The Dark Side (28 page)

If they can make off with any one of those paintings, Greenan knows, the whole hugely expensive and highly dangerous operation will have been justified. It will be, in fact, their crowning achievement.

The Vesuvius Six have been planning this job for twenty months. They've been on the Moon itself, disguised as a crew from the BBC's Natural History Unit, for six weeks. They've practiced their procedures in microgravity. They've checked and rechecked all their equipment. They've run through their plans again and again. They've traveled across Farside to reconnoiter the territory around the secret Spanish base. And they have waited patiently, as usual, for a natural catastrophe.

And when that moment came—in this case it was a powerful solar flare—they were more than ready. They immediately sabotaged a substation and two junction boxes on Farside's central power and communications cable, then converged on the rendezvous point at Perepelkin Crater and raced to the Spanish base. And there they waited, a kilometer to the west, just behind three separate dishes, for the passage of the day-night terminator. Because it's during the last light of the lunar day, with all its visual and thermal anomalies, that the security cameras and infrared sensors are most vulnerable to misreadings and malfunctions. Without doubt, they've been assured, this is the best time to launch an assault.

Presently the last patches of sunlight vanish from the eastern horizon and darkness begins to swallow the base. Greenan lowers his electro-binoculars and signals to Noémi Ritzman, former Olympic bronze medalist for the Swiss shooting team (600m military rifle). In the past she's fired cables though the narrowest of apertures, often from hundreds of meters away. But her task now is even more challenging.

The target is the base's auxiliary power unit, a full thousand meters distant. Rory Moncrieffe, the group's tech expert, is helpfully “painting” it with a laser beam. Ritzman steps out from behind one of the radar dishes and raises her G88 Line-throwing Rifle.
She stops breathing, tenses all her muscles, makes sure she has the target perfectly in the sights—fully accounting for the visual distortion of her helmet visor—and squeezes the trigger. Immediately a bolt streaks out. Encountering no air resistance, the bolt, trailing a piano wire, travels like a bullet at shoulder height. Two hundred meters. Four hundred meters. Six hundred meters. It's still going. It's barely dropping at all. Eight hundred meters. It's nearing the power unit. A thousand meters. One thousand two hundred meters. It's still going. It's missed the target. It's flying into the darkness beyond the base, still trailing the wire.

There's no time for regret. Ritzman has already picked up a backup rifle. She's already training it on the target. She tenses herself again, and fires. A second bolt shoots across the surface. Two hundred meters. Four hundred. Six hundred. Eight hundred. The arrowhead plunges into the side of the power unit. Bull's-eye.

There is no time for self-congratulation either. The gang has only a few minutes in which to operate, assuming they haven't been detected already. So Rory Moncrieffe shifts the laser, this time training it on the outer airlock door of the base. And Ritzman fires a bolt from a third rifle. Two hundred meters. Four hundred. Six hundred. Eight hundred. Bull's-eye again. The Vesuvius Six now have two lines running a full kilometer to the Spanish base.

Now it's time for the explosives team—Branislav Parizek and Blade Testro—to move in. With winches the two men tighten the wires to the tension of guitar strings. Upon these wires they hang two motorized containers, each holding four kilograms of Semtex 6. They flick switches and the containers, like miniature cable cars, start creeping along the wires just a meter and a half above the surface. At about twenty kilometers an hour.

For the Vesuvius Six, this is an agonizing wait. As the explosives
pass into the darkness the gang waits for Rory Moncrieffe, wearing long-range night-vision goggles, to give the all-clear.

And for a long time . . . nothing. Still nothing. The rest of the team snap on their own night-vision visors. They hoist their guns. They check their concussion grenades. They ready themselves for the assault. And they wait.

Then Moncrieffe turns. He gives the thumbs-up. The explosives are in place. The lights are green.

It's now time for Darragh Greenan, raising his grenade launcher, to take command. Five of the team will charge in under the last rays of the setting sun, and when they're halfway to the base Moncrieffe will send an electrical impulse through the wires to detonate the explosives. If all goes well, the auxiliary power unit—currently the base's principal power source—will be knocked out immediately and the outer door of the base will be blown open. The team will blast through the airlock and a third security door and move swiftly to take over the control room, seal off the guards, and punch in the security codes to the vaults below. They expect to be in and out in fifteen minutes.

