Final Inquiries

by Roger MacBride Allen

  "Sure they have," said Frank. "Otherwise, what am I doing here?" he asked, gesturing around the room. "You're off to a good start. Don't blow it with cheap mind games."

  "Point taken, point scored," Wolfson said drily. "But I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess you understand that cooperating with me will help prove you're in the clear. Let's reset and start from the beginning. You be the BSI field agent and I'll be the debriefer."

  "Sure. Let's pretend. And we can even pretend it's not going to be my neck that gets whacked at the end of all this."

  Wolfson ignored the snide comment. "Two nights ago, then. It's after closing time, after dinner. You decide to head back to the joint ops center."

  "That's right."

  "Why work such late hours?"

  "There's a lot of work that piles up, and in case you hadn't noticed, there isn't a lot to do around here. Might as well work instead of staring at the wall. Though I've been doing plenty of that, these last two days."

  Once again she ignored the barbs. "And that's it? No other reason?"

  "Well--all right. One other. Two, if I want to go easy on myself. The second reason was that there was a big meet with the Vixa and the Kendari that people thought might happen two days from then--today, I guess it would be--and I wanted to make sure we had all our ducks in a row. The first reason was that--here's a stunning surprise--I don't much like Kendari, and they're never around the ops center that time of night. They have their grand ceremonial dinner right about then. I figured I'd have the place to myself, without some half-wolf half-ape centaur-thing growling and muttering to herself right in front of me. Brox was--is--not so bad, but Emelza just can't--couldn't--keep quiet. It drove me batty."

  Frank realized a moment too late that he had just handed Wolfson another little bit of motive for his killing the damned Kendari. He waited for her to slap him down for making such pejorative statements about Kendari. She didn't say a word--but the expression on her face spoke volumes. She just scribbled a note into her datapad, and that only served to make Frank even more nervous.

  "I'd say that's enough reason for going in after hours. What's your usual procedure for entering the ops center?"

  "Well, the scanlogger is supposed to detect my ID badge and release the outer door automatically. I just pull it open and pull it shut, then enter the combo on the inner door, pull it open, and go on in. The doors are rigged so you can't open them both at once--so if you get past the outer blast door on a phony ID or something you're stuck in the vestibule if you don't know the combo or the keypad unit doesn't like your fingerprints. That's the theory. But we get so much interference on so many frequencies that the scanloggers hardly ever work the way they're supposed to. Maybe the Vixa are jamming them on purpose--or maybe the Vix just like messing with us. So most times I have to punch in the combo on the outer door too."

  "That what happened two nights ago?"

  "Yeah."

  "Okay, so you pass through the outer blast door, and then the inner door. You enter the main, central room of the ops center."

  "Right. We just call it main ops, usually."

  "What's it look like?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "Are the lights on? Is the room orderly? Is there anyone there? Was there anything unusual?"

  "Are you trying to play cute?"

  "No, I'm trying to walk you through this without asking leading questions. Are you trying to play dumb?"

  Frank hesitated, thought for a second. It was precisely the sort of question he should have been asking himself--and somehow, he hadn't. "Everything was pretty much normal," he said. "The joint ops building is built like a tank--built to be defensible against one side or the other attacking it. It's much stronger than the section of wall between the compounds that it replaced. But one result of that is that it's windowless. No light or air from the outside, so that means the lights and environment system--the air circulators and heating--pretty much have to be on at all times--or at least all times that someone is there. The Kendari like to set the lighting a little different than we do, and they like it a little warmer in there than we do--but no big deal. We argue a little over the thermostat, that's all. So the lights and air were on. I can't swear, but I'd say that the lights and temps were set to Kendari mode, if that means anything."

  "Any odd sounds, or smells, anything like that?"

  "Not that I noticed."

  "Was there anyone else there?"

  "You mean, besides Emelza--"

  "Yeah. Besides Emelza and you."

  "No. No one that I saw."

  "If there had been anyone else in the building, would you have noticed?"

  "Why do you ask?"

