They’d theorized a mugging gone wrong—she’d been beaten, and her jewelry had been taken off her. She hadn’t gone armed, and I couldn’t say why, and I’d never found any case notes. I don’t know that I ever believed the mugging story, but when you’re staring at your fiancee’s corpse on a slab, you’ll hang your hat on any explanation that makes the pain go away.
“You don’t know?” ask Ivers.
“No!” I screamed at him.
Ivers opened his mouth to speak, but instead another bloody hole opened up in his chest, followed by two more, and he looked past me in shock. He raised his blood-stained fingers into the air in front of him.
“Red,” he said. Then keeled forward face first into the gravel.
“No!” I screamed again. “No, no, no!”
“For Hary, you son of a bitch,” said Isibel, holding Ivers’ pistol out. She walked over and shot him again, again in his back.
“Oh, fuck, no!” I shouted, running and kneeling at Iver’s body. I wrestled him over, but his chest wasn’t moving. No wonder, given that it was holier than Swiss cheese.
I lifted up his abdomen, reaching under to find his back pocket, locating his wallet, and pulling it out. There was as an ID, but the name was for Jakob Cliff, nothing related to Ivers. I went through the contents of his wallet. A loyalty stamp card from one of the less popular coffee chains, a debit card to a bank account with a totally different name, Isaiah Nowak, on it. And a numbered key card to a storage center back in New Angeles. There was nothing else on his body.
I rounded on Isibel, snatching Iver’s pistol out of her hand. Before she could protest, I’d hurled it into the lake as far as I could manage.
“What are you doing?” she cried.
“Disposing of the evidence,” I told her. “We need to get rid of this stuff before anyone discovers it and starts asking questions.”
“Shouldn’t we call the police?” asked Isibel.
I shook my head.
“The only SPD out this far into the boonies will be drawing a second salary from the Provisional Authority’s payroll, and the MPA is on GJS’ payroll. And, you know what, I don’t think that GJS is going to like to hear that their main hitman just got offed by the girlfriend of the archaeologist they had killed.”
Isibel stared at me.
“...So, you know, help me load this corpse into the car the car he shot up, and then we’ll push it into the lake,” I finished.
It took Isibel a bit longer of an explanation and then further explaining that I didn’t particularly care if she got a lot of blood or a lot of mud on her, but eventually, we got Ivers loaded in the front seat, buckled in as tight as I could make it, and got the car into emergency tow mode, which unlocked its terrestrial wheels, enough that we could push it down the hill into the lake and we watched it sink in until the bubbles stopped.
“Come on inside,” I said.
Isibel was essentially useless. By now, the shock of having killed a man had caught up to her, and she was soaked through and cold from the rain (she was thin as a rail, too, so a little cold went a long way), so I found a blanket in the cabin and brewed something hot for her to drink, spiked a little bit with a small bottle of brandy I found hiding in a cupboard.
She took the cup from me like it was a holy relic, holding it in her lap for dear life.
“My name’s Sare Jeffries. I’m a private investigator. Theed Montgomery told me to find you,” I said. “That name ring a bell?”
“Yes,” she said. “The man Hary didn’t like. The cop.”
“Ex-cop. GJS head of security.”
“He sent you? Then you’re not a friend.”
“I fucking saved you from a GJS hired killer, and put my own life on the line to come out here to do it. I’m a better friend than your best goddamned friend ever,” I said.
Isibel stared at me for a moment, then nodded.
“I guess that’s true,” she said.
“Isibel,” I said, slowly. “Theed’s dead. He was my friend. I assume that Hary sent you out here?”
“We come here, sometimes, just us two,” said Isibel. “He told me he had something to do after work for Theed before he came up, so I should come here, visit a neuro den with an internet connection, and meet him in a CR he liked, so we could start early, then he’d come back when his job was done. He...he died in the connection with me.”
“I know,” I said.
Isibel gave a gasping sob.
