Demon Download

She shifted her shoulders. 'I'm on generous expenses. Fruit is essential to a balanced diet.'

'Essential it may be, but that doesn't make it cheap.'

She shrugged again. That was a characteristic European gesture, Stack thought, the famous ca va shrug.

He spat the stones into his hand, and threw them out of the window. Maybe they would seed the desert.

'Now,' she said, 'where's the Church of St Werburgh's?'

'You see that half-destroyed building over there?'

'Yes.'

'Well, like they told me, follow the trail of death and destruction through town and you can't miss it.'

'This may be boring for you, I'm sorry. I shall take you back to the fort when I've finished.'

'I'll come along for the ride. I don't mind.'

'That's good then.'

They drove slowly over the bumpy, wreckage-strewn ground.

'Federico,' she said to a voice-activated console.

'Buon giorno, sorella.'

'Good morning. Could you book me a satellite channel, please. I'm going to want to talk to Rome. If you can raise DeAngelis, I would be especially pleased. If not, Edwina will do.'

Federico beeped an affirmative, and got working on it. Stack realized he was flying in very high circles. He doubted if Brevet Major General Younger could as casually get airtime on a satellite link.

Chantal gasped, as if someone had slapped her across the face with a rope-end. Stack followed her eyeline.

She was looking at the raped ruin of the church.

V

Rintoon had doubled the guards, but that hadn't stopped the murderer or murderers from striking nine more times during the night. Cat Finney had retired with an automatic pistol under her pillow, her cubicle lock scrambled and a desk against it. She hadn't slept much. No one who had got a good look at Younger's kitchen would sleep well for months.

At the morning briefing, Rintoon gave a report.

'Rexroth is an unconfirmed kill. It is possible, indeed probable, that we should count him as a suicide…'

'In that case, sir, where's his gun?'

'Good question…er…Badalamenti. His weapon may have been…er…appropriated by personnel unknown prior to Captain Lauderdale's discovery of the body.'

Finney was in yesterday's uniform. It was still discoloured from her climb up the liftshaft. Slung over the back of a chair, it had been the easiest thing to find this morning. She didn't want to admit to it, but her childhood fear of the closet might just have come creeping back. All through the night, she had been waking up and looking at the slats of the closet door, wondering absurdly if the killer might not be lurking within. Her clean uniforms were in the closet, and they would probably stay there until the crisis was over. Rintoon hadn't slept at all, and was looking wilder by the minute. She found it difficult to connect the hypertense, unshaven, neon-eyed c-i-c of this morning with yesterday's smug, complacent, new-pin-neat Number Two. There was something increasingly familiar about him, though, as if he were metamorphosing into a different, truer, more immediately recognizable shape.

'So, if we leave Rexroth out of the reckoning, and setting aside Brevet Major General Younger, we have eight more VUEs to log and deal with.'

VUE. That was a new one on her. Captain Badalamenti, obviously too smart for his own advancement, questioned the acronym.

'VUE, Badalamenti. Violent Unknown Event.'

Major Hendry Faulcon, next down the chain of command after Rintoon, was a five o'clock shadow man. He shaved two or three times a day. He had had late duties last night, and had tried to shave at about eleven-thirty. As far as anybody could tell, the electric razor in his quarters had slithered out of his grip and buzzed halfway down his gullet. He had died of a combination of suffocation and drowning in his own blood. A typical VUE.

Major R J. 'Howling Raul' McAuley was dead in his shower, microneedles peppering his torso. Dr Wilma King, the fort's senior medico, had rotted away from exposure to a source of intense radiation in her surgery. S. M. 'Max the Bax' Baxter, a middle-management Op at T-H-R mopping up the paperwork after the joint action, had been put out of commission by everybody's favourite murder weapon, the unidentified blunt instrument. Captains Garnett and Stableford had been napalmed in their bunks—and they'd taken the same precautions Finney had. Top Sergeant Alexander Stewart was crushed under the wheels of a cruiser whose transmission he was supposed to be fixing. And Trooper Charlie Stress, in the guardhouse for mouthing back to Sergeant Quincannon after a twenty-mile forced march through the desert in full pack and gear, was mysteriously gone from his cell leaving only a couple of severed fingers, some cabbalistic symbols traced in blood and a chunk of what had tentatively been identified as a pancreas.

Everybody around the table was looking ill. There were more than enough empty places in the briefing room. Badalamenti was nervously tearing a page of notepaper into animal shapes. Captain Lauderdale and Lieutenant Williford had turned out in combat gear, M-29s and all, obviously assuming that Fort Apache was on a war footing. Lieutenant Colosanto—who had been bunking with Rexroth—was chewing aspirin as if they were mints. Finney was on her third cup of recaff, and she usually couldn't finish her first.

'I have come to a conclusion,' Rintoon began.

Everyone grudgingly paid attention.

'This post is under attack.'

The disappointment was palpable.

'And I am reasonably certain that I have isolated the culprits.'

Everyone perked up again. Lauderdale straightened his rifle on the table in front of him, ready for action.

'I believe…'

Rintoon took a gulp of cold recaff.

'Yes?' said Badalamenti.

Rintoon swallowed. 'The Maniax are responsible.'

Badalamenti rolled his eyes upwards, and pointed to his head. Rintoon didn't notice, and continued…

'The joint action has hurt them, and this is their last ditch attempt to break the US Cav.'

'But…' someone said before catching the glint in Rintoon's red-rimmed eyes.

'It was Baxter's death that tipped their hand. He was materially involved in planning the strategy of the joint action. He must be a prime target for the Grand Exalted Bullmoose and his remaining followers.

'Baxter was a pen-pusher, sir,' said Badalamenti. 'He was just processing expenses and payments. He never went into the field in his life.'

Finney fought to keep her control. The recaff had done its damage. She felt as if she had been punched in the kidneys.

Rintoon smiled at Badalamenti, and Finney felt the ice seep through her veins. The smile widened to a grin, and the eyebrows flared.

Finney realized where she had seen a face like that before. Rintoon was looking more and more like Jack Nicholson in the last scenes of The Shining. The scenes where he goes after his wife and child with an axe.

'The Maniax are guilty, Badalamenti. Guilty, guilty, GUILTY!'

Badalamenti stood up. 'The Maniax are finished, sir! We creamed 'em. We broke their central structure. We blew up their munitions dump. We rounded up the chapter heads.'

'There's still the Bullmoose!'

'There's no such animal! All the ringleaders, they were all the Bullmoose, sir. It was a floating office. They've