It’s enough to make you never want to go near a bed, any bed, ever again.
The lab report showed biological traces of every person who’d been inside Room Twelve in the past several months, and by itself wasn’t very useful. I put in a request for the genome records for Coleman and for Hodgkins, however. That would require a biological warrant, of course, and we’d have to show cause—but my being able to identify them as the people who’d just tried to kill me inside another hotel room was cause enough, and then some. The voluntary release forms signed by the hotel staff would let us compare our collected bio-traces with them, just to knock a few of those genomes off the list.
The best thing the scan did was give us a genome database in case more suspects came up. We’d be able to prove that they had been in that room.
The clone data was interesting, but not conclusive. That there was only one type identified was not surprising; clones didn’t stay in expensive Beanstalk hotels. It was perhaps more surprising that there were any traces at all.
The problem was that all clones of a given type had the same DNA. John Jones would have a different genotype than Mark Henry…but there were thousands of Joneses and thousands of Henrys and no DNA-based means of telling them apart. Same-series clones did possess different fingerprints, true, but the chances were good, with so many humans in the room and so few clones, that all of the prints would turn out to be human.
So all I knew at the moment was that at least one other clone, and of a different genotype than the Henry model, had been in the room. I didn’t know which model—yet—and I didn’t know when it had been there.
But it was something, and at least we wouldn’t need a warrant to check the clone DNA. Clones don’t have civil or medical rights, and every clone type has its genome and prints on file with Jinteki. A request had already been forwarded from NAPD HQ to Jinteki for a match with their records; we should know the model of the unknown clone visitor in short order, and if another clone had left fingerprints in that room, we’d know that as well. A check of hotel records would tell us if a human guest had arrived with a clone as a personal servant.
But not which individual. The NAPD had been pressuring Jinteki to write individual serial numbers into the so-called “junk DNA” of each individual clone, but so far we’d not gotten anywhere with them. So we’d already proven that a Henry clone had been in the room through the fleck of tissue on the laser; what we could not prove from the DNA traces was that it had been Mark Henry 103.
The bioroids provided an even more difficult problem. Most of those fifteen-some traces would be from sexbots rented for an hour or for a night by past residents of the room. They’d arrived, done their thing, and microscopic traces had been left behind. They always were.
Some might be personal attendants; lots of risties had their own bioroids that they brought along as valets, as arm-candy, or for more personal reasons. The only biological traces left by bioroids were artificial hair samples from the body or the head, and those had originally come from human hair specifically grown from human donor samples. Many—but not all—Eve models would have hair with the same altered DNA code…which, when we checked, would probably turn out to be from some female employee of Haas-Bioroid. I could be pretty sure that the strands of blond hair I’d found on the pillow in Room Twelve had come from Eve 5VA3TC, since I knew she’d been in the bed with Dow the night he was murdered, and the Housekeeping staff would have removed any stray hairs long enough to be visible to the naked eye the last time they’d changed the sheets.
Even so, bioroid hair samples could establish a probability, not a certainty. Evidence collection was all about finding enough probables to build, step by slow step, a statistical near-certainty.
Haas-Bioroid would have records of which models carried which synthetic hair genome; since one donor sample could provide the hair for thousands of bioroids, however, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference if, say, there’d been two Eves in the room that night.
But an Eve usually had blond hair, while a Giselle, for instance, had gold-blond hair from a different donor, and a Rhoda had dark brunette hair grown from yet another source. With luck, we might find a difference if there’d been different models.
Unfortunately, it would be very difficult to prove that they’d been in the room that same evening. Unlike clones, who had their movements closely tracked by the bar codes on their necks, bioroids were personal equipment, and the hotel would not keep records on clients who’d either brought their own along, or who rented one for the night. What we would have to do was check the account records at Eliza’s Toybox and other bioroid rentals for models hired by human customers on nights when those humans had checked into a room at the High Frontier. By cross-indexing the lists, we could eliminate many of the bioroid samples…but by no means all.
And, once again, there was no way to tie any one specific bioroid to Room Twelve on the night of the twenty-third.
Police detective work, I decided, would be a hell of a lot easier if Humanity Labor or the ACM did win and get artificial humans of both types banned. Clone and bioroid evidence could be contradictory, subtle, and, more often than not, frustratingly inconclusive.
My PAD chimed. It was Guerrero.
“Whatcha got?” I asked, fanning open the big screen.
His dark features seemed guarded. “A team got to the Farside tube-lev terminal a few minutes ago,” the security chief told me. “According to the records, there’ve been no passengers matching the images you transmitted, not within the past couple of hours.”
“What…you didn’t have people already there, at Farside?”
“No one authorized to go into the security camera records, no.”
“Damn it, I can go into seccam records from here! I told you I wanted someone there physically watching the trains as they arrived!”
His lips tightened as he watched me from the folding screen. “I am doing the best that I can, Captain, with the resources I have available. You don’t need to shout.”
