Duplicate Effort

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  But maybe the man had known he was going to die.

  Maybe that was as close as he could come to confessing.

  Then Claudius had sighed, and finished differently than he had obviously intended to.

  Culpability in a major crime, he had said. A horrible crime, if the truth be told. And what’s worse is that these bastards hadn’t learned from it. They did it again. So my guilt is compounded by the fact that they should have known better.

  A horrible crime. One that had been instigated by the Wagners. One that had caused an equally horrible revenge that Nyquist himself had gotten caught up in.

  Had Bowles found that crime?

  Isn’t it funny? Claudius said again. I would rather have given up my life and risk a hideous death than admit that I had anything to do with those cases.

  The Claudius in Nyquist’s memory had repeated that phrase twice, but Nyquist was certain the real Claudius had only said it once.

  Was it important? Was that what this was all about?

  Or was that the—what had the therapist called it?—the entry memory?

  I guess I never believed anyone would find us, Claudius had said. I guess I never really believed we’d be called to account. And here we are.

  Here we are. It seemed like he was here. Here they were, the survivor and the victim of a horrible attack, caused by a horrible crime.

  Only just one of them had knowledge of what that crime had been.

  A crime hidden in files.

  Files Ki Bowles had threatened to reveal.

  You said that your son received the same deal, said the Nyquist of his memory. And he wanted to rail at himself. That wasn’t the issue. It was clear that Justinian Wagner was behind everything. The issue was what was everything?

  What had caused this?

  What was in those files?

  Nyquist wanted to ask the ghost of Claudius, but he couldn’t. The man—or his shade—really wasn’t here.

  Just his memory.

  And his memory answered the question that was actually asked: Either they’ve done it again, which I doubt. I haven’t heard news about it, and believe me, I watch. Or my son was told he could bring us in, pay the fine, and betray the client. Rumor has it that the client is looking for new attorneys. So my son had to be considering it.

  The vagueness had been frustrating then. It was even more frustrating now. Now that Nyquist couldn’t verify the conversation, now that he couldn’t be entirely sure that what he remembered as part of the conversation was truly part of the conversation.

  Your son, he had said to Claudius, was looking for a way out, one that didn’t include vanishing.

  He had been guessing, missing the point again, focusing on Justinian instead of the files.

  I think he was going for a half measure, Claudius had said. I think he wanted the files. He’d hand them over, and maybe some money, and not admit anything. After all, he wasn’t involved.

  The files again. Only Claudius had just said that Justinian would have turned them over. To the authorities? To the clients? To confess and allocute?

  It wouldn’t have mattered. If Nyquist understood the vagueness correctly, Justinian hadn’t even been part of the firm when the “horrible crime” occurred.

  “But you and your wife were,” Nyquist said—aloud or in his memory he wasn’t certain, and he really didn’t care.

  He did want the answer, though.

  It can be argued by a good attorney that the real culprit here is my wife, said Claudius Wagner, who had been, by all accounts, a good attorney. There is no proof in my files that I suggested anything other than the client do exactly as my wife advised them years ago. And if I had no records of what she advised them, then all that the attorney would have to say is that I added the sentence ‘because it seemed to work the first time.’ I had no liability. The firm had no liability. We’d gotten rid of the troublemaker by firing her, not killing her.

  But you didn’t fire her, Nyquist had said.

  It looked like we did.

  Only she could have contradicted that, Nyquist had said.

  She might have. Claudius paused, then added, My son is a good attorney.

  Just like his father had been. And what had Claudius just said? A good attorney could argue that the real culprit had been Paloma.

  Nyquist was twisting himself around. He wasn’t sure he understood Claudius’s implications.

  Had he asked?

  “What do you mean?” he whispered.

  Meaning, Claudius had said, speaking very slowly as if Nyquist were dumb, it’s better to have the files without the witness than the witness without the files.

  And there it was: the reason for Nyquist’s conviction that Justinian had killed not just Paloma, but Claudius as well. In that conversation, just before Claudius’s death.

  Witnesses. Files. It was better to have the files.

  Flint said he had given Justinian Wagner the files.

  But what if he hadn’t given Wagner all of them?

  What if he had given some to Ki Bowles?

  You think your son killed your wife? asked Nyquist the good cop who didn’t realize he was about to be attacked by a Bixian assassin attempting yet another assassination of a Wagner.

  I think my son covered his ass, Claudius Wagner said, not without a little pride.

  But he didn’t get the files, Nyquist had said.

  He will.

  For the first time, Nyquist could actually see Claudius. The older man looked up, his gaze empty. His face so full of hurt that it seemed like he could barely contain it.

  My son is a good attorney. He’ll get what he wants.

  Through whatever means necessary.

  Maybe Justinian had thought the files destroyed. Maybe he believed they were missing.

  Only Ki Bowles resurrected them, and Justinian Wagner wanted them.

  He had killed before for those files.

  Had he killed again?

