Axis by Robert Charles Wilson Page B

shifted in his chair and wouldn’t meet Turk’s eye. “Come in tomorrow, we’ll talk about it. Worse comes to worst, it wouldn’t be hard to find a buyer.”
    “Find—what?”
    “A buyer. A
buyer
, you know! People are interested. Sell the plane, pay your debts, start fresh. People do that. It happens all the time.”
    Turk said, “Not to me.”
    “Calm down. We don’t necessarily have conflicting interests here. I can help you get a premium price. I mean,
if it comes to that.
And shit, Turk, you’re the one who’s always talking about hiring onto a research boat and sailing somewhere. Maybe this is the time. Who knows?”
    “Your confidence is inspiring.”
    “Think about it, is what I’m saying. Talk to me in the morning.”
    “I can pay what I owe you.”
    “Can you? Okay. No problem. Bring me a certified check and we’ll forget about it.”
    To which Turk had no answer.
    “Go home,” Arundji said. “You look tired, buddy.”
     
     
    “First,” Brian said, “I know you were with Turk Findley.”
    “What the hell?” Lise said promptly.
    “Hold on, let me finish—”
    “What, you had somebody
follow
me?”
    “I couldn’t do that if I wanted to, Lise.”
    “What, then?”
    Brian took a breath. His pursed lips and narrowed eyes were meant to announce that he found this as unpleasant as she did. “Lise, there are other people at work here.”
    She made an effort to control her own breathing. She was already angry. And in a way the anger was not unwelcome. It beat feeling guilty, the mood in which her encounters usually left her. “What people?”
    “Let me just remind you of the larger issues,” he said. “Bear with me. It’s easy to forget what’s at stake. The nature and definition of the human genome, of what we are as a people, all of us. That’s been put at risk by everything from the cloning trade to these Martian longevity cults, and there are people in every government in the world who spend a lot of time thinking about that.”
    His credo, the same justification, Lise recalled, that he had once offered to her mother. “What does that have to do with me?” Or Turk, for that matter.
    “You came to me with an old snapshot taken at one of your dad’s faculty parties, so I ran it through the database—”
    “You
offered
to run it through the database.”
    “I offered, okay, and we pulled an image from the dockland security cameras. But when you run a check like that, the query gets bumped around a little bit. And I guess something rang a bell somewhere. Within the last week we’ve had people from Washington show up here—”
    “What do you mean, DGS people?”
    “DGS people, right, but very senior, people working out of levels of the department light-years above what we do here. People who are deeply interested in finding the woman in the picture. People interested enough to sail out of Djakarta and knock on my door.”
    Lise sat back in her chair and tried to absorb all this.
    After a long moment she said, “My mother showed the same snapshot to DGS back when my father disappeared. Nobody made a fuss about it then.”
    “That was a decade ago. Other information has turned up since. The same face in a different context. More than that I can’t say.”
    “I’d like to talk to these people. If they know anything about Sulean Moi—”
    “Nothing that would help you find out what happened to your father.”
    “How can you be sure of that?”
    “Try to put it in perspective, Lise. These people are doing an important job. They mean business. I went out of my way to convince these guys
not
to talk to you.”
    “But you gave them my name?”
    “I told them everything I know about you, because otherwise they might think you’re involved in—well, what they’re investigating. Which would be a waste of their time and a hardship for you. Honestly, Lise. You have to keep a low profile on this one.”
    “They’re watching me. Is that what you’re trying to say?