by Malka Older
“You all right?” Sanz-Vidal is asking.
“I’ve got him pinned,” Roz says, breathless. “Second floor of the centenal hall. You have my location. Listen, I think I can hold him; go after the other two! They may be in the canteen, and they should be considered dangerous and slippery. Anything you want to add?” she asks the man she’s sitting on.
“Fucking informant!” he spits.
“Charming,” Sanz-Vidal comments. “Almost there. You have any restraints?”
“I wasn’t planning on making an arrest,” Roz huffs. The assistant is struggling and she is wondering if she should hit him again, but she finds it hard to do out of the heat of battle. She stomps her boot on his wrist instead. He grunts, but Roz has thrown herself off-balance and he’s able to push her off and stumble to his feet. He’s barely started to scurry down the hall, though, when a dark-haired woman in a YourArmy uniform barrels up the stairs and slams him to the floor.
She has him trussed in seconds, but Roz is already shaking her arm. “The other two! We’ve got to get them!”
Sanz-Vidal takes her time standing up and looking Roz over. “There’s another team making for the canteen. Let’s go see what they found.”
* * *
The YourArmy team found a handful of surprised diners, fragments of glass, and a canteen manager angry about the theft of two plates, two sets of silverware, and a wine glass. By the time Sanz-Vidal and Roz get there, after leaving the would-be fugitive government aide to stew in the reinforced backseat of the YourArmy scooter and putting a guard on Lel Jaqeli (“Barsali? No! He would never betray me!”), the InfoSec team has arrived and is running basic forensics.
“Anything?” Roz asks the team lead, Mysoon.
She shakes her head. “We’ll get a proper forensics team in here to be sure. We’re testing the glass fragments and the wine stain, but I don’t think we’ll find anything useful.”
“And the feeds?”
“Take a look.” Mysoon shrugs her a compilation they’ve already put together, all the feeds showing the canteen and its entrances. Roz watches carefully, feeling an eerie déjà vu to the hours of scanning Kas vids with Maria. She can’t quite hold back a shiver as she sees an arm and a bit of hair cross the corner of the vid.
“You see?” Mysoon says, watching her. “They were very careful.” The two men have to cross the vidstream eventually—to get their food and go back to their seats—and their physiques match the description Lel gave, but they cover their faces each time: an arm draped casually across to scratch the opposite shoulder, a hand rubbing the forehead, a scarf pulled over the mouth and nose. Their table is on the edge of the vid, and by pulling their chairs to the farthest extent they eat outside of its range.
“At least we know they’re the right guys,” Roz says.
* * *
Lel Jaqeli insists on throwing a supra for Roz and Corporal Sanz-Vidal to thank them for, as he puts it, saving his life. Roz has her doubts about that, but she needs to talk to the singing footballer anyway. Every time she tries, he laughs and equivocates. She’s pretty sure he’s terrified of Information retribution for whatever he’s done, and while she’s already put a travel restriction on him, she’s not ready to haul him into a holding cell yet (or, rather, have Mysoon haul him). Given his nerves, a social occasion might be more conducive to good intel. Still, Roz stuffs a chemical analysis sensor in her pocket before the feast, although she feels silly about it.
The supra is held in the open-air section of what Lel refers to as “our best, most wonderful restaurant!” It is far enough on the outskirts of town for a rustic vibe, although a crumbling soviet-era factory across the street mars the pastoral impression. When Roz makes her way to their table tucked under a simple gazebo among beech trees, she finds that Sanz-Vidal is a step ahead of her. “We can’t be sure they won’t keep trying,” she explains as she brushes a chemical analysis sensor along the side of a butter-roasted mushroom cap, then blinks for the results. “No poison,” she reports cheerfully, and pops the mushroom in her mouth.
Roz finds herself wishing she had tested all the mushrooms individually.
