I began poring over Ackerman’s trading records, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. It was encrypted in the language of arbitrage, a cipher I couldn’t read. I began printing as many of the records as I could. I needed a professional trader.
I was packing up the printouts when two security guards approached me. I gritted my teeth. I couldn’t see any weapons on them, but they’d be armed. There was no running for it; security could lock the entire building down in a second.
“Mr. Thatcher?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Mr. Thatcher, the Director of Community Relations would like to speak with you.”
Chapter 17
I stood in a tall, octagonal chamber. Thirty-foot-high cherry wood bookcases with wrought iron railings lined the walls. Ornate red and gold drapes hung from the ceiling and over the windows. In the center of the room at cherry desk, sat a kindly looking man wearing reading glasses. He looked up from his report and smiled courteously.
“Mr. Thatcher, good afternoon,” he said, standing to shake my hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
I didn’t reply.
“I’m sorry to inconvenience you,” he continued, “but I’m afraid we have a bit of a problem. We’ve been contacted by the Ackerman Brothers Securities and Investments firm. It appears that they want you on suspicion of several crimes committed against them.”
I looked down at the floor. He had nice shoes.
“They believe you are in the building, and requested that we hand you over to them.”
“I see.”
“Indeed. Now, I’m sure that this is all a misunderstanding between you and the firm, and that you’re as eager as anyone to see it all cleared up. But it’s our policy never to hand clients over to anyone.”
I looked up at him.
“Now, they charge that you have taken the ledger of a colleague, a Mr. Bernard Milton. Indeed, that is the ledger you used to get into the building. They have not deactivated it, presumably so they can track you.”
“I see.”
“Quite. Now by whatever circumstances you came into possession of that ledger, I’m sure that they were legitimate. Nevertheless, its funds are limited, and once you can no longer afford to stay in this building, we will have to ask you to leave.”
Neither he nor the guards seemed hesitant, or in the slightest bit nervous, which troubled me.
“Okay.”
“Very well. Now that we understand the situation, let me tell you what we can offer you. We have several secret escape routes for just such an occasion. They are terribly expensive, far more than you can afford at present.”
“I would assume so.”
“However, this ledger may have a significant line of credit. If so, you would be able to purchase the use of one of our tunnels, and we would guarantee you safe passage out of here.”
I scoffed. He must have thought I was a noob.
“They’ll know you let me escape.”
“What they’ll know and what they can prove to the Karitzu are two different things. We’ll claim you used the funds to bide your time while you escaped with Waste Management.”
“Why do you need me? Why not just take the money from the ledger yourself?”
“A forensic analysis of the ledger could lead them to the physical person who used it. If you’re the person taking out the loan, then we are not a party to any crime.”
I chuckled. They did know what they were doing.
“They’ll never let you keep Bernard’s money,” I said.
“They have no choice. Karitzu regulations on this are clear. The theft is considered to be of the ledger and the funds, Mr. Thatcher, not of our services. We will tell them that we charged the ledger in good faith. Since Ackerman failed to disable the ledger, the liability is theirs.”
I looked at both the guards for some form of guidance or signal, but they were motionless, like statues, leaving the director and me alone in the room.
“Why would you help me?”
“I’m not. This is merely a service we provide. If you can’t obtain the loan, or if the funds are insufficient, you will obviously be unable to avail yourself of it.”
“How can I trust you’ll do what you say?”
“We’re a reputable firm, Mr. Thatcher. The Karitzu might be filled with crime and corruption, and I’ve no doubt Ackerman is. But the Galt prides itself on honesty and dependability.”
This from a man looking to rip off Ackerman for as much as a hundred thousand caps.
“We’ve never turned over a customer’s records or violated a contract. This is my contract with you.”
I’d have had a hard time knowing what to do even with time to decide. But every second we spoke, funds were draining from Bernard’s ledger.
I pulled out the tablet and began racking up loans, liquidating everything I could. Then I handed the device to the director. He swiped his card and tapped out a charge.
He watched, indifferently, as the transaction processed. Finally it bleated.
“Very good, Mr. Thatcher. I have a hundred caps for you, cash. That should help. We’ll be keeping the ledger for Ackerman Brothers. My agent, Mr. Thompson, will take you to the tunnels. I wish you the best of luck. We appreciate your business.”
Mr. Thompson came out and motioned down a circular metal staircase and into a small room with a large vault door. He entered a code at the control panel, and a red light began to spin and a siren wailed.
I watched as a long forked arm came out, traveled along the wall and locked onto a pinion. The locks disengaged, the door popped off its mount, and the arm began rolling back into the wall. Behind where the door had been was a dark cavern.
“Thank you again, Mr. Thatcher.”
I stepped into the rocky tunnel. The alarm wailed again, and the door slowly locked back into place behind me.
It was slow going. I was blind, no source of light at all. I stumbled along, using the cave walls for support. Even a single trip could be disastrous, I could lose my sense of direction and find myself headed back where I came from.