I sighed. Rent-a-cops. Better than nothing, arguably, but…
“Have they checked the ferry terminal?”
“I have another team there now.”
“When did the last ferry leave for Heinlein?”
“Almost six hours ago.”
“And the next one out?”
“Not due to leave for hours, yet.”
That was something, at least.
“Okay, good,” I said. “I want you to shut down the ferry departures until further notice.”
“We can’t do that!”
“Sure you can. You call SEA Control and say, ‘Hey, I got a situation; shut down the ferry.’”
“For how long?”
“Until I tell you. In the meantime, you’re going to check everyone in the ferry terminal waiting area. You’re going to tag their e-IDs, if they have them, and you’re going to scan their faces and their hands.”
“There must be two hundred people waiting for the next departure!”
“Then you’d better get busy, because I’m not turning off the no-flight order until you have them all.”
“I—I’ll need authorization. From Earthside.”
“You’ll have it. Start without. What about Nearside?”
“I have a team at the Nearside tube-lev station, checking people getting off from Farside. No matches in the past half hour.”
“Then start scanning faces and hands there, too.”
“But there are hundreds—”
“Just do it!” And I cut the connection. ¡Gilún! ¡Malparido!
I was going to be catching flak on this one. Technically, police and security forces can request fingerprint or facial scanning data only at specific security checkpoints—such as the security stations at each platform up and down the Beanstalk—or if the subject signs a release, or if a law enforcement officer declares a hot-pursuit emergency. Essentially, I was calling an emergency…but I’d be grilled for it later, first by Commissione
r Dawn, then by NAPD Internal Affairs, and then by a judge. I could end up suspended, fined, fired, in jail…or any combination of the above. I was putting my career on the line, but I had to find the two fugitives.
The question was which way Coleman and Hodgkins would go. I knew they’d caught the tube-lev for Farside. From there they could catch a ferry for Starport Kaguya—but that was blocked, now. Or they could head for the offices of Humanity Labor…a good bet, since they probably had temporary rooms there. Or they could head for the Challenger Mines…possible, but not extremely likely. There were numerous buildings and pressurized underground rooms there, a labyrinth to hide within, but a search would find them eventually. Same for Humanity Labor, if it came to that.
A likelier scenario would be for them to turn around and catch a tube-lev right back to Nearside, where they could blend with the crowd and eventually catch a down-Stalk beanpod for the trip back to Earth.
Once they mingled with the billion or so other people in Earthside New Angeles, it would be damn near impossible to find them if they didn’t want to be found.
The vid chimed again. It was Guerrero.
“What?”
“Thought you’d want to know about this,” he said, holding up a large plastic evidence bag of gold-yellow tangles and strands. “One of the boys found it tucked away behind a seat on-board the tube-lev when it arrived at Farside.”
That was the best news I’d heard in some time. “Good. I’d appreciate it if you would ship it to NAPD HQ right away, Attention: Evidence Department. Include your report.”
“Right.” This time he signed off first.
That seemed to confirm that Coleman, at least, was somewhere at Farside.
But then I got to thinking about that.
Why stuff a wig behind a seat on a tube-lev? Every seat had disposal slots, and even a full a wig as long and thick as that one could be crammed inside. Disposal tanks on a tube-lev car were emptied automatically upon each arrival at a station, the contents shredded, then separated for recycling. A wig made of human hair would have been reduced to discrete elements—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, mostly, with traces of potassium, iron, phosphorous, and others—and shipped either to the Challenger Farside Life Support Unit or on a volatiles tanker bound for Heinlein in short order. There would be no way to trace it then.
So why shove it behind a seat?
Unless…
Unless she wanted it to be found.
Frag! There were security cameras in the main Nearside concourse, but not inside the Nearside tube-lev terminal itself. Coleman had proven to be damned clever already with that wig worn for the benefit of the seccams, and I was beginning to suspect that Hodgkins was using a disguise as well. Was his beard a fake, perhaps?
I called up the security camera overlooking the Nearside concourse and pointed at the entrance to the tube-lev platform. I ran it back an hour…and began watching. Closely.
I was beginning to suspect that Coleman and Hodgkins both had ducked into the Nearside tube terminal, changed their appearance—in Coleman’s case, she’d actually boarded a train and hidden the wig—and then…waited. Later, after the train had left, they would have come back, doing so separately.
Nothing…
Nothing…
I switched over to a security map of the Nearside terminal area. Frag, and frag again. There were two entrances to the terminal from the concourse alone, two sets of restroom facilities with entrances into both the terminal and the concourse, and a maze of security and maintenance passageways back behind the walls. Those last would be no-admittance and require handprints or other security measures to get in, but Hodgkins was in Humanity Labor’s security department, and would be able to get access to literally anywhere.
I hadn’t been thinking big enough. Both of them had re-entered the concourse, avoided the security cameras, and…what?
