Viking

by Daniel Hardman

  “You had no right, you know.”

  “What are you talking about? No right to what?”

  “To shut her out like that. She deserved the truth.”

  “So I just spill the beans and she gets to duck for cover every time a stranger comes to the door? Living in fear is no kind of life.”

  “She took you for richer and poorer and all the rest of it.”

  “I couldn’t bear to scare her to death. That’s no kind of way to love somebody.”

  “The truth is the only way to love somebody, Rafa.” Chen sighed and looked up at the stars. “Believe me, I’ve had plenty of time to ponder this one. Prostitution’s nothing more than two people lying to each other and one lying to himself. There’s no love in it anywhere.”

  “Putting someone through torture isn’t love, either.”

  “Love is giving somebody your naked self and letting them make their own decisions. Sometimes they hurt you and you keep on caring. Sometimes they hurt themselves.” Her voice broke.

  “I guess I can’t blame her. I would have convicted me if I’d been on the jury. What could Julie do? What’s the point of being a prison widow when I was going to die behind bars and she had her whole life ahead of her?”

  Chen shook her head, started to say something, thought the better of it. Finally she ran feather-light fingers up his arm, across his shoulders, and behind his neck. Her touch firmed to a soft tug. “A man shouldn’t have to die lonely.” She looked him in the eye, her head inclined with meaning.

  Rafa’s face was a study in motionless stone and shadow.

  When he spoke again his voice was thin and quiet, but full of steel. “This one will.” And he pulled her hand away.

  Chen stood mesmerized for a dozen heartbeats, then shook herself and stepped back, embarrassed. “I’m sorry.” She wheeled around and walked head-down toward the small thicket.

  After a moment Rafa’s voice came softly after her.

  “Chen.”

  She turned around slowly, as if a hand were rotating her by the shoulder. Rafa lifted splayed fingers in the streaming starlight. One of them glinted faintly.

  “The evidence of an affair was hardest on Julie. And on me. You’ll have to cut this off my cold dead finger.”

  Chen turned around again, her cheeks burning.

  “Chen.” His voice was softer now.

  Again she looked back.

  “I may die lonely, but none of my friends will.”

  A comforting warmth settled on her shoulders and whisked away the hot embarrassment from her cheeks and throat. Her lips twitched with the hint of a bittersweet smile.

  “Good night, sweet prince,” she whispered.

  27

  Julie licked her lips and pressed the key that would complete her call to FBI headquarters. After another conversation with Dr. Satler last night, she’d decided to call, but that didn’t make the approach any easier. She had lain awake till morning rehearsing what she would say, and dark circles under her clear blue eyes testified to the sleep she’d sacrificed.

  At times her little speech had seemed pretty convincing to her own ear, but now she admitted that getting any reaction at all was a long shot. After all, why would anybody at the FBI be motivated to lift a finger for a convicted killer of one of their own?

  The phone sounded a soft alert to signal a connection, and the screen lit up with the pleasant face of a young receptionist. Julie could see a busy office and potted plants over her shoulder.

  “Federal bureau of Investigation, Los Angeles field office. May I help you?”

  “Hi. My name’s Julie Orosco. I’m trying to get in touch with Ray Gregory. Does he work out of your office?”

  The receptionist typed rapidly and studied a display off-screen. “Agent Gregory has actually been transferred, but I have his new office number. Would you like me to connect you?”

  “Yes, thanks.” The screen went blank, and Julie waited anxiously. She was pretty sure Gregory would hear her out; he’d come across as a straight shooter during their one conversation months before, and during his testimony at the trial. At least he’d answer when he saw her ID on his phone. He’d remember the name.

  But thirty seconds later she was leaving a message, feeling an empty sensation of anti-climax. She floundered through, wondering if she should elaborate, hoping everything would not sound as implausible on playback as it did in her own ears. As she was signing off the receptionist came back online.

