Masterminds

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “Yes, thank you,” Goudkins said, but by the time the sentence was out of her mouth, Huỳnh had severed the link.

  Goudkins put a hand against the wall, bracing herself. Another attack. She wondered if DeRicci knew, then realized she probably did.

  Did DeRicci feel relieved that the attack was on Hétique and not the Moon? Or was she worried that things were about to get worse?

  Goudkins wasn’t sure how she felt about it. She headed back to her computer, but as she did, her links pinged.

  She stopped in the ship’s most narrow corridor and took the link without any audio or visual.

  You alone?

  It took her a moment to recognize that the contact had come from Miles Flint.

  Yes, Goudkins answered.

  Great, because I have two questions for you and something I need you to look into.

  No hi, how are you? No have you heard about the new attack? Just a quick contact, with no small talk at all.

  Are you familiar with the Currency Department of the Treasury? He asked.

  As much as anyone is, she sent.

  Should they be funding operations in Earth Alliance Security?

  What? The question made no sense. She actually had to review it. No, of course not.

  That’s what I thought. Have you ever met a woman named Pearl Brooks?

  No, Goudkins sent.

  She authorized the Currency Department’s transfer of funds to an operation run by an intelligence officer named Ike Jarvis. I’m wondering if she’s authorized other operations as well.

  You want me to audit someone in the Currency Department? Goudkins swallowed hard. You realize that someone will trace that investigation.

  Yeah, Flint sent. Hold off for the moment. But if you can check the files on Brooks, I’d appreciate it.

  I’ll only check the easily accessed files, Goudkins sent. We don’t want to alert her to our interest.

  Good thinking, Flint sent. I suspect we’ll have to go deeper later, but this is a start. And thanks for the help.

  Then he signed off.

  Goudkins hadn’t felt as if she had helped at all. She felt like she had told him no continually. Or maybe she was just off-balance from the new attack on Hétique City.

  She went back to her investigative chair. Before she started looking up Pearl Brooks, she watched a few minutes of footage about Hétique City. The destruction didn’t look familiar. It seemed like a completely different kind of attack.

  It seemed odd to her. But at the moment, it wasn’t her concern.

  Mavis Zorn, Jhena Andre, and now Pearl Brooks were Goudkins’ concern. And this thing about the Currency Department had her intrigued.

  Goudkins needed to calm down, and focus. She needed to think it all through.

  An investigation—done right—would focus her.

  She settled in, and got back to work.

  FORTY-TWO

  FINALLY, THEY ALLOWED Berhane and Kaspian to go upstairs.

  Not a moment too soon, either. Berhane had just about figured out what kind of angry fit she was going to throw. She had seen her father do it and get an instant response. She had seen Torkild do it, and occasionally make the person he was screaming at angry.

  And she had seen her mother charm the people who didn’t let her do what she wanted.

  Berhane couldn’t charm, and she wasn’t sure she could be insulting enough, but she was going to try.

  Then the guard opened the last security barrier.

  “They’ll see you upstairs,” he said. “Take the first elevator.”

  She was so astonished that she didn’t walk past him immediately, even though Kaspian did.

  Instead, Berhane said, “I can see Chief DeRicci?”

  “Actually, you’ll be seeing her assistant chief, Rudra Popova. Chief DeRicci is still in the middle of something.”

  Of course. But this was a start. And Berhane had heard about the legendary Popova. The woman could get anything done in one-tenth the time it would take the best assistant anywhere else.

  Berhane’s father had dealt with Popova just once, and tried to hire her away from the Security Office. Popova hadn’t gone.

  Berhane saw that as a vote in Popova’s favor.

  “Berhane,” Kaspian said, making a get-over-here gesture with his hands. Apparently, he thought this opportunity would vanish in an instant.

  She probably should have thought of that as well. She scurried past the guard, and got onto the elevator along with Kaspian. He looked at her, seeming even more stressed than he had when he’d contacted her on the train.

  This is crazy, he sent to her on their private links. Someone from this office should have seen us immediately. Imagine if we had an emergency.

  I thought this was an emergency, she sent back.

  No, I mean something like we’ve locked the clone terrorists in our house and we need someone to get them right away.

  We would have contacted the police in that instance, she sent. She didn’t want to be criticizing the Security Office, even on a private link. Not when she needed them to take her seriously.

  But Kaspian never handled authority well. She had agreed to bring him along because he had all of the details of the old DNA and the possible cloning, but she had done so with reservations.

  Those reservations had just gotten a lot worse.

  The elevator doors opened, and Berhane started to leave, but Kaspian stepped out first. He was deliberately blocking her exit. He looked both ways before he moved aside.

  He had been trying to protect her. Against what, she had no idea. She would have been amused by it, if it weren’t so ridiculous. Kaspian couldn’t have protected her from a physical threat even if he wanted to.

  The corridor was quiet. There were a lot of closed doors, and some voices from her left.

  A woman appeared on her right. The woman wasn’t much taller than Berhane was, but she had a long cloud of black hair.

  “Ms. Magalhães,” the woman said, “I’m Rudra Popova. I’m sorry this has taken so long, but there’s been another attack.”

