FIFTY-FIVE

 

 

WHEN NYQUIST ARRIVED at Space Traffic’s Interrogation Center, a computer informed his links that Palmette waited for him in interrogation room 65B. The number itself surprised him, even though he knew Space Traffic had more interrogation rooms than all of the other Armstrong authorities combined. Space Traffic handled everything from contraband materials to contraband humans. It was the first line of defense against alien governments trying to snatch someone without going through the proper procedures.

More red flags went through Space Traffic than anywhere else on the Moon. Not only did Space Traffic have a lot of interrogation rooms, it had a corresponding number of holding cells, ostensibly to hold anyone—or anything—until it/he/she/they got transported off the Moon again.

He hadn’t been in the Interrogation Center before. He was surprised at how clean it looked, and then realized why. White walls, bright white lights, white floors, white tables, white ceilings. The Interrogation Center was designed to unnerve, and it did—even the interrogators.

Before he came in here, he had briefly spoken to Murray. Murray had explained how the Interrogation Center worked, and why it was better to keep Palmette here than it was to take her to Armstrong Police Headquarters.

Nyquist preferred familiar surroundings—he was already off-balance today—but he listened to Murray. Murray’s argument, besides the basics (that she belonged here) was that she might need to be sent to the Earth Alliance for some stronger punishment than any Moon laws could dish out. So better to keep her here than subject her to transport.

What neither man was saying was that if the news got out that she was in any way responsible for the attacks on this day, there was no guarantee she would survive a transport. Not just because a mob might take her down, but also because the police themselves might not allow her to survive the journey.

It had taken nearly an hour longer for Palmette to go through decontamination than Nyquist expected. The Quarantine Squad had discovered a device attached to her body—although from what Nyquist understood, “attached” was not quite a strong enough word. The device had almost become part of her body, parts of it deeply embedded in the skin.

It took two high level medical avatars to remove the device. The squad leader wanted to send for an actual physician, but Murray had talked them out of it. He reminded them that Palmette had already tried to kill a bunch of people that day; there was no guarantee that the device wouldn’t kill a living breathing person who touched it as well.

Nyquist was annoyed that he hadn’t been consulted about this, although, in truth, he would have made the same decision. No one in Space Traffic had seen this kind of device before, nor could the avatars find it in any known database.

Palmette wouldn’t tell anyone what it was. In fact, she refused to talk at all.

Nyquist hoped that wouldn’t last. He needed to talk to her, and he had bet his part of the investigation on the idea that she would talk to him. Otherwise, he could be back at the Security Building helping DeRicci.

Before Nyquist went into the Interrogation Center, Murray told him where the nearest cafeteria was to Room 65B. Inside, Murray said, were sandwiches, sweets, and more coffee than the most dedicated investigator would ever need.

Since Nyquist had managed to choke down a lunch—not that he wanted food—he figured he wouldn’t need anything else. Still, he was surprised that Space Traffic provided food to its interrogators. Armstrong PD certainly didn’t.

The Interrogation Center had no direct openings into Space Traffic Headquarters or to any public part of the port. A prisoner had to go through heavily guarded, high security back corridors to get to an interrogation room.

So did the interrogator.

Nyquist used the walk through the white corridors to calm himself. He also had to review what he’d spent the last two hours learning about Palmette.

She had never married. No long-term relationships were on file with the City of Armstrong. No living children, which Nyquist found to be an interesting turn of phrase in her biographical material, one he sent an information bot to track down, wishing he had the time to sort through the public records himself.

He had to resort to police files, security department files, and the standard public records. The files from the various police psychiatrists hadn’t arrived yet, although a judge had authorized their release. Nyquist would get pinged when they arrived. He planned to excuse himself from the interrogation to study them when (if) they got to his links.

She had been born in Armstrong, the only child of two engineers, now deceased. As far as Nyquist could tell, she had no living family. She lived alone, had no pets, and, according to her financials, seemed to spend no money in public places like bars or restaurants, suggesting that she didn’t have much of a social life either.

This wasn’t a change after the bombing. She hadn’t done anything before it either, except tend to her career—a career that had gone off-track the moment she showed up, coffee in hand, outside Alvina’s dilapidated house.

Nyquist didn’t like what little he found. It gave him both too little and too much to go on. Enough so that he could speculate, but not enough for him to be confident of that speculation.