“I’ve been up here, trying to get over my grief. I didn’t even let work know that I’d gone,” she said. “I don’t know if I’ll ever go back.”
“You can’t go back,” I said. “You just shot a man. Your boyfriend was killed by the company he works for, and my friend was killed by the same. You can’t go back to your life.”
“Then where?”
“Azacca,” I said.
“On Ceres? You want me to go live on a fucking asteroid?”
“I want you to go live somewhere safe from GJS’s reach,” I said. “You stay on Mars, they’ll find you. They’re good friends with the Mars Provisional Authority.”
“I know,” said Isibel.
“Maybe in a sort of distant, ‘corporations and the government are always in bed together,’ sort of way, but I can assure you, it’s far worse than you might have imagined. Theed had proof.”
“I know,” said Isibel.
“Hary tell you?” I asked.
“I’ve seen the proof,” said Isibel. “I have it.”
“I have it. On Theed’s neurochip.”
“Well, I have a ream of flimsies full of it. A couple of them, actually. Copies of paperwork, audio recordings, even video. Of GJS bribing the MPA,” said Isibel. “That’s why they wanted to kill me, isn’t it? Because they knew I had it?”
“No,” I said. “They wanted to kill you because you saw Hary die on the neuro-link. Because you were one last loose end to be tied up. No one knew you had those copies except Hary.”
“And now you.”
“And now me. Can I...can I take them?”
Isibel stood up and walked back into the bedroom. She returned a few minutes later, tossing a folder of flimsies into my lap. I pulled the first one and started scrolling through its contents. It was just as she said—video, audio, and data, showing how the Mars Provisional Authority was rotten to the gills with GJS money, and how much the market for pharmaceuticals and genetics on Mars had been stacked in GJS’ favor.
“Fuck,” I said.
“Yeah. Makes you think twice about using an autodoc, huh?” asked Isibel. “They have all the contracts for installation services, on top of the rest of their business.”
“Isibel, you need to go to Ceres,” I said. “Unless you can afford to go to Earth.”
“Fuck no,” she said. “How am I supposed to have enough money to live on Earth?”
“Then Ceres is your best bet,” I said. “Azacca’s almost comfortable, these days. I have a friend there who can set you up. You have a pen?”
“A pen? Gosh, uh, somewhere, I think, the owner has a pen,” said Isibel. She rummaged through drawers until she found a pen and paper. I wrote down my buddy’s name and contact info. Well, “buddy,” was a rough approximation. “Guy who owed me a favor for not throwing him in jail,” was more like it.
“Here,” I said, handing it over to her. I saw her right eye flash as she took a picture on her optical. “Don’t contact him until you’re on-site, or you’ll just spook the shit out of him and he’ll run. Get close enough to drop my name first.”
“When should I go?”
“Preferably now,” I said. “Ivers, obviously, isn’t going to be climbing out of that lake any time soon, but let’s not take any chances on the rest of GJS. He’ll have had to check in at some point, and he’ll miss it. And then they’ll come looking for him.”
I stuck around, taking her soaked and bloody clothes and burning them in the fireplace, then watching as she hurried to stuff her belongings into
her suitcase, helping her when I could (the woman couldn’t fold to save her life, although whether it was nerves or just general ignorance, I never knew).
“I...I guess I should thank you,” she said, as we waited for an autocab to take her to the spaceport.
“I didn’t do anything,” I said. “I was one step behind the whole time. Hell, you even killed Ivers.”
“I did, didn’t I?” she said, looking away.
“Listen, he was here to kill you. Killing him was your only way out. I’m not saying, ‘don’t feel bad about it,’ or anything like that, although, if it helps, he was the murdering piece of shit that killed Hary and he apparently might have been the murdering piece of shit that killed my fiancee. But get yourself some therapy on Ceres. It’s a trauma like any other.”
“What are you going to do with Hary and Theed’s evidence?” she asked, changing the subject like a drunk changes lanes.