After a while I noticed a slight upward slope. I came to a huge metal grate wall, a jagged hole in it as if it had been blasted out. A faint light emanated from a manhole cover in the ceiling just beyond it. I climbed through the wall and into an underground structure. It was monstrous, wide enough for two cars. I walked down it, finding a manhole every couple hundred yards.
I traveled that way for two miles until I hit a dead end. It was a wall, and while it was pitch black, I was pretty sure that the wall was solid.
I wondered if I had missed a turn somewhere, or if this escape route was a trap. Maybe I was one of dozens of people sent down there to die. But feeling along I found a hatch. I opened it to find a small, dimly lit chamber. I climbed through, and the hatch fell closed behind me, locking shut.
The chamber was just big enough to hold an iron ladder. I climbed up and through another hatch, finding myself in a brick room with landscaping implements and a door. I stepped out of a maintenance shed in the middle of Browning Park.
I half-expected lights and sirens as I exited the building, but it was quiet. I felt alone, free. I had no ledger, mine or anyone else’s, and for the first time in my life, nobody knew where I was.
The weather was getting pretty wild by now. The park, littered with twigs and smaller branches, was empty.
I hailed a taxi, but only had enough cash to get about two-thirds of the way to Linus’ house. I walked the rest of the way, clutching the papers to my chest against the wind and rain. Darkness had fallen by the time I arrived at Ackerman’s wealthy Red Oaks district and found Linus’ home.
The wind was howling through the trees and branches were falling everywhere. All of the homes had lowered steel shutters over the windows and were powered from buried power lines or by generators. Like my first trip to LowSec, I didn’t see a soul. The place looked abandoned. At least I didn’t see any sign of police either. But they�
��d come. When, of course, depended on the severity of the charges against me. It was a bad storm, and with any luck Ackerman had more urgent matters than staking out every possible place I could go.
I rang the bell. Linus opened the door with a look of shock on his face—something I had never seen before.
“Charles, my god! You’re soaking wet! How long have you been out there?”
“I walked.”
“From your office? You shouldn’t be out in this weather. I’d have loaned you the money if you needed cab.”
“No, no. Something came up.”
“Well, come in, make yourself at home. Take off your coat, let it dry. The rack is over there. My god, why didn’t you at least wear a hat?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“There’s a storm coming—it’s quite big. This is just the beginning. We’re going to see some significant damage; roofs torn off, power lines out, the works. You should have waited until tomorrow.”
“I can pay you a thousand caps for an hour. I need you to review some documents.”
“Now? You’re joking? You really want to spend a grand?”
I handed him the records. He held them away from him in disgust.
“These are soaked, I can barely read them. Most of them are completely ruined.”
“A few of the pages are legible. I need you to go over them.”
“What am I looking for?”
“Anything out of the ordinary. Maybe… well, I don’t...”
I stopped talking and began looking around the room.
“Oh,” Linus said, picking his drink up off the table. “Don’t worry, I acquired a privacy clause in my contract when I became a Gamma. Ackerman can’t tap my home without a warrant issued by a Karitzu circuit judge, and I have it swept for bugs twice a day anyway—there are some downright unscrupulous corps out there. Without privacy, I wouldn’t be able to get anything done.”
The door was right behind me, I could still make a break for it. I caught myself thinking how strange it would look if I just ran out of the house, but how it looked could be the least of my problems. I might well have made a mistake, coming to Linus’—of course I knew that. But he was the only person I knew who could give me an answer. If the price was getting caught, I was willing to pay it.
“You know, colleague, you’ve been acting very strangely as of late,” said Linus, putting on his half-frame spectacles. “I know the bombing affected you more than you let on. That’s fine, but the truth is I’ve been worried since well before that. You’ve rarely been paranoid enough to be an effective colleague. But now I must say you’re more than making up for your former deficiency. You’re too paranoid to function. What is all this business about?”
He knows. They called him in case I show up here. He won’t give you an answer, just run.
“I’m not paying you to ask questions,” I said.
“Quite right,” said Linus, glaring at me over the bridge of his glasses. He thrust out an arm, exposing his watch, and then gracefully brought it within his sight. “One hour, a thousand caps,” he said. “But after that, you will give me some answers. My study is upstairs.”
We climbed a narrow staircase to a very small wood-paneled attic study. A cot rested below the window, and a chair and a small desk with a terminal sat in a corner behind the door. The two of us barely had any room to stand. Linus handed me a towel and began examining the pages.
“Well, these are trades. This is a log from the Ackerman floor, stocks, futures, bonds, equities. Looks like they took place a couple of weeks ago. What am I looking for?”
“Anything out of place?”
“I could look through these for six hours and not find even a single problem. You need to tell me what I’m looking for.”
“I’m looking for trades between Ackerman colleagues—from one division to another, then back again. They call it phantom trading. I want to know if people are making fake trades to inflate income reports.”
“I know what a phantom trade is. Ghosting—it crops up every now and then, but the traders usually get caught. It’s a serious crime.”
“I need you to see if there’s any going on. Check all of these trades.”
“I work in arbitrage, Charles. I know most of these traders. I can speak for the integrity of the division.”