  “I’m sorry. I saw you had to leave a message. His calendar doesn’t show any specific appointments, so I can’t guess when he’ll be back. If this is a business call I may be able to reach him by satellite.”

  It was a polite feeler. Julie wondered briefly how the woman defined “business call”. She wanted to talk about a crime. Did that count—or was business only related to an agent’s current cases?

  “Maybe you can help me find the right person to talk to.” The receptionist raised her eyebrows attentively, so Julie pressed on. “Agent Gregory knows me in connection with a case he investigated a few months ago. I wanted to ask him for some advice about looking into...well, into another crime.” It sounded pretty lame. Was she coming across as a melodramatic housewife?

  The receptionist’s manicured fingers tapped briefly on her desktop as she considered. “Do you want to report something, or discuss an ongoing investigation?”

  “Report, I guess.” Julie could almost see wheels turning behind the tolerant smile—the receptionist probably had lots of experience with neurotic victims of the neighborhood purse snatcher—so she pressed on quickly. “It’s about criminal negligence or manslaughter on a viking mission.”

  The smile became more businesslike. “I see. Well, off-planet activities are all under federal jurisdiction, but our L.A. office doesn’t deal much with that sort of issue. The exo people are all clustered at other major spaceports—Boston, St. Louis, Salt Lake...”

  “The company that’s running this mission is based in Houston.”

  The receptionist nodded confirmation and sent nimble fingers flying over her keyboard. “Houston division may actually have the largest exo team anyway. Supervisor’s name is Oristano. Would you like me to transfer you?”

  Again Julie nodded, and again the screen went blank. This time the status light blinked green quickly to signal an answer, but she remained on hold, reading blurbs and advertising from a Texas net station for a couple minutes before the screen lit up with the image of a graying man with a crew cut. He had a fatherly sort of look about him that immediately put Julie at ease.

  “Mrs. Orosco? I’m Darnel Geire, Division Chief here in Houston,” he drawled amiably. “The lady from Los Angeles said you wanted to discuss some criminal activity on a viking mission based out of Houston.”

  Julie nodded.

  “Agent Oristano is actually in a meeting right now—and since I sent her to it, I thought the least I could do was cover her calls while she’s gone.” He leaned back in a leather-bound office chair and sighed comfortably, managing to seem relaxed but not overly casual. On the wall behind him Julie could see dozens of framed certificates and photographs, plus a large mural of a desert sunset. “Maybe you could give me some more details.”

  Julie cleared her throat. “My husband is a viking with MEEGO, Inc. I believe Houston is their headquarters.”

  Geire nodded and reached for a lotion dispenser on his desk without breaking eye contact. “Go on,” he said, lubricating his hands slowly.

  “I guess regulations require MEEGO to publish a portion of their viking feeds to interested parties. Anyway, I followed Rafa’s activities as closely as I could up until a few days ago.”

  “Rafa?”

  “My husband. I tuned in to him to see how he was doing.”

  “I see.”

  “Well, the last time his feeds were active he was doing field research near a huge herd of some animal. I think they call them ‘hexapods’. Big reptiles things with six legs, stand about three
meters at the shoulder.” Julie couldn’t keep a slight quaver out of her voice. “There was a stampede, and his signal went dead.”

  Geire leaned forward in his chair, his leathered face expressionless. “What is your husband’s status now?”

  “MEEGO lists him as missing and presumed dead. They say he was trampled to death.”

  Geire studied Julie’s face gravely. “You don’t accept that?”

  “Not exactly. He may be dead, but I have a hard time believing they made any investigation at all.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “For one thing, they had updated Rafa’s status in their database within fifteen minutes of the accident, but they claim not to have found a body.”

  Geire raised his eyebrows. “That does seem pretty premature.”

  Julie pressed on. “For another, at least one of the vikings had a serious grudge against Rafa and was near the herd when the animals went wild.”

  “You think someone deliberately started the stampede?”

  “I do.”

