Radicand rubbed at her aether eyes. The dogs would be out hunting for a considerable amount of time, since she had given them such a wide and unstructured remit. Later she might put them on a tight golden leash, and follow them in her guise as hunt mistress. Now, though, all she could do was wait. She wondered how Charlie was doing. Perhaps it was time to check the tablet, she thought guiltily. It had been such a temptation to follow through on this unexpected trail…
Radicand carefully removed her goggles. She turned to glance at her bunk—though it was getting hard to think of it as hers, since she had not slept in it in days—only to see Charlie’s eyes glued to the small screen on her lap.
“What did I miss?” asked Radicand, pulling her chair over to the side of the bed.
“They broke into the warehouse five minutes ago, and there have been a couple of gunshots between them and the altar boys. I think they must have tripped at least one self-destruct, because I heard an explosion and I think it was Butler who swore.”
Radicand screwed up her face, “Charlie, what warehouse?”
“Oh, right. Don’t know if they knew about it already, or if it was something that Maria told them, but they got permission to raid this particular warehouse on the docks. It’s about two miles south west of us. It used to be an airship hangar. It’s filled with canvas tents and crates of deeply suspicious medical equipment.”
“Have they found Ezekiel?” asked Radicand, trying to figure out what was shadow and what was thug on the unsteady screen.
“He ducked behind his bodyguards and ran. They’re chasing him down as we speak. Look, there’s Chan! Oh, get him! Get him!” Radicand had a lot of trouble following the action—whoever was wearing the camera did not seem interested in keeping it upright at all times, and whoever had designed it hadn’t bothered to add a gyroscope to stabilize the image. Radicand started to feel a little queasy, and was grateful she had missed the earliest scenes of chaos.
“Sorry I didn’t wake you up,” she muttered.
“I heard it as soon as they turned the volume on,” said Charlie, waving a forgiving hand, “You were really intent on whatever you were doing, so I thought I’d let you finish. Was it good?”
“I don’t know yet. It’s not finished,” Radicand looking away from the screen and closing her abused eyes for a much needed rest, “I’ve set up my algorithms, I just have to wait and see what they bring me.”
“Waiting is hard,” agreed Charlie, her eyes never leaving the screen, “It’s my least favorite part of an investigation. You know there’s a story, but you have to wait for everything to fall into place in its own time. I sometimes think I’m too impatient for this line of work.”
Radicand massaged her eyeballs and did a few stretching exercises. The aether could be unkind to the body left behind, and watching her father’s body waste away while his mind wandered was a powerful lesson. She got up and walked up and down the short room as best as she could, touching her toes and rolling her shoulders in strange counterpoint to the gunshots on the screen.
“Bootsie! They got to the backroom!” Radicand immediately joined Charlie. Their heads pressed together as they watched the finale. Butler was first through the open office door, gun out and silent. Chan covered him and stepped to the side so that the person holding the camera could come in and do a sweep.
The camera holder—Radicand presumed it was Blankson, since she had already seen Chan and Butler and the three seemed to be a matched set—took a step forward, and panned across the dark, cramped office.
The next thing the camera focused on was Ezekiel, kneeling on the floor in front of… well. Not that Radicand had ever seen a shrine to capitalism, but it made sense that someone who believed in free enterprise might make sacrifices to appease those subtle market forces he couldn’t understand. There was even a homemade votive candle burning, with images of black swans taped onto it. A glass half-filled with red liquid rested near the kneeling man’s hand.
“Get up, move your bones,” said Butler, but Ezekiel turned his head to the side, drank the contents of the goblet in one gulp, and closed his eyes.
Chan stepped forward, with Butler covering him, and nudged Ezekiel with his boot. Ezekiel’s lifeless body fell over.
“Plague,” grunted Charlie, leaning closer.
Her curly mop of hair obscured Radicand’s vision, but then she pulled back with a snarl “Plagues take him, why didn’t Butler stop Croft?” Radicand wasn’t sure what the maligned Agent could have done to prevent it, but the way the others were talking on camera, Ezekiel’s actions were an unexpected problem.
“Now they won’t be able to ask him anything. We’ll have to piece together what he was doing from whatever bits didn’t get destroyed in the last explosion,” growled Charlie, punching the mattress. “I wanted answers. I wanted answers from him.”
Radicand was a little disappointed that he didn’t look like a monster, or even the drug smuggling mass murderer she suspected he was. He didn’t even look dead. Just a well-dressed man taking a nap… in a giant warehouse… that was hardly full at all. In New York City, that much space would cost a CEO’s ransom. At least a Vice President of Procurement’s.
Radicand frowned, “Charlie, what was that warehouse’s address?”
“Pier Seven,” she sniffed, “Why?” Radicand didn’t want to use her goggles just yet—she had to give her brain a break from that sort of direct stimulation. She tapped on her cuff, though. This was a simple enough task even its limited capabilities could handle it.
Finding the right section in the city records took her longer than she had hoped; Charlie occasionally barked questions at her that she ignored. The list of purchase agreements and arguments regarding them were endless. As the ocean encroached and Miami shrank, property ownership had become a fluid and hastily decided thing, as often with bullets as lawyers. Finally when the dyke had been built in the late thirties, and Miami’s city limits etched in concrete and steel, there was a complicated paper trail to piece together for those who had remained through it all. Since that messy beginning, records had been kept scrupulously, and in triplicate.
Radicand’s tenacity was eventually rewarded, and she poked Charlie in the arm in the same location the woman had bitten her at lunch. “Ezekiel rented that hangar,” she crowed triumphantly.
