TWENTY-FOUR

 

 

ROMEY CROWDED NEAR the far wall of the restaurant, silently thanking every single god she’d ever heard of that she had put someone good on the visuals. Emmanuel Tyr should have retired decades ago, but he loved solving things. In particular, he loved processing the visual information that came filtered through a case.

Tyr had muscled his way onto the scene carrying his specialized equipment. Romey had learned long ago to let him set up wherever he needed to. His equipment was finer, more refined, than any other she had seen. She had argued with him on their very first case together. It was one of the few times in her life that she was happy she lost.

Tyr had scouted the entire restaurant, stepping around the crime scene techs as they cleared him. He finally settled on the area near Romey’s makeshift headquarters. He bullied the techs into finishing that area first, then he set up five screens. He attached them to a network only Tyr touched (Romey had learned that the hard way as well) and then got to work.

He also worked faster than anyone Romey knew, as if he were part computer.

She was glad for it on this case, because this case had more visuals than any case she had ever worked.

Almost everyone who had attended Soseki’s speech had recorded it for personal use. O’Malley’s itself had made four recordings of the speech from different parts of the room. Then there were the security cameras, the kitchen cameras, the back hallway cameras, and once Soseki had entered the restaurant proper, more visuals from more onlookers who were determined to have a bit of Soseki to take with them.

Why the man had decided to go through the crowded restaurant instead of disappearing out the back like most politicos baffled Romey. But she wasn’t here to understand him, not yet, at least. She was here to look for something, someone, suspicious.

Within fifteen minutes of setting up, Tyr claimed he found something. He made Romey stand near the far wall, and she brought some of her lieutenants. Banyon Kilzahn wanted to watch as well, but she wouldn’t let him.

She wanted to know what Tyr had before she let Kilzahn report to DeRicci.

For all his enthusiasm, Tyr could occasionally see connections that no one else could. That didn’t mean those connections weren’t there. It usually meant that Romey had to send him back to work so that he could communicate with “the little people.” She never told him she often found his attitudes offensive.

She figured that was part of the price she paid for working with Emmanuel Tyr.

As Tyr’s audience gathered, he offered them a variety of viewing options. Tyr’s five screens had holo capability, so that the watchers could feel like part of the scene if they were so inclined.

Romey wasn’t so inclined.

She told him so. Then she told him to get straight to the report, doubting he would be able to. Emmanuel Tyr loved convincing other people of his own brilliance.

That was the only downside of working with him. He had a tendency to over-explain, and Romey had a tendency to tune out. She didn’t dare on this one, although she’d missed a lot of the explanation already.

“I had the choice of tens of thousands of images per nanosecond,” Tyr was saying. He was a short square man with a full head of black hair. The black hair had to be an enhancement, some kind of holdover from his youth. It looked out of place against his leathery skin, something he’d obviously decided not to enhance, thinking—or so he had once told her—that aged skin gave a person an air of authority.

“I have a program that selects for the best image based on customized details. I set up six different versions of this program, searching for suspicious behavior, someone manipulating our guy’s food or his drink or touching him inappropriately, stalking him—you get the idea.”

Yes, she got the idea, but she knew better than to push Tyr. She didn’t add anything, because he’d hear the addition as a question, then he’d answer it, and she’d lose even more time.

“When you set up a stalking program for a politician,” he said, musing aloud, “You have to be careful to exclude bodyguards and major-domos. You still get a lot of false positives, but that’s where we got our best hit. Watch this.”

She leaned toward the screens.

Tyr pointed to the center one.

“See that guy?” he asked, finger brushing against the image of a thin blond with floppy hair and an arresting face. “Watch him.”

She was still staring at the blonde’s appearance. Blonds were rare anywhere, but they were particularly rare on the Moon. This one was young, maybe twenty-five, unless he had enhancements to make him seem young.

But she didn’t think so. He moved like a very young man, and he had that thinness that most men outgrew by the time they were thirty. Even if they used enhancements to stay thin, they never had that stick-like appearance again.

The blond stood in the back, arms crossed, expression neutral as he watched Soseki give his speech. Fortunately, Tyr had the sound turned off. Romey had heard most of Soseki’s speeches, and no offense to the newly deceased mayor, but they had a certain sameness to them, one she didn’t need to experience again.

Then the mayor finished, all two hundred plus people in the room applauded—except the blond—and then most moved en masse toward the podium for a moment or two with Soseki.

He posed for pictures, shook more hands than she ever wanted to consider, and chatted happily with a number of people he clearly didn’t know. All the while, his bodyguards and his aides stood nearby, looking impatient.

She already knew that the substance which killed him hadn’t come through his hands. He wore SkinSoft and except for the epidermals from all the various hands he touched, his SkinSoft had nothing on it.

He was, she had learned this day, a cautious man, one who never ate at these events, who brought his own liquids, who in fact never ever did anything that would allow people to harm him—at least using known methods.

