Quan’s smile broadened, further distorting his battered features. “You’re not the only one with a network of operatives. We’ve known about the Earth Intelligence Service for some time. That’s why I’m here talking to you instead of begging for a meeting with your planetary government.”
“You’re here because you got caught trying to board a transport departing Shakespeare Hub.”
“Think about what I’m capable of, Mister Novak. If I’d wanted to evade capture on Shakespeare Hub, don’t you think I would have done so?”
“You want me to believe that you allowed the Rangers to beat you to a pulp on the off-chance that somebody would take pity on you and bring you to Earth to be tried? After what you’d done to Bonelli?”
“No. I had to let myself be arrested by the Rangers because of what I’d done to your man Bonelli. I needed to return to Earth in one piece for this meeting, and my chances of arriving here alive were much better if I surrendered myself to Security. Issuing orders to all your agents to kill me on sight? That wasn’t very sportsmanlike, I must say.”
Incredulity drew Novak slowly to his feet. “Not very sportsmanlike? You think this is some sort of game?” In two furious strides he was standing behind Quan’s back. From there it would have been a simple matter to turn that collar around his neck into a noose and choke the life out of him. Tommy Novotny would have considered it a debt repaid. But Novak’s curiosity had been aroused. So instead, he leaned over Quan’s right shoulder and hissed into his ear, “You’re a sociopathic menace, Quan. Every breath you take puts people in danger. Give me one reason for not ending you here and now.”
The prisoner continued gazing serenely frontward. “I have the crucial piece of the puzzle you’re working on. If you kill me now, you might never solve it.”
It was probably just a delaying tactic. Nonetheless, Novak forced himself to stroll casually back to his chair and sit down. “I’m working on a number of puzzles right now. Which one are you talking about?”
“Please don’t play coy with me, Mister Novak. We know your organization recently came into possession of a highly sensitive piece of information about Earth’s ancient past.”
Bringing all his training to bear, Novak kept his expression impassive and took a slow, deep breath to steady his voice before speaking again.
“By ‘we’, I gather you’re referring to your organization.”
Quan tried to nod in reply but was brought up short by his collar.
“Who do you work for?” Novak demanded.
Silence.
“Who gives you your orders, Quan? What’s the name of your organization? How do you know about this sensitive information that we’re supposed to have?”
More silence. Novak studied him for a moment. The prisoner’s demeanor remained calm and infuriatingly unconcerned. If he’d been conditioned to resist interrogation, they could badger him, ridicule him, bully or threaten him for hours on end without getting a rise or making a dent. And considering how much physical punishment he’d already endured with no apparent loss of resolve, torturing him was unlikely to gain them anything useful. The Forrand fortune had been made in pharmaceuticals, so the EIS had an array of substances at their disposal, extremely effective for wiping memories, inducing hallucinations, even counterfeiting death. Although quite useful in the field, none of them could properly be called a “truth drug”. Still, maybe the threat of one would be enough to crack Nestor Quan’s composure.
Novak leaned in and said in a lowered voice, “Right now, we’re just having a conversation. But there’s a data extraction specialist waiting outside the door, with a whole kit full of tools he can’t wait to try out on you. It’s not only about pain, you know. He’s developed drugs that can turn the Human brain inside out. He can scramble your synapses, wipe your cortex, plant you permanently in the middle of your worst nightmare. So, sooner or later you’re going to tell me what I want to know. The question is, how much of Nestor Quan is going to be left at that point?”
Cold dark eyes locked with Novak’s as the voice of someone far more confident than himself replied, “No, the question is, when are you going to ask me the right question?”
— «» —
“He knows way too much,” growled Novak, glaring at the light screen in the observation room. “About Human nature and about the EIS. And about me,” he reflected aloud.
“He knew enough to call your bluff, anyway,” DeWitt pointed out. “So, who do you want to send in with the briefcase of surgical tools to rattle his nerves? Mendez does a great mad scientist impression.”
Novak was in no mood for joking. His gut had been right about this interrogation. It had been an hour-long verbal siege, revealing not so much as a chink in the prisoner’s defenses. An exercise in futility. To every one of his questions, Quan had replied with a melodramatic sigh, “Not the right one.” Finally, Novak had given “the ninja” a knockout injection before stalking across the hall for a change of scenery.
“Or,” DeWitt suggested quietly, “we could make him disappear and fabricate something to tell Madame Vargas. How would she know the difference?”
After a moment, Novak shook his head. That he’d even considered the idea was a measure of the frustration he was feeling. But it was one thing to keep secrets from Juno Vargas, quite another to lie to her face. They’d both promised Dennis Forrand that they would share power equally and be honest with each other after he was gone. When everything came to a head — as it inevitably would, given the direction she was taking — Novak wanted the moral advantage of having stuck to that promise.
He turned to glance at the monitor again, then looked around the room, suddenly realizing that someone was missing. “Where’s Chin?” he demanded.
“He went a little nuts shortly after you began the interview. Jumped off his chair muttering something about ‘your planetary government’, then ran out of the room.”
Novak frowned. Your planetary government? Was that what Quan had said? “Replay the feed for me, De— What the—?”
