Stone tracked Carslake down to his room in the Seasons hotel. He was lying on a sofa, watching TV.
‘You been here all the time, Carslake?’
‘Sure. I gotta save some money, man. It’s gonna cost me if I even breathe outside this room. Those people out there. Designer clothes, cocktails, goddamned Maseratis. They look at me like I’m a piece a shit.’ Carslake’s eyes stayed doggedly at the TV as he spoke to Stone. He was lying of course.
‘Did you notice Virginia Carlisle’s here?’ said Stone.
‘The babe-licious Virginia Carlisle? No. Why should I? You really think she wants to hang out with me?’ He laughed.
Stone cut him off. ‘You contacted her didn’t you? You called Carlisle and told her to come here.’
‘You think she takes notice of me? After I sent her to the wrong end of Sichuan looking for the Machine?’ he said.
‘Chuck it, Carslake. You couldn’t resist getting yourself on TV.’
‘Why shouldn’t I?’ Carslake snorted, coming clean. ‘If I were you I’d find out what Carlisle knows. She’s made the weather on this story and she knows a lot more than she’s letting on. And FYI, I didn’t bring her here. I contacted her with some ideas to get my name on TV, and next thing she’s following me. In fact she was here before us.’ Carslake was still looking at the TV. ‘What puzzles me is: why? Why was she so keen to come down here and talk to me, Doug Carslake? Have you any idea, Stone? Because it beats the hell outta me.’
It was sinking in that Carslake had just hit the nail on the head. Virginia really did have hidden depths, and Stone had just distracted himself from them. He’d been looking everywhere, but some of the answers had been right in front of him. Stone went over to the computer. It was time to do a little extra checking up on Virginia Carlisle herself, rather than Semyonov.
The word “Semyonov” may have been embargoed from the search engines, but Virginia Carlisle was most emphatically not. Stone found articles of every shape size and colour on Virginia Carlisle. Youtube clips by the hundred. Fan clubs, Facebook groups. Profiles of her in every magazine from The Economist, through Vogue, Psychology, Forbes and a Virginia Carlisle lookalike posing in Playboy for the real fantasists. Not a bad likeness either.
Stone soon found the details he was looking for. He realized he was staring at the screen, at the same thing for a good thirty seconds. The game had suddenly changed. The key person in the story about Semyonov and the Machine, was not Oyang, or Junko Terashima, or Ying Ning. It was Virginia Carlisle. He got up and walked to the door.
‘Where are you going, Stone?’
‘I’m going back to find Carlisle,’ he said. ‘I just realised why Virginia Carlisle hightailed it here to join us. She wants to stop the truth leaking out.’