Wilcox thumbed over the tablet and put it down on the table. ‘I think I’ve heard enough. Thank you for your time, Miss Jansen.’
‘Thank you, Agent Wilcox,’ Aneka said, getting to her feet.
The agent did not look particularly happy as they left. Aneka did not really care about that; ‘just following orders’ was not a valid defence.
~~~
‘Why did you terminate that interview?’ Dowler was glowering as he met Wilcox outside the interview room. ‘I was…’
‘You were trying,’ Wilcox said, ‘to set up a woman with a super-computer for a brain and a damn good lawyer. And the lawyer was right, wasn’t she? You have got some sort of vendetta against Jansen?’ Dowler opened his mouth to respond, but Wilcox was having nothing of it. ‘The next time you pull a stunt like this, sir, I’ll go straight to the Administration about your lack of professionalism.’
Dowler was still glaring as Wilcox stalked away.
Yorkbridge Mid-town, 10.10.528 FSC.
‘I heard about Dowler’s stunt,’ Truelove said. ‘I hope you realise I had nothing to do with that?’ Dinner was over and Winter’s former assistant was sitting in the lounge to chat.
‘Yeah,’ Aneka said, grinning as she brought over a tray of drinks. ‘We had figured out that you would have probably stopped him. How did you find out? The way you’re talking it sounds like Dowler was trying to keep you out of the loop.’
‘Wilcox told me. Yesterday, admittedly. He took his time, but he told me. He maybe thought I’d be unreceptive, considering that he was in charge of the interrogations after Winter’s assassination.’
‘Huh, yeah. He wasn’t on your favourite people list.’
‘No,’ Truelove replied, ‘though I heard he was pretty unhappy about the mass arrest. I’ve also heard a rumour that he’s looking closely at Dowler. Wilcox is Internal Affairs, so…’
‘So he shouldn’t have been interrogating Aneka the other day,’ Ella pointed out.
‘No, he shouldn’t have.’
‘And he needs to stop looking at Dowler,’ Aneka said.
Truelove frowned. ‘I’d have thought you’d be pleased about someone else looking into Dowler’s activities.’
‘I’m just not keen on having to show off that armour you didn’t see while rescuing Wilcox from a hit.’ Her lips twitched. ‘I don’t like him that much.’
‘You think they’d try to kill him over this?’
‘They tried to kill you didn’t they?’ Ella said.
Truelove nodded slowly and looked over at the fourth person in the room, Justine Nivalis, her bodyguard. Aneka and Ella knew that Justine was a slightly special one of Winter’s avatars, but Truelove did not.
‘They have a point,’ Justine said. ‘Wilcox may not be the best agent we have, but it would be a shame to lose him. Our mysterious assailants…’
‘Do we really have to use euphemisms for them?’ Ella asked. ‘We all know who they are. They sent a gunship to try to get Aneka on Farrington’s World.’
Justine smiled at her. ‘If we get into the habit of saying who they are at home, we might slip at work. We have no evidence anyone is acknowledging that identified them. Farrington’s World is being blamed on a rogue naval officer.’
‘Of course, nothing’s gone past me to indicate that the Agency is looking for him,’ Truelove said. ‘If the Herosians are actually looking for him… Well, I’m an analyst and I think it’s pretty unlikely.’
‘Anyway,’ Justine went on, ‘we know that these unnamed bad guys have a habit of eliminating threats. If Wilcox becomes one then their course of action is obvious.’
‘It won’t be though,’ Aneka said. ‘They can’t risk a direct assassination or a simulated mugging. This would really have to look like an accident.’ She paused. ‘That can’t be easy to engineer these days. Everything’s so safe. Everything is monitored by computers, and if they messed with the computers someone would be able to figure that out.’
‘That’s true. I’ll mention it to Sharissa. It’s her job to come up with threat assessments.’
‘This,’ Ella said, ‘is a morbid topic of conversation.’
‘Yeah, that’s true,’ Truelove replied, ‘but what do we have to talk about besides work?’
Ella giggled. ‘I don’t know. How about… have you managed to entrap Justine into bed yet?’
