Memory b-10

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Nervously, the sergeant did so. While he was negotiating with Haroche's secretary, who sped the authorization back along with an apology the moment he understood the problem, Miles stared at the flat readout screen projected above the vid plate. It listed the dates and times of every visit he'd ever made down here, going back nearly a decade, together with codes for the items he'd carried in and out, mostly in. There was the safely lobotomized zvegan smart bomb, ah yes. And those strange Cetagandan genetic samples, now undergoing further investigation under the aegis of Dr. Weddell, he suspected. And . . . what the hell . . . ?

  Miles leaned closer. "Excuse me. This comconsole lists me as visiting the evidence room twelve weeks ago." It was the date of his return from his last Dendarii mission, in fact, the fatal day Illyan had been out of town. The time logged was . . . right after he'd reported in to, and out of, Illyan's office; about the time he'd been walking home, in fact. His eyes widened, and his teeth snapped shut. "How . . . interesting," he hissed.

  "Yes, my lord?" said the sergeant.

  "Were you on duty that day?"

  "I don't remember, my lord. I'd have to check the roster. Um . . . why do you ask, sir?"

  "Because I didn't come down here that day. Or any other day since year before last."

  "You're listed, sir."

  "I see that." Miles grinned, his lips peeling back.

  He'd found what he'd been subliminally looking for the last three days, all right and tight. The loose end. This is either the jackpot or a trap. I wonder which? So was he meant to find it? Was he meant to find it, now? Could any seer have predicted this subterranean visit? Assume nothing, boy. Just go on.

  Carefully.

  "Open a secured channel to Ops on your com-console," he told the sergeant. "I want Captain Vorpatril, and I want him now."

  Ivan made good time, coming over from the Operations building on the other side of the city; by luck, Miles had caught him on a day he hadn't skinned out of work early. Miles, sitting on the edge of the evidence room entry port's comconsole desk, one booted leg swinging, smiled grimly at Ivan's entrance, shaking off his ImpSec internal escort—"Yes, yes, see, I'm not lost. You can go away now. Thank you." The evidence room sergeant and his supervisor, a lieutenant, waited on the Lord Auditor's pleasure. The lieutenant was green and shaking.

  Ivan took one look at Miles's face, and his brows rose. "So, Lord Auditor Coz. Did you find some fun?"

  "Do I look cheerful?"

  "More like manic."

  "It's a joy, Ivan, an absolute joy. The ImpSec internal security system is lying to me."

  "Tricky, that," said Ivan cautiously. "What's it saying?"

  "It thinks I visited the evidence room, here, on the day of my return from my last mission. Furthermore, the entry desk log upstairs has been altered to match—it lists me as having left the building half an hour later than I really did. The security records at Vorkosigan House still show the actual time of my arrival, though—just enough time in the gap for me to have taken a groundcar home. Except that I walked that day. Furthermore—and this is the cream—the evidence room's internal vid monitor cartridge for that day was found to be, guess what?"

  Ivan glanced at the obviously distraught ImpSec lieutenant. "Missing?"

  "Got it in one."

  Ivan's face screwed up. "Why?"

  "Why, indeed. The very question I propose to answer next. I suppose this could be totally unconnected with Illyan's sabotage. Want to take a side bet?"

  "Nope." Ivan stared at him glumly. "Does this mean I need to cancel my dinner plans?"

  "Yes, and mine too. Call my mother and give her my apologies, but I won't be home tonight. Then sit down here at this desk." He pointed to the sergeant's station chair; the sergeant scrambled out of it. "I declare this evidence room sealed. Let no one in, Ivan, no one at all, without my Auditor's authorization. You two"—his arm swung to point at the two ImpSec men, who flinched—"are my witnesses that I, personally, did not enter the storage areas today." He added to the lieutenant, "Tell me about your inventory procedures."

  The lieutenant swallowed. "The comconsole records are continually updated, of course, my Lord Auditor. We do physical inventory once a month. It takes a week."

  "And the last one was done when?"

  "Two weeks ago."

  "Anything turn up missing?"

  "No, my lord."

  "Anything missing in the last three months?"

  "No."

  "The last year?"

  "No!"

  "Do the same fellows always do the inventory?"

