“You mean Eve and Henry.”
“A bioroid and a clone.” She shrugged. “The Mayor’s on my case, Harrison. If we can wrap this up, cleanly and quietly over the next day or two, before the sordid details of Dow’s murder get out, maybe we can avoid another round of riots. Understand me?”
I understood, too well. She was talking about sacrificing Henry and Eve to avoid something bloodier.
The hell of it was, they were accessories to the murder. The DA would be able to put together a pretty solid case—placing them at the scene, with the weapon, and with a motive.
It would mean disassembly for Eve, and probably ‘retirement’ for Henry.
I didn’t like this, not one bit.
“Commissioner,” I said, angry, “I gave my word to them that they would be safe.”
“Your word?” She laughed. “To a sex toy? To a clone? Time for a reality check, Harrison. If we can wrap this up by proving the two of them did it, that’s what we’re going to do. It’s what’s in the public welfare.”
I cut the connection before I said something I might regret later.
Damn the fragging politics.
Damn expediency.
Damn the public welfare, if you had to sell your soul to secure it.
I sat there thinking for a long time, because something had at that moment dawned on me…something that had been nagging at the back of my mind for a couple days, now.
How had the men who’d attacked Henry and me out on the lunar surface known where I was?
It would have been simple if the bad guys had been working for Melange Mining, of course. The help-desk person, the personnel-admin clone, either of them could have let their bosses know that a snoopy NAPD detective was looking for Mark Henry.
But what if Melange Mining or the mining bosses had had nothing to do with Dow’s murder?
How had the real murderers found us?
I used my NAPD authorization codes to link in to another set of electronic files, and spent a long and uncomfortable time studying them.
And then I called Lily.
“Fish!” she cried when her face appeared on the folding screen. “What a pleasant surprise! You never call or—”
“Can it, babe. The Commissioner tells me you want to break the story.”
“Rick, I have to. I told Dawn I could hold off for today, until tomorrow at the absolute latest. A friend of mine over at Associated let me know this morning that they’re working the story up now. They’ve talked to Dr. Weissmuller, Fuchida, the SEA, and some of the Housekeeping staff at the High Frontier. There’s already been an official announcement of Dow’s death. His wife went on NetNews the other evening and demanded to know what was being done.”
“You’re just full of good news,” I told her.
“There’s more and better. Humanity Labor has called a press conference for 1600 tomorrow on the front steps of the HL building.”
“About the murder?”
“I can’t imagine what else it would be. Vaughn himself is making the announcement.” She hesitated. “Rick, I can’t sit on this much longer. I’ve got a responsibility to report the news…and if I don’t, someone else is going to anyway.”
“I don’t expect you to sit on it, sweetheart,” I told her. “But when you write it, remember one thing, okay?”
“What?”
“Eve and Henry are not guilty. Say that they are, and you’re going to have to publish a retraction later.”
“How sure are you?”
“Willing to bet my life on it. Here’s another flash. The person who killed Dow didn’t use a mining laser. The whole scene was a set-up to make it look like Henry was guilty.”
“Rick—”
“Where are you?” I asked, cutting her off.
“At the Network. The Midway.”
“Okay. Right now, I’m at the High Frontier. I’m spending the night here again… Room Fifty-Six. I’ll see you tomorrow. I’m coming down-Stalk as soon as I can. And I’ll bring the proof of what I’m saying with me.”
And I cut the connection.
I didn’t want to say too much. Not then.
Not there.
I was expecting visitors.
Chapter Fifteen
Day 9
Even in .04G, I spent an uncomfortable night slumped in the deep, stuffed chair in one corner of the room, my H&K on the floor beside me as I faced the door in the darkness.
I knew they would come. They had to…because now they knew I was on my way to talk to Lily…and they knew I had enough of the picture pulled together to be a threat.
I was certain I’d been bugged.
PriRights is a citizens’ privacy rights group, one of the oldest of a number of similar groups out there. For over a century, they’ve been trying to limit the ongoing invasion of ordinary people’s privacy by government and the big corps. One of their biggest fights was against backscatter scanning. On the one hand, the government demanded the right to thoroughly search everyone boarding the space elevator and certain key tube-lev transit lines. Peek-a-boo units were just too damned effective at seeing what you were carrying into the terminal underneath your clothes. During the last few years they’ve refined things to the point where they can add a couple of tightly focused ultrasound beams, bring your internal organs into view in high-res 3D, and make a fair guess at what you’ve had that morning for breakfast.
One place PriRights has been effective, though, was in combating the widespread use of hidden security cameras and microphones. We can build the things pretty small, now: a camera thinner in cross-section than a human hair, a microphone a bit bigger than a long-chain organic molecule, a short-range transmitter and piggyback modem as small as a grain of sand. They can be powered by ambient heat, such as the heat from a human body, and are for all practical intents and purposes invisible. The government, the big corps, they’re not allowed to use devices like that. The average Joe on the street needs to be able see that they’re there, watching—as with the police security drones drifting ominously about the New Angeles streets like cops on the beat.
