being cruel, whose strength was tempered by decency. Sol needed to remember who he was doing this for.

Sol missed his dad. It had not really hit home until now how much he needed him. Ever since his mother and Nattie had died, Gregor had been his rock. Sol realized that he had never shown enough appreciation of his father. Everything had been warmer, more fun, when Nattie was there to banter with and Mom would hug him or tousle his hair as if he were still a little kid. Mom, who always got emotional about silly little things. It used to
bug him until she died, and then he found that it was what he missed most about her. But in his grief, he had closed up and stopped feeling much affection for his father. They had just got on with life. He supposed that Gregor knew his son loved him. But it had been a long time since Sol had shown it.

“It's not enough to be a fighter,” Maslow went on. “It's about doing whatever it takes, having the nerve to do what other people won't. You know what I mean? Maybe you don't yet, but after you've lived this life for a while—”

“This
life
?” Sol spat, turning to glare at him. “What life? My father's missing—I'm starting to think he might even be dead. I'm hiding all the time, sneaking around like some…some rat; the police are after me…. I'm afraid to go anywhere without you—a professional murderer—to babysit me, in case the people you used to work with find me and kill me. I helped torture a man…. I'm supposed to be training for the boxing trials! I'm supposed to be taking exams; I'm supposed to be leaving school next year! I can't sleep, I can barely eat, I'm so scared sometimes…. Nothing's ever going to be normalagain…. This isn't a
life
.”

He stared wearily at Maslow. “I'm not like you. I can't live like this, and I can't…hurt people like you do. I just can't.”

Maslow regarded him in stony-faced silence. “What choice have you got?” he asked.

Sol was saved from having to answer by the appearance of Cleo and Ana down on the street. They were striding briskly toward the hospital entrance. Sol and Maslow clambered to a corner of the refinery roof that looked over the drive up to the hospital door, just in time to see the teacher and her student walk in.

“Looked like they were moving with a purpose, didn't they?” Sol muttered. “Wonder what they found out.”

 

Cleo and Ana emerged from the hospital at the head of the angry crowd. Cleo's teeth were grinding as she walked, her thoughts a mass of indignation and frustration—a burning rage bursting to be expressed. They had spent hours in the library untangling the web of corporate entities that hid those responsible for the fire.

There were thousands of companies in Ash Harbor, but most of the major business ones were parts of the different commercial empires run by the Big Four: Ragnarsson, Takashi, McGovern, and Schaeffer. Their interests overlapped, and there was a constant struggle between them for domination of the city, but for the most part, Ragnarsson controlled food production, Takashi the water supply, McGovern managed the waste, and Schaeffer controlled the air. Between them, they owned seventy-five percent of the city's property. It was disturbing how little of the city was owned by ordinary people. Much of the rest of Ash Harbor's interests were divided
between lesser industrialists like the mayor, Haddad, and backstreet businessmen like Cortez. But it was the Big Four who really ran the show.

Racine Developments, which owned Cleo's apartment block, was itself owned by Lodestone Housing, which was owned by Carter & Chen Properties….

Behind Cleo, people flooded out of the hospital entrance; exclamations of rage, of disgust and disbelief bubbled like a simmering volcano on the verge of erupting. Word spread to those who had already left the hospital to find places to stay, to sleep, now that their homes were gone. The crowd swelled with those who rushed to join them.

Carter & Chen Properties was owned by Ash Harbor Bank, which was a subsidiary of the Renaissance Banking Corporation….

Forty-six people had died in the apartment-block fire—mercifully few in a block that housed over a thousand people—and there were still victims who would not make it through the night; there were many more who would be maimed or scarred for life. Pain and grief had driven people to look for someone to blame, a focus for their need to make sense of their tragedy. And Cleo and Ana had provided one.

The Renaissance Banking Corporation was owned by Occidental Financial Holdings, which was owned by the Schaeffer Corporation. And the previous year, the
Schaeffer Corporation had put forward a plan to build a state-of-the-art leisure center on the site of the apartment block. A petition from all the people in the area had stopped them, the inhabitants of the block stating their firm objection to having their homes bulldozed to make room for a gymnasium, a weather center, and some tanning salons. Today, the very day after the fire, the Schaeffer Corporation had made its application again.

Cleo and Ana had been unsure of what to do when they had discovered this. They had looked for other instances where the Schaeffer Corporation had benefited from accidents. And once they really started searching, there seemed to be no end to what they found. It seemed impossible that nobody could have noticed this before.

But then they had begun calling the news agencies. As soon as they mentioned Schaeffer, the journalists made their excuses and hung up. Not a single reporter expressed an interest in their story; some even sounded scared. One woman, who had actually lowered her voice to talk to them, told them that her webnews organization was owned by Schaeffer. Most of them were, and those that weren't wouldn't go up against him. Cleo and Ana had started to feel afraid. They called the police and were put through to the Industrial Security Section, which informed them that the fire was being treated as an accident. Did they have any material proof of arson? Cleo could not say for sure that the pipe on the roof that she'd seen the
worker tampering with was a gas pipe or that it wasn't a routine maintenance check. Ana had asked if gathering proof wasn't the job of the police. The officer had said they should be careful about making accusations they couldn't back up.

