Inherit the Earth (28 page)

“Venice Beach,” she told him, with only a slight hint of disgust.

His captors had brought him home—or very nearly home. In retrospect, that wasn’t particularly surprising.

“Thanks for coming to fetch us,” Damon said meekly. “I’m sorry you had to take the trouble.”

“I don’t suppose you have any idea why they didn’t contact Interpol directly,” the woman said wearily. She was looking out into the corridor, waiting for the members of her team to find something that could be used to cut Damon and Catherine free.

“I
think
they’re trying to tell you something,” Damon said. “Not you personally—the people in charge of the foundation.”

“
What
are they trying to tell us?” the data analyst demanded sharply.

Damon didn’t want to admit that he was confused, but he wasn’t sure that his run of lucky guesses could be sustained. “They seem to think that Ahasuerus and the remnants of Conrad Helier’s old research team are loose cannons rolling around their deck,” he said tentatively. “I think they want everybody—including Interpol—to know that there’s a new captain on the bridge, one who intends to run a very tight ship from now on.”

“What on earth is all
that
supposed to mean?” Rachel Trehaine demanded aggressively. She looked at Catherine Praill as if to see whether the younger woman understood it any better than she did.

“I wish I could be more precise,” Damon assured her. “I wish
they’d
be more precise. I don’t know what to believe. There’s too much of it, and it’s almost all lies.”

The woman from Ahasuerus was still annoyed, but she wasn’t entirely insensitive to his distress. She nodded, as if to concede that he’d been through enough for the present. By the time one of the gunmen appeared with a pair of wire cutters she had begun to look thoughtful. Damon didn’t suppose she’d been able to find out exactly what Eveline and Karol were playing at in the short time available to her, but she must have found out enough to keep her interested. She probably knew at least as much as
Damon did, and was probably better placed than he was to start putting the pieces together. When Damon thanked her for cutting him free from the bed’s head she finally took the trouble to ask whether he was all right.

He assured her that he was, then went to place a reassuring hand on Catherine Praill’s arm.

“It’s all over now,” he told her gently. “The police will want to question you again, but I’m sure they don’t suspect you of being involved in Silas Arnett’s abduction. It’s possible that you carried something into his house without knowing you were doing it, but Interpol must have a reasonable idea by now what kind of game this is. They’re being played with exactly as we are.”

“That’s an interesting observation, Mr. Hart,” said a new voice.

Damon looked around to see Hiru Yamanaka, who was coming through the doorway waving his ID card at all and sundry.

“You got here very quickly,” said Rachel Trehaine, her eyes narrowing slightly with awful suspicion.

“So we did,” Yamanaka agreed. “That’s because we weren’t very far away. Mr. Hart is right, Miss Praill—we do have some other questions to ask you, but we certainly won’t be bringing any charges against you and we’ll take much better care of you this time. You, Mr. Hart, are under arrest.”

“For what?” Damon demanded, blurting the question out with frank amazement. “You don’t
really
think I’m Conrad Helier, enemy of mankind, do you?”

“No, I don’t,” the inspector said equably. “In fact, I’m certain that you’re not, but I do have reason to think that you have information relevant to an ongoing murder inquiry, and perhaps to the whereabouts of a man we’re currently seeking in that connection.”

Damon felt horror clutch at his stomach. The mirror man had said that his side in the dispute hadn’t killed anyone—but there was no way to know how many lies the mirror man had told. “Silas is
dead?
” he said, leaping to what seemed to be the obvious conclusion.

“We still have no information as to the whereabouts or well-being of Dr. Arnett,” Yamanaka said, taking no satisfaction from his own punctiliousness. “The inquiry in question is into the murder of Surinder Nahal. We are holding your friend Diana Caisson as a possible accomplice, and we are making every effort to locate our chief suspect, Madoc Tamlin—who is, I believe, currently in your employ.”

