Flint kept his feet planted firmly on the floor. One last question, and then he’d go. If he had some solid information, he could work with it.
“Who were you working for?” Flint asked. “Give me a name.”
“Ike Jarvis, bastard.” Zagrando gave Flint a weak smile. “Killed him. Looks like he killed me too.”
“Not if we can help it.” The woman pulled Flint away, and this time, Flint let her.
She escorted him out of the room. As the door closed, Flint said, “Keep me apprised on every detail of his treatment. I want him to have the best of everything. I will pay for the difference between the standard care and the high-end treatment. Got that?”
“You’ll have to let billing know,” she said. “But we will keep you apprised.”
Then she went back into the room. So did two other people, and some equipment Flint had never seen before.
He had to take care of Zagrando’s expenses, and then he had a name to follow.
Ike Jarvis. Earth Alliance Intelligence.
And Jarvis just might be dead.
Flint glanced at the closed door. He hoped Zagrando made it through. The man clearly had a lot to say, and Flint wanted to hear it all.
THIRTEEN
ANNIVERSARY DAY VICTIMS’ Identification and Recovery Service had three different offices in Armstrong. The first was what Berhane called the “show” office, the one that potential donors met her in, and the one where she brought in professional charity teams to help her with fundraisers.
That office was nice, but not too nice—she didn’t want the potential donors to think the organization was wasting money on office design.
The second office had been a closet. It was outside the dome, in a warehouse where she and Kaspian stored their equipment and everything that Berhane ordered—like up-to-date environmental suits. Because the Moon was in such dire straits, almost all of their supplies came from Earth.
The third office was where she usually worked. It was in an unfinished building not too far from the warehouse. In fact, if she wanted to apply for special permission, she could walk through one of the dome’s airlocks to get to the warehouse.
That walk would require an environmental suit and two weeks of testing to get the permission, but she could do it, and she had even toyed with it in the beginning, just so she could avoid taking the train.
Fortunately, she had realized that was silly before she learned that she would spend half her life on trains.
She sat in the third office now, filling out documentation while she waited for Kaspian. He wanted to present everything to her, because he worried that the problem with the DNA was their fault. When he let her know he was leaving his office in the warehouse, he had added that he believed they needed to redo training.
He thought the DNA problem was because all (or most) of their volunteers were misusing the equipment.
This office was spartan. It had gray floors and gray walls. The construction company hadn’t installed any design features yet, and she had discouraged it from doing so. She wanted the building done, but she didn’t need any fancy stuff.
The documentation she was working on annoyed her. It was for her father. He had provided all of the office buildings and warehouses that housed ADVI-RS, which he did to prove his charitable bona fides. He was already using his involvement with ADVI-RS in pitches he made to investors in his company.
Even though Berhane was a majority shareholder in her father’s company, she couldn’t just move resources to ADVI-RS, much as she wanted to. Her father wanted a wall of documentation to separate the companies.
Believe me, Berhane, he had said, you don’t want ADVI-RS to have the slightest affiliation with any for-profit company.
She was beginning to understand that. But she didn’t like the fact that he required the documentation before he did anything. She figured he could take the action and they could back-date their documentation to account for it.
Or maybe her irritation was simply a cover for the sadness she had been feeling since she learned about Torkild. The first thing she had done when she returned to her office wasn’t to contact Kaspian and tell him she was here; the first thing she had done was download the media reports on Torkild.
He had died in the street in front of his office, kicked to death, it seemed, after getting his morning coffee. Some reporter had gotten a shot of the coffee cup rolling along the sidewalk, coffee spilling from it. Clearly, the reporter was using that from some security camera footage, because there would have been no reason for a reporter to have been onsite at the moment of Torkild’s beating and death.
It had broken her heart. She’d had to stop listening to the reports after just a few minutes because of the way all of the reporters were characterizing Torkild—an opportunist, a man who chased money for money’s sake—almost all of the things she had accused Torkild of the last time she saw him.
And of course, all of the reports mentioned his connection to her and her father.
The door banged shut.
She started. She hadn’t even heard the door open.
She looked up. Dabir Kaspian still had his hand on the doorknob.
Kaspian was tall and unnaturally thin. He worked at twice the speed of anyone else, slept only a few hours per night, and didn’t eat enough to cover all the energy he expended. She tried to get him to take better care of himself, but he told her he would do that when the crisis ended.
Which crisis, she had no idea. She suspected Kaspian liked the overwork and the feeling of exhaustion. It made him feel important.
He gave her a half-hearted, somewhat apologetic smile. “I’m sorry about Zhu,” he said.
“Thanks,” she said this time. She didn’t want to talk about Torkild with anyone ever again. If there was a ceremony for Torkild, she would go, but she wouldn’t let the rest of the city know how devastated his death had made her. “Let’s talk about this DNA thing.”
Kaspian nodded. He tucked a loose strand of his long, gray hair behind an ear. He needed to redo the ponytail he had started wearing a few months ago, when he declared himself too busy to tend to his grooming.
