Burning Sky by John Darnton

Author:John Darnton [Darnton, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781648210242
Publisher: Arcade
Published: 2024-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

25

PAUL SAT AT HIS DESK AND STARED DOWN AT THE DOSSIER THAT had been placed there by Oswald Magus. He looked over at Magus, a gnomish man, who sat back in his chair with a sly smile playing on his lips.

Paul knew he had struck a deal with the devil—he was sitting across from him. Over the past four years Magus had consolidated his control over all Security Forces, including the Color Guard and the Black Guard. He had constructed a formidable apparatus of repression and fear.

The Color Guard had made great strides in eradicating Color X. They arrested people who wore the wrong color clothing. They raided museums to demolish paintings and Chinese porcelain, and ransacked stores and offices to ferret out “illegal artifacts.” They ignited weekly bonfires in every city and ordered people to toss in items from home that carried the prohibited color.

The Black Guard increased surveillance and amassed files on political dissidents. Paul knew that the interrogation sessions in the basement of the Hoover building on Pennsylvania Avenue had turned into torture sessions.

The crackdown meant the Inner Council was feeling secure. The signs of political resistance that had so worried it in 2056 were not visible by 2060.

Two months ago Paul had decided to forgo his willful ignorance of Magus’s methods in order to satisfy a long-buried craving: to solve the mystery of Lesley’s death. And now the answer lay in the dossier on his desk.

The moment he read it, he knew what he would have to do. The conclusion was incontestable. He wondered if on some level, deep down, he had suspected all along that it was Besermann who had ordered Lesley’s murder those many years ago.

He and his henchmen had engineered a plot to lure her to the Tiger’s Nest mountaintop lodge along with the fall guy, Anderson, and used a remote guidance system to steer her car off the cliff. Cold-blooded murder—done at a distance, without fingerprints.

“Besermann saw her as a roadblock on his path to power,” Magus said. “He killed her without a second thought.”

Paul asked, “And his two accomplices, Jeffrey and Maximus. They were—I assume—your sources. Did they confess?”

“Yes.”

“Under torture?”

“Under duress, I’d say.”

“And what’s happened to them now? Where are they?”

“Hanged.”

Paul nodded. Magus was taking on too many decisions independently. He would have to be watched. Paul placed his hand upon the dossier. It included a detailed account of conspirators from the oil companies extending way back to the previous century—how they opposed the idea of man-made global warming and then reversed themselves to embrace it with their own “solution.”

He wondered suddenly about his father, whom he had never known. His death while studying the ice melt in the Arctic was said to have been suspicious. Once, in a confessional moment, Lesley had described how he had been swallowed up in a moulin when the cable snapped. Paul asked: Was it an accident? She dodged the question and, when pressed, had replied simply: “Enough said.” He had taken that to mean that it might not have been an accident.

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