The real reason was that he didn't want to know for sure just yet. He didn't want to find out that the Cassilis Clinic was a fake, or that Tomi had been lying when he hinted that they had another source for 'mats, or that they could never raise the credits on a Federation official's salary. Just for a little while, he wanted to believe that he had a future.
The nurse-aide who'd interrupted his game stopped by again after a little while.
"Are you feeling all right, Haar Silvan? You haven't started playing again, and you look a little flushed." She put the back of her hand against his forehead. Niklaas started imagining what it would feel like if she put it somewhere else on his body, assuming he could feel the touch, and immediately became a lot more flushed.
"I'm not sick," he assured her. "Just . . . thinking."
"Must be pleasant thoughts, for a change," she teased with a smile.
"I was thinking," Niklaas said slowly, "of what life would be like if the only barrier to an active sex life were persuading some girl to get active with me."
The nurse-aide's smile froze in place. "I shouldn't think that would pose much of a problem for you, Haar Silvan," she said softly, brushing a lock of bronze-gold hair from his forehead as she removed her hand. She turned away quickly and hoped he hadn't seen the look in her eyes. Poor boy, he knew as well as she did that he'd likely never face that particular problem. Spontaneous nerve regeneration was a better chance for him than getting to the top of the 'mat waiting list.
She'd read about a case of spontaneous nerve regeneration.
Once.
And it hadn't been very well documented.
* * *
Annemari Silvan's office had been designed to maximize the peaceful flow of spiritual and mental energies, with the usual color and aura harmonizer cooperating with a spirit specialist. The result was a room perfectly suited to Annemari's cool silver-gilt beauty and sharply concentrated mind. The colors were calm silvers and greys, conducive to concentration and with the added advantage that the fading gold of her hair, the only color accent, seemed bright by contrast. The reflecting vid screens on desk and walls were carefully angled so that the light, and any ill-meaning spirits, bouncing off them would be trapped in the fountain of moving mirrors in one corner or the swaying crystal chimes hanging from the ceiling in another corner. Tall silver bins with angled lids were intended to conceal any messy stacks of papers from sight.
It was a beautiful room for one person to sit in, alone and undisturbed, concentrating on high intellectual problems.
Annemari reckoned that she had spent all of fifteen minutes doing that since taking office five years ago.
And that had been on a Sunday morning, at 3:00 a.m., when she slipped up to her office to kick her shoes off and rest her smile muscles after a particularly draining diplomatic reception; and it had only lasted fifteen minutes because one of her programmers had been working through the night, saw her office lights and thought he'd found the perfect time for an informal chat with the boss about how she wanted the new info screen design to work.
Now, in midweek, the subtle silvers and greys of the decorator's scheme were drowned in a rising tide of flimsies in Federation green, urgent notes in Federation orange, diplomatic disks sealed with Federation red, and computer printouts in recycled beige. Annemari felt rather recycled beige herself, as she tried simultaneously to cope with the usual demands of her job and to follow up three separate lines of investigation into the black-market bacteriomats. Some of her official workload could be delegated to her staff; so far she hadn't dared let anybody except Calandra know about the bacteriomat investigation.
That might have to change soon, if she couldn't reconcile the scanty but mutually incompatible bits of information she had dragged off the data nets.
Niklaas's conversation with Tomi Oksanen was the first lead she'd had since Calandra Vissi dropped out of communication. Unfortunately, he'd thought it over by himself for several days before asking her if she knew anything about the Cassilis Clinic, and in those days it seemed that Tomi Oksanen had disappeared. The Oksanen family was not known for divulging information readily, but usually it was the financial data that they buried beneath layer upon layer of misleading documents and false trails to nonexistent banking corporations. Annemari was extremely good at working through financial deceptions. Her twenty years of programming experience stood her in good stead here. The Oksanens and other upper-class financial criminals hired computoads and technonerds to conceal their dealings; Annemari had been a technonerd, and she could still think like one. She knew how all the major Federation databases were designed; she'd designed some of them herself. She'd even written the code for some parts herself. And the trapdoors she'd written for debugging purposes were extremely useful when she wanted unrecorded access to databases that she had no official reason for looking at.
If Tomi Oksanen had been, say, a credit transaction as part of a money-laundering deal between the Oksanens and some more openly criminal family like the Boghaert clan, she'd have tracked him down in no time at all.
Theoretically, a human being should leave far more traces in the system than a single credit transaction and should be correspondingly easier to track down. But Annemari's attempts to meet with Tomi Oksanen and ask him about the Cassilis Clinic had been met with the famous Oksanen blank-wall silence. Tomi? Oh, yes, one of the younger ones, they said casually, as if his playboy exploits hadn't been enlivening the gossip vids—and costing the Oksanen family—for years. In the Med Center? Yes, they had heard he'd been ill. Didn't Auntie Minna say something about his going to the South Coast to recuperate? Or maybe it had been the Valima Mountains. These young people, you know, always flitting about. No, his parents weren't on-planet just now. Couldn't say exactly where they'd be, complicated itinerary, could have been changes. Come to think of it, didn't somebody mention that Tomi was going to stay with one of his lady friends, Kaarina or maybe it was Kristi or could have been Chiara, dear me, forget my own name next, that I will . . .