“I think we found Chin, boss,” said DeWitt, pointing at the live image on the screen.
A man wearing a surgical mask had entered the interrogation room, carrying a cloth-covered tray. As they watched, he pulled the right sleeve of Quan’s jacket out of the leather cuff on his wrist, removed a vial’s worth of blood from his forearm, then carefully placed a stickyplast over the puncture wound before tugging the sleeve back down to cover it.
“Do we care whether the prisoner knows what just happened?”
“No,” said Novak, “but I would sure as hell like to know. Tell Chin I want to talk to him, right now.”
Chin had evidently been expecting the summons. The second DeWitt opened the door to the hallway, the scientist stepped inside the observation room. He was grinning behind his surgical mask.
Smugness wasn’t normally Naguchi’s style; however, given the history between him and Quan, the urge to gloat was probably irresistible. Novak gave him a long look. “Are you volunteering to torture the prisoner, Doctor?”
“Not at all. I’ve just returned from confirming a theory in my laboratory. Now I can proceed with a closer analysis of his blood.”
“Confirming what theory?”
“Mr. DeWitt and his colleagues were less than gentle with Quan when they brought him in. This on top of a vigorous beating by several Rangers that should have rendered him comatose but didn’t. When you began questioning him and he said ‘your planetary government’ — your, not our — something clicked into place at the back of my mind. Remember Trager? I didn’t need a large sample to perform a definitive test, just a smear or two of blood from the towels used to clean Quan up when he arrived.”
“And you’re absolutely certain of the result?”
“Absolutely. The enzymes are identical. Bruni Patel, Trager, and Nestor Quan — they’re all Stragori.”
— «» —
Two hours later, Novak was sitting in the interrogation room watching Nestor Quan regain consciousness. He came to with a shudder, making a reflexive effort to stretch before the cuffs and collar stopped him. When his gaze alighted on Novak’s face, Barry could swear he saw disappointment in the prisoner’s dark eyes.
“No, it wasn’t all a dream,” he assured him. “While you were sleeping, however, we made a couple of interesting discoveries.”
Quan smirked. “You have a learning curve. How encouraging.”
“We now know that you’re Stragori.”
“Good for you. And what was the second discovery?”
“We’ve scanned you top to bottom, and you have no implants. No scarring, either, to indicate you ever did.”
Somehow, the prisoner managed to tilt his head expectantly. “And what do you suppose that means?”
“You’re not a soldier, and you’re not an observer. And yet, you lived on Earth for decades. Doing what, Quan? What brought you to our fair planet?”
“Not the right question,” he replied. “Too bad.”
“Maybe you’re an assassin,” mused Novak. “Your government would want total deniability, so they would make sure you weren’t connected to the intellinet. You could be trained in killing techniques without being optimized. And if a soldier refused to terminate the observer he was shadowing, you could swoop in and do the job instead. How about it, Quan — did you kill Bruni Patel?”
He swiveled his head slowly side to side. “Not the right one. Not even close.”
“Because if you did,” Novak went on doggedly, “that would explain how you know about the sensitive data that recently came into our possession.”
Barry’s earpiece tingled. He activated it and heard Naguchi’s voice instructing him, “Ask him about our work together. And EuroGenics.”
Before faking his death, Naguchi had been renowned for his groundbreaking work in genetics, but some of those breakthroughs had been made in partnership with Nestor Quan. Quan couldn’t have been doing it on behalf of the Stragori government, not without a connection to the intellinet. So who could have sent him to Earth to cultivate one of the most brilliant scientific minds on the planet? It had to be an organization with deep pockets and a network of operatives. Perhaps a large corporation?
That made sense, actually. It explained the enforcers who had strong-armed Naguchi into thumbprinting the contract to sell his patents, and the thug who had met him at the airfield when he returned from Daisy Hub. They would have put pressure on Quan as well, when they realized Naguchi had reneged on the agreement. After the lab explosion that supposedly killed Naguchi and destroyed all his notes and records, Quan must have been desperate. And desperate men did desperate things.
“Don’t tell me you’ve run out of questions, Mister Novak,” Quan admonished him.
“I haven’t. I’m just tired of playing this game. You’re toying with us, teasing us with information that you claim to have but refusing to talk. Well, you’d better start giving me some straight answers, because I am fast losing patience with you, and when I run out of patience, that’s when you run out of time.”
Quan made an impatient sound of his own. “It isn’t enough just to ask questions. They have to be the right ones. Scientists appreciate the importance of asking the right question, Mister Novak. That’s how we classify and organize the answers that surround us in such abundance. For example, the two of us sitting in this room constitutes an answer. But before it can be fully comprehended, one must ask the right question.”
“And that is…?”
“Which of us is the prisoner, and which of us is free? If I believe that my being here puts me beyond the reach of an implacable enemy, then regardless of the way you treat me, I’ve achieved freedom. And if you feel your future depends on getting information from me that someone else requires, then you are in fact the prisoner. You see how the complexion of the situation can change, depending on the question being asked? How easily it could be misunderstood by someone not asking the correct one?
