Sharp: A Mindspace Investigations Novel

by Alex Hughes

  I cut her off, my desperation making none of that important. “Swartz is dying. My sponsor. Swartz. He’s dying, and I need you to arrange for a medic. A microkinesis Guild-trained medic.” I put my hands behind my head. “I need you to come through for me, Kara. You owe me this.”

  She stood, gestured to the chair in front of her. “Sit down, okay?”

  “I don’t want to sit down, I want you to get me a medic.”

  “Sit down.”

  I stood there, staring at her.

  “What kind of medic?” she asked quietly.

  “Cardiac. Heart attack, with some kind of additional damage that means he can’t have an artificial heart. Some kind of complications from his drug use years ago.”

  She closed her eyes, just for a second. “It had to be cardiac. Adam, the Guild is short on cardiac medics. There are three in the country, and two are traveling in high-profile areas right now. The third is working on the president’s uncle, who is also dying. There’s no way I can do it.”

  I moved forward until my thighs hit the front of her desk. “You have to. This is Swartz. Kara, I have never treated you badly for betraying me. For getting me kicked out of the Guild. For ruining my life. I have never—but you owe me this. You owe me more than this.”

  It was like her face opened, her heart ripping out as I saw her sorrow and deep, deep regret like crimson lines painted in Mindspace between us. “You should not have been kicked out,” she said, eyes glistening with half-shed tears. “I swear to you, I never thought it would be like that. You should have been cleaned up and given help. But even so. It was the right thing to do. The right thing to do, and you would have done the same.” She took a breath.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t say sorry lightly; every time was like rehab. Maybe she was right, but: “Swartz is dying.”

  She turned away, looked out the window, let the silence sit as the wheels turned in her head. Finally she turned back. “I can’t do the impossible, Adam. I wish with all my heart I could. If I tried—if I tried, it would be my career and your head both.”

  “I don’t care.” I was no lightweight, and for Swartz, for Swartz I’d fight all comers. “You want to do the right thing, Kara? This is the right damn thing!” I was almost yelling, emotions radiating out. I had no control left. The hospital, the damn hospital and Swartz’s illness, had stolen my control and now my eyes were watering again.

  Kara met my gaze, her eyes watering too. “Even if I tried, odds are your mentor will still not get the help he needs.”

  Now I sat down in the chair, staring at my hands. “I—”

  “There is one thing I could try. But you won’t like the consequences.”

  “Do it.”

  * * *

  Stone entered the room with an angry gait. He was holding a length of sticky cord, a restraint, down at his side. His body language was wary.

  “Thank you for coming.” Kara sat on the side of her desk, hands resting on its edge. “I have a proposition that gets you the tag you wanted.”

  What? I yelled at her mentally. We still had a faint Link left over from years ago; Stone wouldn’t be able to overhear a Link. I’m not getting any—

  Shut up and let me work.

  “I’m listening,” Stone said, his eyes darting back and forth between us. I sat, Kara stood, but our body language and relative positions had to look like a united front against him.

  “Adam will consent to a voluntary—temporary—tag.” Kara’s diction was extremely precise. “For the length of this particular inquiry, and will consent to periodic mental checks and the release of his private information and current employment files to Enforcement for the purposes of your investigation, provided all tags and checks end when your determination is made. You’ll get full access to my records and Adam’s private record from the Guild training facility, and one—count it, one—interview with me about our past. In return, you will provide your private Enforcement medic to treat . . . “ She paused here and looked at me.

  “Jonathon Swartz,” I offered, nerves stretched almost to the breaking point.

  “Jonathon Swartz, Adam’s mentor, who is currently dying of cardiac issues. Within the next forty-eight hours. Said treatment to be the best available. Your Enforcement medic is cross-trained in trauma of all kinds, I am fully aware, and according to my information he is also currently in town and unassigned. The terms of this deal are contingent on timely care.”

  Stone thought about it for a second, looked at me.

  “If you’ll save Swartz I’ll do anything you want and gladly.”