So Greenan steps out from behind the dish. He looks at his team, twirls a gloved finger in the air, and gestures to the base.
Showtime.

But even as he does—before he can swing around and lead the charge—he notices the others looking
past
him with expressions of disbelief, even astonishment, on their faces.

So he pulls up short. He turns, squinting into the darkness. And this is what he sees:

A battered VLTV, not unlike their own, is ploughing across the rock-scattered terrain. With night-vision goggles it's possible—
just
—to see through the windows. And what Greenan makes out is an extremely well-groomed figure sitting in the driver's
seat. And others in the vehicle who look like rag dolls. And glass that's smeared in places with dark liquid—perhaps blood.

But the driver doesn't seem to notice the Vesuvius Six—or care. He just keeps driving north. His vehicle strikes the first piano wire and snaps it. Then continues to the second wire and snaps it as well. And he keeps going. Speeding soundlessly out of sight, at top pace, into the enveloping darkness. And then he's gone.

And now there are warning lights flashing on the Spanish base—an intrusion alert. Guards will be mobilizing inside. Defenses will be flying up. It's no longer safe. And Darragh Greenan, seeing two years of planning evaporate as rapidly as the sunlight, has no time to brood. He wheels around and makes the exit signal.
Game over
. Back to the VLTV. Time to retreat. Time to pull out. To escape.

The others follow the orders at once, mobilizing without any sort of protest. They say nothing aloud, of course, and would not be heard even if they did—they're not using suit-links—but they all accept it tacitly. Greenan's expression, and the emphatic way he made the signal, are all that needs to be said.

It's over. The Vesuvius Six have been defeated. It's time to retire and write those memoirs. Assuming they get off the Moon alive.

Q
T BRASS'S HOUSE LOOKS
like one of those church conversions that have become so popular on Earth. In fact, Justus has seen the place from his bedroom window and thought it
was
a church.

At the door he's greeted by Leonardo Brown and ushered up some stone steps, such as one might find in a cathedral, to a room with arched windows, paneled walls, and Renaissance paintings of devotional scenes. There's a profusion of ferns and tropical flowers as well, along with the chatter of parrots—some of them flying directly onto the balcony to feed from seed dispensers—so the whole effect is like a monastery on the edge of the jungle.

“Lieutenant, I'm so glad you came—sit down, please—can I get you a drink or something?—what happened to your foot?—oh God, this is a nightmare now—oh God, I don't know where to begin.”

She's pacing back and forth in front of the window, talking in
almost overlapping sentences. But this isn't the same overconfident operator as before. She looks drained of color now, and her eyes are swollen, as if she's been crying. She looks so emotional, in fact, that Justus briefly wonders if this is the same woman he met previously—if maybe that was a paid impersonator as well.

“You were a close friend of Kit Zachary's,” he says—a statement.

She stops pacing and looks at him. “You found out about me and Kit?”

“It's my job.”

“Then you can also imagine how upset I've been?”

“I guess so.”

“What did you find out about him, exactly?”

“I know he was your builder.”

“Of course he was my builder. He was
the
builder. He was responsible for erecting half of Sin. Virtually all my building projects—God, he even built this place.”

“On your instructions?”

“He got half his work on my instructions. But he was much more than a builder to me. And much more than a friend. He was like a—no, I wouldn't say a father—he was like an
uncle
to me. A confidant, an adviser, a collaborator.”

Justus shrugs. “He had interesting proclivities.”

“Of course he did. Most men in this place do. And he tried to get me into bed too, of course he did. But I put a stop to that, and it was never a problem again. Look, Lieutenant, that's just the way it is around here. Don't think any less of Kit because he was found in a cheap brothel with some . . . lady of the night. His tastes ran that way. God—I can't believe he's gone!”

“Do you know any of the ‘ladies of the night' he'd previously done business with?”

“No, I don't know anything about his girls—what was she, the
one who was killed? One of those lookalikes, the
Tablet
said, cut to look like some teen movie star—well, I don't want to know about it. But they're cunning, the prostitutes in Sin—they're often luring people into places on false pretexts. It's not out of the ordinary at all. You should talk to her pimp if you want more information on that angle.”

“I did.”