“Yeah? So?” asked Charlie, replaying Ezekiel’s slow-motion collapse in one corner of the screen, while the agents and their fellow officers sifted through the wreckage on the main screen in real time.
“He rented it, my dear Charlotte, from East Santos.”
“Who now, what now?” said Charlie, finally peeling her eyes from her multi-tasking monitor, “Reverend Ezekiel Croft was personally and directly renting that hangar from East Santos?”
Radicand squirmed, “Well, not exactly. East Santos’s research and development department was renting it. And their acting head, Suzahna Winters, personally signed a note subletting it to Nathan T Fork Industries. But check this out,” said Radicand, feeling pleased with her sleuthing, “In one of its earliest filings, Nathaniel Fork is listed as the CEO of Cry Havoc. Now there’s no note that Nathan T Fork Industries was subletting to any third party, but, well, ‘T Fork’ kind of looks like Croft backwards….”
Charlie blinked, “Hot damn, that… that’s not airtight but close enough to be a little bit frightening. Why is East Santos involved in any way with Cry Havoc?”
Radicand slumped, “I don’t know. But I keep coming back to the answer I got earlier when we asked why East Santos was attacking the flock. If East Santos is a monolithic entity, nothing makes sense. But if we start allowing people or groups within the company to have divided loyalties or complex agendas, then just about anything is possible.”
“Wheels within wheels,” grumbled Charlie glancing back at her screen where Ezekiel was collapsing again, “The big wheel run by faith, the little wheel run by the grace of god.”
Radicand frowned, “What?”
“Oh, you know, the song,” said Charlie, glancing back at the agents as they opened another cardboard box of little white communion wafers, “My mom used to sing it when she washed the dishes sometimes. ‘Ezekiel saw the wheel, way up in the middle of the air. Ezekiel saw the wheel, way up in the middle of the air. The big wheel run by faith, the little wheel run by the grace of god. A wheel in a wheel, way up in the middle of the air.’”
“No, I am not familiar with that song,” said Radicand, and something in her tone of voice dragged Charlie back to focus on her face, “It was definitely not one my mother sang while sterilizing her beakers. What was it about?”
“Oh, Ezekiel, you know: Old Testament batshit crazy prophet,” sniffed Charlie, “No one knows what it was about, that’s why they wrote it down. It’s the easy, simple stuff that gets lost to history.” Radicand frowned, the part of her brain that excelled in the aether was getting excited. Something was so familiar… she thought of her index cards in her aether library. East Santos, on the pale blue background had looked right… particularly unremarkable…
“Let me see your screen.” For a moment Radicand wished that Toby and his interesting cuff were here. She needed a higher resolution than her own cuff had. She felt a pang; she would have taken the man without his cuff at that moment. She mentally shook herself; she had to focus on the task at hand, especially when she felt so close to the next answer. Charlie handed her tablet over with a minimum of grumbling, bored with the agents’ slow opening and cataloguing of box after cardboard box.
Radicand called up East Santos’s corporate page and pointed the screen at Charlie, “Do you see their logo?”
Charlie glanced at it, “Sure.”
“What do you see, when you look at it?” she persisted.
“Ok, ok, I see… well, it’s two interlocking suns, kind of look like Aztec suns, which makes sense since Santos was started in Mexico. Very tasteful way to nod company’s cultural roots like that,” opined Charlie, “Savvy, too, since they’ve shined them all up and brought them into the future. The one sun is brass and the other is steel, strength in diversity or something. They rotate so they’re never quite overlapping, always facing different directions… and… oh yeah, whenever they can manage it they put the suns in a cloudless blue sky. In case we needed to be beaten over the heads that it’s endless blue skies with them. Yeah, that’s about all I’ve got.”
“It’s a wheel,” said Radicand, watching the logo turn, “A wheel in a wheel.”
“Way up in the middle of the air? Plague-rats, are you serious? Do you really think this Cry Havoc insanity runs all the way to the founding of Santos?” Radicand called up other images, ran other searches. Charlie let her have free reign on the computer, quietly digesting the data that she had already dug up.
“Mook said Santos bought East Gen Tech,” Radicand muttered, pulling up a new window on the screen, “Look, before that, the Santos logo was just one golden sun on a blue background.”
“Simple, classy,” muttered Charlie.
“Right, well,” continued Radicand, “After the merger or acquisition or whatever it was, they took on the second sun, and they modified the logo so the suns would spin when given the chance.”
“So you’re saying Santos wasn’t totally evil until they bought East Gen Tech?” suggested Charlie.
Radicand ran her hands through her hair, grabbing it with both hands and stared at the screen, willing it to divulge more information, “I think… we need to know more about East Gen Tech.”
“All right,” said Charlie, pulling the screen back, “That I can do my ownself, Miss Aether Queen 2074. Sit back and watch a master...”
Radicand chuckled, and Charlie glared at her friend, “Actually, never mind. I work best alone, unobserved, the better to wow you with my cunning after you have returned with dinner.”
Radicand blinked, “Dinner?”
“Yes, minion! It’s full dark and I’m sure I smelled something tasty being put together in the galley while you were goggling. Go forth and forage, for I foresee some late night forging ahead for us.”
“You’re a loon,” said Radicand, standing up.
“Yes, but I’m your loon,” agreed Charlie, “’Make new friends, but keep the old,’” she sang as Radicand left the room, “’One is stolen and the other’s sold.’”