Annemari made the requisite polite noises and closed the vid channels. She hadn't had much hope for that line of inquiry; she was no good at these games of conversational fencing, couldn't keep her mind on how to corner her opponent because it took all her energy to stop her screaming at them that they were bloody liars. Should have put somebody from her staff on the job, someone like young Jeppe; he was good with people. Except she daren't trust anybody else with these inquiries, and anyway Jeppe was busy smoothing ruffled feathers over in the legislative offices, where Legist Kovalainen claimed the Information Department was deliberately blocking his request for a statistical analysis of all Federation employees sorted on six different properties, four of which hadn't been defined as data fields when most of the employees were hired and processed, and three of which couldn't be listed in the database because they constituted illegal invasion of personal privacy. It would be really, really nice if Jeppe managed to get Kovalainen to understand the difference between "won't give you the information" and "don't have it in the first place and aren't legally empowered to get it" without giving him an excuse to complain that Annemari's department was incompetent. More likely, though, the best he'd be able to do would be to point Kovalainen at some other department and get him to harass them for a while.
Meanwhile, there was the ongoing credentials check on spaceport officials, the request from Health for a program to map possible disease vectors related to the new plague on Junya IV, and the job of reconciling the data retrieval programs embodied in the Information Freedom project with the data concealment programs in the Right to Personal Privacy project. Annemari had delegated all those jobs as best she could, but her best wasn't good enough; two of the three senior staff members entrusted with the projects had already requested meetings, and one of them wanted the meeting to include a representative from the legislative office as the Freedom and Privacy acts, respectively, were self-contradictory statutes already passed by the Legists. "Ask Legist Kovalainen
to join you," Annemari suggested, "I happen to know he's very interested in information retrieval issues." There, that would keep Kovalainen busy, and now she could get Jeppe back to work on something useful . . . like . . . like compiling a statistical analysis of non-Federation medical clinics on Rezerval, number of patients treated, qualifications of staff, whatever other details she could think of to bury the questions she was really interested in. With special attention to Castelnuovo Province.
She promised Vibeke a meeting that afternoon to discuss the Health Department request, reassured herself that Anders Ruggiero seemed able to write and run a simple background and reference checking request without her active supervision, and asked Jeppe for a full report on non-Federation clinics in Castelnuovo Province.
"More BS from the Health Department?" Jeppe moaned.
"Could be a little more interesting than usual," Annemari said without committing herself on the source of the request. "We want full staff lists and resumes, tax data, lists of patients and what they were treated for . . . and don't worry about Privacy Act restrictions on this one."
"Kovalainen will explode," Jeppe predicted.
"Kovalainen doesn't need to be told about all our internal business. That's why I want you on this, Jeppe; I need someone discreet. There are political considerations . . ." Annemari let her voice trail off. "I don't need to tell you about the possible complications here."
Jeppe nodded wisely, as if he actually had some idea what she was talking about. Which was convenient, because Annemari had no idea how she could justify this project if he asked. She'd been banking on the typical technonerd reluctance to admit there was anything at all he didn't already know, and apparently it had worked.
Once Jeppe left, Annemari scrawled Gone for the day on the back of a memo, closed and locked her office door, and set her desk console to route all incoming calls other than Jeppe's to a message list. She spared a moment's envy for the characters in one of the old-fashioned romantic comedy vids she'd seen, who had assistants called "secretaries" specifically to guard the door against visitors. If she didn't have to practically hide out in her own office to get a little uninterrupted time, how much more work she could do!
Of course, her work nowadays was to deal with the interruptions. Ninety percent of her job wasn't technical at all; it was smoothing feathers and adjusting competing demands and setting priorities. And when there was any real computer work to be done, she had to delegate it to one of her eager young assistants.
But this couldn't be delegated. Mentally flexing her fingers, Annemari settled down happily to do a little personal, private research on the Cassilis Clinic, so she'd have some background with which to interpret Jeppe's results. The readily available public information was bland and virtually information-free; with little effort she was able to pull up vids of a long, low white building set in a beautifully landscaped park, short speeches from unidentified but impressive-looking men and women in white coats, blurred views of what were probably the latest in monitors and other medical devices, and testimonials from satisfied patients. "I looked and felt ten years younger after a thorough workup at the Cassilis Clinic," was the general tenor of the testimonials.
It would be interesting to see what Jeppe could add to this picture. So far, all she had was lots of surface pleasantness, no real data, and a general sense that the Cassilis Clinic was a cross between elective beauty surgery and an overpriced health spa for the rich and bored.
Felt like an Oksanen family operation to her. Would a list of employees prove enlightening?
While she waited for Jeppe's results, Annemari checked the progress of the infospyder she'd activated to track Tomi Oksanen's credit usage, transit vouchers, and other traces he might have left in the net. Like the Cassilis Clinic public site, the results were interesting, but not informative. Up to four days ago—the day of his visit to Niklaas—the program had turned up about what you'd expect from an Oksanen playboy. Lots of credit chits from fashionable restaurants, a major funds-verified transaction from a Rezerval jeweler. Annemari recognized the name. Splashy stuff featuring really beautiful Thyrkan rainbow crystals in really tacky gold settings; Tomi must have a new girlfriend, and her taste was about what one would expect from a girl willing to go out with an Oksanen.