  "I ask the questions, Frank. Some to get information, some to distract you from a theory I'm working on, some to get you in the right attitude, willing to cooperate. Maybe it's absolutely vital that I get a clear answer to that question. Maybe I'm just asking it to jog your sense memory a bit, get your brain to think back to what it looked and smelled and felt like that night. So--if there had been anyone else in the building, would you have noticed?"

  It couldn't be that casual a question. She had asked it the second time in exactly the same words as the first time. "Not necessarily. It's a fair-sized building--more like two buildings that meet in the middle, really. A Kendari side and a human side. Main ops is almost like the lobby that links them. But there are side rooms and storage rooms and so on. I've hardly ever been on the Kendari side. On our side, we're built to withstand a siege, if it came to that. Crazy, paranoid stuff--but that was the requirement that came down when the ambassador sought permission to build our half of the thing. So we have bunkers and food supplies tucked away in the lower levels. My understanding is that the Kendari have pretty much the same deal on their side. So, yeah, someone could have been in the building without my hearing or seeing it, easy."

  "Would you have heard anyone come in or out of the building?"

  "Oh, yeah. That's for sure. When the blast door on either side opens and shuts, it's like a bass drum in an echo chamber. They rumble along on their tracks, and slam into place, and you definitely hear it. You feel it."

  "No other entrances? No secret tunnels or anything like that?"

  Frank snorted derisively. "Not outside of vid shows. There is an escape tunnel--but they deliberately left it incomplete when they built it."

  "What happened? They run out of money?"

  "No. Just no place to hide the exit. The compound is completely surrounded by roads. No private or hidden spot to put the tunnel exit. So the horizontal tunnel ends in a vertical shaft, and the vertical shaft ends in a metal lid, a meter below the surface of the road. If anyone used it, to get in or out, they'd have to dig or blast that meter of rock and dirt and road surface. There would be a hole in the road surface a meter across. Someone just might notice that. And, by the way, just because we are paranoid, we do a seismic perimeter check once a week--and we detect it when the Kendari do a seismic check once every twelve days. If someone dug a hole in the ground, we'd know it."

  "Okay, fine. Good. Let's get back to what you saw and did. You arrive in the ops center, and walk into main ops. The lights and temperature are basically normal. Did you note anything else unusual other than Emelza?"

  Frank thought for a moment and shook his head. "No."

  "All right then," said Hannah. "Walk me through the rest of it."

  "I closed the inner human-side blast door, walked into main ops, and I saw her--Emelza--at once. Pretty hard to miss."

  "Describe her appearance."

  "Different from what you've seen, or will see," Frank said at once, instantly knowing he was saying it too eagerly. But it was too late, and he plowed on. "I wanna start off with that. I've had some brushes with the Kendari before. Once I was part of the team that went in and tidied up after an encounter between them and a Human Supremacy cell. You can check my record on that. I've seen Kendari corpses before, and they undergo a lot of postmortem alteratio
n, if you want to use the technical terms. They stiffen up, and their bodies twist around in kind of odd ways."

  "Okay, what's your point?"

  "The point is I've been locked up here for two days thinking this thing through. I don't want to get nailed to the wall because someone who doesn't know corpses sees my description is different from what was there later on, yells 'aha' and decides they've caught me in a lie."

  "Fine, corpses change. So describe what you saw."

  "Not a great deal, because I didn't have much time. I saw her lying on the floor in the center of main ops the moment I looked over. I went over and knelt beside her, being careful as hell not to touch anything. I could see at once she was dead. Not breathing, not moving, eyes fixed and open."

  "She was a xeno, an alien. How could you be so sure? For all you could know, she was in a trance state, or a coma, or some weird sudden-onset hibernation."

  "Hey, Senior Special Agent Wolfson, I'm not all that much dumber than you. Yeah, I thought of that--but what was I supposed to do? Shake her and wake her up? You're right. I don't know aliens. If she was in a coma or something, I would be as likely to kill her as revive her. The best I could do for her would be to notify her own people and let them deal with it."

