Scale, p.9
Scale, page 9
Loretta bit her tongue; if Cara was afraid, she wouldn’t want to trick G8 into believing that she’d surrendered every copy. But if Finch was convinced that Cara still valued the documents for their own sake, there was nothing to be gained by talking her out of that.
“I take it the Idyll was searched thoroughly?”
“Yes.”
“And Cara’s home and business premises in D1?”
“Yes,” Finch affirmed. “And her sister’s.”
Loretta hoped they’d hired a local, and not had Spotlight’s idiots swarming all over these buildings. If anything was likely to spark a backlash in D1, it would be news that impertinent fingerlings had started running rampant in places they had no right to be.
She said, “Honestly, the fastest way to get what you want would be to earn Cara’s trust. Take her to D1 and let her walk free, but tell her that she’ll be charged with blackmail if the documents aren’t returned to you, or if she does anything to publicize their contents.”
“I can’t agree to that,” Finch replied. “I’m sorry, but it’s not going to happen.”
“So you’d rather have the navy poking around the riverbed? And the police looking into your outfit in the desert?”
Finch said, “Cara would be the first person who’d suffer if we lost the ability to resupply the base. It wasn’t designed with someone of her scale in mind, so everything she needs is being brought in specially for her.”
Loretta made no effort to hide her disgust. “So, Cara’s not in any danger from you, but you’ll happily starve her to death rather than set her free?”
“I keep telling you that there are other lives at stake,” Finch replied. “But you keep ignoring me.”
“Well, maybe you shouldn’t have put them at stake. And forgive me if I’m a bit more skeptical about some hypothetical backlash against your inventions than I am about the actual dangers to the actual woman you’re actually holding against her will.”
Finch said, “I can’t just let her go. No one will agree to that.”
Loretta laughed. “If you have no authority to negotiate, why did they even bother sending you to talk to me?”
“Meet us halfway,” Finch pleaded.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Before you call in the navy, try to locate the documents. If you can’t give us ten days, give yourself one. If you find them, we’ll let Cara go – and if we don’t live up to our word on that, you can do your worst.”
Loretta couldn’t decide if this was a ploy, or sheer desperation. How long had Spotlight been looking for the documents, already? The people who’d actually supplied them to Cara in the first place had had almost two weeks to retrieve them, and failed.
But what else could break the stalemate any faster? The chance of persuading the navy – with its administration spread across the seven scales – to investigate the riverbed and force G8 to release Cara in less than a day was zero. Sam’s fears of unleashing an attack that endangered her couldn’t be dismissed either.
Loretta said, “A day, then. Do we have a deal?”
“And once we free her, we get the ten days we asked for?” Finch pressed her. “We get to announce our results when we’re ready?”
Loretta couldn’t vouch for what Cara might do, or promise to stay silent herself if the police became involved and questioned her on the matter. But that wasn’t what G8 were asking of her.
She said, “My only goal is to get Cara released. I have no interest in anything else.”
“Then we have a deal.”
Chapter 18
“Where would your sister hide something that she wanted you to find if she went missing?”
The phone line crackled and groaned. Sam wondered how often the D1 exchange replaced the tapes in their rescalers; maybe he’d worn them out by imposing an unexpected workload over too short a period.
“On the Idyll,” Jessica replied. “There’s a gap behind one of the cupboards that she pointed out to me, years ago. But I’ve already checked it. That’s one of the first things I did when I got on the boat.”
“How carefully did you look?” Sam hadn’t examined the spot himself; he’d been too preoccupied with the footprints to spend another hour scouring every nook and cranny in the cabin.
“I poked around with my finger; there was nothing in there, as far as I could tell.”
“Could you check again? Take away the boards around it, if you have to, to get a proper look. There might be some Scale Seven documents in there; they’d only be a few millimeters wide.” Loretta had said that G8 had already searched the boat, but it was still possible that they’d missed this spot.
“Why do you think she’d have Scale Seven documents?” Jessica asked. “Have you found out who made those footprints?”
“It’s just a possibility we’re following up,” Sam replied, hoping he’d come across as cautious and measured, rather than cagey.
“But why would she have anything like that?” Jessica persisted.
“We often get a number of potential leads that might be genuine, or that might just evaporate under scrutiny. The only way to deal with that is to cross-check them. So if you can, I’d really appreciate you looking on the boat again.”
“All right.” Jessica still sounded dissatisfied, but perhaps she’d concluded that he might have valid reasons not to spell out every detail of this particular lead. “I’ll get back to you in an hour.”
“Thank you.” Sam didn’t like keeping her in the dark, but he had to assume that G8 were listening. Maybe they’d even send someone to the Idyll to check the hiding place before Jessica could reach it, but if that helped convince them that their secrets would remain safe a little longer, all the better.
It was possible that Cara had hidden the documents pretty much anywhere in D1; she could have wrapped them in foil and wedged them behind a wad of chewing gum in any of ten thousand cracks and crevices in the walls of public buildings that nobody would have reason to examine or interfere with. Still, it would require a certain mindset to entrust them to a place she didn’t personally control; he suspected that most people would either have held on to them, or given them to a friend with instructions on what to do with them if they came to harm.
