“Lead me to your colleagues,” Romey said.
“I don’t have colleagues per se,” Juhl said. “I’m the only liaison on staff.”
Romey wanted to shake her. But if Romey tried, she’d probably snap her like a brittle breadstick.
“The other employees,” Romey said through her teeth. She’d already decided that some junior detective was going to interview this woman. Romey would probably kill her before the interview was done.
“Oh, yes, right,” Juhl said. “I think they’ve assembled now. Come with me.”
And she finally stepped through one of the filters, holding the edge of it so that Romey could step inside.
Romey had a sense that Juhl could have done this at any point, taken them directly to the entire staff trapped inside the building, but had been stalling in the mazelike corridors, probably on someone’s instruction.
Romey would find out who that someone was. Just like she was going to find out how this creepy place worked. And she was going to find out just why there were so many human staffers on the premises.
But most of all, she was going to find out what had initially caused the companywide paranoia, and if it was related to Roshdi Whitford’s death.
Thirty-two
Rudra Popova still made DeRicci nervous. Even though they had worked together for almost a year now, Popova still had a look that could make DeRicci uncomfortable.
Part of it was that Popova was one of those brilliant women who also knew how to look beautiful ninety percent of the time. Add to that the fact that Popova had more formal training in security, analysis, and government than DeRicci, and that had made both of them uncomfortable from the beginning.
DeRicci had to repeatedly remind herself that she was the Chief of Security for the United Domes of the Moon, not Rudra Popova. Popova was her assistant, and a damned good one.
But it still made DeRicci uncomfortable to watch Popova come through the doors to her office, looking well put together in a black dress and black flats that matched her long black hair. She clutched a pile of handhelds—and she looked frazzled.
Popova set the handhelds on DeRicci’s desk.
“They’re nutballs,” Popova said. “All of them.”
DeRicci nodded. Popova was referring to a small band of people who backed up the public information network onto private sites. Although to call these people a band was actually wrong. They didn’t associate. Sometimes they even fought.
They were individualists. Some of them were very crazy, convinced that the changing information was filling up with lies that would eventually bring down the universe. Others were just paranoid, afraid that the changing information would cause the most valuable information to be deleted.
And a handful were archivists, who believed that information—whether it was accurate or not—needed a secondary backup in case something went wrong.
DeRicci had had Popova and a small team visit all of them, hoping to cajole the information from them. She wanted the records from that week fifteen years ago. She wanted to compare it all to what was available now.
“One guy wouldn’t open the door because I was from the government. He climbed to the second story of his house and threw water on me, telling me to go away.”
“Water?” DeRicci asked.
“I can’t explain it,” Popova said. “Then another guy deleted everything he had when he heard where I was from. He just destroyed it while I was standing there.”
She sank into the nearest chair. “I hope this information is important.”
It was comments like the last one, spoken in that superior tone, that had made DeRicci dislike Popova at first. Now that they knew each other, DeRicci realized Popova used that tone when she was the most uncomfortable.
“I hope it is, too,” DeRicci said. “Which one of these comes from the archivists?”
“Those are the only ones I brought you,” Popova said. “They don’t save every site and they don’t save every piece of information, so I tried to bring you the broadest range. I hope that’s okay.”
“It is,” DeRicci said. “I might have to send you back out for the other stuff, though.”
Popova shook her head. “Fortunately, I had enough foresight to collect the information from the true crazies when I saw them. I marked their handhelds and I’ll give them to you when you want.”
“Not yet.” DeRicci slid the top handheld toward her. She flicked on the handheld and watched information scroll along the tiny screen.
“In my absence,” Popova said, “we got some more reports.”
DeRicci looked up. Another crisis? Or was it just this one? Not that DeRicci was entirely convinced lost information from fifteen years ago could be called a crisis. To her, it seemed more like a curiosity.
One that may blossom into something more important.
“What?” DeRicci asked.
“You know those power grid flickers that we noted in the old reports?” Popova asked.
DeRicci nodded.
“We’ve had several in the past two days.”
“What?” DeRicci asked. “How come no one brought this to me before?”
“Because they’re not gridwide. They’re isolated. Only certain parts of the infrastructure were affected.”
DeRicci set the handheld aside. It continued to scroll. She should probably have shut the damn thing off, but she wasn’t ready to just yet.
“We separated out the grid a few years ago,” DeRicci said. “After the Dome explosion, when we realized that it would be better to have parts of the Dome with power.”
“Then I should find out where these isolated grid problems were,” Popova said. “That might tell us something.”
“Do that,” DeRicci said. “Look to see if any of the affected businesses from fifteen years ago were in these grid areas.”
“All right.” Popova headed for the door.
“And one more thing,” DeRicci said.
“What?” Popova asked.
“Check the power glitches against police incident reports for the past week.”