  Berhane’s stomach clenched. “Here? In Armstrong?”

  “No,” Popova said. “On Hétique. Are you familiar with it?”

  Berhane wasn’t. But she didn’t know much about the rest of the Alliance.

  “Is that a moon too?” she asked, then thought the question was stupid.

  “You know,” Popova said as she led Berhane and Kaspian down the hallway, “I have no idea. I hadn’t heard of it until today. But the attack looks pretty bad. Apparently their major city was hit.”

  “Why would the Moon’s Security Office care?” Kaspian asked.

  Berhane sent a message across their links: Stop talking.

  To Berhane’s surprise, the question didn’t seem to offend Popova. “We’re trying to figure out the same thing. We think maybe the attacks have moved away from here, although someone just suggested that the attack might have been designed to lull us into complacency.”

  “Nothing will lull us into complacency,” Kaspian said, then looked defiantly at Berhane.

  She didn’t say anything. She agreed.

  They rounded a corner, just as a woman and a man left a large room. They were in deep discussion. The woman looked like a heavyset person who had lost too much weight too quickly. Her clothes bagged on her.

  It took Berhane a moment to recognize Noelle DeRicci. She looked nothing like the out-of-place person Berhane had seen at the fundraiser five months ago.

  The man was gray and clearly sedentary. His hair was gray, his suit was gray, and his face—

  Berhane’s breath caught.

  His face was one of the ones she had seen just a few hours ago, with Kaspian.

  “Oh, my God,” Kaspian said.

  She grabbed his arm. Shut up. They have no idea, and we’ll scare this guy.

  But he’s a clone, Kaspian sent back.

  No kidding, Berhane sent.

  DeRicci and the man ignored Berh
ane and went through some double doors. As soon as the doors closed, Berhane glanced at Kaspian.

  He looked terrified.

  He wasn’t going to figure out what to do. It was up to her.

  “Chief Popova,” Berhane said.

  “It’s Assistant Chief,” Popova said, “but call me Rudra. I’ve worked with your father—”

  “I’m sorry, Rudra,” Berhane said, “but who is that man who was with Chief DeRicci?”

  “His name is Lawrence Ostaka. He’s an investigator for the Earth Alliance Security Division.”

  Berhane was shaking her head. “No, he can’t be.”

  Popova frowned. “I checked his credentials myself. More than once in fact. And in great depth. He is with the Security Division.”

  Kaspian cursed. All the blood had left his face.

  “What’s wrong?” Popova asked.

  “He’s a clone,” Berhane said. “That’s what I came to tell you.”

  “That Lawrence Ostaka is a clone?” Popova sounded as confused as she looked.

  “That there are more clones on the Moon. We found the old DNA as we were digging through the wreckage, and we identified hundreds of dead clones.”

  “He’s not dead,” Popova said, glancing at the door.

  “No, he’s not,” Berhane said, “but I’m sure some of the Peyti clones died on Anniversary Day too. Believe me, his face is one of the ones we were looking at just this morning.”

  “You identified Lawrence Ostaka?” Clearly, Popova wasn’t following this exactly.

  “No,” Berhane said, grabbing Popova’s arm and pulling her close. “No, don’t you see? We had no idea he was here. We just have the faces and the names of the originals. He looks just like one of them.”

  Popova’s mouth opened, then she seemed to get a grip on herself, and she nodded.

  “You need to show me all of this,” she said, “and you need to show it to me right now.”

  FORTY-THREE

  NYQUIST SANK INTO his chair. He wondered if he had raised his voice too loudly when he was speaking to Romey. He had let his feelings take over.

  He ran a hand over his face. He needed to concentrate. He didn’t dare make a mistake on the Zhu investigation, particularly after that semi-public conversation with Romey.

  But right now, he was too shaken to concentrate, at least at the levels he needed to make a perfect case against Romey and her cohorts.

  He would look up the information for Flint, instead.

  The case Flint had sent him was eight years old. Nyquist had been a detective then, and going through his usual troubles trying to hang onto a partner.

  He felt a moment of private amusement. He’d always gone through partners because he had been too harsh on them, because their investigative skills weren’t up to his standards, and, because he had no real manners, he let his former partners know it.

  Romey had had a similar approach to investigation, and she had been as thorough as he wanted.

  Apparently, the only problem he had with her was her moral compass.

  He shook off the thought and opened the case file.

  He was stunned to see that the case was a property case, not a homicide case. He scanned through the information, uncertain why Flint wanted him to look into a property crime.

  Then Nyquist paused.

  The original detective on the case had been DeRicci. And she’d been working homicide at the time.

  So Nyquist went deeper into the file and found that they’d been dealing with the death of a clone who, like other clones before her, had been dumped into the compost buckets near the port.

  Flint had mentioned clones, but not what kind. He was more interested in the case’s connection—if any—to a man named Ike Jarvis. Flint also wanted to know if the person of interest in the case, a man named Cade Faulke, worked for Earth Alliance Intelligence.

  Before Nyquist dug into those names, though, he got lost in the case file. In familiar names besides DeRicci’s. Luc Deshin was briefly a suspect, and DeRicci ruled him out.

