Scale, p.4
Scale, page 4
“Bleak on medical grounds alone?” Sam asked. “Or is it the kind of thing that could depend on money?”
Jessica said, “I don’t think it’s a matter of cost. She certainly never put it that way, or asked me to help with the bills.”
“Have you discussed Cara’s disappearance with Malcolm?”
“I didn’t want to worry him at first,” she replied, “but after a few days I couldn’t hide it from him.”
“And he had no idea what might have happened?” Sam pressed her. “She hadn’t confided in him about some problem that might have escalated?”
“No.”
Jessica agreed to do what she could to get copies of Cara’s phone records. “If the company won’t give them to me directly, maybe the police will be willing to intervene. But not before morning.”
At home, after dinner, Sam’s family sat listening to the radio. In the play, a Scale Four boy had smuggled a Scale Seven friend into school with him; the two were unable to communicate verbally, but they made good use of gestures and notes. When the larger boy started passing questions from his arithmetic test to the friend, hidden in his schoolbag, who could deal with them more swiftly, Sam glanced worriedly at Noor, but she just shrugged, then leaned over and whispered to him, “When I was a kid, my grandmother would tell me stories about capturing smaller people and forcing them to grant a wish. It’s funny how we were never the ones who got captured. But no one takes these things literally.”
“Maybe not,” Sam conceded. Idris was squirming and laughing as the friends’ plan began to unravel, with a teacher hefting the bag from the floor so abruptly that the weight of its inhabitant tore a hole in the bottom and the scheme was exposed.
How pervasive, Sam wondered, was the notion that people from a smaller scale could be treated like djinn, with magical powers you could harness if you just knew how to strike the right bargain?
When Idris was in bed, Sam called Loretta.
“No progress yet on the phone bills,” he said. “But I learned that Cara has a fiancé who’s suffering from cancer. Do you think there could be some medical angle, that links her to D7?”
Loretta said, “There are surgeons here who’ll operate on patients of any scale, if the advantage they have in visual acuity and motor skills makes it worthwhile.”
“Okay. But it’s hard to imagine how seeking out a Scale Seven surgeon could have led Cara into trouble.”
“What did you have in mind, then?”
Sam said, “I gather your medical research is pretty advanced, compared to the rest of us. And the results are often hard to translate; even a plant-based drug will rarely have perfect homologues across every scale. But maybe Cara thought she could sway someone into extending the reach of an existing cure. Haranguing the doctors in D1 to embark on a research program for the sake of her fiancé would probably be futile, but researchers in D7 might have a chance to make real progress before it’s too late.”
Loretta paused long enough for Sam to notice the delay. “Sway them how, exactly?” she asked. “If money didn’t do the trick, you think she tried to threaten them?”
“Desperate people do all kinds of things. Bribes, threats, blackmail.”
Loretta remained skeptical. “So the idea is that Cara tried to extort an oncologist in D7 into helping her fiancé, but they didn’t just ignore her, or call in the police? They’ve either kidnapped her, or murdered her?”
“Maybe she had information that could have done a lot of damage,” Sam persisted.
Loretta said, “If someone from D1 tried to blackmail me, I’d just string them along while I found a way to neutralize the problem at my end.”
“You might be able to cushion the blow from something like an infidelity,” Sam conceded. “With enough time, you could rearrange your whole domestic life. But what if she had evidence of something more serious?”
“Okay. But how? How does a woman from District One learn anything about a doctor whose life is playing out in a place she can’t visit, faster than she can possibly follow?”
Sam said, “She hires someone. Like us, only less scrupulous.” He recounted Jake Palmer’s disparaging remarks about his would-be client from D1.
“You think Cara asked Jake to dig up dirt on her target?” Loretta sounded amused.
“Don’t you think it’s too much to be a coincidence? And he must have been telling the truth when he said he turned her down, or he wouldn’t have mentioned it.”
Loretta said, “Spotlight wouldn’t have turned her down. If she paid them enough, and they thought they could get away with it, they wouldn’t have hesitated.”
Chapter 6
Jake’s phone rang as he was on his way home from the supermarket. It was the same D4 number that had called him, more than an hour before, with an offer that had come to nothing.
“What happened?” he asked, rebalancing the groceries in his arms and glancing westward, trying to pick out the right layer of illuminated windows on which to focus his annoyance. “I thought you were going with Palimpsest?” He kept walking as he waited for Mujrif’s response.
“I am, but there’s still a chance you can help me. I’m acting for a client in D1, and I was wondering if you’d be willing to discuss the approach you had from D1 yourself.”
“I don’t think so,” Jake replied. “I didn’t take the job, but I still owe them their privacy.”
By the time the next words reached him, he was through the front door.
“What if this person’s in danger?”
“Why would you think that?” Jake went to the kitchen and started shelving groceries.
Mujrif said, “Because my client’s sister’s gone missing. Her name’s Cara Leon. Does that ring any bells for you?”
Jake finished unpacking, then lay down on the couch, pondering his obligations. “Why don’t you tell me what you think’s going on, and then I’ll tell you if there’s anything I can say that might help you.”