Popova raised her eyebrows. “Interesting,” she said, and walked out the door, closing it softly behind her.
DeRicci looked at the handhelds, feeling more disturbed than she had all day. Something was wrong, but her information was incomplete.
And the incomplete information was preventing her from knowing how great the threat was—at least intellectually. On a gut level, she had a feeling she was discovering something very important, something she should have been paying attention to for a long time.
But she didn’t yet know what that something was.
Thirty-three
Flint had always known that Ki Bowles skirted an edge. He was just surprised at how close she had come to falling off of it.
Even though he had been personally satisfied when InterDome fired Bowles for her story on Noelle DeRicci, he had had the passing thought—never expressed—that InterDome had overreacted.
After all, Bowles was a well-known investigative reporter, with more awards than any other reporter on InterDome’s staff.
But those awards had cost the company millions in legal fees and damage awards. It seemed that every case Bowles had investigated had resulted in at least one police report, and sometimes dozens.
More than one subject of a Bowles’s story had filed harassment and stalking suits. Even more subjects had filed libel and slander suits. And one had filed a suit alleging restraint of trade.
Flint felt his stomach twist. Shouldn’t Van Alen have investigated all of this before agreeing with Flint that Bowles would be perfect to hire to do the story against WSX? Or had Van Alen thought that Flint had done this work?
Of course, he didn’t know how many other investigative reporters had similar records. Maybe it was just a liability of the profession. Maybe the aggression that Bowles and her colleagues brought to bear against the subjects of their investigations provoked these kinds of reactions.
Mor
e often than not, the libel and slander cases got dismissed. The restraint-of-trade case went further than he thought it would, but it, too, got tossed for lack of evidence.
But the lower-level cases—stalking, harassment—a number of those got settled, not in criminal court, but in civil, with a rather large judgment to the plaintiff.
Flint had handled these cases because they were so technical, letting Talia investigate the stalking cases that Bowles herself had brought.
She had used InterDome’s attorneys for those as well, going after people who sent her letters, followed her around the city, and in two scary instances, let themselves into her apartment.
That was when Bowles had upgraded her security systems, but she hadn’t—oddly, Flint thought—hired a security team. Maybe InterDome provided one.
The stalking cases went on for years, with depositions and witnesses. The injunctions were violated on a regular basis, and each time, Bowles went back to court seeking higher and higher orders of protection.
In one notable case, Bowles had told the judge: If you don’t do something—imprison this guy or ask him to leave Armstrong—he’ll kill me. He’ll find me in some public park or some place and go after me and there won’t be anything I can do about it.
Flint downloaded that information as well. Then he went into the deeper tier of court cases. The defamation cases, the plagiarism cases, the breach-of-contract suits. They revealed an interesting pattern:
InterDome settled the defamation cases, apparently as part of its cost of doing business. It defended Bowles in the plagiarism cases, and always won.
It initiated the breach-of-contract suits itself against Bowles. She never answered in court, and the cases were dropped.
Flint would have to investigate to see if those were simply negotiation tactics for a new contract or if they were something else entirely.
“God,” Talia said after their fourth plate of spaghetti—the last three having left the table untouched, “she lived a really messy life.”
“Most people do,” Flint said.
Although most people’s lives weren’t this messy. He was finding this wealth of legal information on Bowles reassuring. It meant that there were so many possible causes of her death that he didn’t worry quite as much about his own case anymore.
But he wasn’t going to relax. Not yet.
He didn’t want to let down his guard and have something awful happen to Talia.
“It seems every time we look at this stuff, there’s more,” Talia said.
“And we’ve only been looking at criminal and business cases,” Flint said. “There’s nothing personal yet.”
“I thought there wouldn’t be,” Talia said.
“Divorce decrees are legal documents. So are marriage certificates, if they were issued here in Armstrong.”
“Do you want me to look for those?” she asked.
He liked that better than having her dig through the history of a stalker. “Yeah. Look for any marriages, divorces, domestic partnerships, or birth records with her name on them. Then let’s get a sense of her family.”
“You think that’s more important than some stalker?”
He looked across the table at his daughter. He didn’t want to tell her that most murders were simple things, caused by some trauma within the family.
“I think they could be as important as some stalker,” he said. “And more than that, I think the more we know about Ki Bowles, the better off we all are.”
Too bad he hadn’t thought of that when he hired her.
Too bad he’d hired her at all.
Thirty-four
Maxine Van Alen was prepping her closing arguments for a child custody case involving the daughter of a Disappeared when the lights in her office flickered—and went out.
Her computer network remained up, however, giving dim light to the rest of the room. The office network was on a secondary grid, one that had passwords and locks and all kinds of protections, things for which she once thought she paid too much and now knew she hadn’t paid enough.