  “Was there anything in the viking feed that might be useful evidence?”

  Julie shook her head bitterly. She’d been expecting that question and had no good answer for it. Was Geire going to brush her off as a pathological worrier? She had another card to play, if she dared lay it down.

  Geire frowned thoughtfully and straightened his bolo tie. “I’m afraid there’s not a lot we can do to help you at this point. If a viking did in fact provoke these creatures somehow and cause your husband’s death, it would be a federal crime under our jurisdiction. But documenting the origin of a stampede is virtually impossible, and even with good evidence it’s unlikely that we’d accomplish much. The viking probably won’t live out the month anyway, much less the quarantine period for a date with a court on Earth.”

  “How about MEEGO? Aren’t they liable for some of this? Wouldn’t it be negligence or breach of contract or fraud or something if they just left Rafa to die?”

  “That’s a fairly complex question. Yes, the company might be in violation of several laws if your allegations are true. But again, only glaring cases are usually prosecuted because proof is so hard to come by. Just a small portion of the company’s activities is open to public scrutiny, and by the time we subpoenaed private records MEEGO could probably sanitize everything. It’s a real handicap to investigate something that happened light years away.”

  “What if I could prove the company cut Rafa’s signal? That the comlink was broken on Earth instead of planetside?”

  Geire’s eyes narrowed. “I thought you said you didn’t have any evidence.”

  “Not about how the stampede started...”

  “But about MEEGO’s reaction to it?”

  “Yes.” Julie was apprehensive about revealing her own connection to illegal hacking, and she wanted to avoid trouble for Satler’s anonymous friend. But if that was the only way to enlist some help, she had to take the plunge. “I have connections to a hacker who downloaded the logs from MEEGO’s blinker satellite.”

  Geire drummed his fingers slowly, considering the implications. “You realize that the hack was illegal, of course.”

  Julie shook her head impatiently. “The FBI can still use it as evidence, right? As long as investigators acquire the logs without breaking the law themselves?”

  Geire coughed. “That’s a simplification. In certain circumstances your reasoning might apply. But you miss my meaning. Have you considered your own legal standing on this? Did you pay for the services of this computer expert?”

  “No. I don’t think anyone paid anything.”

  “Why’d the hacker go to the trouble?”

  “Milk of human kindness, I guess. I don’t really know the guy at all.”

  “How’d you get the logs, then?”

  Julie swallowed and shook her head. “I can’t say.”

  Geire rubbed his chin in thought, then waved dismissively. “Well, we can come back to that later. Any way to guarantee you have genuine data in the logs?”

  “I’m not much of a computer guru, but the hacker claims the code of origin can’t be faked. At least, not by anyone in the private sector.”

  “And what exactly do these logs show?”

  “Earthside tuned out Rafa’s transmissions several seconds before the satellite quit receiving them. I went back and looked at all the other available viking feeds, and I think the stampede hadn’t reached my husband when the signal died.”

  “Maybe they could tell something gruesome was about to happen, and wanted to spare the squeamish.”

  “I don’t think so. During that lag a series of encrypted instructions from Earth was blinkered to the planetside booster unit. Rafa’s signal went dead a few milliseconds after the final batch of commands from Earth was executed.”

  “So they completely cancelled his broadcast. But if he died a moment later, what does it matter?”

  “I don’t think he died in the stampede at all.”

  “Why?”

  “Because at the same moment my husband’s signal died, all of MEEGO’s other viking feeds cut out due to ‘technical difficulties’. There’s a six minute window when no viking feeds are available at all. But there’s no evidence of communication problems in the logs.”

  “What were they doing when the signals came back?”

  “Searching for survivors in a skimmer. I guess several vikings were missing besides my husband. But they were already a couple kilometers beyond Rafa’s position and claimed to have found nothing. That’s simply not possible.”

  “I don’t know about that. If these animals are as big as you say, there might not be much to find... But let’s go back to MEEGO’s motivation for a moment. What earthly reason would they have for wanting your husband dead?”

