Sins of the Father (13 page)

"Mr Gregory?"

The woman was sitting in an armchair with her legs curled under her, waiting for him as he stepped out into the living room. She had turned the Tri-D player on, and he saw two steaming cups of coffee on the low table in front of the sofa.

"Are you going out?" She looked up at him through curled lashes, her fingers playing unconsciously at the hem of her robe. "Already? I mean, you paid for the whole night."

"I'll be back soon," he lied to her. "Something came up at work and I have to go in to the office. It won't take long. In the meantime, make yourself at home."

Briefcase in hand, Arkady moved smoothly from the living room to the door of his apartment. As he opened the door, he heard the woman's voice behind him.

"Mr Gregory? What about if there's another call? Should I answer it, or just let the machine take it?"

"I wouldn't worry," he said, smiling gently at her over his shoulder. "There won't be any more calls."

Still smiling, Arkady stepped out into the hallway and closed the door behind him. Then, without so much as a backwards glance, he left the girl, the apartment, and his old life behind, never to return.

"Jimmy Nayles is dead."

In a flurry of vid-phone calls, the message spreads. Contingencies are activated. Pre-existing plans are put into practice.

In gambling dens, drug labs, stash houses, number drops and brothels, the reaction is the same. In a dozen sectors across the city, a hundred illegal enterprises abruptly shut up shop. Records are burnt. Deliveries are cancelled. Merchandise is re-routed. Customers are turned away.

In the brief space of a few hours entire criminal operations are packed up and ready to go, to be moved lock, stock and barrel to new premises. Tomorrow, when the dust clears, things will get back to normal. Safe in new locations, these same operations will unlock their doors once more and proclaim they are open for business. But, for tonight, everything is different. Tonight, the dictates of security mean precautions must be taken.

Tonight, Jimmy Nayles is dead.

For Leonard, the news came as he was transferring a crate to the cargo van parked in the loading bay. Hearing the sounds of commotion, he paused in his work and turned to see a group of cutters running naked down the stairway. Jensen and the other guards were with them, and as Leonard watched he realised the cutters and their guards were carrying big bags of uncut coffee, as well as all the weighing and measuring equipment from inside the cutting room.

"Hey, Lenny!" As Leonard stood gazing in confusion at the scene before him, Freddie Binns suddenly ran up beside him, his face red and breathless. "Get those crates loaded on the van quick! We got to get moving!"

"Okay, Freddie," Leonard said. He looked again at the stairway. "Is something wrong? How come everybody's running?"

"Wrong?" Freddie looked at him as though he was stupid. "Didn't nobody tell you? Jimmy Nayles is dead, Lenny!"

"Jimmy Nayles?" A thought played dimly at the edges of Leonard's memory. The name sounded familiar, like he had heard it from somewhere before. "I think I know the name..."

Abruptly, Leonard noticed that Daniel was waving at him to attract his attention. The boy had been sitting on a crate, minding his own business, but now he put his finger to his lips to signal Leonard should stay quiet.

"Of course you know it, Lenny," Freddie sighed in exasperation. "You've been working here a month, you must have heard it from somebody. Jimmy Nayles is the top man. The big boss. He runs this whole operation. Now he's dead, we've got to move to new digs before the Judges get wise." He clapped his hands urgently. "C'mon, Lenny. Chop-chop! We ain't got time for talking! We got to get our asses in gear!"

Turning to one of the crates, Freddie started to drag it himself as the cutters and the guards arrived at the loading bay to begin packing their burdens pell-mell into the back of the van. Stooping to help Freddie with the crate, it suddenly occurred to Leonard exactly where he had heard the name Jimmy Nayles - or James Nales, at least - before. It was strange when he thought of it, but when he had first seen Mega-City One it had seemed to him it had to be the biggest place in the world.

Now, big city or not, it was beginning to look like the world was a lot smaller than he had thought.

By the time the hoverlimo arrived in the parking garage beneath the Bob Woodward Hotel and Buy-Mart, Peter Arkady was already waiting. Stepping from the shadows, he opened one of the limo's rear doors and sat inside the passenger compartment.

"Well?" he asked the driver as they pulled away. "What is our progress?"