“May I?” he asked, and then, without waiting for her answer, he commandeered the office computer system, opening a half a dozen holographic screens all at once.
Faces filled them, with old identification marks at the bottom of the imagery. She hadn’t seen some of those marks since she was a child, looking through family images she’d found stored in an unmarked file in the computer system of her childhood home.
“What’s this?” she asked, as she stood up. Kaspian had placed the screens too high for her to comfortably see them from her desk.
“These,” he said, “are some of the identifications that have come from the DNA we’ve gotten from the various bombing sites.”
Berhane frowned. “I’m confused. These identifications are old.”
“Not only that,” Kaspian said, “These people died forty, fifty, sixty years ago.”
She didn’t touch the screens. She knew the files would tell her who these people had been, but she wasn’t ready for that. Not yet.
“Were there some…cemeteries…in some of these domes?” she asked. She knew her Moon history. A few of the early Earth colonists had actually buried their dead before it was outlawed, and one or two of the domes had allowed the practice to continue for certain religious sects.
“That’s the first thing I checked,” Kaspian said. “Even if that were the case, though, it wouldn’t help with the other problem.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
He took a deep breath. “Some of this DNA has showed up in more than one dome.”
“I know,” she said. “You mentioned that we’re having the problem with all our volunteers.”
“No,” he said. “I mean that DNA from the same person has shown up in more than one dome. Which is why at first I thought we were dealing with tampering.”
She felt cold. “By our volunteers
?”
“Yes,” he said. “But it’s never the same volunteer who gathered the sample, and often the volunteers used different equipment.”
Berhane’s chill worsened. “You’re not here because of procedures, though, are you? You wouldn’t come in person about something we could change with a simple agreement.”
“That’s right.” Kaspian glanced at the screen and sighed. “I don’t think this is about our volunteers.”
Berhane didn’t like what she was thinking. “You believe this is another cluster of clones.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m afraid I do.”
FOURTEEN
PIPPA LANDAU SAT on the edge of the bed in her hotel room, hands clasped over her carry bag. She had sat here since she registered, feeling her heart pound, questioning everything she was doing.
The room was larger than she expected, with a big bed, soft coverings, and a lovely sitting area. The bathroom off to the side was a religious experience.
She had never been in a hotel room this nice off Earth. But then, when she had been traveling outside of Earth, she had been incredibly poor. She wasn’t rich now, but she had money, enough to make this trip without hurting her children’s inheritance if she didn’t survive.
She was terrified. And weirdly, that terror was freezing her in place.
When she was young, she hadn’t frozen in place when she was terrified. If she had, she never would have escaped Starbase Human. She wouldn’t have had her quiet, comfortable life and her marvelous children.
She wouldn’t have survived.
Her fingers tightened on her bag. She had unfamiliar clothes inside, along with familiar shoes and, of all things, a pillow. So middle-aged midwestern woman, that pillow. Not something Takara Hamasaki would have brought with her off Starbase Human.
(Although she had brought a pillow off the starbase. Pillows and blankets and dirty clothes and all kinds of things that she had stored in the crappy space ship she had dumped at her very first chance.)
Pippa made herself take a deep breath. She needed to find Takara Hamasaki within herself, the persona she had abandoned decades ago. The woman she had become in the intervening years was too comfortable for a survival instinct.
Pippa was halfway there. She had cut and colored her hair. She wore different clothes than Pippa Landau would have worn while teaching school.
She was sitting here, in Armstrong, after taking a shuttle from Illinois.
It would be ridiculous to stop now.
She stood up, because standing made her feel just a little less overwhelmed. She looked at the public network screen attached to the hotel wall, but she didn’t walk over to it.
She had researched who to contact while she was still at home. She had come up with only one name. Noelle DeRicci, the woman who headed the United Domes of the Moon Security Office. It seemed the other heads of the Moonwide government were dead or had abandoned their posts.
That probably should have scared Pippa off when she had been in Iowa, but it hadn’t.
It sure made her nervous now.
She took a deep breath and put a hand to her ear, just like all of her kids had done when they got their first links as young teenagers. Her links weren’t very sophisticated. The encryption in them was designed for families, not for high-level government work. And the encryption was also designed for short bursts of information, not long conversations or large amounts of data. Designed to aid a bank transfer or send a message to a medical professional or to let children know that they needed to come home because their father wasn’t going to make it through the week.
Her eyes welled. She missed Raymond. He hadn’t known any of her history, and he probably would have been furious when he found out she was a Disappeared and hadn’t told him.
But he had always been steady in a crisis. He had known how to handle everything, even the momentary lack of courage that was affecting her right now.
The very thought of him, his lanky, sturdy frame, his broad, sun-reddened midwestern face, calmed her.
She had loved him. She had had three beautiful children with him.
She had a legacy.
She could do this and not regret the life she had lived.
