Deshin had asked only one question in the middle of all of Conte’s ramblings: did Conte also sell nonhuman DNA?
Conte did not. He seemed alien-averse.
Besides, he had said, how’m I gonna know the good from the bad? I don’t associate with aliens.
Good point, particularly since he hadn’t known the good from the bad with the Frémont DNA.
Deshin took the name Jhena Andre. While he listened to Conte, Deshin called up the records of Andre’s employment at the prison. She had lasted there for nearly two years. The Frémont death had occurred early in her career.
Deshin had mentioned that to Conte, then asked, “Did she ever talk to you about the Frémont DNA?”
Conte had shaken his head. “We never talked about that night again.”
“Not ever?”
“I told her we weren’t supposed to talk about it. She listened. She was a good girl,” he said. “I figured she was just scared. She’d done something that could lose her a job.”
“So, you never heard of her selling DNA?” Deshin asked.
“No,” Conte said. “She’s hasn’t broken the law since, either. She’s one of those reliable people.”
“You know this because…?”
“Because I tracked her down when I couldn’t find the DNA,” Conte said.
“Did you ask her if she had any for sale?” Deshin asked.
“Of course,” Conte said.
“And?”
“She didn’t,” he said. “The others I sent to her, they couldn’t get any from her either. She asked me not to send anyone else.”
“Yet you gave me her name,” Deshin said.
Conte shrugged. “That’s why I’m not charging for it.”
A comment which had made Kaielynn snort out loud. Conte had gotten offended at that, and the discussion had ended soon afterwards.
Conte left, with two of Deshin’s team tailing him, not that it really mattered. They all knew that they were done with Conte.
Deshin had decided to stay in the business suite to use the hotel’s network to trace this Andre woman. He did it from here partly because his trace was expected, and partly because he wanted to seem aboveboard with it all.
She wasn’t hard to find. Conte hadn’t lied. Her career seemed legitimate. In fact, she didn’t seem like a person who would ever break any laws for any reason.
She had parlayed her job at the prison into a career with the Earth Alliance. She had moved out of prisons and into other parts of the human-based government, always working in support capacities as she moved up, generally as an assistant.
She had become an administrator a dozen years ago, and was working her way into some part of the Alliance, but he couldn’t tell what part. That was classified.
Deshin leaned back from the floating screens and rubbed his chin. As far as he could tell, everything this Andre woman had done had been legal—except for that moment with Conte.
But Deshin had been involved in the fringes of things for a very long time. He knew that people who bent the law, people who broke the law, often repeated the action.
He also knew that very smart people rarely got caught. She hadn’t, not with that entire Frémont incident, and she should have. The prison authorities should have investigated everyone associated with Frémont’s untimely death. Perhaps they did; but they didn’t find Conte—who would have been first on Deshin’s suspicion list—and they didn’t discover that Andre had helped him.
If they had discovered it, she never would have received promotions. She would have remained in lower-level positions. And she never would have worked in classified areas of the Alliance.
She bothered Deshin. She bothered him a lot.
The little tidbits of information that he kept getting—what he’d been hearing from Flint, and from some of the others, kept coming back to people inside the Earth Alliance.
Maybe Conte had just given him one.
Deshin stood and walked to the windows. He could feel Kaielynn watching him. She didn’t like his tendency to stand in front of window and look outside. She was always afraid a sniper would get him.
Maybe a sniper would one day. But he doubted it.
Deshin hadn’t built his business on fear as much as mutual back-scratching. Even though he dealt with some of the shadiest people in the Alliance, they always had a lot to lose if they lost him.
Except here. He hadn’t been that kind to Conte.
But Conte had no reason to hurt him. No one did. And no one seemed to care that Conte was giving out Andre’s name. She had asked him not to do it again. When Conte had told Deshin that, Deshin hadn’t detected a lie.
Then Deshin frowned at the mountains, looming over this small city.
He hadn’t detected a lie, but he also hadn’t detected any upset.
Andre had asked Conte not to give out her name.
She hadn’t come after him, she hadn’t been angry with him, she hadn’t tried to shut him down.
Given some of her connections in the Alliance, she could have done that.
A generally innocent person, someone who had only made one mistake in their life, worked very hard at covering up that mistake. That person got defensive. That person got angry. That person often got vindictive.
Deshin cursed himself silently. He hadn’t thought to ask Conte what her reaction was.
But Conte, in the spirit of full disclosure, would probably have warned Deshin. Conte was a talker who would have said something like, Be careful when you approach her. She doesn’t like hearing my name.
Conte might have decided to let Deshin walk directly into a mess, but then he would lose any possible business Deshin might bring him.
And the one thing that Conte had to gain was future Deshin business. Conte had even mentioned it on the way out.
We’re a backwater, Conte had said, but I know sometimes organizations like yours find backwaters useful. Now that we’ve made contact…
He had let that hang, then he had grinned.
Deshin had nodded, knowing it was always better to leave doors open than it was to slam them closed. He had implied—but never said—that he would continue to do business with Conte.
Even though Deshin doubted he ever would.