  "It rotates. It's . . . not a popular chore."

  "I'll bet not." Miles glanced at Ivan. "Ivan, while you're sitting here, call Ops and requisition yourself four men with top security clearances, who have never worked for or with ImpSec. They're going to be your team."

  Ivan's face screwed up in dismay. "Oh, God," he groaned. "You're not going to make me inventory the whole damned thing, are you?"

  "Yes. For obvious reasons, I can't do it myself. Somebody's planted a red flag here, with my name on it. If they wanted my attention, they've certainly got it."

  "Biologicals too? The cold room too?" Ivan shuddered.

  "All of it."

  "What will I be looking for?"

  "If I knew that, we wouldn't have to do an inventory, now, would we?"

  "What if, instead of something taken out, something was added? What if it's not a lead you've got hold of, but a fuse?" Ivan asked. His hand flexed in nervous pantomime.

  "Then I trust you will stamp it out." He gestured the two ImpSec men into his wake. "Come with me, gentlemen. We're going to go see General Haroche."

  Haroche too came on the alert the minute he saw Miles's face, as Miles and his little train marched into his office. Haroche sealed his doors behind them, shut down his comconsole, and said, "What have you found, my lord?"

  "Approximately twenty-five minutes of revised history. Your comconsoles have been buggered."

  Haroche's face grew unhappy indeed as Miles explained his discovery of the added time, with corroboration from the evidence room supervisor. It darkened further with the news about the missing vid record.

  "Can you show where you were?" he asked when Miles had finished. "Prove you walked home?"

  Miles shrugged. "Possibly. I passed plenty of people in the street, and I am, ah, a bit more memorable than the average man. Scrounging for witnesses ages after the fact is the sort of thing the municipal guard has to do all the time, investigating their civil crimes. I may put them on it, if it seems necessary. But as an Imperial Auditor, my word is not on trial."

  Yet.

  "Er. Right."

  Miles glanced at the evidence room men. "Gentlemen, will you wait for me in the outer office, please. Go nowhere and speak to no one."

  He and Haroche waited until they'd cleared the room, then Miles continued, "What is certain, at this point, is that you have a mole in your internal security systems. Now, I can play this one of two ways. I can shut ImpSec down entirely while I bring in outside experts to check them. There are certain obvious disadvantages to this method."

  Haroche groaned. "A slight understatement, my lord."

  "Yes. Taking all of ImpSec off-line for a week—or more—while people unfamiliar with your system attempt to learn and then check it seems to me an invitation to disaster. But running an internal check using internal personnel also has, um, obvious drawbacks. Any ideas?"

  Haroche rubbed his forehead. "I see your point. Suppose . . . suppose we set up a team of men to do the checking. At least three, who must work together at all times. They watch each other that way. One mole I must grant, but three, chosen at random . . . they can freeze the system in sections, with the minimum disruption to ImpSec's ongoing duties. If you like, I can give you the list of qualified personnel, and you can select the men."

  "Yes . . ." said Miles slowly. "That works. Good. Do it."

  Haroche breathed obvious relief. "I'm . . . grateful you
are reasonable about this, my lord."

  "I'm always reasonable."

  Haroche's lip twitched, but he didn't argue. He sighed. "This thing is growing uglier all the time. I despise internal investigations. Even if you win, you lose. But what … I confess, I don't understand this business with the evidence room. What do you make of it?"

  Miles shook his head. "It looks like it's meant to be a frame. But most frames come with pictures in them. This one's empty. It's all … very backwards. I mean, usually, you start with the crime and deduce the suspects. I'm having to start with the suspect and deduce the crime."

  "Yes, but . . . who would be fool enough to try to frame an Imperial Auditor? It seems just short of insane."

  Miles frowned, and paced the room, back and forth in front of Haroche's desk. How many times had he paced like this in front of Illyan, as they'd hammered out his mission plans? "That depends … I want your systems analysts to look particularly for this. That depends on how long this thing has been sitting down there in the evidence room comconsole. It was a buried mine, set to go off only when touched. When were the changes made in the records? I mean, it could have been any time between the day I arrived downside, and this morning. But if they were done more than a few weeks back—somebody maybe didn't think they were framing an Imperial Auditor. I don't see how they could have foreseen my getting that appointment, when I didn't myself. They were framing, bluntly, a cashiered junior officer who had departed ImpSec under a cloud. The obscure son of a famous father, and some kind of demi-mutant to boot. I might have been tailor-made to be an easy target."