  “The medic is available,” he said cautiously.

  Relief hit like a long, cold drink of water. Maybe, maybe this was going to work. Maybe I could save Swartz. “Thank you, Kara. I . . .”

  She looked me straight in the eye. “For the record, I don’t owe you anything.”

  I nodded. “This is more than—”

  “No. I don’t owe you anything because it was the right thing to do. And this—this was the right thing too.” She looked at the clock and stood up, suddenly exhausted. “I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave my office. I have an urgent meeting in ten minutes I have to be ready for.”

  “Thank you,” I told her.

  She nodded, and suddenly was hugging me. I got a glimpse of her mind, her satisfaction at a deal well made and sadness—quiet sadness. “I’m sorry about Swartz. I really am. He’s been sending me updates on you every month for years. He’s a good man.” Then she glanced toward the door, concerned about time.

  “I’m going,” I said. “I’m going right now.”

  Swartz had sent her updates?

  * * *

  Stone and I walked down the hall, to a small alcove under a window at the end. A statue of the Guild founder, Cooper, sat on top of the small table there. I reached out and straightened the statue; his code of ethics still meant a lot to me.

  “You realize it’s not going to be that easy,” Stone told me.

  “What?” Suddenly my stomach was bad in free fall. “Why the hell not?”

  His body language seemed aggressive suddenly, and I was on full alert, ready to fight. I would be hard-pressed not to lose, and even if through some miracle I survived, in the middle of the Guild building . . . well, I wouldn’t get far afterward.

  But he only fidgeted with the sticky cord where I could see him, a threat, but a veiled one. “A cardiac medic is the most expensive commodity in the Guild stable right now. And you’re getting someone with similar skills, better skills maybe, as he’s versed in trauma and recovery. What you’re offering in return is not nearly worth what you’re getting.”

  He was bargaining with a life. A normal life. A sudden, horrible thought occurred to me. “If the Guild had anything, anything to do with—”

  “No,” Stone said at once, looking discomfited. “No, we wouldn’t—I wouldn’t. Not randomly and not without cause. And not, on first choice, to a noncombatant. I have some ethics.”

  “You’d say that even if it was you.” I didn’t bother to hide my cynicism. “And I’ve already blocked your investigation at least once and promised you I’d do it again. This plays right into your hands.”

  “I swear on the Guild founders that this was neither me nor anyone else acting on behalf of the Guild. Demand any proof you like. This was not me.”

  Every interrogator instinct in me said he was telling the truth. And even if he wasn’t I still needed what he offered. “You swear it?”

  “I do, on any oath you name.”

  “What do you need to make up the difference?”

  He straightened a bit. “It’s a large difference. I don’t know what will make that debt work.”

  He was fleecing me. I could see him setting me up like a mark on the street. But the trouble was, I needed what he was offering and according to Kara—whom I believed—there was no way else to get it. “Fine, we’ll call it a debt. But I need the medic, and I need it now.”
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  “We do the tag first.”

  “Temporary,” I stipulated. My stomach roiled. To have somebody able to check on me at any moment of any day . . . I already had Swartz, I told myself, Swartz and Bellury checking up on me. But if I wanted to keep Swartz, it had to be done. “A fully removable tag. You know I’m strong enough—and trained enough—to check.”

  He nodded.

  I swallowed.

  “It’s standard procedure. And I will check at random. But this isn’t my first case, or my thirtieth, and I’m fair. After the first few seconds you’ll know I’m there. I’m not cruel and I’m not invasive. If I don’t understand something or it looks suspicious, I will look for more information before I make a determination.”

  I nodded, the fear still there, but tempered.

  If it was anybody but Swartz . . . Swartz, who’d picked me up when I was a punk and convinced me I could be better. That I could have a chance at a real life again. Swartz, who’d dragging me kicking and screaming into a place where self-respect was possible, and happened. Swartz, who kicked me in the ass when I thought about going sideways. “Swartz needs the medic now. Now, or it’s useless to him and me both.”