“Oh, I’ll make sure it gets to the right people,” I said. I had only an inkling of who those might be, but I was sitting on enough high explosive information to bring down half the Mars Provisional Authority and most of GJS.
I certainly wasn’t going to give it straight to the police.
The autocab arrived, the gull wing door popping open, showing a pleasant little bartender sitting behind the counter. Isibel stood up, her body shaking, and sighed.
“A drink will help,” I told her.
She reached a hand out and I shook it, then watched her stroll down the front and into the cab. The jets fired and it lifted off into the sky.
I made it all the way back to my beat up old Zond before I lost it, screaming and shouting. I tossed Hary’s files on the seat next to me, then keyed in the address of the storage center Ivers’ key went to. I should have slept on it, I knew, but I figured by the time I got back to the City of Devils, I’d have had a nice long cry for my trouble. I still had one more call to make, but I could make it on the way down.
Chapter 12
I t took me a couple of days to climb out of my well of self-pity: one day for the whiskey, one day for the hangover. Nobody had come looking for me, and I guessed that, somehow, I’d managed to stay off the grid. A search of the internet for Peppy and Gannard had turned up a couple of missing persons reports, but it was low-level news—a couple of nobodies at the planet’s largest collection of somebodies disappearing? Who gives a shit? No report of a shootout in the wilderness, or a car with a body in a lake.
Which meant I felt safe enough to take a little detour down to the Self-Stor and figure out Ivers’ keycard.
It was one of those storage places that doesn’t ask too many questions and only has enough people to make sure the padlock on the employee bathroom is secure and that all the folks skipping out on living in places with fancy accoutrements like running water and electricity aren’t take showers in the sink.
The keycard and Ivers’ ID bought me all the access I needed. Ivers’ unit was one of the smaller ones, basically a broom closet. There was a table and a metal security box. The key was still in the box’s lock.
I opened the lid.
I wasn’t sure what I was expecting I would find—a gun, that would be predictable, obvious. Wads of paper money, the untraceable hard currency to secret away, that also would’ve made sense. Maybe a memory stick full of videos of Ivers’ kills, that would’ve been a little novel, but also useful.
Instead I found a second ID inside a thin single-fold wallet.
The name was not the same, and Ivers appeared at least five years younger, with a much closer haircut. The ID carried his name, his rank, and his service number, along with a blood type and a place of birth.
On the other side of the wallet was a unit badge. A red skull swallowing the Earth, a sword running through the whole thing.
That explains that, I thought.
I put the ID back in the box, closed the lid, and retreated out of the storage room, locking it behind me. When I got out on the street, I walked a couple of blocks, then tossed Ivers’ keycard and driver’s license in the trash and hailed an autocab.
I was surprised, but not shocked, when the door opened and it was Stopher again.
“Good morning, M. Jeffries,” he said, warmly. I entered, and gave him Murado’s address.
“Up to no good?” Stopher asked.
“Something like that,” I said.
“Another wild case?”
“No, I don’t think so...I...I need to think for a moment,” I said.
“Oh, sure,” said Stopher, obviously deflated by my rejection. “Do you mind if I watch the news?”
“Go ahead,” I said, and the bar’s hologram projector lit up. I withdrew into my own head.
The unit Ivers had been in was a special operations force that, officially, didn’t exist, although everyone in the entire system knew it was for real—the subject of more military fanwank novels than you could shake a stick at. But it was why, officially, Ivers didn’t exist. They were the Dictator’s fist, the ones who, at a moment’s notice, could kill anyone anywhere. And, somehow, GJS had been able to afford to hire one of these spooks.
And whoever had killed Mari had hired the same one.
But...Mari had never liked the government. Even renewing her PI registration had been like pulling teeth for her. She’d avoided anything to do with the law like the plague. And yet, this guy, who must have generated more government paperwork in an hour than she had in her entire life, had been present for her death.