That doesn’t mean that invisible electronic surveillance systems aren’t used…or that they’re not available to people or to groups who want them. Technically, it’s three-to-five years in prison if you use such a device without the subject knowing about it, but the government can usually demonstrate it was a need-to-know or a public safety issue and get away with it, while the corps know whom to pay off.
As I sat there in the dark, I once again pulled out my PAD and unfolded the screen. I typed in my badge number and authorization code, and again linked through to SEA e-security files.
The black-and-white image of a nude man appeared on the screen, rotating in space. The man was me, caught by the backscatter unit as I’d gone through security the other day while boarding the Challenger Memorial Ferry on my way up to Heinlein.
Personally, I try to avoid backscatter scans whenever possible. I’m just not a huge fan of the enforced technological strip-search, even when it’s a sophisticated AI rather than a human that’s actually looking at the images.
Because, frankly, anyone with the right access codes can look at the files, just as I was doing now.
I froze the rotating image and zoomed in slightly from the front. I could see the hazy shadow of my shoulder holster high on the left-side of my chest, and the much sharper, clearer image of my H&K hand cannon, tucked safely away beneath my now invisible jacket. My badge was clear too, attached to the holster, my service number picked out bright and clear in the X-ray image.
Other bits and pieces of hardware stood out sharply on the image. The implants in my wrists that accessed my credaccount and personal data downloads. The two spare clips of 12mm pistol rounds at my waist. My PAD hanging in its thigh holster, tucked in next to my leg. I zoomed in closer, panning up to my chest…then to my left shoulder.
It was tough to see unless you knew exactly what you were looking for.
It looked
like a tiny, faint star. It might even have been an artifact of the backscatter scan, a stray bit of noise, but I zoomed in still closer.
The star was hovering above my left shoulder, as though riding on my invisible jacket. Some shapes were just barely discernible beside the reflected bit of flare, but so fuzzy it was impossible to know what they were or what they were for.
Unless, of course, you knew.
It was all I could do not to go to my jacket, hanging in the closet by the hotel room door, and check that shoulder… My fingers—gross, clumsy things—would not be able to find the near-microscopic device, though, or to remove it from the weave of my clothing, and it would only tip them off that I’d found the bug.
John Jones’s bug. The device he’d planted on me eight days ago on the up-Stalk beanpod when he shook my hand and casually touched my shoulder.
Jones 937. The enigma, the clone secretly hired by the clone-hating Roger Dow and Human First. Jones with the educated vocabulary, the atypical interest in human psychology, and the apparent ease around full-humans.
I wanted to add “Jones the murderer,” but he couldn’t have been part of that, not if he was a fellow up-Stalk traveler on the beanpod from the Root to Midway that first morning after the murder. That’s why I’d overlooked him for a time, frankly. Jones wouldn’t have had time to take part in the murder, catch a beanpod down to Earthside New Angeles, and then find the guy assigned to the murder case and follow him back up-Stalk the next morning.
Well…no. As I called up the beanpod schedules and took a look at them, I realized he could have done it. Pods leave from the Challenger terminal going down every few hours. It’s an hour from Challenger to Midway, another hour from Midway to the Root. So he could have done it, sure.
But it was far more likely that he’d already been in place in Earthside New Angeles. The most disturbing part of it was the realization that NAPD security had been that badly breached. How had Jones found out that I was the detective on the case? I’d not even known that bit of news myself until after Ray Flint had turned me down in Jack’s sitsleazy. That was…when? Oh-three hundred, or so?
On the other hand, Human First was a big organization, and they had a lot of money behind them—including the full backing of Humanity Labor. Enough clout, enough money, and enough contacts inside the Force to pick up a detective assignment as soon as Commissioner Dawn or her admin assistant had plugged my name into the case file.
Hell, maybe it was the admin assistant, or even Dawn herself, who were on Humanity Labor’s black-op payroll. I didn’t like thinking like that, didn’t like the implications, but it was possible, and I had to consider all of the possibilities, however unpleasant.
One way or another, they’d fingered me as the detective in charge of the Dow case. Jones had picked me up at the Root and followed me on-board the beanpod. He’d struck up a conversation with me and had found a way to casually plant a nearly microscopic bug on me—audio at the very least, but possibly a camera as well.
It wouldn’t be transmitting all the time. There were scanners that could pick up that sort of thing from quite a distance away, alerting me if something was transmitting from my clothing. More likely, the device was programmed to wait until I’d connected with the Net through my PAD—picking up the signals associated with the palm device’s multiple wireless connections—then piggybacking an outgoing burst signal containing compressed data over the Net, where Human First would have lurking electronic agents just waiting to snap it up.
The gunmen at Sinus Medii—could they have tracked me by the bug since, at that point, the bug was sealed inside my suit? Possibly so. That suit had been pretty thin, strictly for short-term surface work. Even if not, they might have picked me up when I entered Melange Mining’s headquarters and asked for Mark Henry. A microbug like that easily had enough memory on-board to let it react to key words, like “Henry” or “Dow,” enabling it to tune in on important conversations and transmit data containing them. By that time it might even have established a parasitic link with my PAD, using it to continually transmit my real-time position.