They go through a lot of eating, drinking, and small talk before Jaqeli will listen to anything serious. Roz tries to take her time, nibbling olives, exclaiming loudly over the deliciousness of the khachipuri (which she hopes will absorb a lot of alcohol), but Lel keeps urging them to greater feats of culinary appreciation. “Have some salad! What did you think of the fish? Try this pomegranate sauce; it’s delicious, I promise you!” At least he is eating indiscriminately himself; Roz is a little worried about indigestion but no longer fears Jaqeli is trying to poison them.
It takes an hour and a half, three bottles of wine, and five toasts before they can settle down to business. “Look,” Roz says when she finally has his attention. “We’re concerned about other governments that may fall prey to this group. Information isn’t interested in petty issues right now—stretching the regulations or allowing these consultants to come in unlisted. We just need to know what happened.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” Jaqeli says. “I’ll tell you all about it. Have some more wine. So, yes, this group. They came to us before the election, during the campaign. Said they could help us out. At first, it was the same as the others, you know, ‘getting culturally acclimated to Information,’ ‘how to run a campaign without stretching the truth,’ and so on.” Roz, taking a small sip of wine, meets Sanz-Vidal’s startled gaze over her glass—they are both wondering whether that last one is about how to stretch the truth without getting caught. “But then they get here, and it’s different. Did you try the imeruli?”
“Different how?” Roz asks, taking the plate of cheese he’s handing her.
Jaqeli squirms again. “You have to understand. We were new to this. Information seemed … scary.”
“Scary?” Roz repeats. She’s focused on Jaqeli, but she has the sense Sanz-Vidal is rolling her eyes, and remembers that she’s not Information either.
“Well, it’s like you want to know everything. Everything! I mean, once we became a part of the system, it was clearer, there are limits, but even so … before that, it was really scary! It was like…” For the first time in this monologue, possibly since she’s met him, Lel’s voice drops. “We imagined it the way they talk about soviet times.”
Roz has a sudden flashback of Suleyman, back when he was still largely unknown to her, saying something similar. About Sudan. Something she had done. The restaurant! Calling them on those fake stock photos.
Seeing Roz is distracted, Sanz-Vidal takes over the questioning. “So? What did they offer?”
“They told us they could help us find a way around Information,” Jaqeli says. “Not entirely, of course, but a way to carve out some space for ourselves that wouldn’t be under such surveillance, such scrutiny.”
“What—wait,” Roz says, snapping back into the conversation. “Are you talking about feeds?” She messages Maryam silently, asking her to listen in, and opens a visual stream for her.
“Yeah, part of it was the feeds,” Jaqeli says. “That actually made a lot of sense. They told us to take some of the money that Information gave us for all that crazy feed infrastructure, and use it instead for some of the things people need.”
Roz feels like hitting her head against the table. How could she miss this? Sanz-Vidal is eyeing her with worry, and Roz tries to fix her expression. “And besides the feeds?”
Jaqeli waves his hands around, spilling wine from the glass he’s holding. “Something about siphoning off the intel before it gets to Information, I didn’t understand, techie stuff. Barsali handled most of that. Barsali! Do you really think he would have let them kill me?”
Roz gives up on messaging secretly and whispers a message to Mysoon to suggest a new angle of questioning for Barsali, with the vid of the last few minutes attached, then another requesting a techie to get as much as they can out of Jaqeli once he’s sober. Roz tries to extricate herself
from the feast via profuse apologies, and then even more profuse compliments to the food, and then by claiming to be too full to eat another bite. But apparently, dessert is coming, then coffee, and Lel won’t hear of her leaving. In desperation, she excuses herself to the bathroom and calls Maryam from there.
“Did you hear that?” she whisper-yells. The bathroom is small, with stained tiles, two derelict-looking stalls, and an open roof that displays a water treatment system bridging over to the men’s.
“I think I got most of it,” Maryam says.