  Julie shrugged. “I can’t begin to tell. Unless it has something to do with his criminal record.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Julie sighed mightily. Now was when she found out how open-minded her listener could be. “Rafa was convicted on two counts of first degree murder a few months ago. It was an unbelievable shock—just didn’t add up. At the time of his arrest I was sure he’d been set up somehow. But the evidence from the trial was pretty compelling, and eventually I quit believing his side of the story.”

  Geire looked sympathetic. “I can tell that remembering it all is painful for you. But it’s not an unusual story. Most convicts claim they’re innocent, and most vikings are convicts.”

  He didn’t add that most convicts had wives who were gullible or foolish, but Julie imagined the extra sentence anyway.

  She drew circles slowly with her fingernail, unable to look up at the screen. “I understand that. I’m not sure if I made the right decision when I filed for divorce. But I came across some strange files today, when I was going through stuff from the attic, that made me wonder if there was more to the story. Something that might put the evidence against him in a new light, might make MEEGO see him as a threat...”

  Geire pumped more lotion.

  “Go on,” he said. “I’m listening.”

  “I found a key to a virtual safe. It was on an old vid disk in a photo album from our wedding.”

  “A safe you knew about?”

  “Rafa never mentioned it. I don’t think the detectives who looked through his records for the trial knew about it either. It wasn’t labeled or anything. Took me several hours to trace the issuer code.”

  “What did you find?”

  “It’s tied to a bank account in Mexico City. Not much money, but there were some records on deposit.”

  “And?”

  “The bank wouldn’t release the sealed stuff without all kinds of documentation. They wanted a death certificate for Rafa plus proof that I was his next of kin. I got the feeling they’d check and find out about the divorce decree, so I didn’t even try.”

  “You mean you haven’t seen the sealed portion at all?”

  “Not yet. I wish I knew whethe
r it was important. They gave me six weeks; then they’re going to clear out the safe and delete everything in it. How do you like that?”

  “Sounds pretty drastic. Can’t they tell you anything about what’s inside?”

  “Well, there was one group of files where he’d put me down as joint owner, and I had them send me a copy.”

  “What was in them?”

  “Pictures, mostly. Of Rafa as a boy. And lots of old letters, journals, a home movie or two. But none of it made any sense.”

  “Why not?”

  “There shouldn’t be any stuff like that. Rafa’s family’s house burned to the ground when he was in college. They lost everything. It was something he was pretty torn up about.”

  “Could this just be some stuff he had forgotten? Like most of us have stashed in the attic?”

  “That wouldn’t explain it.”

  “Why not?”

  “The names are all wrong. In the vids everyone is calling Rafa ‘David’, and there’s an older brother named ‘Raul’ that I’ve never heard of before.”

  “So your husband had a secret past. Very intriguing.”

  Julie bristled slightly and had to consciously calm her voice again. “The FBI thought he had a hidden life once before. During the trial they traced some offshore bank account to him and showed all sorts of money going in and out of it. But this is totally different. It’s family outings to the beach and birthday parties and dancing at his cousin’s quinceañera. There’s nothing sinister about it.”

  “FBI? We were the ones that investigated him?”

  Julie hesitated slightly, then nodded.

  “So why did you say it might make a difference to our findings, or to MEEGO?”

  Julie took a deep breath. “Because the last clip I saw was of my husband, Agent David Rosales, graduating from an academy in Quantico, Virginia.”

  Geire raised his eyebrows in surprise, and for a long time his eyes appeared to defocus as he pondered. At last he sighed, leaned back, and gripped the armrests on his chair. His face was grim. “Now I have to admit—that is a strange turn of events. You would think we’d have dug that sort of background up when we ran your husband’s fingerprints. I can’t understand why he wouldn’t volunteer it. Maybe he saw no point; it doesn’t change evidence or invalidate a conviction.”