Damon was lost for words. He didn’t know whether to be more alarmed by the fact that Diana was in custody or the fact that Madoc—who evidently wasn’t—had somehow been fingered for a murder he surely couldn’t have committed. He had thought himself dazed and confused before, but he was doubly so now. “Oh shit,” he murmured, in lieu of anything meaningful to say.

Yamanaka was looking at the short length of chain dangling from Damon’s wrist, as if regretting that Rachel Trehaine had taken the trouble to have it cut. “Please come with me, Mr. Hart,” he said. “I think it’s time you told us everything you know about this matter. We’re rather tired of people
playing
with us.”

For a fleeting second, Damon wondered whether the man from Interpol might be right—but only for a fleeting second. By the time he consented to be led away, he was already rehearsing the half-truths and evasions he would have to deploy. Whatever kind of game this was, he didn’t think Interpol could possibly win it. He didn’t even think they could be reckoned as serious players, although Inspector Yamanaka obviously didn’t see things that way.

Damon was taken to one of two waiting cars. Sergeant Rolfe was beside it, holding the rear door open. While Damon climbed in, Hiru Yamanaka went around the other side and took the seat next to him. Rolfe slammed the door shut and walked away, escorting Catherine Praill to the second car.

“I suppose you got a note pushed under your door too,” Damon said to Yamanaka as the car pulled away.

“We put Ms. Trehaine under discreet surveillance after you
went to see her,” the inspector told him mildly. “We were taking an interest in all your movements, and the call you paid on Ahasuerus stood out as one of the least expected.”

“Where were you when Steve Grayson kidnapped me?” Damon asked sourly.

“Again, not as far away as you might have thought. Unfortunately, we lost sight of you temporarily. We feared for your safety, having seen the message which was put out on the Web shortly after you and Mr. Grayson took off—and even more so when Rajuder Singh satisfied us that you really had been taken from the island by force. Do you wish to press charges against Grayson and Singh, by the way? We didn’t have enough evidence to arrest them without your testimony, but we’re still keeping an open file on the matter.”

“That’s okay,” Damon said drily. “They thought they were acting in my best interests, and perhaps they were. Best to let it alone—Karol is my foster father, after all.” As an afterthought, he added: “They
were
working for Karol, weren’t they?”

“I believe so,” the Interpol man confirmed. “We checked their records, of course. Rajuder Singh’s is unblemished to a degree that’s rather remarkable in such an old man. He’s an ecological engineer and has been for well over a century. He knew your father quite well, although that was a long time ago.”

Damon didn’t respond to that item of delicately trailed bait. When the silence had lasted five or six seconds, Yamanaka spoke again in an awkward manner to which he was plainly unaccustomed. “I ought to inform you that there was an unfortunate incident shortly after you left Molokai—an explosion aboard the
Kite
. Rescuers picked up a dozen survivors, but there was no sign of Karol Kachellek.”

Damon turned to look at him, feeling that insult was being heaped upon injury. “Karol?” he said helplessly. Numbly, he noted that the Interpol man had said “incident” rather than “accident.”

“I’m afraid so,” Yamanaka said. “It seems probable that he’s dead, although no body has been found.”

“Murdered?”

“We don’t know that. The investigation is continuing.”

“Am I a suspect in that investigation too?” Damon asked abrasively. “Do you think I went to Molokai to plant a bomb on my foster father’s boat?” He didn’t expect an answer to that and he didn’t get one, so he quickly changed tack. “Is Eveline okay?”

“So far as we know,” the man from Interpol said, with a slight sigh that might have been relief at the opportunity to impart some good news. “I’m very concerned, though, for the safety of Silas Arnett. If you have any information regarding the identity of the persons responsible for his abduction I implore you to tell me without delay. We’ve now received several communications from someone who claims to be the
real
Operator one-oh-one, disowning all the recent notices posted under that alias. It’s difficult to confirm her story, of course, but given that she’s incriminating herself I’m inclined to believe her. It has always seemed to me that this business could not be the work of Eliminators, unless some powerful organization had suddenly decided to commit its resources to the cause of Elimination. I find that hard to believe.”