Soseki had lived through the dome bombing. He’d been brash back then, but the bombing taught him caution. He’d also received an inordinate number of death threats, particularly as the press reported on the political machine he’d built inside the city. He could have been, according to more than one person she’d spoken to this afternoon, mayor for life. And, she had thought a bit unkindly, he had been.

She would have been pursuing the mayor-for-life angle if the governor-general and the mayor of Moscow Dome hadn’t been attacked as well. This was not a vendetta against a particular person. She doubted this attack had much to do with Soseki at all. It had to do with his being mayor of the City of Armstrong.

It was symbolic—and Soseki would have hated that.

Tyr continued to point out the blond man. Each time Soseki moved, the blond man moved as well. But the blond man was good. He didn’t hover, nor did he stalk. He didn’t even seem obvious.

At one point, he simply looked like a man who wanted to get out of the restaurant, and when one of the bodyguards blocked him, he looked annoyed.

Finally, the blond man made his way to the door. He stepped outside just before Soseki finished glad-handing. If someone had been watching the blond man—and Romey wasn’t sure anyone had—they would have seen a man impatient to get out of a crowd, and then once out, a man who needed to catch his breath before he went on.

Romey wagered that when she showed this to the bodyguards—who wouldn’t remember the man until they saw him—they’d say that he claimed to be uncomfortable in crowds. If she hadn’t seen him in the room where Soseki was making the speech, leaning comfortably against the wall, unconcerned when people brushed past him, she would have believed he had some kind of phobia against crowded places.

Poor Soseki. His bodyguards weren’t as good as they should have been. They should have noted the difference in the blond guy’s behavior inside the back room and then in the corridors.

On the visuals, Soseki’s bodyguards came out of the door, with Soseki in the middle. Romey frowned. She hadn’t realized just how obviously a bodyguard’s stance told an attacker exactly where the potential victim was.

The blond guy moved just a little to the side—not much—adjusting his own position so that he could get close to Soseki.

Then all the blond guy did was brush casually against Soseki’s arm.

Soseki didn’t notice. Neither did the bodyguards.

The blond guy scurried away, as if he were afraid the crowd would catch up to him, and as he did, Soseki froze in place.

“What the hell happened?” Romey asked.

Tyr was prepared for the question. He let the wide image dim, and focused on that moment when the blond guy brushed against Soseki. Tyr magnified the image until all that was visible were the sides of both men’s sleeves.

The fabrics touched so lightly that they didn’t even indent. Soseki wouldn’t have felt anything at all. But as those two bits of fabric touched, a small needle-like object emerged from the weave in the blond guy’s sleeve.

“That needle thing,” Tyr said as they watched, “is so tiny that the naked eye can’t see it. I’ve had to magnify this…”

But Romey stopped listening after “naked eye.” She watched the needle thing slide into Soseki’s sleeve. Then the needle thing disintegrated, and the sleeves separated.

“Will we find trace elements of that thing on Soseki’s sleeve?” she asked.

“How would I know?” Tyr asked. “I don’t think so, but I don’t specialize in that kind of thing. I’ve gone over this a few times, and even at an even greater level of magnification, I don’t see anything left on the mayor’s sleeve. But that doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

“Right.” She knew it would matter when they had the blond guy in custody. When they prosecuted him. But it didn’t matter at the moment, unless that trace amount of whatever told her what exactly caused Soseki’s death.

Although it was pretty obvious. Tyr zoomed back out. A second or less after the needle went in, Soseki froze in place. Then the gray color started spreading over him.

“That’s enough,” Romey said. “I don’t need to see that again. I need some good images of this blond man, holo images as well as 2-D.”

“Already got it,” Tyr said and sent it to her via her links. She let the flat images whiz past her left eye, and did not even look at the holoimages because she knew what they would show. They’d show the blond guy in motion, so that the officers would see his gait, his height, his gestures. The officers would know exactly how this guy moved and got around. They might even be able to track him just from the image.

She forwarded all of the images to the entire Armstrong PD with a notice that this was the guy they wanted—”for questioning,” of course. She did want him for questioning. She wanted to know what the hell was going on.

Romey also sent it to DeRicci. And then, because Romey promised, she also sent it to the investigators in Moscow Dome.

Immediately, she got a scrambled text response from Moscow Dome:

You’re kidding, right?

She moved away from her team, and answered on the same encrypted link. No. You recognize this guy?

Hell, yeah. We’re looking for the same guy.

Romey frowned. I thought the attacks happened at the same time.

They did. The liaison from Moscow Dome sent her a series of images. It looked like the same guy, only he was getting close to Moscow Dome’s mayor.

Romey cursed. Clones? she asked. They’re using clones?

What else would it be? The liaison sent back.

It made no sense. Clones were obvious. They got noticed. They were easy to track, particularly if—like most clones on the Moon—they were registered.

Anyone claimed responsibility for yours yet? she sent.

DeRicci was the one who responded. Clearly she’d been monitoring the communication. No one’s claiming responsibility for any of it, she sent. But, clearly from these images, it’s only a matter of time.