Paola arrived in Cam’s hospital room as the genemod machine lights went green.
“There you are. I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
“There’s a waiting room, you know. Any sane person would use that.” She’d called him a lot of things in their working life, but sane had never been one of them. “You’ve changed, Alistair, since you’ve been away.”
Everyone changed. Alistair was a lot more cynical, less trusting, than he had been, and no wonder. “Maybe it’s your memory of me, versus the reality.”
“It’s not that. It’s . . . you used to care, Alistair. Now you’re . . . I don’t know, you’ve lost your passion.”
Two years scraping to survive, then having the company who’d put you there try to kill you might do that. Besides, he’d never been more passionate about doing his job than he was about finding Nika Rik Terri.
The doctor came up as the genemod machine pinged completion. He checked the readings, then helped Cam out. “All done,” he said. “You’ll have a nice bill at the end of it. Hu-skin is expensive.”
“Thank you.” Alistair handed Cam a pair of coveralls he’d purchased from a vending machine. “Your clothes were wrecked.”
Cam looked at the coveralls as if he’d never seen vending-machine clothes before—he probably hadn’t, even on Zell he’d dressed well—then opened the pack. “What do you think?” he asked Paola. “Too large? Or too small?”
“Doesn’t he know your size?”
“Paola. You have the wrong idea.”
Her link buzzed. She held up her hand. “Got to take this one. It’s a priority three.”
Alistair had taken a number of priority calls in his time. Priority-one calls were major incidents involving a lot of people, such as an explosion that killed everyone at a function, or a large passenger ship being attacked by pirates in legal space. Priority two was for smaller incidents that had a big impact. Shanna Brown’s assassination was one of them. Most of Tamati Woden’s kills were priority twos. Priority three was important, but the impact was limited.
Cam was right. The coveralls were too big, and once they were out of the pack, they fluoresced with an orange luminescence—to Alistair—that increased as they took on the heat from Cam’s body.
“They have?” Paola started to walk, beckoned impatiently to Alistair and Cam when they didn’t immediately follow. “Restrain them. Don’t make a big thing of it, unless they try to escape. And for God’s sake, don’t kill them. I’ll have the Honesty League and the media all over it.”
“Shoes?” Cam asked.
Alistair shook his head.
Cam sighed. “You probably would have got the wrong size anyway.”
“Come on, you two. I need to get back to the office.”
They jogged to catch up to her.
“Did you have something you wanted to say to us?” Alistair asked. “I mean, you came to see me.”
“Or was it to warn us someone was trying to kill us?” Cam asked.
“Of course I want to talk to you.” Paola was almost running herself.
“What’s the hurry?”
“My prisoners have escaped.” She stabbed impatiently at the lift button, stabbed it again.
“Prisoners?”
Paola didn’t normally take prisoners. She prosecuted them, signed the warrants for them, but she didn’t do the hard labor. Not usually.
“You know, wrongdoers who get caught. They’re put behind bars.”
“Why do you have prisoners?”
“Because the Honesty League is on my back.” The lift arrived, took them to the roof, where an aircar swooped down. Paola was inside before the door was fully open.
Alistair grabbed the aircar door, held it while Cam got in, then jumped in himself. In the mood Paola was in, she was just as likely to forget they were there. She’d left him behind once, talking to no one as the aircar lifted. It had been ten minutes before she’d realized.
This time he made it in. Just.
“I spent the afternoon talking to them.”
“Slow down, Paola. Tell us who the prisoners are.”
“Rogue agents. I told you about them. In your apartment, when I offered you back your job. Remember? They were found unconscious on their ship.”
He had forgotten. That must have been what she had been doing at the spaceport earlier, on the news. Arresting the agents.
Paola called the jail and got Walter Lanzo, who was always on night shift. Alistair had been bringing prisoners to him since he’d started at the Justice Department.
“How did my prisoners escape?”
“Hello to you, too, Paola. Which ones are yours? I’ve a hundred and seventeen in the cells.”
“You’ve only got a hundred and fifteen now.”
“Tell me who they are, and I’ll find out for you.”
Alistair had never heard Walter raise his voice, not even to prisoners.
“These two.” Paola pushed images through.
Walter pursed his lips, looked at the screen in front of him. “Says they’re still in the cells.” He pushed the feed through to her; it came up on the aircar main screen. Two women in business suits. One paced the cell; the other sat back on a bunk, scowling. “Shall I go check?”
“Finally. Thank you.”
Walter left the view on-screen.
Paola switched channels, called her own office. No one answered. “Where the hell are they?”
Hopefully out arresting escaped prisoners. A silent alarm sounded on Alistair’s own link. He glanced at it. An incident at the Justice Department building.
“Oh, come on,” Paola said.
“I’m getting an alarm,” Cam said. “I have no idea what it means.”