“How old is the woman who claims to be the original Operator one-oh-one?” Damon asked curiously.

“She’s a hundred and five now,” Yamanaka told him, “but that’s a side issue. My most urgent concern is the safety of Silas Arnett. Now that those confessions have been released. . . .”

“They were fakes,” Damon told him.

“Painfully obvious fakes,” Yamanaka agreed, “which could easily have been made without Dr. Arnett’s active involvement. That’s what worries me. If his kidnappers didn’t actually need
him
, but only needed to remove him from the scene, they might have killed him before they removed him from his house. Now that we’ve found Dr. Nahal’s body, there seems to be more than adequate cause for concern.”

“You don’t really think I had anything to do with that, do you?” Damon asked gruffly.

“You commissioned Madoc Tamlin to look for Dr. Nahal.

When the local police discovered Tamlin at the murder scene he attacked them with a crowbar and ran away.”

“I commissioned Madoc to collect some information,” Damon said defensively. “I can’t believe he’d involve himself in a murder—that’s not his style at all. You
can’t
be serious about holding Diana as an accomplice.”

The man from Interpol wouldn’t confirm or deny his seriousness. Instead, he said: “Dr. Arnett’s supposed confession was an interesting statement, wasn’t it? Food for thought for everyone—and food which will be all the more eagerly swallowed for being dressed up that way.”

“It was rubbish,” Damon said.

“I dare say that Dr. Arnett was correct about the effect the Crash had, however,” Yamanaka went on. “The way he spoke in his second statement about bringing people together was really quite moving. The idea that for the first and only time in human history all humankind was on the same side, united against the danger of extinction, is rather romantic. The world isn’t like that anymore, alas. That’s a pity, don’t you think?”

“Not really,” Damon replied, wondering where this was leading. He knew that the Japanese were supposed to have made a fine art of beating around the bush before coming to the point, but the man from Interpol hadn’t previously shown any particular inclination to circumlocution. “A world devoid of conflicts would be a very tedious place to live.”

“I take your point,” Yamanaka conceded, “but you are a young man, and even I can barely imagine what the world was like before and during the Crash. I wonder, sometimes, how different things might seem to the very old: to men like Rajuder Singh, Surinder Nahal, and Karol Kachellek, and women like Eveline Hywood and the real Operator one-oh-one. They might be rather disappointed in the world they made, and the children they produced from their artificial wombs, don’t you think? They were hoping to produce a utopia, but . . . well, no one could convincingly argue that the meek have inherited the world—at least, not yet.”

Damon didn’t know what the policeman might read into any answer he gave, so he prudently gave none at all.

“Sometimes,” Yamanaka added, in the same offhandedly philosophical tone, “I wonder whether
anyone
can inherit the world, now that people who owned it all in the days before the Crash believe that they can live forever. I’m not sure that they’ll ever let go of it deliberately . . . and such fighting as they’ll have to do to keep it will be mostly among themselves.”

He thinks he’s figured it out, Damon thought, with a twinge of grudging admiration. He’s asking for my help in finding the evidence. And why shouldn’t I cooperate, if people are actually dying? Why shouldn’t I tell him what I know . . . or what I believe? “My father never owned more than the tiniest slice of the world,” he said aloud, by way of procrastination. He was awkwardly conscious of the fact that he had said
my father
instead of
Conrad Helier
. “He was never a corpsman, and never wanted to be.”

“Your father remade and reshaped the world by designing the New Reproductive System,” Yamanaka replied softly. “The corpsmen who thought the world was theirs to make and shape might well have resented that, even if he never disturbed their commercial empire. Men of business always fear and despise utopians, even the ones who pose no direct threat to them. The corpsmen probably resent your father still, almost as much as the Eliminator diehards resent
them
.”

“He’s been dead for fifty years,” Damon pointed out. “Why would corpsmen want to waste their time demonizing the dead?” He hoped that Yamanaka might be able to answer that one; he certainly had no answer himself.