“Check it anyway.”
“Okay,” he said reluctantly.
I toweled off as Linus broke out a red pen and a calculator. He sat at an old-fashioned writer’s desk and began reviewing the trades. He circled numbers, broke them down, put them back together in new ways, tallied and split them again. He coaxed trades, one into another, across locations and traders. When he was done he took off his spectacles.
“I’ve got to tell you, I don’t see anything here.”
My heart sank. I took a long, deep breath, the first since I fled Ackerman earlier that afternoon, the last I would have as a free man.
It was okay now. They could catch me. In fact, they already had caught me—long ago. They caught me when I did... well, whatever it was that I did to get their attention. I was fine with it, I really was. At least I knew the truth, and I was tired of running, tired of being the mouse in the maze.
And really, what had I been expecting? Either Linus would find phantom trading or not. One meant the entire world was coming to an end, the other meant only mine was. I was nauseous just trying to figure out which option I preferred.
I sat back on the bed.
“You don’t look well, colleague. I can loan you some alcohol, if you would like. Maybe you need one of your sedatives?”
“I quit,” I said, putting my arms behind my head.
“Oh, well that explains it. That and the cigarettes? You can’t just up and quit those things. You need to do it under the supervision of a professional.”
“No. I just needed to find the trades. I needed them to be there, that’s all.”
“Well, this is just a small sample of trading. I couldn’t certify that there weren’t a few traders ghosting.”
“No. What I was looking for was systemic. Are you sure that all of these trades are good?”
“Well, you’d need a forensic accountant to be a hundred percent sure, but if there’s ghosting going on, it’s not on these pages. If it is, someone’s found a new way to hide it. None of the products traded here had reciprocal trades back, in whole or in part, and most are to other corps in the Karitzu. Some pages are damaged, I can’t attest to what’s on those, but if you bought insider information on some kind of systemic problem, you may need to ask for your money back.”
“No, that wasn’t it.”
“Well, I can’t imagine why you wanted to find phantoms. But for what it’s worth, I’m sorry. Perhaps you have other trades I could look at?”
“No,” I said, defeated. “If they were there, you’d have found them right away.”
“They really couldn’t have been there, Charles, I’m sorry. People, new traders in particular, sometimes think that Phantom trading is a good idea. They try it, the market corrects, and they get wiped out. Getting away with corruption on a mass scale like what you seem to be describing—it’s nearly impossible. Free, fair systems always win out. The invisible hand….”
I tossed the towel onto the bed.
“I know,” I said. “I should have always known…”
“I can look again tomorrow, if you like. I can access all of this material from work, you don’t need to print it out.”
“No.”
“As you like. Now there is the matter of the thousand caps?”
I nodded and leaned back on the bed. He was going to have a hell of a time getting paid. I could only be turned into so much soap.
Lightning struck, and the lights dimmed for a moment. Linus looked out the window.
“You know what, I’ll run a tab. This will be a bad storm. I have some kerosene, and I think we’ll need it. I’ll make up a room for you and we’ll settle up in the morning.”<
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My shoulders slumped, and the tension in my body melted away. I wouldn’t need to run anymore. I was caught. I could tell Linus the truth. Then at least he’d get a little money for turning me in. I could make a break for LowSec, I figured, but what would be the point? Kate was all I cared about down there. With her, I could live there forever, happy. Without her, without a contract, and with Ackerman chasing me—I could run, but I’d only die tired.
Everything she had said was a lie. Kate was fake, the Republic a fake too. Christ, I said to myself, with my luck it wasn’t even a conspiracy. Aisling was just some stupid lady who stole water, I got myself all worked up over it, and they nabbed me. End of story.
I had wanted the world to end. What kind of person wishes for that?
Just then the doorbell rang. I jumped out of the bed and hit my head on the sloped ceiling.
“Christ, relax!” cried Linus. “My god, it’s probably my friends. I rent them every night. I didn’t bother canceling them because I didn’t think that they’d show up on a night like this. They’re dedicated, I’ll give them that. If they ask for hazard pay, though….”
“Send them home,” I said. “Send them home!”
“All right, but then you’re going to tell me what’s going on. I’ve been more than patient. I want to help, but you need to tell me everything. No more secrets, you understand me?”
I nodded, and my colleague went downstairs.
I sat there a fully rationalized, constructed criminal. Retention had invested a lot of time and money, turning me from a lonely divorcee who had gotten caught up in a young woman’s silly rhetoric into a full-blown citizen.
I casually wondered if I could find any hope in Linus. He clearly had designs on me—something he had been grooming me for. He had been far too patient for what I was paying him. I could ask him for a favor—forever in his debt to save my life. I’d be a slave, but I’d live. But buying off my debt would cost him a pretty penny, and there are easier ways to get a slave. I couldn’t imagine anyone would consider me a bargain at any price.
I heard muffled voices coming from downstairs. I looked at the disintegrated mass of pulp and ink into which I had poured all my hope for redemption. I had risked everything to learn that they were worthless.
The Water Thief Page 16