“Something’s happened in our building. It’s a warning to stay away if you’re not at work, to be careful if you are.”
Paola finally got through to her office. “What the hell is going on?”
“The prisoners resisted arrest, ma’am. We’ve cornered them in one of the stores.”
“Gas them, then.”
“We can’t, ma’am. If we gas them, we gas the whole building.”
Walter called Alistair. “I thought I saw you with Paola and I can’t contact her. Is she still there?”
Alistair nodded.
“Tell her she was fussing about nothing.” He stood outside a barred cell. A woman stood close to Walter, clutching at the bars. She looked like one of the women Alistair had seen in the earlier image. The other woman remained on the bunk.
The woman clutching the bar yelled at the screen. “You can’t keep us in here like this. We’re from the Justice Department. We’ve been framed.”
Walter looked at Alistair. “Is it true?” Walter had a soft heart, but he’d never, so far as Alistair knew, let a prisoner go, no matter how much he sympathized.
“I don’t know.”
Alistair tapped Paola on the shoulder.
“Can’t you see I’m—”
He pushed the link to the main aircar screen, pointed to Walter, standing outside the cell, zoomed in so Paola could see who was behind him.
Her eyes widened. She cut off her other call. “Who are they?”
“Walter thinks your prisoners.”
The aircar pinged for descent to the head office.
“Then who are the people we’re chasing?” Paola demanded.
“Someone trying to get into the Justice Department,” Alistair suggested. It made more sense than someone escaping from jail and heading straight to the headquarters of their arrestors.
He didn’t believe in coincidences. How likely was it that two people she’d arrested turned up at the Justice Department headquarters just afterward? “ID them,” Alistair ordered Walter. “Let us know if their ID matches. We’ll investigate the intruders at head office.”
Alistair exited the aircar. “Do they know anyone at headquarters, Paola?”
“They’re agents. They did their training here. Of course they’ll know people.”
“They’re agents, yet you arrested them?” They hadn’t arrested Alistair. They’d put him on suspended leave.
“I had to. I had the Honesty League on my back. Otherwise we could have sacked them quietly. Instead it’s a media circus and we need to give them a trial.”
Cam followed them out. Hopped. “This tarmac’s rough.”
He’d forgotten Cam had no shoes.
Cam waved him away when he would have helped. “Let me mince,” and he did, across the roof. Alistair matched his pace.
Paola looked out across the roofs, looked back quickly. “Can’t he go any faster?”
“I’m doing my best,” Cam said.
Paola always had set a fast pace to the lift. How much courage did it take her just to arrive at and leave work every day? Alistair gave her a gentle push toward the lifts. “Go press the button for us.”
“That’s some phobia,” Cam said once she was out of hearing.
“Yes.”
They reached the lift, where Paola waited with one palm against the wall. “Ground floor’s locked down. They have to authorize us, can you believe.”
They were trying to catch intruders down there.
“We’ll go down to second,” Alistair said, because it had to be better for Paola than standing out here in the open, waiting for access.
“Thank God,” Paola muttered, and punched the floor number.
They stepped out onto the second floor.
“They were brought in this afternoon. Which is what I came to see you about earlier tonight. Before I interviewed them, I reviewed the case file. They’d contracted to deliver some young man to a merc ship. But they underestimated the crew young Bertram Snowshoe was with. Finally,” as she must have gotten clearance for the ground floor, for she punched the lift button.
“Bertram Snowshoe?”
“Get in the lift, Alistair. Stop gawking.” The other two were already inside. He followed. “Yes. Snowshoe. I looked him up and found two people had inquired about Snowshoe recently. Leonard Wickmore and yourself.”
This case was getting more tangled every second. “Why does Wickmore want Bertram?”
“That’s something you can answer tomorrow, when you interview him. I hear he’s on Kitimat.”
“The other day when we interviewed him, he was at his office on Eaglehawk Prime,” Cam said. “Not liking the coincidence.”
“Executives travel all the time. They do most of their work on their way to and from places.” They stepped out of the lift and Paola stopped to talk to the agent in charge. “What’s happening?”
They were outside the storeroom. The room number was familiar.
“We cornered them in the storeroom,” the agent in charge said. “They’ve locked themselves in. The engineer is about to open the door.” He hesitated. “They know we won’t harm them. They’re using that to their advantage.”
It was clear what he was asking.
“You have my permission to use force,” Paola said.
“Yes, ma’am.” He opened a link.
“Wait.” Alistair frantically searched records. Where had they stored the Songyan machine? Storeroom 313. How unsurprising. “You didn’t corner them at all. They’re here to steal the genemod machine.” And Paola had just given the order to use deadly force. “Rescind your order, Paola. We need these people alive.”
He was too late. The guards had already stormed the door.