Twenty

 

Flint picked up burgers and carried them into the First Unit of the Armstrong Police Department’s Detective Unit like he still worked there. The office looked different than it had when he left. It had more cubicles because more officers had moved up to the unit—not because more officers deserved promotion, but because Chief Andrea Gumiela had decided that she needed more investigators after Anniversary Day.

He had never thought of Gumiela as visionary or even a good leader, but she had been right about that. And she had increased the call for more police officers. Somehow she had convinced the city to give her more money for scholarships and loans to the police academy.

It helped that she knew the temporary mayor.

He wound his way around the cubicles. The greasy scent of the burgers made his stomach growl. He’d splurged for real meat, from one of the cow farms in the center of the Moon. Expensive stuff, but not as expensive as the beef imported from Earth, brought on very speedy ships with tight schedules, delivering outrageously priced “real” food for the food snobs who thought anything Moon-grown or developed wasn’t good enough.

It took him a few minutes to find Bartholomew Nyquist’s office, even though Flint had been there a number of times before. Flint had contacted Nyquist about half an hour earlier, promising him dinner in exchange for a discussion.

Nyquist was the one who suggested the precinct.

Either Nyquist was extremely busy with work, or he didn’t want to be seen with Flint. Or both.

They had an uneasy relationship. It was based on respect: Flint knew Nyquist was one of the best detectives on the Moon and Nyquist knew that Flint could find anything. But Nyquist did not approve of the fact that Flint had left the legal side of the job to brush against the shady side. Nor was Nyquist comfortable with the fact that Flint had paid Nyquist’s medical bills after a Bixian assassination attempt. The city’s health plan wouldn’t provide the funding for the kind of rebuild and rehab that Nyquist needed to remain a functioning member of society. Besides, Flint always felt a bit guilty about that attack. He should have seen it coming.

Both men also had DeRicci between them. Nyquist was involved with her, but she often turned to Flint first in professional matters. It made both of them uncomfortable.

But DeRicci was her own woman and she was going to make her own choices, no matter what each man said to her.

No matter how senseless her choices were.

That last thought came with a surge of anger, which Flint tamped down. If he were giving advice to Talia, he would tell her to wait to make a decision until her emotions receded.

But Flint had a hunch these emotions wouldn’t pass. Besides, he felt the press of time.

He peered into Nyquist’s office. It looked like the man had been sleeping there—and smelled like it, too. Nyquist was sitting behind a desk littered with food wrappers, old coffee cups, and a pile of pads. A crumpled blanket covered one end of a sagging couch, and a group of shirts had been balled up in an approximation of a pillow.

Nyquist looked up at Flint, the circles under his eyes so deep that the scars from the attempted assassination—the ones that Nyquist refused to have removed—shone whitely against his skin.

Flint held up the bag of burgers. “Let’s go to an interrogation room,” he said. “It has to smell better than this place.”

Nyquist smiled, then stood up. He carefully made his way around the desk, apparently not wanting to dislodge the mounds of anything, and came to Flint’s side.

“What couldn’t wait?” he asked.

To the point, as usual.

“I got some new information,” Flint said. “Noelle said I could tell everyone about it and run the investigation if I wanted to.”

That much was true. Whether or not he would imply to Nyquist that DeRicci wanted Nyquist to investigate the clones was another matter entirely.

“Wow, aren’t we becoming the most important man in the room,” Nyquist said.

He didn’t sound bitter, although his words could be taken that way. Flint was glad they were discussing this in person rather than through links. He would have taken offense without the light tone Nyquist had in his voice.

“Are you on the payroll yet?” Nyquist asked, and this time, the tone wasn’t light.

Flint smiled. “You know I don’t need the money.”

“Yeah,” Nyquist said, “although I don’t like being reminded of that.”

Flint’s money, and the way he had gotten it, was at the heart of the disapproval Nyquist felt toward him.

“But I wasn’t asking about money,” Nyquist said. “Payroll means you work for them. Have you taken the plunge?”

Even though he knew Nyquist was brilliant, Flint was always surprised at how intuitive the man was. Nyquist had gotten to the heart of why Flint had arrived, without Flint saying a word.