“It’s exactly the same as DarFur, ToujoursTchad—autonomy, the feeds, the trauma from previous authoritarian governments—I can’t believe I missed this. Of course the feeds were what these consultants were offering them.”
“I’m not following all of that, habibti, but I’m sure you’re right,” Maryam says. “To be honest, I’m more worried about the other part.”
Roz remembers. “Siphoning off intel before it reaches Information?”
“Yeah. That part.”
Roz imagines data being collected and vanishing so completely, they don’t even know it’s gone. “How could they do that?”
“I have no idea,” Maryam answers.
CHAPTER 39
Mishima finds hunting down consultant-assassins an invigorating distraction from fame, China, and sneaky intel leaks. So far, she hasn’t managed to pin the assassins down to any particular affiliation, which makes it tricky. She’s identified unpaid consultancies with six different centenals, all of which lost a head of state, deputy, or centenal governor after the consultant visit. In each case, the name of the consulting company is different, as are the names of their representatives and their professed specialization. Are they changing their names, or is Mishima uncovering a vast network of covert agents?
There is no trace of any of the companies beyond these single episodes. It’s baffling to her that anyone, even a government new to Information access, would hire a company with no references, even one they didn’t plan on paying. That brings her to another similarity among the six cases: there was no bidding process or due diligence done on any of the contracts. It’s an anomaly: all of these governments had processes for hiring consultants, of varying degrees of stringency.
Conclusion: they already knew these guys.
Time to cross-ref. Mishima goes through every link between the six assassinated leaders over the past year, then two years, then three. It’s not hard to imagine there are circumstances under which they would meet, at least virtually if not in person. They were all young, charismatic leaders of movements representing groups that had been beaten down for decades, if not centuries. Not all of the leaders were new to micro-democracy, but they were all representing new governments or at least newly multi-centenal governments. What’s baffling is how they managed to communicate without it getting picked up by Information.
She finds isolated links during their campaigns: Al-Jabali met the organizer from Nuwara Eliya at a virtual conference; the Xinjiang leader was a member of the same governor’s association as the Honduran. It’s possible that contact could have spread this way, word of mouth one by one. It certainly would have been the safest way to avoid detection. But it seems awfully slow and random.
Maybe word of mouth can help her, too. You always miss something doing virtual research. Mishima looks up the Information team that worked with Nuwara Eliya during their transition to micro-democracy, and sends a message to the team lead, asking him to get in touch. There’s an update from Roz about the events in South Ossetia, and she adds that to the mix. There is surprisingly little analysis, given that it’s from Roz, just the timeline of events in that brush with the assassins. Mishima wonders if she’s being careful about what she puts on Information.
With the election over in DarFur—the widow won—Ken is on his way home, and Mishima wants to get her workout in before he arrives. He might be the one who needs pampering this time.
As she skates down the boulevard, building speed, she thinks about how dispersed these assassins seem to be and wonders what they’re after. Are they anti–oppressed ethnic groups? Pro–status quo? Trying to create chaos?
Chaos reminds her of Anarchy and some of the other anti-Information, anti-election groups she’s monitored in the past. Is that where this is headed?
Or is it something more concerted, and she’s just not seeing the pattern? A way for them to seize power?
Which would mean taking power from these governments that are finally getting their first shot.
Or—maybe it’s not about those governments. Maybe they’re the means, not the end. They are thinking globally. Who has real global power?
There is, of course, another point of contact among all of the victims, one so obvious and ubiquitous that she almost missed it: Information.
She needs to call Roz and talk this through with her.
Mishima catches a movement that feels wrong, too fast or too close, from the doorway up ahead on her right. She crouches, throws her arm up, leans into her speed. If she had been running, the metal bar swinging toward her head probably would have caught her, broken her arm at least, but the skates give her the momentum to slide under it.
She spins around, staying low, with one leg out in case she can catch her assailant with a sweep. But no, he stepped back, and now he’s coming after her. He’s a large guy, metal pipe swinging in figure eights in front of him. Fancy. Mishima keeps her spin going and takes off away from him; there’s no way he can catch her on foot while she’s on her skates.