She opened an encoded link and sent a message to the woman who had been listed as DeRicci’s assistant, Rudra Popova.
My name is Pippa Landau, Pippa sent. I am a longtime Disappeared. I have information on the history of the Anniversary Day clones that I believe you need. I’m taking a huge risk contacting you. Please do me the courtesy of letting me speak with Noelle DeRicci as soon as possible. Thank you.
Pippa brought her hand down. It was shaking.
Her link only brought silence.
Somehow she had thought she would get an immediate response, even if that response was automated. But she didn’t.
She looked at the edge of the bed, the spread wrinkled from her moments of indecision.
She wasn’t going to sit back down there. That was a defeat.
She would wait up here for an hour, and then she would get something to eat from one of the nearby restaurants.
If she hadn’t heard from the Security Office by then, she would contact them again. She would keep doing so until they responded.
No matter how long it took.
FIFTEEN
FLINT TOOK THE elevator to the top floor of the Security Office. He hated standing in that little box. It made him feel restless.
He was being pulled in eight different directions. He had been trying to get back to his office to investigate the leads he had received earlier in the week, and then he’d gotten derailed by personal events. He had just settled those when Zagrando contacted him.
Now that Flint had spoken to Zagrando, Flint wanted to investigate Zagrando’s (albeit truncated) information. But Flint also felt odd about leaving Zagrando alone with the medical authorities.
It wasn’t so much that he didn’t trust them—although that was a factor. It was that he worried he would lose Zagrando to some Earth Alliance official without anyone ever knowing.
Flint had already asked Space Traffic’s Murray Atherton to keep an eye on Zagrando, saying that Zagrando had information essential to solving Anniversary Day, and he would only give it to Flint. Flint warned Murray that someone might be coming after Zagrando, and under no circumstances was Murray to allow anyone to take Zagrando without contacting Flint first.
Of course, as he did that, Flint didn’t use Zagrando’s real name, but the alias he’d arrived with.
So far, no one had come after Zagrando, either on a space ship or inside the port. Murray had stationed a number of space traffic cops near the port’s medical facility, and some near Zagrando’s room. Everyone in Space Traffic was on alert for a ship that might arrive in obvious pursuit of someone. Flint wanted to make certain that no one followed Zagrando here.
He had looked at the trajectory of Zagrando’s ship once it got close to the Moon; it appeared as if no one had followed him. But Flint knew that only time would tell.
The port was relatively safe—as safe as it could be, given what was going on these days on the Moon. He never thought of the port as a dangerous place. These days, he thought of it as a potential escape route.
He had told Talia that a number of times. If things looked particularly bad in the dome, she was to go to Flint’s ship, the Emmeline, and wait for him there. If the dome was being harmed in anyway, she was to take the ship off the Moon.
He had told her that he would let her know when the situation warranted that. He didn’t think anything rose to that level on this day, but he also knew that it could.
Which was why he had decided to ask for Talia’s help with Zagrando. She would be as safe here, with the police protection and the Emmeline nearby, as she would be in the Security Office or with him while he was working in his office. Or so he liked to think.
Besides, the help Flint needed with Zagrando was risky in a different way. He could only trust Talia with this
particular mission.
He hoped she was up for the task.
She was still in the Security Office. Even though he knew she was doing better, he had worried that the improvement was just temporary. Now, he had to believe what Talia had told him before he left; that she was doing better, and that she was willing to work.
He didn’t contact her on his links. Instead, he had gone directly to the Security Office. As he rounded the corner from the elevators, Popova waved at him from her desk.
“I have a question for you,” she said.
He glanced at the kitchen. He wondered if Talia was still there or if she had moved to a different part of the building.
“Make it fast,” he said.
“Have you heard of a woman named Pippa Landau? She says she’s a Disappeared.”
Flint turned toward Popova so fast that he nearly lost his balance. “She what?” he asked.
“She says she’s a Disappeared.”
Flint frowned. “People don’t admit that.”
“I know,” Popova said. “That’s why I thought you might know her. Maybe she has come home after a Retrieval Artist found her or she was in the news and I missed it…?”
Flint shook his head. “In theory, I’m retired. I haven’t watched that kind of news closely since Talia moved in with me.”
“So, you don’t know her.” Popova sounded disappointed.
Flint gave her a wry smile. “Believe it or not, I don’t know every single Disappeared in the Earth Alliance. Why are you asking?”
“Because she contacted me just a few minutes ago, and said she was a Disappeared, and she had important information for me, and she was taking a risk contacting us.” Popova tapped a finger against her desk. “I haven’t responded. I don’t know how to handle this at all. Do you think you could find out if she’s what she says she is?”
“No,” Flint said. “I’ve got much too much to research as it is, and all of it seems to be tied to the Anniversary Day attacks. I will tell you this, Disappeareds never identify themselves that way. Either she’s a fraud or she thinks this information is so important she has to reveal herself to give it to you.”
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