Feeling frightened and powerless, Cleo and Ana had returned to the hospital and told anyone who would listen about what they had found. And this time, people paid attention. The crowd marching down Bessemer Street toward the headquarters of the Schaeffer Corporation was now six hundred strong…and growing.

 

Sol and Maslow followed the crowd, trailing through the understreets and over rooftops. They watched as more and more people joined the march, and what it lacked in organization, it made up for with momentum. And it was not passing unnoticed by the authorities. As the crowd grew, so did the number of police cars and vans shadowing it in the surrounding streets. It was illegal to travel in such large groups; massing in crowds such as this was only permitted in certain static areas of the city, where the concentrated weight would not interfere with the motion of the Machine.

“Where are they going?” Sol wondered aloud as he and Maslow scaled a ladder that would take them over the pigeon-painted roof of a food-processing plant.

“Ragnarsson's headquarters are the other way.”

“It's not Ragnarsson they're after,” Maslow replied, pointing overhead. “We're heading right into the center of the Third Quadrant.”

Sol glanced up, and there, high above them, was the giant tower crane. The Schaeffer Corporation's tower crane. Where two men had died when one of its carriages had fallen from its arm. Vincent Schaeffer's carriage.

“They're fools.” Maslow grunted as he pulled himself up onto the roof. “No organization. The police will break them up in no time. And now your friends down there are going to be marked. You start something like this, you're messing with the Machine.”

Sol followed him over the ledge and hurried through the rows of huge, tilted solar panels that made the roof look like the deck of an ancient sailing ship, to the far side, where he could look out on the street below. He wanted to be down there with them; there was a visceral anger in that crowd that touched something in him. All the fear and pain and frustration he had felt over the last two weeks boiled up inside him, wanting to be shared with others like him.

 

The crowd marched on into the heart of the Third Quadrant, coming to the majestic, monolithic headquarters of the Schaeffer Corporation. And waiting there in orderly rows in front of its steps were two squadrons of a hundred and twenty red-clad ISS troopers in full riot gear.
From a crane carriage suspended overhead, senior officers were observing the scene.

The building was a minimalist, sloping slab of ferro-concrete twenty stories high, filling the end of the street. Its dark-tinted windows bulged like a hundred insects' eyes, and on either side of the street, matching buildings rose like canyon walls. As the crowd shuffled to a halt in front of the riot troops, a silence descended on the street. A menacing sense of impending violence hung in the air, the police officers' transparent shields raised in a barricade, their gas masks hiding any show of emotion. For just a moment, there was perfect calm in which all that could be heard was the perpetual rumble of the city's works in motion.

Then Ana spoke up.

“Bring out Schaeffer!” she cried. “This company burned down these people's homes! We want some answers! Bring out Schaeffer!”

Other voices took up the call. “Bring out Schaeffer!” they demanded in increasingly louder roars. There was no plan, no idea of what they would do if he emerged. This crowd of individuals had become a single entity, a massive animal in pain, crying out in its anguish for comfort and for revenge.

“Disperse and return to your homes!” a voice ordered over a bullhorn from the crane carriage overhead. “You are in contravention of Section Eight of the Illegal Gatherings
Act. Disperse immediately! Disperse and return to your homes!”

The police officer's choice of words could not have been worse.

“What homes?”
a voice screamed out. “They've burned our homes to the ground!”

Shouts echoed the cry, and the massive creature surged forward, the people on its leading edge stumbling ahead of the crowd to be pressed hard against the first row of shields, the nervous police officers roughly shoving them back. Ana and Cleo found themselves being shunted backward by the glasstic shield of the trooper in front of them. They were being crushed, and the crowd was becoming dangerously aggressive; Ana called out for calm. Other voices joined in, and the crush eased. Word started to filter through that there were more troops behind them. They were surrounded. Fear welled up; people began to grow uneasy…defensive. The enormous conglomerate behind Ana flexed with emotion, and she suddenly realized how close they were to calamity.

“This is your final warning!” the bullhorn declared.

“We will not allow you to endanger the city. Disperse immediately!”

Nobody budged. It wasn't clear if what happened next was a deliberate act, or a panicked move by some frightened riot trooper, but there came a popping sound, and something arced lazily overhead, trailing a tail of smoke.
The tear-gas canister landed right in the center of the crowd, and suddenly there was mayhem. For the second time in as many days, people found themselves coughing and choking, unable to breathe in poisonous fumes. Blinded by the chemical smoke, those in the center pushed outward, and the creature that was the crowd swelled, its edges crashing against the shields that barricaded both ends of the street. The police staggered backward against the weight of the people, only to find themselves pushed forward again by their comrades behind them. More tear gas was fired into the crowd, and the cloud of eye-stinging smoke spread quickly over the street.

“What are you doing?!” Ana shrieked at the officer who was jamming his shield against her. She stood protectively in front of Cleo, holding her back. “We just want some goddamn justice!”

The air was thick with fumes, and she squeezed her eyes shut as they started to burn; it was as if somebody were squirting boiling water in them. She screamed until her chest was so constricted by the crush of bodies against her that she had no breath. Her nose and throat felt full of thorns and she gagged, her empty stomach pushing bile into her mouth. She spat on the shield pressing against her face, opening her swollen, tear-filled eyes to look into the gas-masked face of the trooper in front of her. The edge of his shield was pulled down, and he raised his heavy
baton over his head. Her arms were pinned against her chest; she couldn't even raise them to defend herself.