"The evasion is at seventy-five per cent completion, Mr Gregory," the driver replied. Through the open partition between them, Arkady saw the man raise his eyes to look at him in the rear-view mirror. "I am told it should reach ninety per cent within the next hour. Even if the Judges are on to us, we will have disappeared before they can act. At most, all they will find waiting for them are low-level stragglers and empty premises."

"Good. But my name is not Gregory any more. It is..." Finding his memory had failed him, Arkady checked the citizen ID in his briefcase. "Whittaker. I am Arthur Whittaker. Hmpff. I shall have to remember to have a word with Brotsky about these names. He could have at least have given me something that sounds less like an insurance salesman. But then, anonymity is the point of the exercise, I suppose. What about you, Vasseivich? What is your name now?"

"Dunn," the driver replied. "I am Roy Dunn."

"Roy? Really? Still, it could have been worse. With his febrile imagination, our illustrious document-maker might have called you Ralph something. Or Billy-Bob, or Lester, or Mitch. Hnn. Americans." He sucked air between his teeth. "Is there any better proof of what idiots they are, than the fact they give their children such stupid names?"

Stifling a yawn, Arkady felt tiredness creep over him. He had been busy since he had been roused from his bed. In the wake of the report of his superior's untimely demise, he had visited his own office and activated a pre-installed virus inside his business computer designed to purge all files, before walking to the rendezvous point to be picked up by the limo. Gazing out through the tinted Plexiglas of the passenger window as the limo pulled out of the garage and took to the air, he experienced a sudden annoyance at the thought of the setback his organisation had suffered tonight. Inevitably, as they moved their enterprises to new locations and attempted to cover their tracks, there would be financial losses in the shape of abandoned merchandise and materials. Still, in the end, it was better to keep some of the pie than lose it all. Tonight, they might well lose millions of credits, but had they left their operations exposed and the Judges had found them, then the losses could have run into the billions.

As the limo rose up through the airways and Arkady found himself looking out over the city, a new thought occurred to him. In the rush and hurry of leaving his apartment, the full implications of news he had received had swept over his head. Now, he realised, with the death of its leader, he had moved up the Organisation's hierarchy. The succession was clear. He was now the top man. He allowed himself to savour a quiet moment of elation. He was Number One. As the words of the storybooks had it, the king was dead.

Long live the king.

"Mr Whittaker?" Abruptly, the sound of the driver's voice intruded into his thoughts. "I was asked to remind you there is a question that awaits your most urgent consideration. I am talking about Gruschenko's killers. There will need to be retaliation."

"Agreed," Arkady said. "Put the word out through the usual channels that we will pay a hundred thousand credits to whoever can lead us to them." He looked at his watch. "Now, I need to make a call."

Pressing a button on the armrest of his chair to seal the partition, Arkady leaned forward to open the compartment containing the limo's vid-phone. Typing a number in from memory, he activated the scrambler encryption, then waited for the call to go through.

"Prendergast here." A man's face appeared on-screen as the call was answered. Arkady saw the man's hand appear briefly as he touched something to the side of his screen. "The line is secure. So, Mr Arkady? To what do we owe this honour?"

EIGHT

DEAD BEAR, THE TEA PARTY AND LAZARUS

"Konrad Gruschenko," said Watch Commander Hunter as he stood at the lectern addressing the assembled ranks of Judges seated in the Sector House 45 briefing room. "No doubt some of you are already familiar with the name. I understand the Judge-Tutors at the Academy still occasionally make use of him as a case study in their classes."

Lifting a small remote control device from the lectern, Hunter pointed it at the blank briefing screen behind him. A picture appeared: a grainy 2-D photo of a burly man in his fifties, his image caught on surveillance-cam as he stepped from a limousine flanked by a phalanx of bodyguards.

"This is what Gruschenko looked like in 2097," Hunter continued. "He first came to Justice Department attention in the late 2090s, as the leader of an immigrant crime group of ex-Sov Bloc citizens running a stookie glanding operation in Sector 83. They called themselves 'The Organizatsiya' - that's The Organisation, for those of you that don't speak Sov. Further investigation revealed that stookie glanding was only the tip of the iceberg when it came to their activities. Gruschenko and his cronies had their fingers in about every racket you could think of: drug smuggling, murder-for-hire, counterfeiting, credit and insurance fraud, illegal gambling, arms dealing, organ legging, loan sharking - you name it. Street Division took them down in a series of raids in 2098. There were casualties. A lot of the Sovs resisted arrest, including Gruschenko himself."