  I let him put the tag on me, squirming and jittery the whole time. And there it was, a square patch of his mind sitting on the right side of mine. A square patch of not-me, something a shield couldn’t stop. Like a boil sitting on the top of my mental skin, painful and swollen and all too firmly attached.

  “Try to block me,” Stone said.

  So I did, hard.

  But, out of my control, there he was. It’s working, the stranger said, inside all my defenses. I tried to throw him out, I tried to expel him like food poisoning, like vomit, but— Calm down. Calm. It’s okay.

  I took a breath, then another, tolerating him like a bit in my mouth.

  And then he was gone.

  “I’ll be checking in on you in random intervals for at least a week, likely longer, considering your history.”

  Then he opened the door and let me go. I kept looking over my shoulder as I walked out the door and down to the elevators. Kept looking, and waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  Swartz was going to get the help he needed, right?

  * * *

  On the way out of the building, when I thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse, it did.

  I was walking through the middle of the huge open glass-and-steel atrium in the center of the main skyscraper, the central glass elevator tubes extending like the spine of some huge animal above me, tiered floors all around. And there, not far from the elevator, in a crowd of folks dressed in office clothes, was Tamika. She was staring at me with accusing eyes.

  And I turned around and left, in the fastest walk I could manage. Acid burned in my gut, a sharp pain like a fillet knife dragging my gut, so I left. Like the coward I was.

  CHAPTER 16

  Back at the department, I snuck past Cherabino’s cubicle and went farther back into the secure area, the really secure area, past the new plastic sheeting separating their airflow from ours. Something about wanting to contain contagions. Honestly, computer viruses had only morphed to infect non-Tech-implanted humans once, and we had vaccines now; separate air for four cubicles was overkill. I mean, if we were all going to die, we would have died by now. But there was no telling the head of Electronic Crimes that.

  I was carrying a piece of paper with all the information we knew about the strangler, written in nice, clear, large block letters, arranged logically by type and logic. I was out of time, out of patience, with a vision riding on my back and a tag in my head. If I wanted to save Swartz, to save my job and find Emily’s killer, I had to act. I had to make this happen—me, no waiting for anyone else.

  The cubicle I needed was the second on the right, currently full of the large bulk of a man.

  “Hey, Bob,” I said.

  “What now?” Bob turned. He was a balding caricature of an aging cop, the kind who went four steps after a suspect, then collapsed into a panting mess. Bob didn’t have to chase suspects on foot, though; and he was as stubborn as a bulldog about getting the answers you were looking for in a much, much more dangerous space than just the street. Bob dealt with the Net, the tiny, dangerous, cracked remains of the data-soaked superhighway that had once ruled the world. In that space, he was a cowboy, a cowboy with an Uzi and an attitude, and the power he held sat badly on that pudgy body, disturbing as hell and twice as dangerous.

  Bob had an implant—a real, honest-to-God computer implant—in the back of his neck that tapped directly into his brain, and he was one of the youngest people I’d ever seen with a legal one. When untold thousands of people had died in a rash of wetware viruses and electrical burnouts during the Tech Wars, well, implants weren’t so popular anymore.

  “Something you needed, genius?” Bob asked with a scowl.

  “I have a new problem for you.”

  His eyes lit up, and he grabbed the paper out of my hand. Twenty-eight seconds while he processed the text, implant-aided sight making short work of the information. The computer screen behind him flashed strings of numbers, images of snakes and trees, and a few disturbingly vivid crime scene photos. It stayed on the last, the brown-red pool of blood by a woman’s bare feet, a picture from the scene I’d seen a few days ago.

  Bob looked up, the living personification of a computer prompt.

  “I strongly suspect this guy is in the databases of several federal agencies, since he’s associated with Fiske, which is a federal case. I also know he’s been tied to maybe a dozen murders here in the metro area. But I don’t know what the agencies have to say about him, and I don’t know which murders.”

  “That’s an open-ended query. Not a walk in the park. Plus the feds are off-limits.”

  “As are you, supposedly. But here we are.”