  Thirty-six

  Justinian Wagner had already dispatched two in-house detectives to see what kind of information they could gather about Ki Bowles’s murder. He still hadn’t tapped the rest of his Armstrong investigation team, however.

  He felt like he didn’t have enough information to point them in the right direction.

  Bowles’s murder was about his firm. Someone was trying to destroy him. While he had dozens—maybe hundreds—of enemies, very few people in his life knew both his business and Ki Bowles’s.

  Which was why he was watching her news story about WSX again. He had to be missing something.

  He was sitting at his desk with his own unnetworked system opened to the listing of all the files. Whenever Bowles mentioned a name or a case, he searched for it.

  He was going to have his legal assistants make a list of all the people involved in each case. People or alien groups or corporations. He also wanted each case summarized—the core principle involved, and the means of settlement. Only he’d have some junior associates do that.

  Then he would have a few partners scrutinize the cases for unusual activity. “Unusual activity” was the firm’s euphemism for sometimes extralegal actions or, as Bowles would say, illegal proceedings.

  What Wagner would tell Bowles now, if she were still alive, that legal or illegal sometimes didn’t matter in this universe. Results did.

  He would have thought she understood that.

  He sent a message to the head of his detecting team. I need a forensic accountant to examine Bowles’s financials. Specifically, I need to know how she made her living in the six months since she left InterDome Media.

  That might give him who hired her. The amounts might also tell him whether or not Bowles had compromised what few ethics journalists had to tell the story that the person or persons who hired her wanted.

  He got a message back. One word, which was all he needed.

  Assigned.

  Good. He’d have more assignments like that as the afternoon went on.

 
; He wished he could hurry this, but he knew he didn’t dare. He needed to be accurate, and as hidden as possible.

  The police would probably blame him for Bowles’s death as well. If they found that he was poking into her life after her death, they would think he had been looking for something when he had her killed.

  He shuddered. He’d never hired an assassin in his life.

  He’d let some information drop to the wrong source more than once—a lot of his former clients always had someone after them. And then there was his mother.

  His mother, who had abandoned him and his brother, who had decided that her life was much more important than theirs.

  His fingers clenched. He made himself turn his attention away from her, and then he stopped.

  He hurried through the report, scanning it, not listening, until he got to Bowles’s promises at the end.

  “We will look at everything from WSX’s relationship with its individual clients, humans whose names you’ll recognize, people who believe they’re above the law, to the law itself. WSX has handled dozens of cases for the United Domes of the Moon. And then there are the corporate clients. From the various subsidiaries of Aleyd Corporation, arguably the largest corporation in this sector, to some questionable rulings in WSX’s past, particularly those involving WSX’s first big client, a corporation so deeply involved in this sector that everyone recognizes its name…”

  Wagner froze her image after that quote. He hadn’t thought much about what she said.

  WSX’s first big corporate client. A corporation so deeply involved in this sector than everyone recognizes its name.

  He couldn’t be sure which corporation Bowles meant. Information histories of WSX had mislabeled WSX’s first corporate client many times, because informal histories had used news sources and interviews, not the client records.

  WSX’s first big corporate client was Environmental Systems Inc. Wagner’s mother had brought the corporation into the WSX fold when she had become partners with his father. But she had continued to handle ESI, until she left the firm.

  Then his father had handled them, passing them off to Wagner when he “retired.”

  Wagner’s own files on ESI were incomplete. His parents had taken the incriminating files with them. He had gotten those files back when his mother was murdered.

  The case that had ultimately gotten his mother killed was an ESI case. It was complicated, and he hadn’t understood all of it himself, not until he got the complete files from Miles Flint.

  Who had inherited them.

  From Wagner’s mother.

  Miles Flint. Who had known Ki Bowles.

  Wagner leaned back in his chair. He had had his computer techs go over and over the files, making sure Flint hadn’t tampered with them or deleted any of them. The techs had reassured Wagner that Flint hadn’t even looked at them, that the information Flint gave Wagner hadn’t been copied or read or even touched since months before Paloma died.

  Wagner scrolled through some old files of his own. The detective files he’d put together on Flint back when it became clear the man was too close to Paloma. Wagner had wanted information about the man Paloma had sold her business to.

  He had wanted a way to destroy Flint, and he’d never quite found it. He hadn’t had time to discredit the man with Paloma so he had hoped, immediately after his mother died and the terms of her will had become clear, to discredit Flint in the courts.

  But there had been no need. Flint had cooperated, keeping his mother’s money—which Wagner hadn’t needed—but giving Wagner exactly what he wanted: all of the WSX files that his mother had kept in her ship, files she had stolen from the firm she started so that she could blackmail her entire family.

  Wagner leaned forward. He could scan his own ESI files, but according to all he could remember, ESI hadn’t broken any laws on any planet in the Earth Alliance since Wagner had become their lawyer.

  The “questionable rulings in WSX’s past” that concerned ESI had all happened when Wagner’s parents ran the firm.