Almost certainly they would be headed down-Stalk, and would have to board a beanpod at the Space Elevator terminal. Any other destination—the Challenger Carousel, the High Frontier, the low-G facilities near the Carousel—would offer them temporary safety at best. Sooner or later, they’d have to pass in front of a security camera.
There was also the possibility of tagging their credaccounts or e-IDs—they were sure to have e-IDs, working for a major company like Humanity Labor. Almost everyone had one—well, everyone except for a few neoluddites, anti-technology anarchists, fundamentalists afraid of the Antichrist’s mark, and a few million homeless people—but you weren’t likely to encounter any of them at the top of the Beanstalk. The problem there was that fake e-IDs were not that hard to come by; any halfway competent underground programmer could do it in a matter of minutes—not enough to scam a deep electronic query, but good enough to fool typical doorway security scans and low-level security checkpoints.
So I linked in to the Beanstalk’s security system again, calling up the backscatter data.
Every person boarding the Beanstalk at any terminal had to walk through the backscatter unit. Used to be there’d been exceptions…but then that terrorist had smeared himself all over the inside of a beanpod ten years ago, and there were no more exceptions. Everyone got scanned.
However, in deference to groups like PriRights, many security sites used computer programs to blur faces and certain body parts normally kept hidden, and most claimed to discard the information after the subject was checked for weapons…but the original data scan showed everything at maximum resolution, and the records were simply too valuable to discard. With a high enough security clearance, anyone could see all the data.
As I was now, I’d have to explain myself to Internal Affairs—add another one to the list, boys—but I didn’t have the time right now to go through channels.
I started with people who’d boarded the next down-Stalk pod at 0445 that morning, within a few minutes of the attack in my hotel room. I pulled up the image on a man in a business suit and carrying a briefcase. No.
A child. No.
A woman with short hair, wearing a traveler’s suit with a shoulder cape. No.
The images were in black and white, but at a superficial scanning level the faces were crisp and clear, showing details as fine as creases and skin pores, if I zoomed in closely enough.
No…no…
Each image that came up was a multilayered composite created by the system network. By typing in commands, I could rotate the image, zoom in close, or actually adjust the image for depth and completeness of penetration, which could progressively show the person in street clothes all the way down to some rather grotesque sonar-generated cutaways revealing their internal organs, if I cared to dig that deep.
I kept the scans on superficial for the time being; I was looking at the faces.
No…no…no…
I could have set my PAD’s secretary to the task, but, as usual, I didn’t trust a machine to replace my eyes and brain—a piece of AI software couldn’t ride hunches.
No…no…no…
Attached to each image was e-ID data, pinged from the subject when the scan was made.
No…no…
There. That one looked like Frank Hodgkins. I typed commands into my keyboard, effectively increasing the depth of scan until his hair and beard vanished. I recorded both sets of images; they would be useful in an ID check later. I also looked at the e-ID data. The name given was for Fred Callahan, a machinist from the Strugatsky Apartments back in New Angeles, visiting Heinlein on vacation. He’d checked through Beanstalk Security at 0525…that was almost two hours ago.
And the pod had left at 0600.
I kept checking. No…no…no…
Fifteen minutes later, I spotted Thea Coleman. Her e-ID listed her as Belinda Wiggins, a programming specialist for Armitage Software living at the Columbiad Arcology in Heinlein. She was traveling to Earthside New Angeles to visit family.
I copied her at several levels of scanning as well, for future reference. Then, just because I wanted to cover all b
ases, I checked the e-ID pings of people leaving the Beanstalk platform, in case either or both had pulled another switch-and-double-back on me.
As near as I could tell, both had boarded the pod and were on their way to Midway right now.
Correction. Their Beanpod had arrived at Midway at just past 0700. It was now almost 0730. They were already there…either at the Midway station, or else they’d changed pods and continued on for the last leg of their trip to Earth.
I was too late to stop them.
Chapter Seventeen
Day 9
I put out calls both to Beanstalk Security at Midway and to the NAPD, alerting them all that the two fugitives were at Midway and presumably bound for Earth. I lifted my hold on Moon-bound ferry launches, and told Guerrero to recall his people.
So why the hell didn’t I have them check the backscatter records at Midway? I could have verified whether “Wiggins” and “Callahan” had already left down-Stalk for Earth. I wanted to do just that…but in fact, I couldn’t bend the privacy laws quite that far.
Backscatter scanning has been controversial ever since it was first introduced back in the very early years of the 21st century. There were some messy legal cases arising from their use and for a time they were banned, but ultimately the technology was just too useful to ignore. Eventually they’d become common enough that even a dive like Tommy’s could afford one.
But PriRights and others had pushed through civil legislation that made the use of backscatter x-ray records to track people a violation of civil—as opposed to criminal—law. You could use them to find out if tourists were smuggling bombs onto the Beanstalk or weapons into Jack’s, but accessing the stored images later for any other purpose could end in a civil suit.
Android: Free Fall Page 23