“No,” Flint said. “I’m never going to work for anyone again.”

“Yet Noelle put you in charge of the investigation.” Nyquist pushed open the door to an interrogation room. It was one of the all-white rooms, which had nanoscrubbers to keep the filth off the walls. Someone somewhere had figured that sensory deprivation made criminals talk faster.

It probably wasn’t true, but it sounded true. And people liked to do things that sounded true more than they liked to do things that were true.

“It’s not that straightforward.” Flint put the bag on the table. He propped the door open, not because he minded the room, but because he knew that most of the surveillance systems kicked in only when the door was closed.

Nyquist opened the bag and pulled out the wrapped burgers, along with the gigantic cups of coffee that Flint had insisted on. He’d survived on precinct coffee for too many years to ever drink it again.

“You’re creepy, you know that,” Nyquist said as he unwrapped the burger. “You remember how I like my burger.”

Flint smiled and took his. “I don’t remember. Talia taught me to keep a log of the things people like. She got mad every time I forgot.”

Nyquist sat in one of the chairs. “That kid of yours has changed you.”

“In a good way, I hope,” Flint said.

“Jury’s still out.” Nyquist kicked one of the chairs toward Flint. “Sit down. I promise I won’t arrest you.”

“I’d like to see you try,” Flint said with a smile. He sat down. He was surprisingly nervous. He made his decision to go around DeRicci and the first thing he did was talk to her lover.

But Flint needed Nyquist. Flint needed Nyquist to move the police investigation in the right direction. Even though Nyquist wasn’t officially in charge, he had a lot of clout both by virtue of his personality and his closure rate. He struggled against authority—something he used to have in common with DeRicci—but he was popular among his fellow detectives.

Flint unwrapped his burger. Juice flowed off it and onto the wrapper. Even if he spilled, the scent of the burger would not remain in this room. Unlike Nyquist’s office, this room smelled fresh, as if it had been recently scrubbed. It probably had—more of that sensory deprivation thing.

“The reason I wanted to talk to you,” Flint said, “is that I found out something rather startling about zoodeh. The quarantined vessels aren’t the only source of it in the Earth Alliance.”

He explained what Luc Deshin told him. Nyquist’s eyes widened, but he didn’t say anything. He simply listened as he devoured his burger.

When Flint finished, Nyquist said, “We shouldn’t have missed that.”

“I know,” Flint said. “I feel the same way.”

Nyquist nodded, his cheeks just a bit red. He seemed furious at himself. He took a deep breath, crumpled the wrapper, and set it aside for the recycler. Clearly, he was gathering himself, setting his emotions aside, forcing himself to concentrate on the investigation now, not on the mistakes of the past.

“You still have informants,” he said, surprising Flint. Unlike DeRicci, who had demanded that Flint tell him the source, Nyquist knew the source wasn’t exactly legal, and didn’t seem to mind.

“Yeah,” Flint said.

“You keeping this one close to the vest?” Nyquist asked.

“For the moment,” Flint said. “But I will tell you this: My informant has access to a lot of information. He wants to know the bomb components, because he think he can trace them through his networks.”

Nyquist smiled slowly. “He wants to know the bomb components, does he?”

Flint didn’t smile in return. He wondered if Nyquist thought the request naïve, if Nyquist thought that Flint’s informant would then use that information to build his own bomb. Flint was about to say something when Nyquist added,

“We’d love to know the components, too.”

“You don’t know?” Flint asked.

“No,” Nyquist said. “We think all the bombers did what Ursula did. We think they attached something to easy-to-convert something or other, something that would become a bomb with the right trigger.”

Flint nodded. He had heard some of that, but he figured he’d leave the bomb details to the bomb squads. “I’m sure the dome collapses didn’t help.”

“We have no idea what we’re looking at.” Nyquist leaned back. “I even went back to the old warehouse from the first bombing four years ago to see if we missed anything.”

“Had you?”

“Hell if I know. What I do know is this: We’re never going to know what caused that bomb to blow, and we’re never going to know about the others. I think that’s deliberate. I think the Etaen issues around the first bombing and the appearance of those clones of PierLuigi Frémont were deliberate distractions, so we’d look the wrong direction. We looked in the wrong direction after the first bombing, and we’ve been chasing our tails with this one.”