So, given that, and given Deshin’s assessment of Conte’s character, Deshin felt confident in assuming that Conte would have warned him if Andre were temperamental.
All Conte had done was warn Deshin that the woman didn’t want to be contacted, which was an entirely different thing.
Deshin clasped his hands behind his back and paced the large room. She didn’t want to be contacted, but she hadn’t gotten angry. No pure clones of Frémont were on the market, even though someone could have made a fortune from them.
Which explained why the Black Fleet grew angry when Deshin wanted designer criminal clones of Frémont. There were none, at least that the Black Fleet could find.
And Deshin couldn’t find them either.
The one person who had an opportunity to make them—Conte—had somehow contaminated the DNA, so he couldn’t build anything except relatively useless fast-grow. And he wanted Frémont clones as well.
In fact, he had the most to gain if he found them. And he had done his research on Deshin. Conte had known that Deshin was worth a fortune. Conte would have offered the clones to Deshin if Conte had them—or even had access to them.
The clones of Frémont, then, weren’t on the market at all. They existed for another purpose—and that purpose was pretty clear.
They were soldiers in that war he’d mentioned to Flint. People didn’t sell soldiers. They used soldiers.
Which made Flint’s search of the money even more important.
Deshin sighed.
Kaielynn glanced at him, as if she were wondering what he was doing. She probably was.
He couldn’t bargain with a government official for clones that she might or might not (more than likely might) knew about. He didn’t dare. And he didn’t
have the capacity to investigate someone with high security clearance in the Earth Alliance.
The other track he could try to investigate was to find Peyti clones of Uzvekmt, and see if he could buy those. But that would look out of character for him, since Deshin’s organization only used aliens in their native environment.
The Peyti were so law-abiding that the two times he’d tried to start a business on Peyla, he’d lost a small fortune. He couldn’t work with them.
So, he couldn’t pursue the Peyti clones either.
He had to give this part of the investigation over to Flint, with suggestions that Flint and his connections see what they could find.
Deshin had other leads to chase, ones he wouldn’t mention to Flint or anyone close the power structure.
At least, not yet.
FORTY-ONE
THE CITY OF ARMSTRONG had decided to warehouse the Peyti Crisis clones in a prison outside of the dome. Armstrong had several prisons, and this one was considered “transitional,” so it didn’t follow the rules of the other prisons.
It claimed to be a maximum security facility because it housed criminals of all types who’d been charged and were too dangerous to release while they awaited trial. It had the silly name all of these transitional facilities had: It was called a Reception Center.
Nyquist had been to this particular Reception Center hundreds of times in his career, and had hated it each time. It wasn’t clean enough for his tastes. It was also poorly managed, something he had complained about a few years ago. Even then—before Anniversary Day, before these current crises—the response he had gotten was a cold one: They’re prisoners. Why do you care?
As if that were a personal failing. As if he were sympathizing with them somehow.
He had taken a train to the Reception Center, and arrived through the front doors. Ever since the Peyti clones had arrived, the Reception Center had discouraged visitors. Nyquist had had to go through five layers of bureaucracy to get his visit approved, and even then, he’d had to use DeRicci’s name to get final approval.
He ended up telling the prison system that he was trying to see one of the Peyti clones, Uzvaan, because of a case they’d worked on in the past, not because of the Peyti Crisis.
Apparently S3 had delivered their injunctions here as well. They were making certain everyone knew who could talk to the clones and who could not.
Still, it had taken nearly two hours after Nyquist arrived before he was allowed into the interview area. He felt like the procedures had taken him from cop to suspect to possible bomber. Every part of his person got checked. His identification got run a dozen times. Each time, the procedures became more and more invasive.
He tried to remain calm about it all, but the farther he got into the system, the more he regretted agreeing to this ploy. As the hours went by, and he confirmed his identity as a law enforcement official yet again, he wondered if the clones themselves had been notified of S3’s gambit. Because if they had, then his time with Uzvaan would be wasted.
Finally, after he’d been sitting alone for hours in the strangely set up interview room, he realized the day was lost anyway. Who cared if his interview with Uzvaan was a futile trip? At least he had tried.
He hadn’t seen an interview room in the Reception Center like this in years. He rarely had cases that involved interviewing nonhuman suspects. Somehow, his years as a detective mostly focused on human-against-human crimes. That might have been because of a temper tantrum he had had early in his career, before his bosses in the detective division realized he was a cantankerous jerk, not a guy who had hard and fast rules about stupid things.
In that temper tantrum, he had complained—loudly—that he hated keeping track of legal murder and illegal murder. He believed then—and still believed—that all murders were the same. What sparked the tantrum had been a Disty Vengeance Killing.
The Disty Vengeance Killings might have been allowed under Alliance law, but Nyquist was a human being first, a member of the Alliance second (or third, or one-hundred-and-fifty-seventh, if truth be told). He believed that murder was murder, especially murder that entailed a gang encircling a single individual, capturing that individual, and eviscerating that individual, decorating a room with that individual’s remains.
He didn’t care what the law said; he didn’t care that in many instances involving the Disty such things were “justified.” He didn’t believe they should happen at all.