“Throw off your shackles, Mister Novak. Ask me what you really want to know.”
“All right. But can we trust anything that you say?”
Quan threw him a reproving look. “Regardless of my intentions, the answer would be yes. Come on, you can do better than that.”
“What was your real reason for letting yourself be captured on Shakespeare Hub?”
“As I said earlier, I have information that you need in order to solve the puzzle, and I wanted you to have it. Not your government. Not even your organization. You, personally.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re the only Human Bruni Patel was willing to trust with the file he stole from the Directorate’s archives.”
“You’re aware that he was murdered by Stragori agents before he could deliver it?”
“What makes you think his death was the work of our government?”
“When his body was found, all the implants had been ripped out. Only a Stragori would have known to do that.”
An unreadable expression slithered across the prisoner’s face. “Mister Novak, if this had been an official assassination, there would have been no body left for you to find. Our operatives are trained to clean up their messes. So, the killer may have been Stragori, but it’s highly unlikely that this individual was acting under orders from the Directorate.”
“You betrayed and destroyed Nayo Naguchi and viciously attacked one of my agents. Now suddenly you’re being helpful. What’s going on, Quan? Have you developed a soft spot in your heart for Humanity after all your years of living among us?”
“Really, now, do I strike you as someone who has a sentimental bone in his body? Here is the answer to your question: My government has made a decision with which I disagree, and I’ve decided to show them the error of their ways by sabotaging their plans for your world. Whatever they think is going to happen, they’ll be wrong. And I’ll be vindicated.”
“And what do we get out of this, exactly?”
“The truth, Mister Novak. Whether or not Humanity is ready to handle it, at long last someone on your planet with both the means and the will to act on it is going to know the truth.”
— «» —
When Naguchi returned to his lab, he found a message from Susan Rosenberg on his computer: I’ve destroyed my notes as you instructed, but I’m not seeing any of your trigger words so far in the document I’m translating, Nayo. Seems pretty harmless to me — something about preparing animals to be used for experimentation — but then, I’m not a biologist.
CHAPTER 11
“You said your government had made a decision, Quan. What was it?”
They’d been at this for quite a while. Stifling a yawn, Novak realized that he had no idea whether it was dark or light outside. Weariness was creeping into his muscles, sending chills rippling across his back and down his legs. He debated with himself which would be wiser: to succumb to his fatigue and take a break, or to fortify himself with java and keep going. Quan, on the other hand, remained maddeningly fresh and alert, apparently deaf to his own diurnal rhythm. Maybe he didn’t have any. Maybe the days on Stragon were fifty hours long, or the Stragori version of Humanity had evolved beyond the need for sleep.
“Am I keeping you awake, Mister Novak?”
He gave himself a hard mental shake and replied evenly, “No, Quan, I’m keeping you awake so you can answer my question. What was the Directorate’s decision?”
As he expected, Quan’s response to this was silence. However, it was a thoughtful silence, not a defiant one, so he continued, “We’ve translated the document in the file you mentioned earlier. We’ve deduced that Humans and Stragori are the same race. We also know that your government would rather keep that explosive little fact a secret.”
“
All true,” said Quan. “Knowing the truth about our origins, the Directorate had a choice to make. They could either acknowledge our shared history and reunite with our distant cousins of Earth, becoming a single race of Humans once more…”
“…or?”
“Or not. They chose not.”
Novak was dumbfounded. “Why would they do that? Stragori isn’t a name you chose for yourselves — it’s a Thryggian word meaning ‘control group’. It’s a constant reminder of the crime that was perpetrated against our race in more primitive times.”
“As far as the Directorate is concerned, Humans are still living in primitive times.”
“Yes. We’re a young race with a lot to learn and the other races try to have as little as possible to do with us. Believe me, we’re painfully aware of that.”
“Not just a young race. Compared to the rest of us, you’re literally a race of youngsters. And as for the crime you refer to, you have no idea of its magnitude.”
Novak had left his earpiece on. “Barry,” said Naguchi from the observation room. There was an unaccustomed urgency in his voice. “I’ve got a hunch. Ask him his age.”
“What?”
“Just do it. Please!”
Returning his gaze to Quan’s bruised and swollen face, Novak asked, “How old are you, anyway?”
“That little mouse in your ear is very clever,” remarked the prisoner with a knowing smile. “Reminds me of someone I used to work with. Make sure he gets an extra piece of cheese for dinner.”
“Answer the question, Quan.”
“Very well. Measured in Earth years, my age is one hundred and seventy-two.”
— «» —
“Why do I have the feeling that he’s enjoying this?” muttered Novak.
Sitting in the swivel chair to his right, Naguchi swung it a quarter-turn toward him and replied, “Because he is.”
It was six o’clock in the morning and they were alone together in the observation room, gazing at the light screen. Mendez had brought the prisoner a cup of water and was holding it to his mouth so he could drink. But Mendez was slow to tip the cup and Quan’s head movements were severely restricted by his collar, forcing him to lap up the water with his tongue, like an animal. Watching the scene pulled up memories for Novak.
The Relativity Bomb Page 11