She reached for her desk, meaning to feel her way out of the room, when the lights came back up.
She stood, her hand on the desk and her heart pounding.
The lights had done that same thing two years ago when an explosion had blown a hole in the Dome. But she had heard the concussion—and worse, she had felt it. It had knocked her to the ground, even though it was nowhere near her offices.
This silent flickering somehow bothered her more.
Before she called her assistant, she checked the screen that was connected to her office network. Nothing seemed different than it had before.
Which bothered her. Shouldn’t it have been different? Shouldn’t something have shown up when the backup system kicked in?
She pressed a chip on her wrist. Her interoffice link flared to life, chirruping as it did.
“Find me the best tech we have in the office at the moment,” she said.
Then she signed off before her assistant had time to say anything.
Van Alen walked around her office, checking for other problems. Her hands were shaking, which bothered her. Usually nothing rattled her.
But this had.
She looked at the nonnetworked computers, where Flint often did his research. They remained off.
She wasn’t about to turn them on, not yet.
Then she went to the window, and peered out at the street below.
People continued to walk by as if nothing had gone wrong. She heard no horns or sirens or screams, like she had that day the explosion had rocked the Dome.
She heard nothing at all, and she should have, if other places suffered something similar.
That uneasiness grew. Was this power loss unique to her building?
She touched her chip again.
“And send me the office manager as well as someone from maintenance. Someone human.”
Maintenance had a lot of androids and bots, as well as a few college students who worked in the nonlegal areas, approved through alien student visas. She never let the aliens upstairs. They had no keys and no real knowledge of what went on up here.
She hoped.
Obadiah Mankoff, Van Alen’s office manager, peeked around the raised doors. He was slender to the point of gauntness and no matter how much Van Alen fed him, he never seemed to gain weight. His hair was thinning, too. It was as if he couldn’t acquire any more substance than he already had.
“No,” he said, “I don’t know what caused it. Give me some time and I’ll figure it out.”
“Nothing on the public news nets?” Van Alen asked.
“Nothing that I’ve found. It’s only been about two minutes since we had the glitch, Maxine.”
He could talk to her like that because he was the most efficient employee she’d ever had. He’d worked his way up from low-level maintenance where he started ten years ago to office manager just six months before—just after Flint went through his marathon sessions of research here in the office.
Mankoff had been one of the few upper-level employees who hadn’t questioned Van Alen about the man she was keeping in her office.
She had liked that discretion. Mankoff treated everything Van Alen did as normal, even if it wasn’t.
“I’m wondering if this is isolated to us,” Van Alen said.
“Why would that be?” Mankoff asked.
Van Alen wasn’t going to tell him about Bowles or the research or Flint’s fears for all of their safety. But she was going to make sure Mankoff took this little light flicker seriously.
“Send someone around the neighborhood to see if the other buildings had an issue,” Van Alen said. “And make sure that tech gets here.”
“Did something malfunction?” Mankoff asked.
“That’s the point. Something didn’t malfunction at all,” Van Alen said. “Didn’t you notice? The office network didn’t go down at all.”
“It’s on a separate grid,” Mankoff said.<
br />
“Within the building,” Van Alen said. “If the power went out in the neighborhood, everything should have shifted—even momentarily—to backup energy.”
Mankoff’s mouth opened slightly. He clearly hadn’t thought of that. He’d been dealing with other things—probably panicked employees who, like Van Alen, had flashed back on the Dome explosion.
“That is odd,” he said. “I’ll see what I can find.”
“I want someone good with networks now,” Van Alen said.
“Our best went out to lunch before the glitch,” Mankoff said.
“Then send our second best and have our best come here when he gets back.”
“All right.” Mankoff slid out the door, hurrying away, obviously trying to get everything done as fast as Van Alen wanted it.
She went back to the window. Maybe she should contact Flint.
But he had enough troubles with that daughter of his, and conducting what he thought was a necessary investigation of Bowles.
Still, Flint knew computers and networks and systems better than anyone Van Alen had ever met.
And he did ask her to tell him if something went wrong.
She sat down behind her desk and used her personal link to contact Miles Flint.
Thirty-five
Nyquist pulled up outside Paloma’s apartment building, using one of two emergency vehicle spaces. He hit the car’s police code, so that any passing police vehicle knew he had the right to park here, and then he shut off the engine.
Once, the buildings in this exclusive section of Armstrong had violated city codes by butting up against the Dome. But rich people like Paloma loved the view. The Dome side of the apartments overlooked the Moonscape, as if they were part of the Dome itself.
Nyquist had nearly died here.
This was the first time he had come back.
He leaned back in his seat, trying to ignore the twisting feeling in his stomach. Flint had brought him back here. Flint and his hints that Ki Bowles murder was somehow related to the murders of Paloma and Charles Hawke, aka Claudius Wagner.
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