Free Walking Dead by Peter Dickinson Page B

can get a microphone on us here. The fall makes too much noise.”
    â€œNow, look, Fred …”
    â€œI got a telex yesterday with your next posting. You’re on two-month loan to the State laboratories on Main Island. Got something?”
    â€œNo. Of course not. I just jerked the thing because you startled me. What on earth …”
    â€œWhen you get a bite, try and do that again … uh, David, it’s the first I’ve heard of any State laboratories on Main Island.”
    â€œWhy didn’t you tell me yesterday when you got the telex? Bringing me out here to break the news! Honestly, Fred, I’ve got to say this—I go along with your spy neurosis because it keeps you happy, but mucking about with my life … !”
    â€œLook at the mouth of the bay. Try to do it naturally.”
    Foxe shrugged and swung round. A little beyond the reefs an orange cruiser had anchored, and a man in a wet suit was preparing to go overboard, while another man was adjusting what looked like a fancy camera on a tripod.
    â€œCouple of amateur Cousteaus,” he said.
    â€œThat’s a directional mike, David. But I doubt if they’ll be able to tune the falls out.”
    â€œOh, come off it. OK, you’ve lived here for years, you know the form, I can’t argue with any of that. But I also know that if the Company’s being mucked about the way you say it is, we’d have pulled out of Hog’s Cay ages ago.”
    â€œA very good point, David. That’s the key to the whole problem—it even explains why you are here, working on an experiment you know to be valueless. Have you ever asked yourself why the Company is on Hog’s Cay in the first place?”
    â€œI imagine there are tax advantages. And it makes sense to have the plant here, processing raw materials with cheap labour, rather than shipping them out in bulk. And the labs were set up to look at substances in some of the local flora, I was told.”
    â€œYes, that’s all true—but laboratories on our scale, David? We’re a cover, but like any good cover we have to function in our own right.”
    â€œWhat are we covering?”
    â€œNothing. We were bust three years ago.”
    â€œYou’ll have to explain.”
    â€œThe Company came in here, as you say, to exploit a few raw materials. But … have you ever thought about the nature of a big multinational organisation, David? It can be very interesting. Among other things it has so many secrets, secret formulae, secret activities, secret bargains. Where can it hide them all?”
    â€œSwitzerland, I thought.”
    â€œYes, that is one solution. Centralise into a secure country. But if that country isn’t as secure as you thought … Even Roche has been called to account by client governments, you know. Our solution was to spread the danger, to give as few hostages as possible to any one government, to take advantage of a tangle of different legal systems, and so on. A few years back the Southward Islands looked an ideal refuge—that was under President Afenziah—a little country, poor and backward so that a small investment from the Company had a major effect on the economy, and apparently stable. The plant was already in existence, the laboratory only planned. It was enlarged to undertake work of considerable complexity, well away from the rest of the world scientific community. Large scale computer storage facilities were installed, and complex safes. A Director was chosen who had experience of security matters …”
    â€œYou?”
    â€œCorrect, but don’t tell Galdi. You see it suits me to have this thought of as a neurosis—my colleagues are then security conscious to keep me happy, without believing that there are really any secrets to guard.”
    â€œIngenious,” said Foxe. He thought so, too. He hadn’t realised that Dreiser’s neurosis had reached that stage of