  “It’ll cost you.”

  “I saw these dulce de leche donuts with a side of Bavarian crème on the way into work,” I said. The donut shop would take my stupid cardboard food voucher from the department; I wasn’t allowed to handle money, but they got more than half of their business from the cops anyway and didn’t mind paperwork. “How about a dozen?”

  “Every day for a week.”

  Inside, I winced. His prices were getting higher. “You used to do this for me for free.”

  “You used to ask easier questions.”

  “Fine. You want the donuts first thing in the morning?”

  “Afternoons.”

  “Fine.”

  Bob turned all the way around in the chair and faced the computer. The screen started flashing pictures too fast for me to follow, the occasional polygon, a federal seal, and then it hurt my eyes to even try—I looked at the side of the cubicle and watched the flashing light, the shadow of Bob’s hands conducting like an orchestra.

  This is why I went to Bob even though I wasn’t supposed to. This was why I paid whatever the greedy idiot wanted. Because this search capability—well, the computer, a secure computer like Cherabino’s, could do that in a few seconds. No, what took so long is sorting through the data, knocking out the important bits from the dross of the thing. And that—that—is what Bob’s brain on an implant could do in thirty seconds or less.

  Only right now it was taking longer. A lot longer. Maybe this federal database thing hadn’t been a good idea after all. Maybe I’d get a call and a visit from scary men in black suits . . . And, well, prison was starting to sound all too possible. The prison or the Guild. At least neither was that horrible vision, I told myself.

  The screen went bright red, and the phone rang.

  Bob tapped his temple, and the ringing abruptly stopped. “No, it’s me. We’re pulling a file. Literally one file. Calm down. Yes, I know that’s classified. Do you want plausible deniability or not?” He glanced over at me, a nasty look. “No, it’s for the homicide division. They’re looking into this guy. There’s been some murders in the area. How the hell do I know why they don’t wa
nt to go through channels? You want to loosen up the sphincter or what? Yeah, yeah, I’ll decrypt it so they can’t look at your codes. Like I wouldn’t do that anyway. Yeah, you can delete the military mission crap. We don’t care about that stuff anyways.” He tapped his temple again. “Cranky bastards.”

  Then he turned all the way around in the chair, and I could almost see the data swimming behind his eyes. Suddenly, abruptly, it was gone and he looked tired. He waved in my general direction. “You now owe me two weeks of donuts. And coffee. The file will be printing on the computer by the time you get there; they just need a minute to redact stuff.”

  I turned to go, but his voice stopped me before I left the cubicle.

  “You have two days before I tell Zahir; it’ll show up then anyway, and I’m not taking the fall for it.” He paused. “Why not just read it off somebody’s hard drive?” He meant their minds, I was sure. Typically we called that wetware, but Bob was jacked in.

  I looked back at him. “Telepathy is local. Twenty feet or so, unless there’s something that breaks the rules. This guy’s in Washington or somewhere else with the other spooks. Much, much farther than twenty feet.”

  “Oh.” He turned back around, giving me the cold shoulder. As if the thought of such limitations was dumb, and unbelievable.

  Bob’s phone rang, and he answered, “Yeah, he’s still here.”

  He handed the phone off to me without explanation.

  “You’re lucky I have a flag on your record,” a man’s voice said without introduction. “I just intercepted a major search-and-contain order against you. Why exactly do you need classified information?”

  “Who is this?” I asked warily.

  “Special Agent Jarrod, FBI. I called you a few days ago. I’ll repeat myself. Why do you need this information?”

  I swallowed. Great, now I was in trouble with the FBI. “We have a murder case we’ve traced back to this guy. I’ve read the signatures myself, and we’ve traced his methods back to at least fifty other for-hire kills in the area. But I don’t have a name and I don’t have a way to get to him, other than his association with somebody I’ve been told we cannot touch. I need more information; I knew the victim and I am not, I repeat, not going to let her killer get away scot-free because I didn’t get all the information. No matter what Cherabino says. No matter what the rules say.”