Someone must have made a note in his personnel file, because from then on, the bulk of his cases were human-on-human. Crimes he could understand. Oh, he still caught a Disty Vengeance Killing now and then—he’d met Miles Flint on one. But mostly, Nyquist investigated crimes he could understand, crimes that made sense, crimes that were crimes—at least in his book.
Which meant that he rarely sat in the part of the Reception Center that housed nonhumans. Even when he visited Peyti criminals here, they had been escorted to the human wing.
This time, Nyquist had been escorted to the Peyti wing. He had been given an environmental suit that he did not want to wear unless he absolutely had to. He draped it over his arm. The authorities also gave him a mask that he could use in place of the suit, rather like the Peyti did, provided he didn’t stay in their environment for long.
The mask looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in the past decade. He didn’t even want to carry it, but he did, just in case he needed it.
He asked for—and received—permission to see Uzvaan in what the Reception Center called “The Tunnels,” the area between the human section and the Peyti section. The Tunnels looked like they’d been transported from Mars, narrow little warrens that meandered around equipment he didn’t understand.
The Tunnels that he went through were narrow little tubes made of a thick, scratched substance that looked like permaplastic, but couldn’t be. Permaplastic hadn’t been used on buildings since the colonial era. Still, he hated that he couldn’t see through what should have been clear.
His links had been shut off, except for his emergency links, and those had been adjusted to the Reception Center’s systems, which meant that anything from the outside went through the Reception Center first. But if there was a crisis inside the Reception Center, then he’d be among the first to know.
Not that he could do anything. His weapons were gone. The only reason he still had his badge was because it was part of a chip built into his hand, and not attached to any of his links.
He didn’t even have a human guard to take him this deep into the Reception Center. Instead, mouthless android guards with muscles twice the size of his thighs led him inside. He hated the android guards more than he wanted to admit. He found them creepier than some aliens he’d had to deal with over the years.
They deposited him, alone, in a clear round room that looked like it was floating in air. He’d seen the specs for these things but had never actually used one. They were little one-person protective shields. If he knew where the control panel was, he could drive the thing like a spaceship into other parts of the Reception Center—or at least, other parts of The Tunnels.
Instead, he got to sit at a table in what appeared to be a bubble inside an ocean of blue liquid. The table rested on a clear flat floor, that made him feel like he was floating in the center of the bubble—a sensation he didn’t like at all.
And that’s where he waited for another hour, that was where he decided his day was already wasted and so he shouldn’t resent the task, and that was where he felt a small bubble of his own—a bubble of panic. Should there be another attack, should there be some kind of crisis in the Reception Center itself, he was trapped in his little one-person ship, all alone, in that ocean of blue.
After ninety minutes, he found himself wondering if the little one-person bubble was a test of a visitor’s resolve. Because he knew if he stayed much longer, he’d go ever so slightly crazy.
Or maybe not slightly.
About the point where he started to weigh the pro
s and cons of leaving without seeing Uzvaan, another bubble made its way through the ocean of blue liquid. As it got closer, he saw that the new bubble had a single occupant—a maskless Peyti.
Nyquist assumed that Peyti was Uzvaan. He’d only seen the lawyer without his mask once, that day of the Peyti Crisis. And if Nyquist were being honest with himself, he would admit that he had no real idea what Uzvaan looked like without the mask.
That day, Nyquist had simply been focused on the mask itself—and the bomb it contained.
Uzvaan’s bubble stopped a few meters from Nyquist’s. Uzvaan sat on a chair. Nyquist couldn’t tell if Uzvaan’s arms were bound to the chair or if he was just sitting with his hands pointed downward.
Every time Nyquist had been with a Peyti lawyer, they’d either been standing or they had been sitting at tables working. He had never seen one just sit before.
Nyquist was grateful for his own small table. He had something to rest his arms on. He used that moment to tap one of his chips, so that he could record the conversation. He wasn’t certain if he would be allowed to remove the recording from the Reception Center, but he had to try.
Tiny tubes floated out of Nyquist’s bubble and out of Uzvaan’s bubble. The tubes met in the middle of the liquid stuff.
“Bartholomew Nyquist,” Uzvaan said, his voice as clear as if he were inside Nyquist’s bubble. Nyquist started despite himself. Uzvaan’s voice had haunted his nightmares for a week now. “I never thought I’d see you again.”
And I would have thought that you would sit there quietly, refusing to talk, Nyquist thought, but didn’t say. He didn’t want to give Uzvaan ideas.
“I actually have to talk to you as a lawyer,” Nyquist said, managing to sound put upon.
“Come now, Bartholomew,” Uzvaan said in that precise way that once won him cases. “We both know I’ve been disbarred.”
“Well, then one of us was misinformed,” Nyquist said. “Surprisingly, none of you clones have been disbarred, at least not yet.”
Nyquist couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his voice. He told himself that Uzvaan would expect the sarcasm. Nyquist wasn’t sure if that were true, but he could only pretend so much.
The Peyti Crisis: A Retrieval Artist Novel: Book Five of the Anniversary Day Saga (Retrieval Artist series 12) Page 26