He had gone into a thousand interrogations with less, but somehow that felt wrong in this case. Perhaps because he knew Palmette. Or perhaps because he felt oddly guilty.

He’d been off his stride since she challenged him about law and justice.

Since he realized she wasn’t the innocent victim he had hoped she would be.

Interrogation Room 65B looked the same as the other interrogation rooms near it. White with a one-way mirror, more ways to record and process information than any interrogation room in the Armstrong PD, and thick walls so that no creature could use its limbs to break through. Some of the other members of the Earth Alliance, aliens by Armstrong standards, had the strength to easily break standard human construction, but not here.

This place was designed for nonhumans. That it imprisoned humans easily was a bonus.

Nyquist stopped outside the one-way glass and looked in. Palmette sat at the table, her hands flat on the white surface. Restraints gave her some freedom of movement—she could move her arms to her side or back up the table—but not enough that she could attack her interrogator or try to break out of the room.

She was wearing some kind of beige jumpsuit, which was soothing to his eyes in all that white. He knew, from the materials that bombarded him as he went into the Interrogation Center, that he was supposed to change into pure white clothing as well, so that his clothing disturbed her eyes, but he wasn’t going to do it.

He needed some psychological advantages, it was true, but not that kind. Besides, Palmette was too smart for the standard mind games. She’d been trained in them, just like the officers in Space Traffic.

Just like Nyquist himself.

She looked up as if she could see him behind the window. She couldn’t, of course. Nor could she hear anything from outside the room.

She looked thinner than he remembered, thinner, even, than she had seemed inside Terminal 81. There he had seen her as a threat. Now he saw her as diminished woman, one who had nothing. Less than nothing really.

Logically, she had said, it’s better if I die.

She had been right. It would have been much better for her if she had died.

Which begged the question—why hadn’t she tried harder to get the squad to kill her? Why didn’t she have her own failsafe, something she could have activated to facilitate her own death?

Maybe that device they had found on her would have done that, and maybe she hadn’t activated it.

Did that mean she was willing to cooperate? Or was she regretting her decision in Terminal 81?

Somehow he needed to find out.

He put his palm on the door and waited for it to process his living flesh, his DNA, and his authorization. Before the door unlocked, it cautioned him that he might be dealing with a dangerous offender. Should there be any violence at all—from him or from her—other authorities would be summoned.

He had to indicate his formal—legal—understanding before the door allowed him inside.

He hadn’t had to do that in police headquarters in more than thirty years. He had forgotten about all the strange legalities scattered through Armstrong as a matter of course.

The door opened inward. He stepped inside.

The air was much colder in here, uncomfortably so, and it smelled of cleaning fluid. He had the option of making the room hotter and having it smell of rotted flesh. The idea of that turned his stomach. He just left it as close to standard as possible.

“I didn’t think they’d let you anywhere near me,” she said before he could speak. “Don’t you have a conflict of interest?”

He knew what she was trying to do; they had the same training. Whoever spoke first theoretically controlled the interview.

Provided, of course, that the other person didn’t understand the mind game.

Nyquist had been playing that kind of mind game long before Palmette was out of school.

“What would that conflict of interest be?” he asked.

“I thought if you cared about….” She let her voice trail off.

He could actually read her expression for just a brief moment. She had believed him back in Terminal 81 when he said he cared about her. Now she was doubting that.

If she doubted it too long, she would not cooperate.

“For a standard investigation, you’re right,” he said as he sat across from her. “There’s nothing standard about this.”

She bit her lower lip, watching him.

“You’re in a lot of trouble, Ursula,” he said, deciding at that moment to go with her vulnerability. He was going to be the friend, the mentor, the person she could rely on.

“Is that why I’m still here?” she asked. “So that you can ship me off to some prison somewhere without sullying Armstrong any further?”

“No,” he said, deciding to lie. “It’s so that I can talk to you without Gumiela watching over this. She’d stop this interrogation from the start.”

“That bitch,” Palmette muttered.

He almost nodded, not because he agreed about Gumiela (although he’d had his run-ins with her) but because Palmette’s reaction told him she was more comfortable with him than even she realized.

“Talk to me, Ursula,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do to help you.”

Her gaze met his, then hardened. “And do what? Make sure I didn’t get sent to some death hole? Make sure that people know how pitiful I am? You don’t have any power, Nyquist. You can’t help me.”

She was right. But he didn’t want her to think that.

