by Paula Guran
He hadn’t told Gerda what happened to Sonja, and he wouldn’t, until he knew more. He didn’t want to spoil Gerda’s day.
The door to Deshin’s office opened, and Koos entered, looking upset. “Upset” was actually the wrong word. Something about Koos made Deshin think the man was afraid. Then Deshin shook that thought off: he’d seen Koos in extremely dangerous circumstances and the man had never seemed afraid.
“I did what you asked,” Koos said without preamble. “I started vetting her all over again.”
Deshin leaned against the desk, just like he had done when he spoke to Sonja. “And?”
“Her employers on Earth are still filing updates about her exemplary work for them.”
Deshin felt a chill. “Tell me that they were just behind in their reports.”
Koos shook his head. “She’s still working for them.”
“How is that possible?” Deshin asked. “We vetted her. We even used a DNA sample to make sure her DNA was the same as the DNA on file with the service. And we collected it ourselves.”
Koos swallowed. “We used the service’s matching program.”
“Of course we did,” Deshin said. “They were the ones with the DNA on file.”
“We could have requested that sample, and then run it ourselves.”
That chill Deshin had felt became a full-fledged shiver. “What’s the difference?”
“Depth,” Koos said. “They don’t go into the same kind of depth we would go into in our search. They just look at standard markers, which is really all most people would need to confirm identity.”
His phrasing made Deshin uncomfortable. “She’s not who she said she was?”
Koos let out a small sigh. “It’s more complicated than that.”
More complicated. Deshin shifted. He could only think of one thing that would be more complicated.
Sonja was a clone.
And that created all kinds of other issues.
But first, he had to confirm his suspicion.
“You checked for clone marks, right?” Deshin asked. “I know you did. We always do.”
The Earth Alliance required human clones to have a mark on the back of their neck or behind their ear that gave their number. If they were the second clone from an original, the number would be “2.”
Clones also did not have birth certificates. They had day of creation documents. Deshin had a strict policy for Deshin Enterprises: every person he hired had to have a birth certificate or a document showing that they, as a clone, had been legally adopted by an original human and therefore could be considered human under the law.
When it came to human clones, Earth Alliance and Armstrong laws were the same: clones were property. They were created and owned by their creator. They could be bought or sold, and they had no rights of their own. The law did not distinguish between slow-grow clones, which were raised like any naturally born human child, and fast-grow clones, which reached full adult size in days, but never had a full-grown human intelligence. The laws were an injustice, but only clones seemed to protest it, and they, as property, had no real standing.
Koos’s lips thinned. He didn’t answer right away.
Deshin cursed. He hated having clones in his business, and didn’t own any, even though he could take advantage of the loopholes in the law.
Clones made identity theft too easy, and made an organization vulnerable.
He always made certain his organization remained protected.
Or he had, until now.
“We did check like we do with all new hires.” Koos’s voice was strangled. “And we also checked her birth certificate. It was all in order.”
“But now you’re telling me it’s not,” Deshin said.
Koos’s eyes narrowed a little, not with anger, but with tension.
“The first snag we hit,” he said, “was that we were not able to get Sonja Mycenae’s DNA from the service. According to them, she’s currently employed, and not available for hire, so the standard service-subsidized searches are inactive. She likes her job. I looked: the job is the old one, not the one with you.”
Deshin crossed his arms. “If that’s the case, then how did we get the service comparison in the first place?”
“At first, I worried that someone had spoofed our system,” Koos said. “It hadn’t. There was a redundancy in the service’s files that got repaired. I checked with a tech at the service. The tech said they’d been hit with an attack that replicated everything inside their system. It lasted for about two days.”
“Let me guess,” Deshin said. “Two days around the point we’d hired Sonja.”
Koos nodded.
“I’m amazed the tech admitted it,” Deshin said.
“It wasn’t their glitch,” Koos said. “It happened because of some government program.”
“Government?” Deshin asked.
“The Earth Alliance required some changes in their software,” Koos said. “They made the changes and the glitch appeared. The service caught it, removed the Earth Alliance changes, and petitioned to return to their old way of doing things. Their petition was granted.”
Deshin couldn’t sit still with this. “Did Sonja know this glitch was going to happen?”
Koos shrugged. “I don’t know what she knew.”
Deshin let out a small breath. He felt a little off-balance. “I assume the birth certificate was stolen.”
“It was real. We checked it. I double-checked it today,” Koos said.
Deshin rubbed his forehead. “So, was the Sonja Mycenae I hired a clone or is the clone at the other job? Or does Sonja Mycenae have a biological twin?”
Koos looked down, which was all the answer Deshin needed. She was a clone.
“She left a lot of DNA this morning,” Koos said. “Tears, you name it. We checked it all.”
Deshin waited, even though he knew. He knew, and he was getting furious.
“She had no clone mark,” Koos said, “except in her DNA. The telomeres were marked.”
