She brought herself the rest of the way back from the Salander 3’s world, the replica of it inside her head. “Very well.” Sarah ground out the cigarette stub in the green-veined malachite bowl beside her. “What do you want to know?” A smile below half-lidded eyes, directed in turn at Zwingli and Wycliffe. “What do you want me to tell you?”
“You don’t have to tell us anything other than the truth.” Wycliffe appeared as if he had won some obscure debating point. “What you saw. What happened to you. Everything that happened down there.”
Kill them all, thought Sarah. Her eyelids went all the way closed. And let God sort them out.
She heard the child’s voice, piping up: “There were bad things. The ones that’re always there. That’s what she saw.”
“Yes,” said Sarah, nodding. She opened her eyes and gazed at the two men watching her. “That’s what I saw. The things that are always there.” Her thin smile became laughter that she couldn’t help from tearing her throat. “Excuse me. But it’s really very funny.”
“Are you all right?” Zwingli spoke, sounding genuinely concerned. “Can I get you something?”
“No, no; it’s all right.” Sarah gestured with one hand. “It just struck me that I solved the mystery.”
“Mystery?” From inside his jacket, Wycliffe had taken out a small notepad. He glanced up from the few words he had scribbled. “What mystery is that?”
“Is there more than one?” She brushed a tear away from the corner of her eye. “The cat, of course. I found out what happened to the cat.”
“Cat?” The stylus remained poised on the notes.
“The one that my parents took with them. The official pet of the Salander 3 expedition. You must’ve seen it, in the old news photos, in the company files. A big, fluffy marmalade cat.”
“Ginjer,” said the image of the little girl, sitting forward in the wing chair. “That’s what it’s name was. That was what my mother called it. The nanny told me so.”
“Miss Tyrell . . . when I said that everything could be important, I might have misspoken.” Wycliffe tapped the stylus on the notepad. “The cat—and yes, I do remember seeing it in the old photos—that actually might not be critical to our mission. If the cat is alive and well down there, that’s wonderful, but really—”
“Hardly alive.” Sarah glared at the man. “And it probably wasn’t too well when it died. Though that probably didn’t take too long, from the looks of what I found.” Her voice turned flat and grim. “It wasn’t that big a cat when it was alive. When Anson and Ruth Tyrell took it aboard, and they all went sailing off toward the Proxima system. But it’s amazing how large an area an ordinary domestic house cat can cover . . . when somebody puts their mind to it.” She looked down at her hands, which she had spent so much time scrubbing clean in the shower, long after the red marks had swirled down the drain. “And somebody did.”
“Miss Tyrell . . .”
“Be quiet,” she snapped. “You wanted to know everything. You don’t get to pick and choose now.” Sarah let her voice drop to a whisper. “We were running . . . the little girl and I. Because we were scared. Because we had seen the bad things; they had come right out and spoken to us, they had told us what they wanted to do. That’s why we were scared. And it was dark—there are some very dark places down there—and I tripped and fell. I had Rachael by the hand; she was running to keep up with me, and then she almost fell, too.”
“But I didn’t,” said the girl.
“That’s right. You didn’t.” Sarah nodded. “Because you knew.” For a moment, she wondered how a piece of her own subconscious could know something that she herself wouldn’t have been able to know. But she let the thought pass away.
“You knew your way around; you knew what else was down there. I didn’t; that’s why I fell. On the cat. Or what was left of it.”
She paused, looking from one man’s face to the other’s, gauging their reactions. Why they should be so queasy about the death of a cat that had happened over two decades ago—she supposed their reaction was due to the closeness of detail. The deaths of so many people in the apocalypse of the Tyrell Corporation’s L.A. headquarters-hundreds? Thousands? She had never bothered to find out the exact number—they didn’t matter.
“The person who did it,” continued Sarah, “must have been very thorough. From the evidence. It’s one thing to just make a mess-anyone can do that—but to have a certain artistic sense . . . that’s almost as admirable as it is evil.”
Under her breastbone was a cold, hard stone where her heart should be; Sarah knew that she wouldn’t be able to speak like this, otherwise. I wouldn’t even be able to live. Not anymore. “I don’t suppose the cat would have suffered too long—it wouldn’t have been able to. It would have to have died at some point early on in the process. So it wasn’t done for the cat’s sake . . . or at least no more so than was necessary.”
“For whom, then?” Wycliffe’s voice was nearly as soft as hers. “And who did it?”
“Who did it? My father, of course. Anson Tyrell.” A shake of her head, as though chiding the one who had spoken. “And don’t pretend that comes as so much of a shock to you. I have a feeling that you both knew-perhaps the whole shadow corporation knows—just what happened aboard the Salander 3. About my father’s insanity and his homicidal rampage. You all knew; perhaps you were the ones who erased any mention of it from the company files. So that I wouldn’t know.”
Wycliffe and Zwingli exchanged glances with each other, but said nothing.
That was enough for Sarah to know that she had surmised correctly. “Don’t worry about it,” she said, amused by the flicker of panic she had seen in the men’s eyes. “I’m sure you and the others did it for the absolute highest of reasons.”
“It was . . . to protect you.” Zwingli blurted out the words. “Really.”
“Of course it was. If I didn’t know what had happened when I was just an infant in my mother’s arms-all those things of which I was supposedly too young to have formed memories—then I wouldn’t have bad dreams, would I? How thoughtful of you. And naturally, I wouldn’t be quite so resistant to your plans for resurrecting the Tyrell Corporation as I might have been if I already knew what was in the Salander 3. You might not have been able to talk me into going down there.”
“That’s not quite fair,” said Wycliffe. “As you’ve said before, without you there is no Tyrell Corporation. The opposite can be said as well: you don’t exist, or you can’t for much longer, unless the corporation comes back from the shadows. Any subterfuge was as much for your benefit as ours. And as it happens, there are only the slightest, fragmentary records of what might have happened during the Salander 3’s final expedition. A few transcripts of statements made by the company employees who went aboard the ship after it had returned to Earth—and most of those had been severely edited or destroyed before anyone from the shadow corporation would have had a chance to access them.”
“You have to give my uncle credit for his thoroughness, all right.” Sarah felt her face hardening. “God forbid anything should besmirch the Tyrell Corporation’s public image.”
“Eldon Tyrell might have had motivations beyond that.” Wycliffe shrugged and spread his large-jointed hands apart. “If things are as you found them inside the Salander 3—and we have no reason to doubt you on that score— then it might not have been for the company’s sake that Dr. Tyrell acted as he did in suppressing this information. It might have been for the family name.”
“Oh? And there’s a difference?” Sarah raised one eyebrow. “Between the family and the corporation?”
“Not much, admittedly. Let us say, then, for your father’s sake. And the way he was remembered. Anson Tyrell wasn’t a psychotic murderer when he left on the Salander 3’s expedition; whatever happened to him aboard the ship, it happened out there.” One of Wycliffe’s bony fingers pointed upward, to the night sky beyond the yacht’s contained spaces. “Something happened that made him do what he did.”
“You said ‘murderer.’ That was the word you used.” Sarah’s narrowed gaze fastened onto the man. “People don’t say ‘murderer’ when they’re talking about a cat getting eviscerated and hung around a room like a Christmas garland.”
One of her hands balled into a fist, knuckles as white as those she had seen through the blood smeared on her father’s hand. “Perhaps ‘psychotic’—that’s easy enough. But not the other.”
Wycliffe’s mouth opened, but snapped shut again before any words came out.
“I caught you out on that one,” said Sarah with grim satisfaction. “I haven’t told you yet about the other things I saw down there—”
“The really bad things,” chimed in the little girl sitting in the wing chair.