  Frank glanced at the camera peeking out of Wolfson's shirt pocket, and wondered what sort of sensors were hooked up to it. There were probably some sort of stress detectors that would do pretty fair work as lie detectors--and he might have just given them something to detect. Nothing he had just said was, strictly speaking, false--but it was plenty misleading. He had thought of the possibility that she was in a coma or altered state. And it was no doubt true that the best thing he could have done in the absence of real knowledge or expertise was to call in her own people. But the minor detail he was leaving out was that he had thought of all that a full twenty-four hours after the fact. At the time, he simply assumed she was dead.

  "All right," said Wolfson. "We've got you kneeling down in front of her, deciding not to touch anything. Then what?"

  "Then, not much of anything. I gave it another twenty seconds--I counted it out--just to be sure I didn't see any sign of breathing. I didn't."

  "What did you see?"

  "I told you--a dead Kendari!"

  "And you gave me a long song and dance about how Kendari bodies change appearance when they die. So tell me how the body looked when you saw it, and everything else you saw."

  What was she after? Did she just want to get a good description at a known time, so as to zero in on time of death? Or was there some detail she was watching for, something he had to include to prove himself? Or was it that something big and obvious happened, and she needed to give him every chance to mention it, because his not knowing about it would prove something? There was no way to know. She wasn't kidding about not handing out leading questions. He had no choice but to play it straight and hope for the best. He thought carefully, and began to speak.

  "She was lying on her side, the right side of her body facing up," he began. "I couldn't see any marks or indications of struggle or violence on her body. No--not quite true, now that I think of it. There was one small bruise or bump right at the back of her neck. Unless it was just Kendari acne. Just a little red mark, less than a centimeter across. She was lying stretched on her side, with her legs fairly relaxed. Her tail was sort of curled in toward her legs, almost as if she were sleeping on her side--though I don't think Kendari do sleep in that pose. I could see a discharge from the eye and the ear that were visible, and from the nose. The skin was drawn back from her mouth, in sort of a snarl or a grimace, and the inside of her mouth was badly inflamed. And, of course, there was that coffee mug right by her. I couldn't know for sure, of course, but it sure looked like caffeine poisoning to me."

  "You know how to spot the symptoms of Kendari caffeine poisoning?" Wolfson asked skeptically.

  "Are you kidding? Zhen Chi briefs us once a month at least. There are posters up in all the offices. There are huge restrictions on eating or drinking anything with the slightest hint of caffeine in it. Yeah, I know. Everyone here knows it in their sleep."

  "Glad to hear it," said Hannah. "Bear in mind I said I was avoiding leading questions. I didn't say anything about misleading questions. All right, keep going."

  "That's about it, really, in terms of what I saw."

  "Sometimes people see more than they think they have. Was there anything else? Any other marks or indicators on the body?"

  Frank frowned and shook his head. "I don't think so. I didn't notice anything else unusual."

  "How about the mug, the cup? Talk to me about that."

  "I didn't look at it all that carefully," Frank lied. That mug could be nothing but trouble for him, and he wanted to stay away from it. "It was white. I think it had the BSI logo on it. It looked like it broke in the fall. That's about it."

  "What about what you just said about caffeine safety rules? Was having coffee mugs in the joint ops center normal?"

  "No," said Frank, as emphatically as he could. "No, and no again. That was one reason none of us much liked the duty in there. A total ban on caffeine in all forms."

  "So what was that mug doing there?"

  "I got no idea. Ask whoever brought it in."

  "Part of the caffeine safety rules seems to be everyone having their own personal cup or mug. Where's yours?"

  Oh, hell and damn, thought Frank. Why did she have to go there? "It's missing," he said. No point hiding that anymore. Not when she'd find it out anyway. "I lost track of it about a week ago. It was in my office--not in the joint ops center, my office in the main groundside embassy building. It could have gotten pushed off the edge of my desk, and fallen into the trash can. Or maybe somebody broke it by accident and just threw it away without telling me." Or maybe it got hidden away so it could be prepared for use as a murder weapon.

  "Describe it," said Wolfson.