He pressed the remote again, the image on-screen changing to a close-up of a burnt and blackened human hand lying severed amid a pile of debris.

"When the tac-team kicked in the door, Gruschenko opened fire on them with a lazooka. The lazooka malfunctioned, resulting in an explosion that killed Gruschenko and two of the Judges. Of course, after that, there wasn't much left to identify the bodies. Fingerprints and DNA from a severed hand found among the rubble matched Gruschenko's, so it was assumed he was dead. Case closed. At least, that was the way it looked until tonight."

The image on the screen changed once more, revealing a close-up of the body of James Nales lying dead in his office.

"A few hours ago, Psi-Judges Anderson and Lang were called to investigate a homicide at the Franz Kafka Office-Plex," Hunter said, nodding to the two Psi-Judges sitting among the front row of Judges. "The victim's name was James Nales." He turned to indicate the screen behind him. "As you can see, Nales appears to be in his late thirties. In the course of medical examination, however, it became apparent the victim had undergone several rejuve jobs and was actually in his eighties. A routine DNA scan confirmed his identity: James Nales was Konrad Gruschenko. It looks like Gruschenko faked his death in 2098, and continued his criminal activities under a new ID."

Momentarily, the Watch Commander was silent as a ripple of whispered conversation ran around the room. Then, he raised his hand for silence.

"Given the fact 'James Nales' was only ten years old in 2098, there's every chance this wasn't the first fake ID that Gruschenko used. The Organised Crime Unit is currently working under the theory that he must have changed identity and moved his rackets every few years - that's how he escaped detection for so long. Presumably, he figured he could stay one step ahead of us forever. Fortuitously though, his death has now given us all the information we need to shut down his entire operation."

Again, the image changed. The grisly close-up of Nales/Gruschenko disappeared, replaced by a map of the Sector in which a dozen different locations had been highlighted.

"Forensic analysis of the encrypted records on Gruschenko's office computer has identified a number of locations where we believe illegal activity may be taking place. Accordingly, we will be mounting a number of simultaneous raids on these locations at dawn. These raids will be timed to coincide with similar raids on other suspected Organizatsiya fronts across three different sectors. The timing is crucial: by going in simultaneously we increase our chances of catching Gruschenko's confederates red-handed before they can destroy any evidence. With any luck, we should be able to roll up the whole network in one fell swoop, in the process dealing a crippling blow to organised crime in this city. Any questions?"

He paused, looking out at the faces of the Judges before him.

"No? Good. Once this briefing is over, you will all report to your assigned tac-teams where you will each be given details by your supervisors of your specific duties during the raids. In order to maintain operational security, codewords will be used in all future briefings, as well as in Control dispatches and in radio communications between tac-team members. Gruschenko will be referred to as 'Dead Bear'; the Organizatsiya will be called 'The Tea Party'; while the operation itself has been codenamed 'Lazarus'. I repeat: Dead Bear, The Tea Party and Lazarus. Remember those words and use them. This operation is too important to be compromised by some idiot flapping his lips. If I hear anybody breaching security by using the real names, they'll find themselves on a charge."

"Finally, before you go, a note of caution." Switching off the briefing screen and laying down the remote, Hunter's face adopted a sombre cast. "Be aware that some of the perps are likely to be ex-Sov Bloc citizens like Gruschenko. In which case, we're talking about career criminals with extensive experience of the Sov Bloc justice system; which, I'm sure I don't have to tell you, is a hell of a lot harsher than our own. That means they don't scare easily. In all likelihood, therefore, we can expect them to resist arrest. I want it clear: I'm not telling anyone here to shoot first and ask questions later. But, that said, be ready to go in hard, fast and heavy. Remember, when you're taking down a perp, it's not just your own life that's on the line, but also the lives of your fellow Judges. You know the drill. Stay sharp. Stay alert. But, most of all, stay alive."