Sometimes irony can fuck you up, a little bit.
“Can you believe this guy?” asked Stopher.
“What?” I said, snapping back to my present.
“This asshole, Max Yallen, can you believe him?”
“Why, what he’d do?”
“Nothing. It’s what he said.”
“What’d he say?”
“Hold on, let me rewind it.”
I watched the hologram play backwards, but Stopher took it too far back, into the previous story. He tried to fast forward a bit, overcorrected, and we ended up back in the tail end of the last new story again.
“Nevermind, let me watch the whole thing,” I said.
“More developments in the story of price fixing and collusion between GalaxJonesStein and the Mars Provisional Authority, which broke when an independent newspaper in New Angeles published what appeared to be internal document showing constant meetings between the government and the GalaxJonesStein company, a leading genetics and pharmaceutical researcher and manufacturer, to accept bribes and oppose GJS’ rivals in the market. A subsequent investigation has produced rather immediate charges, apparently spurred on by a number of whistleblowers in GJS’ corporate structure.
“This morning, the board of directors, or what remains of it, voted unanimously to remove GJS’ CEO, Dru Vinlan, from his position. M. Vinlan is out on bail, pending a hearing into multiple criminal charges relating to the alleged bribery. In his place, the board has appointed current GJS Chief Operating Officer, Maxilien Edard Yallen to the position. M. Yallen, a fifteen year veteran of the company, had this to say:”
There was a cut, and the boney, angular face of Max Yallen filled the projection area.
“I have accepted this task with great reluctance. My predecessor was, despite the charges against him, a great man and this company owes him a great deal. The Board of Directors has decided that he cannot continue on in his position during this crisis, and M. Vinlan has abided by that decision, as he always has. He will be greatly missed.
“I want to address the charges against both him and this company, which devotes its profits towards treating the illnesses of humanity, and providing life-saving breakthroughs in gene therapy for those in need. The malfeasance alleged by the government is an absolute antithesis to the principles of free and unrestricted markets that I and the entire Board of Directors at GalaxJonesStein hold dear, and frankly it does not shock me these allegations are being made by government officials accused of their own corr
upt doings. Every stockholder in GJS knows that any attempt to stack the deck, even in our favor, is a violation of our corporate mission and vision, and while we intend to fight these charges in court, I want everyone, from our employees, to our customers, to our shareholders, to even our competitors, to know that if anyone at GalaxJonesStein is discovered engaging in such unlawful practices, now or in the future, we will be the first to make sure they are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Thank you. I will not be taking questions at this time.”
“Bullshit,” said Stopher, as the anchor returned to blathering about the sudden precipitous fall in GJS stock prices.
“Don’t believe him?” I asked.
“Do you?”
“No, but I’ve met the bastard. You’ve just seen him on TV,” I said.
“Well, it sounded like a bunch of malarkey to me. Besides, it’s going to be tried in a Martian court, isn’t it? They’ll walk.”
“Probably,” I agreed. If Theed’s dossier was even halfway right, GJS had spent a lot of money insuring itself against having to answer for its crimes. That said, I’d given the entire thing over to the NA Sun-Phobos, so maybe some of the judges and prosecutors would be in the hot seat as well soon enough.
Or maybe the entire staff of the Sun-Phobos would end up dead. You could never tell with these things.
Stopher chattered on about Max Yallen and his corporate evil, but I tuned him out. I didn’t need a primer on the evils of GJS myself, but I supposed it made Stopher feel better to give me a lecture in the dangers of bribing regulators and controlled markets. I wasn’t going to argue the point, but it seemed like a good way to get dragged into an argument if straight up murder was the greatest or least of their crimes.
“Thanks Stopher,” I said, getting off at Murado’s house, transferring my payment to him for the ride.
“Any time, M. Jeffries,” he said, though I could tell he was a little disappointed the whole ride had been uneventful.
The Archaeologist's Mistress Page 18