  Then.

  "I don't like being a target. I'm downright allergic to it, anymore."

  Haroche shook his head in wonder. "You confound me, Lord Vorkosigan. I believe I'm finally beginning to understand why Illyan always …"

  "Why Illyan what?" Miles prodded after a long moment.

  A lopsided smile lightened Haroche's heavy face. "Came out of your debriefings swearing under his breath. And then promptly turned around and sent you out again on the stickiest assignments he had."

  Miles essayed a short, ironic salaam in Haroche's direction. "Thank you, General."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Ivan found it two hours before dawn, not quite by chance.

  It was in the fifth aisle of the second room he'd tackled, Weapons IV. He'd placed Biologicals, Poisons, and the Cold Room last on his list for this very contingency, in the hope that he might not have to do them at all. Miles would have chosen to knock off the worst rooms first; sometimes, he had to admit, Ivan was not such an idiot as he feigned.

  Ivan trod out to the reception area. Miles had been cross-checking the inventory lists on the comconsole there for the last several hours, ever since he'd overseen Haroche's three-man security systems analysis team selected and put to work upstairs.

  "I'm in a Weapons Room, right?" Ivan demanded, waving his inventory sheaf of plastic flimsies.

  Miles tore his attention away from the chemical description of the nine-hundred-and-ninth item in alphabetical order in the Poisons Room: Ophidian Scrapings, Polian, Three Grams. "If you say so."

  "Right. So what's a little box labeled 'Komarran virus' doing on Aisle Five, Shelf Nine, Bin Twenty-Seven? What the hell is it, and shouldn't it be in Biologicals? Did somebody misclassify it? I'm not unsealing the damned thing till you find out what it is. It might make me break out in green fungus, or bloat up like those poor suckers with the Sergyaran worm plague. Or worse."

  "The worm plague has to have been the most disgusting in recent history," Miles agreed. "But it wasn't very lethal, as plagues go. Let me look. Was it on the Weapons Room listing?"

  "Oh, yes, right where it should be. They think."

  "So it's got to be a weapon. Maybe." Miles marked his place and re-filed the poisons list he'd been examining on the Evidence Rooms' library comconsole, and pulled up that of the weapons section instead. The "Komarran virus" had a code classification that blocked access to its description and history to any but men of the very highest security clearances. ImpSec HQ was crammed with such men. Miles smiled slightly, and overrode the lockout with his Auditor's seal.

  He hadn't read more than the first three lines before he began to laugh, very softly. He would swear, but he couldn't think of any invective foul enough.

  "What?" snapped Ivan, craning around to peer over Miles's shoulder.

  "Not a virus, Ivan. Somebody in Classification needs a lecture from Dr. Weddell. It's a bioengineered apoptotic prokaryote. A little bug that eats things, specifically, neurochip proteins. The prokaryote, Illyan's prokaryote. It's no danger to you at all, unless you've acquired a neurochip I don't know about. Oh, God. This is where it came from … or rather, this is where it came from last." He settled in and began to read; Ivan, hanging over the back of his station chair, knocked his hand aside when he tried to advance screens before Ivan had finished too.

  This was it, hidden in plain sight, buried in an inventory of tens of thousands of other items. It had been sitting here demurely in Bin Twenty-Seven, Shelf Nine, collecting dust for nearly five years, ever since the day it was delivered to the ImpSec Evidence Room by an officer from Komarran Affairs. It had been picked up at that time by Imperial Counter-intelligence right here in Vorbarr Sultana, on an arrest-sweep of Komarran terrorist cells associated with . . . the late Ser Galen, killed on Earth while trying to launch his last complicated, dramatic, and futile plot for bringing down the Barrayaran Imperium and freeing Komarr. The plot for which Galen had created Miles's clone-brother Mark.

  "Oh, hell," said Ivan. "Has your damned clone got something to do with this?"

  "Brother," corrected Miles, swallowing the same fear. "I don't see how. He's been on Beta Colony for almost the last half-year. My Betan grandmother can confirm it."