Flint raised his eyebrows. “And you think that’s deliberate.”

“So do you,” Nyquist said, “or you wouldn’t be here. What do you really want, Miles?”

Here it was: the opportunity to tell Nyquist everything. Flint had to decide right now if he should trust the man completely or not.

“We’ve been working on the clones, and honestly, getting nowhere,” Flint said. “We thought they were about PierLuigi Frémont, about someone using him to scare us all or to make this worse somehow.”

“It’s not?” Nyquist asked.

“Are you familiar with designer criminal clones? Order up your favorite criminal, the perfect one for the crime at hand?” Flint’s heart was pounding. Here was his gamble: Had DeRicci talked to Nyquist and sworn him to secrecy?

Flint couldn’t quite imagine that. DeRicci kept secrets, exactly the way she was instructed to keep them. If she could tell no one, she told no one.

End of story.

“Designer clones have been around since cloning started,” Nyquist said. He was clearly thinking out loud. “Mostly it’s illegal. Not just because people try to pick parts and glue them together as if a clone is some kind of robot, but also because the truly famous people, the ones everyone wants to clone, own their own DNA. If they sell their DNA, the designer clone is legal. But most famous people never sell their DNA.”

“Yeah,” Flint said. “And people like PierLuigi Frémont cannot be cloned. That’s an Earth Alliance law as well. If the criminal has not been rehabilitated, then he or his heirs cannot sell his DNA.”

“Yet you’re saying someone is doing it, that this DNA did not come from the heirs.” Nyquist set his coffee down. “That it’s some kind of racket.”

“Yes,” Flint said, waiting for Nyquist to catch up to him.

“I should have gotten notification. All legal and security entities inside the Earth Alliance should have gotten notification,” Nyquist said.

“I don’t think the cloning or the sales are happening inside the Earth Alliance,” Flint said.

Nyquist turned gray. He rubbed his fingers across his mouth, then swore softly. “Because all you need is one,” he said. “Slow grown. Trained.”

Flint nodded. “Who is going to notice a thief with a vague resemblance to one of the more famous thieves in the Alliance? Especially if he’s younger, dressed differently, and speaking current slang?”

“There’s no guarantee here, though,” Nyquist said. “You can’t be sure that because a clone shares the DNA with his famous originator, the clone will act in the same way. Sorry, Miles, I’m a big believer in environment.”

“Me, too,” Flint said. “But look at it. These clones are made in bulk.”

“Raised in bulk,” Nyquist said.

“And not human.” Flint hated saying that. Because they were human. He’d always known it intellectually, but Talia had proven it to him. “Under the law, anyway.”

“You’re talking Earth Alliance law,” Nyquist said.

“Do you know anywhere that gives clones the same rights as the original?” Flint asked.

“Not without a lot of legal mumbo jumbo,” Nyquist said. “And the Earth Alliance is the most progressive place I know for the legal mumbo jumbo side of things.”

“Yeah,” Flint said.

Nyquist stood up. “You’re saying they raise clones in bulk, like cattle, kill the ones that won’t go with the program, and sell the rest.”

“I’m guessing,” Flint said, “but that’s the only way this all makes sense. At least to me.”

“Given the information from your informant,” Nyquist said.

“That too,” Flint said.

Nyquist shook his head. “That seems like a lot of work to me. Why not build an android or use something else to do your big theft?”

“Androids won’t work,” Flint said. “No one can seem to make them sophisticated enough.”

He’d studied their systems in the past, and he’d found that there was still some kind of limitation in artificial intelligence that made some humans nervous.

“I liked it better when we thought one nutcase created the clones specifically for this job.” Nyquist grabbed his coffee cup and swirled it. “What you’re telling me is that there is a nutjob who wanted the clones for this job—”

“And waited more than twenty years for them,” Flint said.

“That’s what I don’t get,” Nyquist said. “You have to be one cold S.O.B. And now you’re telling me there are enough cold S.O.Bs to make designer criminal clones into some kind of market category.”

Flint shrugged. “I suspect most of them are used for other things, like creating your own team of pickpockets.”