She switches off all comms—a personal rule during battle—and opens a rearview vid from her antennae. He’s not even trying to follow her, which probably means—
The other thug steps out in front of her, and Mishima crashes into him. For once, her helmet comes in handy: it detects the obstacle before she does and explodes out of its collar, enveloping her head with its shell and giving more punch to her impact with the big guy’s chest. Mishima recovers first, bouncing back before he can grab her. She twitches the emergency gesture to switch her blade resistance, so that she can stand and fight without her feet sliding out from under her, and aims a kick at his knee, but he’s already got his balance and is swinging at her. Mishima ducks the hook and gets in a quick jab under the ribs, then pushes away from him. He stumbles with the hit and then roars back at her, fists jabbing.
Mishima isn’t normally into flashy kicks, but hey, at least she’s wearing a crash helmet. She adjusts the resistance on her left blade to almost nothing and puts an edge on her right as she launches into a spinning reverse roundhouse. It works amazingly well, her twist building some serious speed before her foot rakes across his face. As she spins away—and keeps spinning; this isn’t going to be easy to get out of—she sees a massive gash open up on his right cheek.
That’s good enough to hold him, she thinks. She adjusts her friction to slow her turn until she can start skating again, lopsided from the dizziness but still putting distance between her and her attacker. She accelerates toward the crossing into the green center line of the boulevard, wondering where the first guy is, and how many more of them there can be, and who—
Her feet suddenly catch under her at maximum resistance and she trips forward, flying headfirst into the airspace above the road. She pulls herself into a tight-curled bullet and hears the deep thrum of a horn sliding by her. She hits the tarmac in a hard, bouncing roll, skimming painfully along the sidewalk and slamming into the corner of a fence post.
Mishima doesn’t lose consciousness, but there’s a dazed moment of looking up at the sky as though it were her bedroom ceiling, observing from a great distance leaves of a tree and the pointy iron spear of a fence. She thinks she hears music, which alarms her because it seems so improbable. She creaks her head to the side and sees the morning ballroom dancers about half a block down, standing around in clusters, looking toward her.
She hears yelling and remembers, and she’s shaking her head and rolling, much more slo
wly than she’d like, onto her side and then her knees. Her right arm hurts. She pulls her helmet off with her left; it’s absorbed all it can, and she needs all her senses. She can see one of the men on the other side of the street, hollering at cars to stop, careening toward her. She starts to get to her feet, then freezes, realizing what happened. They hacked her skates!
Her right arm must be broken, because it isn’t where she expects it to be but instead limp at her side, so she shucks off her shoes with her left hand and achieves solid ground just before the first thug—blue shirt, burly, mustached—barrels down on her, brandishing the pipe like a baseball bat.
Fortunately, Mishima always carries her stiletto. Pulling it out with her left, she feels a surge of joy that all that left-handed practice will finally come to good use, and she uses that triumphant swell to fuel the blow as she steps inside his swing and jams the knife up under his sternum.
She doesn’t wait to see what happens, jerking her knife back with a twist before the muscles can clench, and turning to stumble toward the dancers. Something is wrong with her left leg, a pulled muscle or a twisted joint. She can stand on it but running is painful. She has probably lost the element of surprise with her knife. Surely one of the dancers will have called emergency services by now?
Mishima backs up against the fence and opens comms, planning to tell Nejime to arrest every Information officer who has worked on the integration of the centenals where assassinations happened, but she is immediately deluged by incoming calls. Six incoming calls at once! Something is going down, but it’ll have to wait until she’s done with this. She sees him as she slams her comms closed, the first man who stepped to her, balding and with a trim chestnut beard. He’s keeping pace with her on the other side of the street. His left hand clapped to a bright red bit of cloth against his face, something metal flashing in his right.