“Designer Criminal Clone,” Deshin said. A number of criminal organizations, most operating outside the Alliance, made and trained Designer Criminal Clones for just the kind of thing that had happened to Deshin.
The clone, who replicated someone the family or the target knew casually, would slide into a business or a household for months, maybe years, and steal information. Then the clone would leave with that information on a chip, bringing it to whoever had either hired that DCC or who had grown and trained the clone.
“I don’t think she was a DCC,” Koos said. “The markers don’t fit anyone we know.”
“A new player?” Deshin asked.
Koos shrugged. Then he took one step forward. “I’m going to check everything she touched, everything she did, sir. But this is my error, and it’s a serious one. It put your business and more importantly your family in danger. I know you’re going to fire me, but before you do, let me track down her creator. Let me redeem myself.”
Deshin didn’t move for a long moment. He had double-checked everything Koos had done. Everything. Because Sonja Mycenae—or whatever that clone was named—was going to work in his home, with his family.
“Do you think she stole my son’s DNA?” Deshin asked quietly.
“I don’t know. Clearly she didn’t have any with her today, but if she had handlers—”
“She wouldn’t have had trouble meeting them, because Gerda and I didn’t want a live-in nanny.” Deshin cursed silently. There was more than enough blame to go around, and if he were honest with himself, most of it belonged to him. He had been so concerned with raising his son, that he hadn’t taken the usual precautions in protecting his family.
“I would like to retrace all of her steps,” Koos said. “We might be able to find her handler.”
“Or not,” Deshin said. The handler had killed her the moment she had ceased to be useful. The handler felt he could waste a slow-grow clone, expensive and well trained, placed in the household
of a man everyone believed to be a criminal mastermind.
Some mastermind. He had screwed up something this important.
He bit back anger, not sure how he would tell Gerda. If he would tell Gerda.
Something had been planned here, something he hadn’t figured out yet, and that planning was not complete. Sonja (or whatever her name was) had confirmed that with her reaction to her dismissal. She was terrified, and she probably knew she was going to die.
He sighed.
“I will quit now if you’d like me to,” Koos said.
Deshin wasn’t ready to fire Koos.
“Find out who she answered to. Better yet, find out who made her,” Deshin said. “Find her handler. We’ll figure out what happens to you after you complete that assignment.”
Koos nodded, but didn’t thank Deshin. Koos knew his employer well, knew that the thanks would only irritate him.
Deshin hated to lose Koos, but Koos was no longer one hundred percent trustworthy. He should have caught this. He should have tested Sonja’s DNA himself.
And that was why Deshin would put new security measures into place for his business and his family. Measures he designed.
He’d also begin the search for the new head of security.
It would take time.
And, he was afraid, it would take time to find out what exactly Sonja (or whatever her name was) had been trying to do inside his home.
That had just become his first priority.
Because no one was going to hurt his family.
No matter what he had to do to protect them.
Broduer had six different nanoprobes digging into various places on the dead woman’s skin, when a holographic computer screen appeared in front of him, a red warning light flashing.
He moaned slightly. He hated the lights. They got sent to his boss automatically, and often the damn lights reported something he had done wrong.
Well, not wrong, exactly, but not according to protocol.
The irony was, everything he had done in this autopsy so far had been exactly according to protocol. The body was on an isolated gurney, which was doing its own investigation; they were in one of the most protected autopsy chambers in the coroner’s office; and Broduer was using all the right equipment.
He even had on the right environmental suit for the type of poison he suspected killed the woman.
He cursed, silently and creatively, wishing he could express his frustration aloud, but knowing he couldn’t, because it would become part of the permanent record.
Instead, he glared at the light and wished it would go away. Not that he could make it go away with a look.
The light had a code he had never seen before. He put his gloved finger on the code, and it created a whole new screen.
This body is cloned. Please file the permissions code to autopsy this clone or cease work immediately.
“The hell . . . ?” he asked, then realized he had spoken aloud, and he silently cursed himself. Some stupid supervisor, reviewing the footage, would think he was too dumb to know a cloned body from a real body.
But he had made a mistake. He hadn’t taken DNA in the field. He had used facial recognition to identify this woman, and he had told DeRicci who the woman was based not on the DNA testing, but on the facial recognition.
Of course, if DeRicci hadn’t pressed him to give her an identification right away, he would have followed procedure.
Broduer let out a small sigh, then remembered what he had been doing.
There was still a way to cover his ass. He had been investigating whether or not this woman died of a hardening poison, and if that poison had gotten into the composting system. He would use that as his excuse, and then mention that he needed to continue to find cause of death for public health reasons.
Besides, someone should want to know who was killing clones and putting them into the composting. Not that it was illegal, exactly. After all, a dead clone was organic waste, just like rotted vegetables were.
He shuddered, not wanting to think about it. Maybe someone should tell the Armstrong City Council to ban the composting of any human flesh be it original or cloned.