  Then she was forced off the case by Gumiela, who assigned the case to Property. Property actually did some work—or claimed DeRicci’s work as their own—and sent a unit to arrest Cade Faulke.

  By the time the unit arrived, Faulke was gone. His little office was messy, and his android guard had been disabled. No one in the area wanted to talk about where he went, which was pretty common for the neighborhood near the port.

  But what wasn’t common was that all of the security footage within a several-block radius had been shut off.

  Nyquist dug in, searching for even casual references to Cade Faulke. Nyquist found several in older files. Faulke had served as an informant to a large number of detectives, including one Andrea Gumiela before she had received her promotion to chief of detectives.

  All of Faulke’s tips had been about activities inside the homes of major crime figures.

  The dead clone had been embedded into Deshin’s household. According to DeRicci’s meticulous case file, Deshin had told her he thought the clone was the daughter of an old friend.

  Nyquist leaned back.

  Designer criminal clones. He’d heard a lot about them, particularly the way they were used to fight crime outside of the main part of the Alliance.

  He hadn’t realized that was going on inside the Alliance—at least to this extent—and he hadn’t realized it had been going on here, on the Moon.

  He almost got up and went to Gumiela’s office. He could use some of this to get out of the Zhu investigation. Gumiela wouldn’t want it known that a former murder suspect had been her go-to source for her most high-profile cases, particularly when that go-to source appeared to be embedding clones into households across the Moon.

  But after that confrontation with Romey, Nyquist no longer wanted off the Zhu case. It didn’t matter that the case would take a lot of work.

  Romey had crossed a line. She seemed to think herself immune from the law.

  And he’d learned that people who felt that way lost track of the line. They seemed to believe they were the line, and that their judgment was impeccable.

  His certainly wasn’t. Witness his attraction to Romey. Especially while DeRicci needed him.

  He loved DeRicci, and he hadn’t been able to stop his eye from wandering.

  Or his brain, apparently.

  He went back to the file, to see what else he could find.

  He needed to track down Cade Faulke, the clones, the intelligence service, and a man named Ike Jarvis.

  Nyquist finally understood why all of this interested Flint. It was one of those pieces that might lead to a breakthrough in the investigation—maybe more than the Peyti corporation information that Nyquist had gotten from Uzvaan.

  He felt the same kind of excitement he usually felt when he was about to close a case.

  He was close to something, something important.

  Something big.

  Something that might lead them to whoever it was that wanted to destroy the Moon.

  FORTY-FOUR

  IN THE MAIN conference room at the Earth Alliance Security Division Human Coordination Department, someone had stacked all of the beautifully carved wooden screens into one corner. Some of those screens were antiques. Careless handling could cost thousands in simple repairs.

  Odgerel winced as she saw that. She stepped past them, trying not to frown at the lack of respect accorded to ancient things inside this room, and rubbed the knuckle of her forefinger against her forehead.

  The headache had never quite left after her rather rude awakening. Her head still buzzed with the aftereffects of all the emergency klaxons sent through her links. Even a solid (if quick) breakfast and the large cup of oolong tea she had downed before her arrival hadn’t eased the aches.

  She didn’t wake to emergencies well any more.

  But she was calmer than she had been an hour before. She had taken the time to center herself, knowing that everyone around her would be pan
icked.

  Most of them were. Her staff, while brilliant and experienced, tended toward drama.

  The only other calm person in the room was Mitchell Brown. His serene presence seemed like an island in the middle of stormy seas.

  Only tension lines around his eyes belied his physical composure. And those tension lines faded as his gaze met hers.

  “Sir,” he said, bowing slightly.

  She nodded to him, and then at the rest of the staff. She had fifteen trusted department heads and assistants, counting Brown. They had gathered around the beautifully carved mahogany table that she had brought with her when she had taken over the Human Coordination Department. She had had an invisible nanocoating (removable, of course) placed on the table’s surface so that no spilled beverage or sharp-edged jewelry would damage the wood.

  She now wished she had had the foresight to do the same with the screens.

  She pulled back her chair, carved to match the table, and sank onto the soft golden cushion. Beneath her calm, a thrum of exhaustion already threatened.

  Perhaps she was getting too old for this job. When she awoke, she thought she might be too old for emergencies, but emergencies were what the job was all about.

  “I had asked you, Mr. Brown, to prepare an update for me when I arrived. Have you one?”

  “Yes, sir.” He waved a hand over the center of the table. Semi-solid holographic images appeared, showing ships in low orbit, firing on the planet below.

  Brown’s information had been right when he contacted her; the ships were clearly not part of a fleet of ships. They were as dissimilar as they could possibly be—high-end space yachts mingling with weaponized cargo ships fighting alongside re-commissioned warships.

  “We didn’t recognize any ships except these three.” He highlighted three of the ships. “I’ve seen two of them used in crimes before. The third has a sales record history that we could trace.”

  “And I assume you have.” Odgerel hated it when a presenter paused for effect. Brown would learn that.

  “The first two ships belong to two different organizations, the Ibori crime family, and the Kee crime family. The third ship traces back to an underling who works for the crime lord Gahiji Palone.”