  Frank allowed himself a moment of annoyance, and the luxury of letting it show. "Don't tell me you're not playing cute, Wolfson," he said. He tapped the mug she had brought him that morning. "Just like this one. And just like about fifty or sixty or a hundred or two hundred that we've handed out to visitors and members of delegations and so on in the last year."

  "There's the same and there's identical," said Wolfson. "That mug is brand-new. I swiped it out of a case of them in the back of the Snack Shack. Was yours old? New? Worn-looking? Chipped?"

  "Yeah, my mug was worn and chipped--two weeks ago. But that one I dropped myself. Smashed to bits. I threw it away. So I got a new one. Stole it from the same place you stole that one."

  "If there are so many of them around, how did you tell yours from all the others?"

  If that wasn't a leading question, it sure as hell was the next best thing to one. "I marked it, of course. But you knew that."

  "How? How did you mark it?"

  "I used an indelible marker pen and wrote my name on the bottom of it."

  "Your full name?"

  "Yeah. Right. 'Special Agent Francis Xavier Milkowski.' With smiley faces instead of dots on all the 'i's. And I drew in pink and blue flowers all around my name."

  Wolfson just sat there, staring at him, waiting. Finally he gave in. "I wrote my nickname. 'Milk.' What my friends call me."

  "Something tells me you want me to stick with 'Frank,'" she said.

  "For the time being," he said. "Anyway, I'm not feeling that friendly toward you, right now--Hannah."

  "I'll bear up somehow--Frank," she said, her voice stiff, but not unkind. "For what it's worth, I might be the best friend you've got in the world--in all the worlds--right now." She glanced down at her notes, but Frank had no doubt that was just to make him sweat for a beat or two before the next phase of the duel. But it worked.

  "All right," she said. "Back to the narrative. You see Emelza. She looks pretty dead. You see the coffee mug. All correct?"

  "All correct."

  "How closely did you examine the coffee mu
g?" she asked.

  I saw it was mine. I saw my name written on the bottom and I broke out in a cold sweat and stayed the hell away from it like it was radioactive and covered with plague germs. That part I didn't expect. Frank kept his poker face on and shrugged. "I saw it was a coffee mug. A white BSI mug. I think it was a little broken. Maybe a chip had come out of it. I didn't look at it that close. There was this dead alien right in front of me that sort of drew my attention."

  "Nothing else about the mug?"

  "Nothing," he said, and instantly wished he hadn't said it quite so belligerently.

  Wolfson looked at him closely for longer than he would have preferred, and then spoke. "All right, then, we'll move on. You see the body, you see the mug. What next?"

  "I grab my commlink and call the ambassador."

  "From right there? From the main ops room?"

  "Right there. Kneeling over the body. Maybe thirty seconds after I got there."

  "Why so fast?"

  So no one could possibly think I had time to do it, dummy! "What was I going to do instead that should have come first? Conduct a funeral service? And yeah, I gotta say, I was a little in shock. I figured I'd better do something, and fast, and that seemed like the best thing. Besides, like I said, she looked dead, but I'm no expert. Maybe she's not dead, and the Kendari could do something fast." And he hadn't thought of that explanation until a day too late either, but Wolfson didn't need to hear that.

  "Why didn't you call the Kendari? I know the embassy commlink doesn't connect with the Kendari embassy directly, but there you were in the joint ops center. There must be some sort of comm system that would get you direct to the Kendari."

  It was his turn to stare long and hard at Wolfson. Didn't she get it? If not, then, okay, he'd run it all past her. "One--the joint ops center is suddenly a crime scene. I don't want to touch anything I don't have to. I don't want to shed a hair, or lose a drop of sweat, or plant a shoeprint anywhere I don't need to. I might muss up whatever evidence is there--or leave behind misleading evidence that might implicate me.

  "Two, I pick up the phone and say 'Hello, deadly enemies of humanity. It's me, the BSI agent who obviously hates your guts. You know, the one you don't much like either. I'm standing over your dead cop. Please come take a look.' Then what happens? Maybe two minutes later I'm lying dead next to her.