The interesting part about that transaction was that Tomi had a girl and felt it worth splashing credits in the form of showy jewelry on her. The Oksanen men had a reputation for being generous with the women they ran around with, but only for services received.
If Tomi was in condition to receive any services at all from his new girl, the Cassilis Clinic had worked the kind of miracle Annemari had thought only bacteriomats could perform.
Niklaas said Tomi had sworn that nobody on the list was losing a chance at a 'mat transplant because of Cassilis Clinic. But what was the word of an Oksanen worth?
The rest of the record was the usual—no public transit records, of course, but a handful of dangerous-flying notices, two summonses for failure to appear and answer charges of causing a flitter accident, the kind of fines that would have got the attention of anybody but an Oksanen, and a large credit transfer to somebody Annemari had never heard of, who turned out to be the injured party in the flitter accident. Who had also failed to appear at the second hearing, the day after the transfer, so the matter had been dropped. Solved in the usual Oksanen family fashion: throw enough money at it and it'll go away.
The really interesting—and frustrating—thing was that there were no traces of Tomi Oksanen anywhere in the net for the last four days. For some reason the Oksanens must have decided to keep his recent activities private. Annemari tapped in a code that would open Rezerval's largest secure financial systems database to her. This would show any of Tomi's transactions that had been blocked from view.
Nothing showed up.
Annemari trawled through Rezerval's off-planet transactions and discovered that some of her colleagues were keeping surprisingly large credit accounts on Toussaint, a non-Federation world that was a favorite for tax evaders. But that was none of her business, so she ignored the information and asked for any transactions specific to the Oksanen family.
That brought up a flood of data, probably enough to keep Federation lawyers happily employed for years picking holes in the Oksanen financial empire if only there were a legitimate way of sending the information to them. Annemari narrowed the search to the last four days and to transactions involving Tomi Oksanen personally.
There were none.
No credits, no flitter tickets, nothing.
Of course even an Oksanen had the power to drop off the net for a while; anybody sufficiently rich and discreet could achieve that by using only personal flitters and private landing zones, making no transactions, entering no controlled areas, staying on-planet. It would not be trivially easy on Rezerval, where half the planet was made up of Federation offices and other controlled zones where proof of identity and time of entry were automatically recorded. But it was possible, even if not exactly in the notoriously flashy Oksanen style.
The really interesting thing was that this wasn't the first blank in Tomi Oksanen's records. He had "disappeared," in the sense of leaving no traces in the system, for twenty days following his release against medical recommendations from the Med Center and into the care of Oksanen family physicians.
Twenty days in the Cassilis Clinic? With no charges recorded—from what looked like a luxury spa and plastic surgery clinic?
A chime from the deskvid announced that Jeppe was sending preliminary results directly to her. Annemari wished she had told him to sneaker-mail them; papers carried by hand left no record, e-transmissions were not as secure. Oh well, she'd asked for enough stuff to disguise her real interests; it took long enough to sort the mass of data and pick out the records relating to Cassilis Clinic.
Jeppe hadn't been able to get at a list of patients and treatments; an attached note indicated that he had some ways around the Clinic's security but was
n't sure he could get in without setting off alerts. Good judgment call, that. Annemari didn't particularly want anyone at the Cassilis Clinic to worry about being investigated—not yet, anyway. And she also didn't want to tell Jeppe or anybody else about the extra bits of code she'd inserted into most Federation database systems as a programmer.
Because the tax information was in public Federation databases, Jeppe had been able to do a thorough job on that without breaking any regulations at all. Annemari would not have been surprised to find that as far as the Federation knew nobody had drawn any income from the Cassilis Clinic—but no, that would have been obvious. The Oksanens were liars, cheats, and notorious tax evaders, but they weren't obvious; that was what made it such a pleasure to pit her wits against theirs. Jeppe's spyder had neatly sorted taxpayers reporting income from the Cassilis Clinic by amount, so that the list began with several blandly meaningless corporation names and ended with the pittances paid to daily scrubbers, groundskeepers and other low-level employees.
It was the ones in the high-middle part of the list that interested Annemari. These would be the top-salaried employees, the surgeons and medtechs. Lots of surgeons. You'd expect that. No, lots of surgeons, far more than it would take to staff the plastic surgery part of a clinic like that. Annemari randomly highlighted about ten percent of the names and set the spyder's parameters to pull up resumes; any licensed clinic was obliged to file resumes for all technical and medical staff, so those also had been available to Jeppe. She read the results, frowning slightly, then requested full resumes on everybody reporting income between—hmm, what did a Federation Level Five medtech get, 600,000 credits a year? Okay, make it everybody between 500,000 and 5 million; that would pick up some top techs and some of the smaller dummy corporations, but should cover everybody she was interested in.
Disappearing Act Page 15