He sighed. He didn’t want to be the one to do it. He’d slip the suggestion into his supervisor’s ear and hope that she would take him up on it.
He pinged his supervisor, telling her that it was important she contact him right away.
Then he bent over the body, determined to get as much work done as possible before someone shut this investigation down entirely.
DeRicci sat in her car in the part of Armstrong Police Department parking lot set aside for detectives. She hadn’t used the car all day, but it was the most private place she could think of to watch the footage Deshin had given her.
She didn’t want to take the footage inside the station until she’d had a chance to absorb it. She wasn’t sure how relevant it was, and she wasn’t sure what her colleagues would think of it.
Or, if she were being truthful with herself, she didn’t want Lake anywhere near this thing. He had some dubious connections, and he might just confiscate the footage—not for the case, but for reasons she didn’t really want to think about.
So she stayed in her car, quietly watching the footage for the second time, taking mental notes. Because something was off here. People rarely got that upset getting fired from a job, at least not in front of a man known to be as dangerous as Luc Deshin.
Besides, he had handled the whole thing well, made it sound like not a firing, more like something inevitable, something that Sonja Mycenae’s excellent job performance helped facilitate. The man was impressive, although DeRicci would never admit that to anyone else.
When DeRicci watched the footage the first time, she had been amazed at how calmly Deshin handled Mycenae’s meltdown. He managed to stay out of her way, and he managed to get his security into the office without making her get even worse.
Not that it would be easy for her to be worse. If DeRicci hadn’t known that Sonja Mycenae was murdered shortly after this footage was taken, DeRicci would have thought the woman unhinged. Instead, DeRicci knew that Mycenae was terrified.
She had known that losing her position would result in something awful, mostly likely her death.
But why? And what did someone have on a simple nanny with no record, something bad enough to get her to work in the home of a master criminal and his wife, bad enough to make her beg said criminal to keep the job?
DeRicci didn’t like this. She particularly did not like the way that Mycenae disappeared off the security footage as she stepped outside of the building. She stood beside the building and sobbed for a few minutes, then staggered away. No nearby buildings had exterior security cameras, and what DeRicci could get from the street cameras told her little.
She would have to get the information from inside police headquarters.
Um, Detective?
DeRicci sighed. The contact came from Broduer, on her links. He was asking for a visual, which she was not inclined to give him. But he probably had something to show her from the autopsy.
She activated the visual, in two dimensions, making his head float above the car’s control panel. Broduer wore an environmental suit, but he had removed the hood that had covered his face. It hung behind his skull like a half-visible alien appendage.
News for me, Ethan? she asked, hoping to move him along quickly. He could get much too chatty for her tastes.
Well, you’re not going to like any of it. He ran a hand through his hair, messing it up. It looked a little damp, as if he’d been sweating inside the suit.
DeRicci waited. She didn’t know how she could like or dislike any news about the woman’s death. It was a case. A sad and strange case, but a case nonetheless.
She died from a hardening poison, Broduer sent. I’ve narrowed it down to one of five related types. I’m running the test now to see which poison it actually is.
Poison. That took effort. Not in the actual application—ma
ny poisons were impossible to see, taste, or feel—but in the planning.
Someone wanted this woman dead, and then they wanted to keep her death secret.
That’s a weird way to kill someone, DeRicci sent.
Broduer looked concerned. Over the woman? He usually saw corpses as a curiosity, not as someone to empathize with. That was one of the few things DeRicci liked about Broduer. He could handle a job as a job.
It is a weird way to kill someone, Broduer sent. Then he glanced over his shoulder as if he expected someone to enter his office and yell at him. The thing is, one of these types of poisons could contaminate the food supply.
What? she sent. Or maybe she said that out loud. Or both. She felt cold. Contaminate the food supply? With a body?
She wasn’t quite sure of the connection, but she didn’t like it.
She hadn’t like the corpse in the compost part of this case from the very first.
Broduer took an obvious deep breath and his gaze met hers. She stabilized the floating image, so she wasn’t tracking him as he moved up, down, and across the control panel.
If, he sent, the poison leaked from the skin and got into the compost, then it would be layered onto the growing plants, which would take in the poison along with the nutrients. It wouldn’t be enough to kill anyone, unless someone’d been doing this for a long time.
DeRicci shook her head. Then I don’t get it. How is this anything other than a normal contamination?
If a wannabe killer wants to destroy the food supply, he’d do stuff like this for months, Broduer sent. People would start dying mysteriously. Generally, the old and the sick would go first, or people who are vulnerable in the parts of their bodies this stuff targets.
Wouldn’t the basic nanohealers take care of this problem? DeRicci was glad they weren’t doing this verbally. She didn’t want him to know how shaken she was.
If it were small or irregular, sure, he sent. But over time? No. They’re not made to handle huge contaminations. They’re not even designed to recognize these kinds of poisons. That’s why these poisons can kill so quickly.
DeRicci suppressed a shudder.