Sam closed his eyes and tried to imagine Cara’s state of mind after the documents came into her possession. She might not have understood quite what she’d ended up with; even the G8 employee who’d presumably been bribed to copy anything valuable or sensitive they could get their hands on need not have grasped their real significance. But she must have believed that she finally had some leverage, and that she could force G8 into carrying out the research that her dying lover needed just by threatening to release these trade secrets. It would have been smart to make duplicates and hide them somewhere no one would think of looking, but she might also have wanted at least one set she could keep watch over around the clock, to reassure herself that they had not gone missing. And if that was the case, surely she would have had them with her on the Idyll, and not left them back in D1.
Or at least, brought them with her. But what if something had spooked her, once she reached the harbor? Just because she hadn’t been taken until after her meeting with Landau, that didn’t mean the submarine wasn’t already in place beneath the boat.
Sam pictured Cara peering over the side of the Idyll, trying to see down through the layers, hunting for an explanation for a strange sound she’d heard, an eruption of bubbles to the surface, a subtle change in the appearance of the water. If she thought the people she was blackmailing might take this opportunity to retrieve their secrets, what could she do about it?
As far as Sam knew, she hadn’t left the boat at all – and a Scale One woman really couldn’t have gone anywhere in D4 without being spotted. If she’d given the documents to Landau, she would have told him to pass them on to Jessica, or the police, or a journalist. Could Landau have betrayed her, and held on to them for his own purposes? But it wasn’t really all that likely that she’d hand them over to him at all; it was a cross-scale business relationship, not even longstanding from Cara’s point of view. Nowhere near close enough to rely on for a favor like this.
So how would she get the documents off the boat?
Landau had shown her Scale One demonstration models of his new product line, and she had declined to place an order. The appliances certainly hadn’t remained on the boat. Perhaps Cara had reasoned that she could claim a change of heart and arrange to have them sent to her later, along with her usual shipments. It sounded risky, but if she did have duplicates as well, she might have been more worried about being caught with the documents in her possession than she was about losing a copy that wasn’t actually irreplaceable.
Sam picked up the phone, then put it down again. If he tried to explain any of this to Landau while censoring himself to keep G8 happy, he’d just end up sounding deranged. He could always call Loretta and ask her what she thought of his tenuous theory, which would presumably be enough to tip off G8. But for all he knew, their whole deal with Loretta was just a hollow promise. Surrendering every possible advantage to them in the hope that they would keep their word would be insane.
He left the office and headed east. The tails on him had changed several times, and though some of them had been easy to spot, their skill level was so variable that he’d be a fool to be complacent.
The Forty-five Café wasn’t too crowded. Sam found an empty booth and ordered a mango juice, glancing across the room now and then as if he was expecting to be joined by someone shortly. Then he got up, leaving his drink on the table, and headed for the toilets. In the passage, he took a turn that led to an exit on the east side of the building; he’d half expected he’d need to stoop to get through the doorway, but the café’s architects had aimed to facilitate crossings, not filter people out by scale.
He kept walking east for a block, before turning north. The footpath wasn’t so narrow that he was obstructing anyone if he walked carefully, and while he caught a few irritated glares, for the most part the locals were unfazed by his presence, and a few greeted him warmly in Panscala. When an old man looked up at him sourly, Sam addressed him in some dialect he’d learned from Yukio – “Good day to you, sir!” – and the recipient smiled and returned the salutation.
As he turned again, to the west, he glanced back down the street, quite certain that no tail from D4 had followed him. If G8 had been prepared with a second tail who’d been shadowing his movements on the D5 side of the border, Sam could only applaud their extravagance, but it seemed unlikely. The chances were, anyone following him wasn’t even aware yet that he’d left the café.
Back in D4, he made his way as quickly as he could to the Dawn factory on the western border. At the reception desk, he said, “Sam Mujrif. I’m here to see David Landau.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No. But please tell Mr. Landau this is in regard to the disappearance of Cara Leon.”
The assistant hesitated, but Sam gazed back at him sombrely with his best they’ve-found-a-corpse-and-that-takes-precedence-over-everything stare.
“One moment. Please take a seat.”
Sam remained by the desk. The assistant spoke on the intercom. “You can go in,” he said.
Landau looked dismayed as Sam greeted him. “Is this bad news?” he asked.
“Not necessarily,” Sam replied. “I really need your help, though. Do you still have the Scale One demonstration models you showed Cara at your meeting?”
“Yes.” Landau frowned. “Why?”
“Would you mind if I inspected them?”
Landau gazed at him, bewildered, but then opted not to ask for an explanation. “They’re in the warehouse. I’ll have someone show you to them.”
“Thank you.”
In a corner of the warehouse, the man Landau had sent to accompany him gestured at the unmissable giant boxes, then went back to whatever he’d been doing. Sam turned on an extra ceiling light, and brought a stepladder over from beside the wall.