  "If you want confirmation," said Ivan, "then you must be thinking what I'm thinking. Could he have been pretending to be you again?"

  "Not without going on one hell of a crash diet."

  Ivan grunted half-assent. "Could be done, with the right drugs."

  "I don't think so. I promise you, the last thing Mark wants is to be me, ever again. I'll have his whereabouts formally checked anyway, just to stop everyone from galloping down a blind alley. The ImpSec office at the embassy on Beta Colony keeps him in their sights just because Mark is … who he is."

  Miles read on. The Jacksonian connection was quite real too. The chip-eating prokaryote had indeed been made to order there for the Komarran terrorists, by one of the Houses Minor more usually known for its tailored drugs. And Illyan had been its intended target from the beginning; the disruption of ImpSec had been timed to coincide with the assassination of then-Prime Minister Count Aral Vorkosigan. The ImpSec investigation of five years ago had traced the prokaryote right back to its building of origin, and the Komarran payment to the Jacksonian biochem team's bank accounts. The new search, just launched, must sooner or later turn up the exact same data: later, if they had to totally reconstruct the first tedious investigation; sooner, if the organization overcame its collective amnesia and spotted the data in its own files. Three to eight weeks, depending, Miles estimated.

  "This explains . . . the frame, at least," Miles muttered.

  Ivan cocked an eyebrow. "How so?"

  "I came at it in the wrong order. My ersatz visit here was meant to be found, yes, inevitably, but it wasn't meant to be found first. This data . . ."—Miles waved at the comconsole—"when it finally arrived here, would have focused attention on the Evidence Rooms. Instead of starting with the comconsole records, and then checking the inventory, the investigators would have begun with Bin Twenty-Seven and then checked the security records of people going in and out. Where they would have been quite pleased with themselves for finding me, a recently cashiered officer with no business here. Gone at that way, it would have been a much more convincing frame."

  Miles sat for a moment, ordering his thoughts. Then he called ImpSec Forensics and requi
sitioned the senior officer on call. After that he put through a call to Dr. Vaughn Weddell's home console.

  The machine blocked him, and tried to take a message; Weddell didn't care to have his beauty sleep interrupted, it appeared. He tried once more, with the same results, waited a full three seconds to recover his patience, and then called the Imperial Guards. Miles had the duty officer dispatch a couple of their largest uniformed men to Weddell's flat with instructions to wake him up by whatever means were required, and bring him at once to ImpSec HQ, carried bodily if necessary.

  It still seemed an eternity—almost dawn outside, Miles gauged—before Miles had his team assembled, and marched them all before him into Weapons Room IV. Weddell was still whining under his breath about being awakened so rudely in the middle of the night; as long as he prudently kept his complaints sotto voce, Miles chose to ignore them. Neither he nor Ivan had gotten any sleep at all, not that Miles was the least tired right now.

  The forensics man was given first crack at the exterior of the little sealed biocontainer.

  "It's been moved a few times," he reported. "Some fingerprints, some smudges, none very fresh . . ." He duly recorded them by laser-scan, for cross-match with Evidence Rooms personnel, and the rest of the population of the Empire if necessary. "The screamer-signal circuit to detect the container's removal from the Evidence Rooms has never been activated. No hairs or fibers. I wouldn't expect much dust, given the air filters here. That's all I can say. It's all yours, gentlemen."

  He stepped back; Ivan stepped forward, drew the box from its shelf, and positioned it on the lighted examination board brought in for the purpose. The box was sealed with the simplest of numeric code-locks, designed more to keep it from popping open if accidentally dropped than for any real security—for one thing, the access-code was listed right in the inventory description. Ivan referred to the flimsy, and tapped in the sequence. The little lid swung up.

  "Right," drawled Ivan, peering inside, and then at his inventory-flimsy again. The box was lined with a shock-proof gel-pack, scored by six parallel slots. Three slots were filled with tiny brown capsules, small enough for a child to swallow. The other three were empty. "Six sealed vector-delivery units—that's what they're called on here, anyway—to start with, one taken out for examination five years ago and listed as destroyed. Five supposedly left—only now there are three." He opened his hand with a flourish; the forensics man again stepped forward, and bent over the box to begin checking the seal from the inside.