He stared up at the ceiling, wondering if he should start cooking dinner, or if the intermittent intrusions would be enough to make him burn something. If Mujrif had hired Loretta, why hadn’t she called instead, to make the same enquiries in an eighth of the time? Or maybe these interminable phone calls from D4 had stretched her patience so thin that she’d decided to drop the case.
“I’m wondering if Cara tried to blackmail someone, and bit off more than she could chew. All I’m really asking is whether she approached you to do something shady that might have served that purpose.”
Jake thought a little longer, and came to a decision. “She wanted to know what was going on in a medical research facility. She claimed she was trying to help a sick friend, but it sounded more like corporate espionage to me.”
He got up from the couch and returned to the kitchen.
“Did she say which facility?” Mujrif asked.
“Generation Eight.” Jake placed the phone on the countertop, put two onions on the chopping board, and poured some oil into a pan, but then decided against lighting the burner or raising a knife until the task had his full attention.
“Do you think anyone would have agreed to help her?”
“If you’re talking about registered agencies, there’s only me, Palimpsest and Spotlight. And if Loretta was involved, she would have told you.” Jake supposed he couldn’t blame the guy if he was going behind Loretta’s back for a second opinion, but he probably owed it to him to be clear that it wasn’t an entirely disinterested one. “Loretta and I used to work together, but then I went out on my own. I can’t vouch for every single thing she does, but if Cara ended up in trouble, it wouldn’t have been Loretta’s fault, and she wouldn’t be trying to hide it.”
“Okay. And Spotlight?”
Jake said, “Spotlight used to be a security firm only, with no investigations branch, but then they took over three of the old agencies. I have friends who got caught up in the merger, and they aren’t in the business anymore. So I’m not going to libel the company, but I’m not going to offer them a glowing reference either.”
Mujrif said, “All right. I appreciate your help.”
“Any time.”
Jake lit the flame under the pan, then set about dicing the onions. It was none of his business now; whatever was going on here, Loretta would handle it.
But if Cara had acquired the kind of enemies that could make a Scale One body vanish, what would they do to someone their own size who got in their way?
Chapter 7
The thicket of crown-of-thorns trees and the floodlights along the perimeter gave the Generation Eight complex a distinctly unwelcoming vibe, but Loretta couldn’t blame anyone with a building full of pharmaceuticals and high-end lab equipment for taking steps to deter intruders.
Patrick Kozul, Head of Security, met her at the entrance. She was surprised he’d even taken her call, let alone agreed to see her in person. Either the company really did have nothing to hide, or they were confident that a gesture of good will and transparency was the best way to convince her of their innocence.
Kozul handed Loretta a visitor’s badge, then ushered her in past the guard. “It turns out that your client’s sister wrote to us,” he said, as they crossed a foyer full of colorful sculptures of elaborately branched and twisted molecules. “Almost three weeks ago. I wasn’t even working here then, but we’ve managed to locate the correspondence.” They entered a corridor lined with doors whose labels suggested purely administrative functions, but even here there was a whiff of organic solvents in the air.
“I suppose that’s more polite than a phone call that lasts sixty-four times longer than usual,” Loretta observed.
Kozul laughed. “Does your client call you?”
“No, we go through an intermediary.”
“Well, that’s something.”
Kozul led her into his office and invited her to take a seat. “Here it is.” He handed her a sheet of what looked like optically reduced type.
Loretta read it through carefully; the style was the kind of unadorned Panscala that everyone learned in school, with the aim of being understood as widely as possible, for as long as possible. In the letter, Cara asked, politely, if there was any prospect that the new cancer medications that Generation Eight was working on might be extended to patients of her own scale. She offered to fund research on such a project; the payment she mentioned was generous.
“So I’m guessing no one took her up on this?”
“The Director declined,” Kozul replied. “She didn’t think there was much prospect of success, and though this sounds like a lot of money, when you have an open-ended problem it needs ongoing funding. I gather Ms. Leon is a business owner, and perhaps this amounted to her life’s savings, but she could hardly come up with the same sum again, week after week.”
“No.”
“But apparently she didn’t take no for an answer?”
Loretta said, “She approached a former colleague of mine with the hope that he could obtain more information about the research being done here. He refused, though, so we don’t really know what her intentions were, or if she ever found someone willing to help her. Are you aware of any attempted breaches, following her letter?”
Kozul was apologetic. “I can’t discuss that kind of thing.”
“I understand.”
“I can’t imagine what she thought she could do with some provisional results for Scale Seven cancer treatments,” Kozul mused. “And she’d only have to wait a week or two for the most promising work to be published.”
“Maybe it was wishful thinking,” Loretta replied. “Maybe she thought she could figure out the equivalent molecules, all by herself.” In high school biology, her teacher had drummed one lesson into her head: even water of your own scale didn’t behave, on your terms, exactly the same as any other scale’s water did for them. Nature had taken millions of years to learn how to jump from scale to scale; it wasn’t as simple as playing a tape at a different speed, or resizing a letter with the right kind of lens. But if you were desperate enough, you could convince yourself of anything.