“And what did he say?”

“He was rudely interrupted.”

QT stops again and looks at him. “Oh my God—he was silenced too, wasn't he? They—what did they do?”

“They killed him.”

“Oh Jesus.”

“Right in front of me.”

“Oh Jesus.”

“And I chased the killer—that's how I twisted my ankle. It's a wonder you didn't see it. We put on quite a circus act.”

“Sorry,” she says, “but when I found out about Kit it hit me hard—
really
hard—and things really started falling into place. I had to get out of the office and reassess.”

“Reassess what?”

“
Everything
.”

Justus isn't completely convinced by her show of grief, but he's relieved there's any grief at all. For a fleeting moment he even thinks how vulnerable she looks—less formally dressed, emotional, not in complete control. But he drives the thought from his head. “Things started falling into place?” he asks.

“Well, yes—how can I say this? Since we last spoke there was that terrorist statement—from The People's Hammer; it's all over the local media—and then I heard about Kit—and
things started falling into place
.”

“What do you mean?”

She runs her hand through her hair. “I don't know what I mean.”

“That's not an answer.”

“It's difficult for me to say, Lieutenant—it's difficult for me even to contemplate—you must understand—and I'm not even sure if I'm right—I don't want to believe it—I
really
don't want to believe it—but the possibility just won't go away. And then, the more I think about it . . .”

She sighs, squeezes her eyes shut, as if suffering a thought so terrible it's painful, then collapses back on the sofa. If it's a performance, thinks Justus, then she deserves an Oscar. Maybe she
is
a professional actor after all.

“I think,” she goes on, “I
think
 . . . but don't
know
 . . . that my father is behind this after all.”

She exhales, as if the admission has taken everything out of her, but doesn't continue. Forcing Justus to ask, “What makes you say that?”

“Because it's logical. Because it's just too logical to be denied. Because when you put all the pieces together—all the visible pieces and some that are still hidden—it makes too much sense. Because this is what I
feared
would happen, in my worst nightmares. It's what
I'd
do if I were my father. Except I'm
not
my father. And now I don't know how far he's going to take it—and that
scares the shit out of me
.”

Justus again feels the urge to comfort her. “You're going to have to explain yourself,” he says.

“I can try, but there are things that you're going to have to take at face value—assuming you aren't even better at your job than I think. And you can start with Kit Zachary. He was very rich and very powerful in Purgatory, but like Otto Decker he was
not
someone any terrorist group would want to kill. You must
understand and accept that. It makes no sense at all. This whole terrorist angle—it's baloney, pure baloney. It has to be.”

“You might be interested to know that most of the PPD agrees with you.”

She smirks. “Do they, now?”

“Why the sarcasm?”

“Because it's an
obvious
cover-up—to anyone in the know. But then, I don't believe it's designed to be anything more than that—a transparent ruse. Something to serve a purpose for a few days, maybe a few weeks, and then be ripped away like a veil.”

“And how does that work, exactly?”

QT suddenly launches to her feet and starts pacing again, as if she has to move to keep up with her own thoughts. “I think someone is trying to set me up. I think Otto Decker was killed because he was expendable. A well-known ally of my father's, yes, but one who was no real loss. And they also killed Ben Chee in the process—that was a bonus. And now they've eliminated Kit Zachary—a powerful supporter and associate of mine. To the public it might still look unclear—they won't be able to join the dots. One of my father's supporters dies, then one of mine. It might even look like tit-for-tat. Except that I had
nothing
to do with the murder of Otto Decker, I promise you. So what's going on? High-ranking people are being killed. And soon others will be killed as well—this is just the beginning. They'll mainly be allies of mine, but there'll be an expendable associate of my father's occasionally as well, just to muddy the waters. And what does this do? What's the grand game? Well, it makes sure all my father's rivals are accounted for—anyone who might have ambitions to take over from him while he's away—and it strips me of my power base too. But there's more. Because when the terrorist charade falls apart, as it's clearly designed to do, it's
me
who'll be framed
for the assassinations.
Me
. I'm the one who'll be painted as the devious puppet master behind the whole thing.
I'll
be the one who's supposedly been knocking off these people, because they'll be painted—they're
already
being painted—as
my
rivals. It's crazy, but it just might work.”