Truelove blushed, but Justine said, ‘I entrapped her. I like to work closely with those I’m guarding.’
Aneka smirked. ‘Someone could attack her while she’s in bed.’
‘I had never thought of it like that,’ Ella mused. ‘I mean, if they did you would lose valuable seconds getting from one room to the next.’
‘Aneka’s obviously been training you in tactics,’ Justine suggested. ‘That is exactly how I explained it to Elaine.’
Truelove shrugged. ‘I didn’t buy it for a second, but I’m not going to pass up the sex, I’m a Jenlay.’
Downtown Yorkbridge, 11.10.528 FSC.
Darren Wilcox watched the black-haired woman sitting beside him sip her wine and tried to work out how he had managed to get so lucky. She grinned at him and said, ‘What?’
‘Uh… nothing,’ he replied, sipping from his own glass. ‘I was just… admiring the view.’
She had a pretty blush. She had a pretty face. No, a beautiful face. She was slim, petite, with the kind of narrow, angular facial set he had always found attractive. Her legs were long; her black hair fell over moderately large breasts, which were barely concealed by her dress that was made up of many thin strips of metallic, silver bioplastic. She looked like a woman who had gone out at the end of the weekend to find a sleeping partner, and somehow she had picked him.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘I’m not really that fond of bars.’
‘You’re not?’
‘They’re noisy. No privacy.’
‘You’d prefer to go somewhere else?’
She looked down, timidly, almost submissively. ‘There’s a hotel about two blocks south of here…’
Wilcox sank the rest of his drink. He was feeling impulsive tonight. Why should he stop himself having a little fun for once?
12.10.528 FSC.
Sharissa’s eyes scanned over the scene critically. It was not a pleasant view. The body lay on the bed where it had fallen, just as the service girl had found it. She was currently in the local hospital being treated for shock. There was less blood than one might have expected, but then a laser drilling through a Jenlay skull tended to cauterise the wound.
Looking up she could see the scorch mark on the ceiling. The beam had been less focussed after burning through Wilcox’s throat, then his skull and brain. He had been sitting up, obviously. The pistol was a service issue, polychromatic, light pistol. A Crawford-Patrick model. Sharissa had no doubt it would be registered to Wilcox.
It looked like a suicide, clean and simple. The problem was that Sharissa could see no reason why Wilcox would have killed himself, or why he had come to the hotel room to do it.
‘Did the scans come up with anything?’ she asked.
The forensics tech was looking at his tablet. He looked bored. ‘Nothing. No one else was here with him. That’s preliminary, obviously. We need to run the data through a full analysis, but we can’t find any genetic material from another party here. The place is clean.’
‘What’s with the reddening of the skin?’
The tech looked down at the body. Wilcox’s face and neck did look red, flushed. ‘Uh… That’s probably blood pressure changes from the beam. That kind of heat causes a lot of fluid expansion in soft tissue like the brain. Brains have a lot of blood vessels and the beam would boil the fluid.’
Sharissa nodded. It made sense, to some extent anyway.
‘I’d like this room cleared. Now.’ The voice came from a man who had just entered the small suite. Tall, well-built, with blonde hair and cold blue eyes, and hard features which Sharissa recognised.
‘Edgerton, what are
you doing here?’
‘A senior agent has died under unusual circumstances,’ Edgerton replied. ‘This is an IA matter, Torrence.’
‘Wilcox was a lead investigator in Internal Affairs. Agency policy dictates that investigations into the death of an agent are not investigated by their own department. And policy also says that the death of an agent is a security issue…’
‘Not anymore. This comes right from the top. IA is taking this.’
Sharissa’s eyes narrowed, but she said, ‘Okay. I’ll be personally monitoring the case until I get it back.’
‘Sure, Torrence,’ Edgerton replied as Sharissa walked past him to the door. ‘Good luck with that.’
Yorkbridge Mid-town, 15.10.528 FSC.
‘I know you were talking to Elaine about Wilcox getting murdered,’ Sharissa said, ‘but there’s really no evidence that it wasn’t a suicide.’