“The whole day has been strange, Ursula,” he said. “Soseki’s murder, then you in Terminal 81. The fact that it’s Anniversary Day. I looked at all of your behavior over the past few weeks. It’s clear that you were trying to stay off the grid, and it’s also clear that someone was helping you. At least, that’s what the Quarantine Squad thinks. Me, I think someone was forcing you to act for them. What did they have on you? What were you afraid of?”

It was a gamble. He was giving her a defense. She could spin a web of lies here that would take days to unravel. But she was angry as well, and scared, and maybe even regretting her decision to let Nyquist bring her in.

“I’m capable,” she snapped. “I’m smart, Nyquist.”

“I never said you weren’t,” he said, sounding as defensive as possible. “But I don’t have the computer skills to do the things you did. Not many people do. That’s why I think you’re in trouble. Because someone was forcing you into this stuff.”

“I learned it,” she said. “I learned a lot of things this last year.”

He was about to answer her when his links pinged. Information had come in, but because of the nature of the Interrogation Room, he didn’t know if it was the psychological evaluations or something else.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I need to step out for a minute.”

“Yeah, of course you do,” she said. “Is Gumiela out there? Does she want input? Is that why you have to leave?”

“No one’s out there, Ursula,” he said gently. “It’s just you and me here. That’s how I’m able to talk to you. Everyone else is dealing with the death of the mayor.”

He didn’t add anything about the governor-general or the other assassination attempts. He wanted her to tell him about them.

“It’s a big deal today. Armstrong is in chaos.”

He was laying it on thick, but he wanted her to think she had succeeded. She had disrupted the city as much as the bombing had four years before.

“Then why were you free to come after me?” she asked.

“I wasn’t after you,” he said truthfully. “I came to the port to talk to you about the quarantines. I found the zoodeh. I figured you could help me figure out how it got into the city. That’s when I figured out you weren’t at your desk. I had the guys in Space Traffic track you down. They think you’re a threat, Ursula.”

“They might not be wrong,” she said, but he was heartened to hear the “might not.” It meant she was thinking of cooperating.

He debated with himself for a moment, wondering if he should stay and press an advantage.

But he wasn’t sure it was an advantage. He needed those psych reports. He wanted to make sure he didn’t trigger something that would shut her down.

He needed her to talk.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, and let himself out of the room, closing the door behind him.

The hallway was blessedly warm. He hadn’t realized how cold he had gotten inside that room. He stepped just a few meters away from the door, away from the window, not wanting to turn his back on her—even if she couldn’t see him.

Then he examined the message that came through his links. It wasn’t the psych report that he wanted. It was information he actually wished he hadn’t had.

The device Palmette had attached to her body matched the one worn by Soseki’s assassin in most ways. This one differed in strength. She wasn’t going to use that lighter to set off the interior of the quarantined ship. The device would have magnified the laser blasts, making them even stronger, and sending them ricocheting outward, changing their frequency so that they would ignite the webs of protection, starting a chain reaction, not just with the webs of protection around that ship, but also around the nearby ship.

Murray’s hunch had been right: she would have exploded Terminal 81, but the devastation was so much more than anyone could have imagined. It would have taken out the port and possibly an entire section of the city before it got contained. Thousands would have died.

Thousands.

Nyquist felt a surge of anger run through him. Sane people didn’t do things like that. People with even a dollop of empathy wouldn’t let something like that happen.

She could have told him about the device. Him or the others. But she wanted them to shoot her.

Or maybe she had chickened out at the last minute. Maybe Nyquist had done that with his little speech about saving her life for nothing.

The thing was, four years ago he hadn’t saved her life for nothing. He had saved her life so that she could cause chaos throughout the Moon. So that she could help kill Soseki and maybe the governor-general and who knew how many others.

He put a hand to his face. If he hadn’t saved her none of this would have happened.

Soseki would still be alive.

The day would have been just fine.

Or would it? Wouldn’t whoever planned this have found someone else? Someone just as vulnerable as Palmette? Someone who wouldn’t have backed down when confronted by the Quarantine Squad?

He let out a shaky breath.

He did have to switch the focus of this interrogation. He had to move away from why and move to who.

And she had given him a clue how to do it. She wanted him to believe she was capable of planning this, that she was smart enough, strong enough.

So he would pretend to believe she could do it. He would go along with that delusion until it fell apart. He would find out who the hell was behind all of this.

And then he would stop it once and for all.