Stormchild by Bernard Cornwell

supplement across his desk. I had ringed Nicole’s face with ink. “She’s my daughter,” I said, “and I want to find her.”
    “Ah, Genesis!” Matthew Allenby said with immediate recognition. He pronounced the word with a hard “G,” and with a note of dismay.
    “Genesis?” I was querying the hard “G.”
    “The German pronunciation,” he explained. “I believe the group’s leader was born in Germany.”
    “I’ve met him.”
    “Have you now?” Allenby immediately looked interested. “I haven’t met von Rellsteb. Not many people have.”
    I described the circumstances of my encounter with the naked harem on von Rellsteb’s catamaran. Allenby seemed amused by my account, and he was a man clearly in need of amusement, for his office was papered with posters that depicted the torn and bloody corpses of seals, dolphins, whales, porpoises, manatees, and sea otters. Other pictures showed poisoned landscapes, fouled rivers, oil-choked beaches, and skies heavy with toxic clouds. It was not a cheerful office, but nor were the evils against which Allenby had devoted his life and which had given him a Sisyphean gravity beyond his years. “What I really want to know,” I finished up, “is who Genesis are and where I can find them.”
    “Genesis”—Allenby still stared at the photograph of Nicole—”is an impassioned community of environmental activists; green militants. They’re remarkably secretive and, as a result, somewhat notorious.”
    “Notorious?” I said with some surprise. “I never heard of them before yesterday!”
    Allenby pushed the color supplement back across the desk. “That’s because until now the Genesis community has confined its activities to the Pacific, but believe me, within our movement, they are notorious.”
    “You sound disapproving,” I challenged him.
    “That’s because I do disapprove of them.” His disapproval was qualified, perhaps because he did not want to sound too disloyal to a group that espoused his own organization’s aims. “Genesis believe that the time for persuasion and negotiation is long past, and that the enemies of the environment understand only one thing: force. It’s a view.” He shifted uneasily in his chair. “But the trouble with ecotage, Mr. Blackburn, is that it can very easily become eco-terrorism.”
    “Does Genesis’s ecotage involve killing people?” I asked, and hated myself for indulging the suspicion that Nicole had been responsible for her mother’s death, but the article’s mention of dynamite had sown a tiny seed of doubt that I wanted eradicated.
    “No, not that I know of,” Allenby said to my relief. “In fact, I think most of their actions have been somewhat clumsy. They’ve made various attempts to tow paravanes equipped with cutting gear into Japanese drift nets, but I believe they lose their gear more often than they destroy the nets, which is a pity. Do you know about the drift nets?”
    “Not much,” I admitted, and Allenby described the fifty- and sixty-mile-long monofilament nets with which the Japanese, Taiwanese, and Koreans were destroying sea life in the Pacific.
    “Nothing living can escape such a net.” Allenby could not disguise his bitterness. “It’s the nuclear weapon of the fishing industry, and it leaves behind a dead swath of sea. In the short term, of course, the profits from such a device are phenomenal, but in the long term it will strip the ocean of life. The men who use the nets know that, but they don’t care.”
    “The newspaper says that Genesis used dynamite in some of their attacks?” I said.
    “Ah, rumors,” he said in a very neutral voice.
    “Just rumors?” I probed.
    He paused as though weighing the wisdom of retelling mere rumors, then shrugged as though it would do no harm. “Last year two Japanese whaling ships were being scaled in South Korea when bombs destroyed the dock-gate mechanisms. Both ships were effectively sealed inside their dry docks. A dozen green