The reason they were discussing the recently deceased agent was that Sharissa and Janna were over for dinner; Janna and Ella were in the kitchen, and Sharissa had mentioned the case. Aneka had looked distinctly dubious.
‘He was found dead in a hotel bedroom by the room service staff,’ Sharissa went on. ‘He was definitely killed by his own pistol. The weapon log indicates that no one else used it, and besides, there was no one else in the room with him.’
Aneka’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘How do you know he was alone?’
‘They went over the room with scanners. No genetic material from anyone else.’
‘You guys really don’t get many murders in this city, do you?’
‘Huh?’ Sharissa said, looking perplexed.
‘It’s a hotel room. How is it even vaguely possible that the only genetic material in it belongs to Wilcox?’
‘Uh… I hadn’t thought of that, but now you say it…’
‘Okay,’ Aneka said, her tone thoughtful, ‘what else… The laser burned through?’ Sharissa nodded. ‘What shape was the burn on the ceiling?’
‘Uh… Well, a laser burn. A point impact blurred by vapour diffusion.’
‘Short duration?’
Sharissa frowned thoughtfully. ‘No. There was some wobble. It must have been about a one-second burst.’
‘Yeah, when he fired his gun, his body tensed from shock, locking his finger on the trigger for a second, but he would have either shifted back or wobbled. The ceiling track should have been a line… or a spiral. Someone was there, holding him upright. I’m guessing a woman. Someone had to persuade him into a hotel bedroom.’ She looked up for a second. ‘Well, in my day it’d have been a woman, but we’re talking Jenlay…’
‘No, I checked up on him after the inquisition. He’s never been known to have a male partner. It’s not impossible, but it’s unlikely. He must have met her in a bar…’
‘Probably something not too far away. One or two blocks. Walking distance, maybe even short walking distance. A bit of an urgent need to be alone and naked.’
‘IA are already classifying it as a suicide,’ Sharissa said. ‘Stress induced. No further need to investigate.’
‘And you’re going to leave it at that?’
Sharissa grinned. ‘Vashma no!’
‘Okay, but be careful. I do not want to have to look at burn patterns on your ceiling and realise you didn’t commit suicide.’
‘They’d never do that with me.’
‘No?’
‘No one would believe it. First, that would be two high-ranking agents committing suicide in short order, and second…’ She turned to look toward the kitchen where Janna and Ella were giggling. ‘No one would believe it. If someone wanted to kill me they’d hit me on an op.’
‘You’d die when your subject was attacked.’ Aneka glanced at the kitchen. ‘Don’t let that happen either. Janna would never speak to me again.’
22.10.528 FSC.
Ella held up a small, red data card and Aneka looked at it a little suspiciously. ‘A blonde teenager bumped into me on the way home,’ Ella said. ‘She slipped this into my bodice, would you believe, while she was helping me up and apologising a lot.’
‘A teenager we know?’
‘Uh-huh. And it’s red…’
Aneka took the card and headed for the bedroom. Locked in her gun safe, hidden away at the back of one of the wardrobes, was a secure card reader. Despite being quite secure in and of itself, the device had no decryption system built into it; that was handled once the entire package had been uploaded to Aneka’s internal storage. It took her twenty minutes or so to go over the contents once it had been decrypted.
‘Basically,’ Aneka explained, ‘it’s from Justine. Someone claiming to know who killed Winter, and why, has come forward. They say they’re being hunted. They’ll come in, but they only trust Elaine Truelove. Sharissa will be handling the security and extraction.’
‘So it’s a trap,’ Ella said flatly.
‘Well, yeah.’
‘So why are they going to do it?’
‘In case it isn’t a trap, but with the stipulations for the meeting…’
‘Like?’
‘Hand weapons only. No more than three agents besides Sharissa and Elaine. The meeting is to take place in a wooded area about twenty klicks outside the city. Winter sent topographic maps and aerial photographs, and it’s prime ambush territory. It’s a trap.’
Ella’s hands clenched into fists and she bit her lip, worry written all over her face. ‘Can we do anything? And by “we” I obviously mean you.’