“Fagan for the modern era,” Nyquist said.

Flint actually had to reference the word “Fagan,” and he realized then that Nyquist was referring to an ancient Earth novel, one still taught in schools. “Yeah, I guess.”

But Nyquist had moved on. “That one nutjob and then whoever—whatever—is making the clones. Of all the things you could have told me, Miles, this scares me more than anything.”

“It scares me too,” Flint said. “Someone has designed these clones as weapons.”

Nyquist looked at Flint over the cup. Flint tried to hold off a blush. His pale skin betrayed him more than he wanted it to, particularly when someone like Nyquist, who could see things clearly, looked at him with that level of speculation.

“You made that point earlier, without saying it,” Nyquist said. “There’s something you’re not telling me here.”

Yes, Flint imagined himself saying. Noelle told me that you could handle the case, but the clones were something classified. I’m just bending the rules a little.

“Yes, there’s something I’m not telling you,” Flint said. “And for now, I’d like to keep it that way.”

Nyquist set the coffee cup down without drinking anything. “You want me to look into the designer criminal clones, don’t you?”

“In a specific way,” Flint said. “I want you to look at past investigations here on the Moon, in particular. See if any arrests have led back to some kind of organization or ring.”

“What if that organization belongs to your informant friend?” Nyquist asked.

“Nothing would surprise me.” Flint sighed, then decided to add one more layer of honesty. “I’m tired of the way this investigation is going nowhere, Bartholomew. Some of that is our fault, but a lot of it isn’t. And I’m done playing nice. I’m going to piss off a lot of people in the next few weeks. If you don’t want to be part of that, say so now.”

Nyquist smiled slowly. “‘Piss off a lot of people,’” he repeated. “Like your informant friend.”

“Possibly,” Flint said.

“And Noelle.”

Damn that man was perceptive. “Yes.”

“Aren’t you worried that I’ll tell Noelle something you don’t want her to hear?”

“No,” Flint said.

“Because you’re not worried about me?” Nyquist asked.

“Because she already knows I’m mad at her. If something she doesn’t like comes at her from the investigative side, she’ll know it comes from me.”

“You’re positive?” Nyquist asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Flint said. “And if she doesn’t like it, well then, too bad. I don’t work for her.”

Nyquist leaned back. His expression had become unreadable. “I don’t work for her either, Miles.”

“I know,” Flint said. “But you’re close.”

“I have no idea if we’re close,” Nyquist said. “I suspect you’re closer to her than I am.”

It was a night for honesty. “Noelle and I have never been involved.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Nyquist said.

Flint didn’t know how to respond to that. He never had known how to deal with that undercurrent between him and Nyquist. It had started before Nyquist started seeing DeRicci. He and Nyquist hadn’t entirely trusted each other then either, but they had respected each other.

Apparently, they still did.

“No one has really taken charge of this investigation,” Flint said. “I’ve been given a dozen reasons why, most of them coming down to the way that this agency can’t do something without that agency’s approval. I’m tired of it. I don’t belong to any agency. So I’m going to run the investigation. If people don’t like it, then fine. They can ignore me.”

“Or arrest you,” Nyquist said.

“If I do something illegal,” Flint said. “I don’t plan to.”

“Yet you’ve done illegal things before,” Nyquist said.

Flint looked at him, purposely keeping his expression neutral. “Have I?”

This time, Nyquist didn’t respond directly.

“It doesn’t matter, Miles,” Nyquist said. “I guess that’s what I’m trying to say in my own inept fashion. I’m going to help you. If it costs my job, so be it. I can’t live this way either.”

“And if it costs your relationship with Noelle?” Flint asked.

Nyquist shrugged. “You get older, you realize that things change.”

“That’s a rather bloodless way to look at life,” Flint said.

“I prefer to think of it as realistic,” Nyquist said.

“Does Noelle know about your realistic point of view?” Flint asked.

“She’s not at issue here,” Nyquist said. “What’s going on outside us, the fact that we can’t catch these criminals, that’s the issue. I’m with you, Miles, all the way to the end if need be. We will catch them.”

Flint smiled. He was more relieved than he realized. “And we will make them pay,” he said.