“I hope someone does translate our best drugs all the way to Scale One, eventually,” Kozul said. “And I hope Ms. Leon turns up, safe and sound.”
“Thank you.” Loretta took the hint and rose to her feet; Kozul opened the door, then followed her out into the corridor.
In the foyer, she noticed a Periodic Table on the wall, but it was drawn as a three-dimensional array of boxes, instead of the flat grid she recalled from school. The whole lepton thing had started shaking up chemistry just as she’d finished learning the old version; she was really going to have to make the effort to catch up sometime, or she’d find herself as befuddled and out of touch as someone twice her height.
“Let me know if there’s any news, or if there’s anything else I can do for you.” Kozul sounded perfectly sincere; Loretta nodded gratefully.
Outside, as she set off home, she took out her phone and made a call to her sister.
“I think I’m going to have to cancel dinner,” she told Dahlia. “I was really looking forward to it, but I’m starting to feel lousy, and I don’t want you catching whatever I’m coming down with.”
“Are you going to be all right?” Dahlia asked.
“Sure, I just need to sleep it off.”
“Okay. Take it easy.”
“Thanks.”
“I love you, Loretta. Look after yourself.”
“You too. Bye.”
Loretta pocketed her phone. There had been no dinner plans, and Dahlia knew that she was fine, so the real message – encoded in her choice of scenario, from the list they’d agreed upon long ago – should have come through loud and clear.
Chapter 8
Loretta prodded the rock with her foot to convince herself it wouldn’t crumble beneath her, then lay down on her stomach and checked that she had a clear view of both entrances to the Generation Eight complex. The hilltop wasn’t as close as she’d have liked, but with her binoculars she could at least pick out individual figures moving around outside the building.
She was assuming that Spotlight would have garnered their own information the easy way – bribing an employee – but that wouldn’t be an option anymore. And if all they’d managed to uncover was some ethical corner-cutting in a drug trial, there wouldn’t be much prospect of extracting the same revelations again. But who sent a hit squad to D4 to throw a woman off a boat, for anything so easy to finesse? None of this made sense unless Cara had got her hands on something much bigger than she’d bargained for.
Employees began leaving the complex and heading home. There was a change of staff at the main guard post. Loretta took a swig from her hip flask without taking her eyes off the target; as the water seeped down her throat, a welcome chill of perspiration spread across her skin. Dahlia would be leaving the Palimpsest office soon, dressed in Loretta’s clothes, returning to Loretta’s apartment. Never mind if she was being watched or not; Dahlia always enjoyed a bit of theater. And she could keep working on her book wherever she was, while earning a little extra money.
The outflow of workers dried up, and most of the lights went off in the building. The ticking of Loretta’s watch rose up against the silence, every tert seeming to stretch out for twice as long as it should have. When she was a child, her friend Bernice had told her solemnly that drinking Scale Six water would have exactly that effect, though if there was any trace of logic to the myth, it should surely have been the opposite. But as it turned out, it just induced diarrhea.
She crawled back out of sight, stood up and stretched her limbs for a while, then resumed her position. What might happen in a place like this, when the usual workforce went home? Did a second crew arrive, to cook up something illicit? Of all the places to hide a drug lab, a drug lab seemed like one of the easiest. But how many people could be in on it, before it became impossible to keep the whole thing secret?
Loretta took a packet of walnuts from her pocket and worked her way through them, one at a time, savoring the oily residue as it accumulated on her palate. She was growing restless, but there was no point cursing the lifeless building below. Maybe its occupants really did spend all their time trying to cure cancer, and Cara had made an entirely different enemy.
A truck appeared on the road, driving south toward the complex. It slowed as it approached the building, but it didn’t stop at the main gate; it turned into an alley and came to a halt beside the second entrance.
Why would any delivery be scheduled so late? Loretta watched the driver step out and approach the side gate. The barbed crowns of the trees obscured her view, but after a short time the driver returned to the truck, the gate swung open and the truck drove through.
The floodlights were aimed at the exterior, not the inside of the compound, but Loretta could make out a couple of people moving barrels on trolleys, from the building to the back of the truck. Perhaps it was just chemical waste, to be treated or discarded. If it was contraband, the shift who’d just departed could hardly be unaware of it. But then, maybe she was naïve; maybe everyone knew, and they all took a cut of the profits.
As the truck backed out through the gate, Loretta made a decision: anything was better than lying around for another ten minutes. She clambered to her feet and started down the hill.
She waited for the truck to drive past the compound and pick up speed on its way back north, then she broke into a steady jog, keeping her eyes fixed on its rear lights and doing her best to match its pace precisely. The streets of the industrial sector were deserted, and there was enough vegetation along the side of the road for her to weave mostly through shadows; she couldn’t be sure that she was literally invisible to the driver, but her clothes were dark and the streetlights were sparse. The back of the truck was windowless; maybe there were guards on board, but unless they had a security detail following along on foot that she had somehow failed to spot, no one was going to notice her but fellow pedestrians out for their own recreational exercise.