Aneka flashed her a grin. ‘Well, Winter’s given me a lot of information…’
22km North-North-East of Yorkbridge, 23.10.528 FSC.
‘TacNet up and running?’ Aneka asked silently.
‘Full tactical network orchestration is engaged,’ Al replied. ‘Data feeds from the passive sensor array are assimilated. I have hacked the communications network the agents are using, and included their bio-monitor feeds in the available data. I have also managed to patch into the air traffic control system for the city and I am monitoring the radar grid for this area. It is possible that Justine has detected my intrusion, but no one else has and she will say nothing.’
‘And your new software…?’
‘Is functioning perfectly. This is not the field trial I had planned for it. Something less critical involving a simple archaeology expedition would have been less of a stress test.’
‘Maybe, but I trust you and it’ll be useful. Give me a display of the area.’
It was not so much a display as an environment. Aneka was sealed away within her nanosuit; even her eyes were covered in a layer of living metal. Since she saw through the ‘eyes’ of the suit’s sensors it was easy enough to replace that with a virtual environment representing a bird’s eye view of the area, in three dimensions, stitched together from multispectral sensor images and manufactured data. It took a second or two to adjust to the sudden shift in perspective, then…
‘This is amazing. I feel like I can see everything. I’m a tactician, not a strategist, but this makes me feel like I could do both.’
‘If it were not for your comprehension speed, the influx of data would be overwhelming,’ Al reminded her. ‘You are rather more capable of handling this sensory load than a normal person would be.’
‘Huh.’
Sharissa, Justine, and Truelove were in a clearing within a large coppice of moderately aged trees. There were two more agents with them, taking up positions just outside the clearing to watch the two main ways in and out, to east and south-west. Aneka’s position was also marked, four metres up a tree on the north side of the clearing. Between her camouflage and the canopy she was invisible to anyone below.
‘Time?’ Aneka asked.
‘It is ten minutes until the appointed rendezvous time. No sign of the informant.’
‘I guess we just have to wait then.’
~~~
Fifteen minutes later they were still waiting and Aneka could tell from the radio traffic that Sharissa was getting
restive.
‘Core One to Band Two, anything?’ The blonde’s voice was tense. That was unsurprising.
‘Nothing, Core. Quiet as the grave.’ That was the man on the south-west approach.
‘Band Three?’
‘Nothing. All quiet.’
Aneka frowned. Three was moving as she spoke, shifting from her place on the eastward track to a spot further north.
‘Her pulse and breathing are accelerated,’ Al commented.
‘Have we got a visual of where she is?’
‘Not that specific area.’
‘We give it another five minutes,’ Sharissa said, ‘and then we get out of here.’
‘I think,’ Aneka said, moving smoothly out from the cleft between the two branches she had occupied for the last two hours, ‘that we’ll go take a look at Miss Three. Drop the tactical, but keep monitoring.’ Her vision shifted to the view through her eyes, or the face of her suit anyway, and she located the descender which would drop her silently to the forest floor by way of a monofilament line.
Getting around the woods without making noise meant moving slowly, but the trees were not too close together and she had her suit’s camouflage system. And Three was busy prepping some sort of short-barrelled grenade launcher from a Bi-weave bag when Aneka found her. That took her attention away from her surroundings, which was either an indication of bad training, or that the woman was nervous about what she was up to.
‘Smoke or gas grenades,’ Al said. ‘Designed to incapacitate rather than kill.’
‘Huh.’ Aneka watched as the woman checked her watch and then shifted forward. Something was about to happen.
‘Movement on the north side,’ Al said. ‘They are camouflaged, but the passive sensors have too broad a spectral range.’
‘Movement!’ Two said. ‘I’ve got a lone figure approaching.’
‘Al?’ Aneka asked.
‘Sensors on that side are detecting nothing.’ And that meant someone had got to two of Sharissa’s people.
‘Three? Anything on your side?’
‘Nothing, Core.’ Three lifted to a more upright position and settled her grenade launcher.
Aneka Jansen 5: The Greatest Heights of Honour Page 6