None of his pen-knife’s blades fit the slots on the oversized screws, but he found a set of specialized tools hanging from a board nearby. Once he’d unscrewed the side of the first device, he maneuvered the panel out of the way; it was unwieldy but weighed almost nothing.
Sam stepped inside and shone his flashlight around, recalling Idris’s briefly held conviction that there were small people living inside the family’s radio. The electronics were D4-sized, so behind the giant control knobs and massive speakers there was an awful lot of empty space, if not quite enough for the cast of a drama to reside comfortably. Cara could hardly have disassembled any of the boxes without Landau noticing, but the carpentry was not so immaculate that the flexible boards all met in airtight seals, so she could easily have slipped something through a crack while pretending to size up the appliance.
The beam of the flashlight showed dust filling the air, and more gathered on every surface. Sam found the concentrated scent of Scale One timber slightly nauseating. He searched around all the gaps, which revealed themselves as bright lines in the gloom, but the devices had probably been tilted steeply on the trolleys carrying them from boat to truck to warehouse, so a small object pushed inside might have ended up anywhere. After brushing aside dust for two or three minutes, though, he was convinced that the cabinet was empty.
He moved on to the second device. It was a tape recorder, but the motors and reels weren’t eight times larger than his own; no doubt D1 customers would relish the miniaturization, even if they weren’t yet clamoring for this particular model.
It did come with rechargeable batteries, though, and they were bulky enough to make it awkward to get around inside. Other objects protruded into the remaining space; Sam kept bumping his elbows on various shafts and flanges. At first the discomfort filled him with pessimism, as if it were some kind of mocking confirmation of the absurdity of his quest, but then he recoiled from the illogic of that. He kneeled and scraped a finger along each dusty corner, pursuing the search as diligently and methodically as he could. At least the oil lubricating the motors smelled normal, if a little overpowering in the confined space.
When his fingertip encountered something solid but movable, it felt dense enough to be a piece of ordinary metal, but when he blew on it and cleared away the dust he saw a matte gray rectangle about the size of his thumbnail. He lifted it up and placed it on one palm, playing the flashlight beam over it, then prodding it gently with his finger again.
It was an envelope, made from Scale Seven paper, containing what felt like a bundle of forty or fifty sheets. He couldn’t see any writing on either side, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t a random piece of District Seven mail that had blown in on the wind.
Sam placed it in his pocket, then continued the search; for all he knew, the full set of documents could comprise more than one package. When he finally moved on to the third appliance, he did so with an air of grim disappointment, just in case any of the warehouse workers were observing him.
The third device combined a radio and a tape recorder. Sam searched the interior as thoroughly as the others, but there was nothing.
He propped up his flashlight on a bracket, then opened the envelope and spread out the contents on the floor of the cabinet. He could barely distinguish ink from paper on the tiny sheets, let alone read a word of the microscopic print, but he photographed the grid of pages in six close-up shots using a suitable filter, then he turned them all over and photographed the opposite sides.
Sam reattached the panels he’d removed, returned the tools and the stepladder to their proper places, then left the warehouse and walked out through reception without speaking to anyone. Who knew what Landau would think of the visit, but any lies Sam told him now would only complicate things further.
He made his way south, stopping at a kiosk to buy some chewing gum. As he walked, he checked the ingredients listed on the packet, confirming what he’d thought he recalled: the gum was not intended to have any nutritional value, and though the flavors were market-specific, the same cheap rootlife plants were used for the bulk of the gum in the versions sold everywhere. He took out a stick and chewed it for a while until it was tasteless, then he dipped it in a shallow puddle of rainwater and squeezed it as dry as he could. It wouldn’t pass a forensic examination, but it probably wouldn’t need to.
At the harbor, the Scale One docks were deserted. Sam went to the berth where the Idyll had been docked, stood for a while gazing out over the river, then removed the gum and the envelope from his pocket. There was a crack between the boards near his feet of just the right size; he squatted down and jammed the gum into the space, then once he was sure it was firmly stuck and wasn’t going to fall through into the water, he wedged the envelope in beside it.
Back at the office, he called Loretta.
“I was going over the conversations I had with the sailors at the wharf,” he told her. “One man saw Cara step off the boat for a moment, around 15:10, and just stretch her legs. She didn’t go anywhere ... but do you think she could have hidden the documents right there?”
Loretta was skeptical. “Hidden them on the wharf?”
“Glued them to a pillar or something. I don’t know. They’d be so tiny, no one would notice. I know it sounds like a long shot, but why else would she get off the Idyll then get right back on again?”
“So are you going to check it out?”
Sam said, “I could, but I’m a bit tied up right now. And if the arrangement with G8 was for them to send their own people to ensure the chain of custody, maybe you could see if they want to follow up on it themselves.”
Loretta said, “All right.”
Sam glanced at the clock; he still had several minutes before he was expecting Jessica to call back.