  And all of that information had been in the files Flint had received from Paloma.

  Wagner could sic the detectives on him, trying to find out for certain whether Flint had worked with Bowles to destroy WSX.

  Or Wagner could talk to the man himself.

  He slapped a corner on his desk, alerting his assistant. “I want the best security team we have in my office in three minutes.”

  “Yes, sir,” the assistant said, wasting precious time. Wagner signed off before his assistant could say anything else.

  Could Flint hate WSX enough to kill another human being?

  Was the man capable of murder?

  Wagner’s mother never thought so. And Paloma wasn’t fooled by many people.

  But people changed.

  Circumstances changed.

  And when Wagner had been investigating the man who had inherited his mother’s fortune, the word he’d heard the most was “ruthless.”

  Ruthless people took out anything that stood in their way.

  Including other people.

  Thirty-seven

  Flint was staring at a large group of files scattered across the screen when something screeched in his ear. He looked away from the screen, which illuminated the plate-covered table where he and Talia had been working, and stared at the new study groups sitting near the door.

  Most of the groups were human although two were Peyti only. No one seemed to have screeched.

  Then Maxine Van Alen appeared as a small hologram in the middle of all the plates.

  Flint jumped.

  Talia stared at him. “You okay, Dad?”

  “I…” He’d never seen anything quite like it, at least not without a holoreceiver. “I think someone is trying to contact me.”

  “Damn straight,” Van Alen said in a tiny voice that didn’t quite sound like her.

  “Let me move somewhere more private,” Flint said to both Talia and Van Alen.

  “I’ll move,” Talia said. “I’ve been sitting too long.”

  She stood before he could argue.

  “Don’t go far,” he said.

  She glared at him as if he had just said the stupidest thing ever, and he probably had. As frightened as she was of being hurt, it was clear she would stay within his line of sight.

  “What the heck is this holoimage?” Flint asked Van Alen.

  “Hmm?” she frowned. Then she looked down at something he couldn’t see. “Oh. Must’ve been the glitch.”

  “Glitch?” he asked.

  “We had a…” She wavered, disappeared, then reappeared as a free-floating see-through face where Talia had been sitting.

  Flint found that a lot more disturbing than the tiny image standing on the table.

  “Is your link secure?” Van Alen asked.

  “Probably not,” Flint said. “I’m in a more or less public place. I can contact you back.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think there’s a need. I can talk to you when you get here.”

  “Is there a problem?” Flint asked.

  “We don’t know,” Van Alen said. “I want you to check. We had a power flicker.”

  “Really?” Flint had seen power flickers during major emergencies, but never at any other time. It was simply too dangerous within the Dome. “Nothing changed here.”

  “Oh, dear,” Van Alen said. “I’m beginning to wonder if it was isolated to our building. I’d like you to go through our systems and see.”

  Because she trusted him? Or because he worked for free? Or because she just needed some reassurance?

  He dismissed that last thought. Van Alen was too self-confident to need reassurance.

  “Unless this is a true emergency,” Flint said, “I’d prefer not to.”

  “Given what we discussed earlier today,” Van Alen said, “I’m worried. I’d like you to check our systems.”

  “Given what we talked about,” Flint said, “and the work Talia and I’ve been d
oing, I’ve come to realize that there are dozens of other possible scenarios. All as or more likely than the one we came up with this afternoon.”

  He didn’t like talking in code, but he felt it necessary, given the fact that the link wasn’t secure.

  “That is good news,” Van Alen said.

  “None of it is for sure. Just leads to explore. I can come if you think it critical.”

  “I don’t know what to think,” Van Alen said.

  “Do you have any computer or network techs on-site?” Flint asked.

  “I’ve sent for some.”

  “Let me send you a series of things they should look for. If they find even one of those things, contact me. I’ll come running. Otherwise I’ll be there as soon as I finish this research. How’s that?”

  Van Alen smiled at him. “Good enough, I think.”

  “All right then,” he said. “The list is forthcoming.”

  He would do it silently and send it through his more secure private link. Then he would return to the research on Bowles.

  Van Alen signed off. Flint waved at Talia. She was standing near the pastries display, staring at it as if it were an excellent piece of art.

  It took a moment to get her attention. When he did, she smiled at him, and came back so fast it seemed like she had run.

  “Problem?” she asked.

  “I have no idea,” he said.

  “Do we have to leave?” She sounded a little too hopeful.

  “Not yet,” he said. “Let’s get back to work.”

  She sighed. He silently compiled his list and sent it to Van Alen. Then he returned to the screen that was filled with the downloads from public records all over the sector.

  Bowles had lived an interesting life.

  He was now going to see if it had been interesting enough to get her killed.

  Thirty-eight

  An hour into the interview process and Savita Romey knew she was at a dead end. She’d spoken to at least twenty employees of Whitford Security, and none of them had the same information about anything.

  Apparently information was as segregated as the rooms were, parceled out on a need-to-know basis, and sometimes not even then.