Someone had been tracking me every step of the way throughout this investigation. They’d listened in on my conversations, they’d known where I was going, and who I was speaking with.
Knowing all of that, I’d set a trap.
Not an elaborate one, certainly, but the best I could manage on such short notice. My last conversation with Lily would have told them exactly where I was, though doubtless they knew that information already, and how long I would be here. It also told them that I hadn’t yet passed my proof on to Lily; I didn’t want to set her up as a target, and I wanted any eavesdroppers to think I had something special in my possession.
Something more definitive, more evidential, more solid than a strong hunch.
I’d given them a small but definite window—the time between when I’d talked to Lily, and when I would be catching a down-Stalk pod in the morning. They would have to strike tonight. Here.
So I waited there in the dark. I’d bunched up pillows and bedclothes to make a suggestive lump in the middle of the bed—something that might look like me. I’d put my jacket and holster in the closet, and taken the added precaution of removing my shirt and putting it in the closet, as well, just in case the bug had video as well as audio.
I’d programmed my PAD and set it on the desk, hiding it under a casually placed brochure touting the recreational glories to be found on the Challenger Planetoid. It wouldn’t be able to catch a vid of anything, but it should be able to record any conversations, and someone entering the room wouldn’t see it without a careful search.
Then I went back to my chair.
I must have dozed a little, because I was jerked awake by the door chime. This is it.
“Who…the hell is it?” I called, doing my best to imitate someone just awakened out of a deep sleep, muzzy and groggy. I pressed my timepiece and read the faintly luminous numerals on the back of my hand. Oh-four-thirty…zero-dark-thirty, as we’d called it in the service.
“Room service,” a woman’s voice called over the intercom, sultry and suggestive, dripping warm promise. “Very special room service.” The door screen, when I flashed it, did indeed show a young woman whose attire matched the promise of that voice.
And I could also see that the image was a vidcheat, a clever bit of video software fed directly to the security scanners to give a completely illusory picture of who was outside. Slick…and completely illegal, of course.
“I didn’t order room service,” I called back. “It’s the middle of the fragging night, for chrissake!”
“This is very special room service,” the voice repeated. “Compliments of Mr. Fuchida and the High Frontier staff and management, and of Eliza’s Toybox!”
I picked up my pistol and quietly chambered a round, but kept the weapon hidden beside my leg. Did they really think it was that easy…just asking to be let in that way in the middle of the night?
“Open.”
The door slid aside, and the woman walked in, silhouetted by the light in the hallway at her back. By that dim light, I could see that she was wearing grip-slippers and skintights, that she was short-haired…and that she was carrying something in her right hand.
At first, I thought it might be a knife, but there was no blade, just the hilt nestled in her hand…and suddenly all of my attention was focused on that deadly, bladeless knife. I saw her thumb move, and a tiny, silver bead fell silently from the knife hilt, dropped perhaps thirty centimeters toward the floor and then hung there, floating in mid-air just below her knee.
A monoknife.
My blood ran a little colder at that. A monofilament knife consisted of a strand of buckyweave fabric just one molecule thick, fed from a reel inside the hilt. When the bead at the end of the filament drops, the thread is pulled out and an electric charge from the hilt stiffens it, just like a folding screen or newsrag. The “blade” isn’t completely rigid; it has some give, l
ike a fencer’s foil. But that one-molecule-thick wire will slice through solid steel as though it were clay…or through clothing, flesh, and bone without slowing for an instant, without even noticing there’s anything at all in the way. Sharp doesn’t begin to describe it.
I watched as she paused in the doorway, then strode forward. Not exactly a sexy walk to the bed…with her grip-slippers making tiny fft-fft noises as she shuffled across the carpet. Then her right hand came up, whipping the silver bead and its attached, invisible thread high above her head. She snapped the monofilament down, cleanly slicing through sheets, mattress, and the bed frame.
I stood, my H&K held in both hands, aiming at her from the side. “That’s quite enough, sister,” I told her. “Drop the knife and step back from the bed.”
I heard her gasp. She hadn’t yet fully registered that I hadn’t been in the bed when she’d sliced through the sheets, and my voice coming from the far corner of the room must have been a real shock.
“Frag!” she spat, whirling.
“Lights on full!” I commanded, and the room lights came up, glaring and harsh as only room lights can be at 0430 in the morning.
Thea Coleman stood before me, stooped, her face flush, panting. “You’re too clever by half, Harrison,” she said.
She still hadn’t dropped the knife.
“I want you to retract the monofilament,” I told her, the pistol leveled directly at her chest.
She hesitated, then her thumb moved, and the silver bead rose up as though it was part of a conjurer’s levitation trick, snapping into the knife’s hilt with a tiny click.
Android: Free Fall Page 21
