CHAPTER 7
We checked in with Andrew, one of the police forensic accountants, when we got back to the department. Or rather, Cherabino did and Michael and I tagged along. It was only the next cubicle over from hers and he had fantastic coffee.
“Have a minute?” Cherabino asked.
Andrew turned around in his chair. “Only about ten before the next meeting. What do you need?”
I gestured to the display of real gourmet coffee beans, grinder, and brewing machine.
“Go ahead,” Andrew said. “I made a fresh pot a little while ago.”
So of course I fixed myself a cup, humming happily under my breath. Blue Mountain coffee, real sugar, milk even. Andrew’s cubicle was the Cadillac of cubicles.
“Have you had a chance to do discovery on Noah Wright’s accounts yet?” Cherabino asked him.
Michael handed me a cup, and I made him coffee as well. Three sugars, no cream. Too much when he wasn’t drinking department swill, that wasn’t my problem. He took the cup with a polite nod.
Andrew poked around in some files, pulling one out. “Actually, yes.” More shuffling papers. “Wright banked through our local New World branch. And his company was remarkably cooperative about sharing financial records on him and his ‘retirement.’ His pension was laughable. But he paid his mortgage and his bills on time, thousands of ROCs a month. He does not have the savings to support this.”
“What are you saying, exactly?” Cherabino asked.
“The money doesn’t work,” Andrew told her. “I’ve looked under every rock and every tree, but no progress. He has cash deposits well under the amount that usually gets attention, and he’s paying most of his bills with cash as well.”
“Is there a rich relative that’s supporting him?” I asked, knowing full well the evidence was pointing rather to a drug trade or something similarly illegal. Unemployed researchers didn’t make large amounts of untraceable cash, not legally anyway.
“Not that I can tell, and I’ve looked.” Andrew looked apologetic. “Perhaps it’s a relationship with someone with extra cash, as in romantic relationship.”
“Most likely, though, it’s criminal,” Cherabino said.
“Well, yes, it looks that way.”
“Thanks, Andrew.”
“No problem. Um . . . I do have the thing . . .”
“We’ll leave now,” I said cheerfully. Of course I was taking the cup with me.
We settled in Cherabino’s space, across the narrow cubicle hall. I drank coffee. Michael held his cup. Cherabino wished she had coffee.
I handed her mine; she sipped and handed it back. Neither one of us commented.
“If he’s up to something large-scale and criminal, why isn’t he being tracked by the department already?” Michael asked.
“That’s a good question,” Cherabino said. “That’s a very good question. If you get some extra time, go through the dispatch and case file records for the last year or so. I want to know if we just haven’t put two and two together.”
“Before or after I get an interview scheduled for the Pubbly case?”
“After. Oh, and see if you can find the car from the Kiershon case—it might be in a chop shop or something, but if we can find the bloodstain evidence, that’ll prove our theory.”
“How many cases do you have going right now?” I asked, amazed.
Cherabino sighed. “Too many. Far, far too many.”
• • •
Later that afternoon, exhausted and unwilling to go back to the interview rooms, I did paperwork. Until I had an idea.
“Hi, Bob,” I said. It was a little disturbing how good I was getting sneaking into the high-security area.
The balding overweight cop turned around in his chair. Bob was well over three hundred pounds, splotchy skin on his neck, and breathed hard when he got out of his chair. That didn’t matter; Bob could run rings around the fittest cop on the floor in his domain, the Wild West of the small remaining Internet. He was a cowboy, a rebel, and one of the youngest people I’d ever met with a legal implant in his brain. Most people were too scared the viruses would turn their brain to Jell-O—Bob took the risks with both hands and helped to shut down the electronic criminals every day. That didn’t mean he liked me.
“What?” he asked me. He’d been staring at a computer monitor—a much bigger, much nicer, much more restricted-level technology than anything Cherabino had ever used—and now was staring at me. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
“Hello,” I said in return, by now used to this little song and dance of ours. “But I am prepared to offer you a dozen cream-filled chocolate donuts, delivered every week until Christmas.”
He sat a little straighter. “With holiday sprinkles?”
“If you want sprinkles, you can have sprinkles,” I said, feeling generous. “I’ll even throw in a box of real coffee from the donut place you like. With holiday flavoring.”
He wavered. “Zahir’s cracking down on unauthorized projects, you know.”
“This will only take a few minutes. No FBI files, I promise. Nothing behind a firewall.”
He thought about it. I could almost see the numbers and probabilities going past him. Almost see, because I couldn’t read him at all; Bob’s computer implant created an electric field that effectively made his mind feel like gibberish to me. Electromagnetic fields interacted with Mindspace and Mindspace fields with electronics—anyone who’s had a watch run down on their wrist from too much emotion knows this already.
Most people were too afraid of the computer viruses that had destroyed the world in the Tech Wars to want an implant, much less to work in the tiny remaining Internet, walled away from anything important. Most normals lived in a world walled away from anything breakable, with information routinely Quarantined before it even left. Bob couldn’t be Quarantined; he was too deep, too often, swimming in the sea of information. That made him both dangerous and valuable, and for all his girth, he knew he was both.
“Make it half a dozen twice a week, and make sure they have sprinkles,” Bob said firmly.
I suppressed a smile. “You got it.”
He leaned his chair forward. “What’s the puzzle?”
“I want you to find me the information that Noah Wright released on the Internet a few months ago. His boss says it’s sensitive, and they’ve tried to erase it all. You told me once that nothing is ever really erased from the Internet.”
“It isn’t. Who is ‘they’?”
“Cardinal Laboratories.”
“Ah.” He sat back. “This related to the soldier project?”
I blinked. “The what?”
“The government recently announced on secure channels that they’re working with Cardinal Laboratories to design a biologically enhanced soldier. There’s been a flurry of protest over it, but the military is emphasizing that the design is biologically based, and is on a different system from the hybrid Tech used before the war. The science groups are still up in arms. The laboratory has had protestors all over its New York office.”
“Why haven’t I heard about this?” I asked.
“It’s all over the Net, but the government’s suppressing the newspapers. There’s free speech protests about that too, but it’s starting to die down. Everybody with access already’s had their say.” He looked at me. “You really need to keep up with the news.”
“Um, if you say so.”
“What was the name of the guy again?” Bob asked me.
“Noah Wright.”
“Think I know the guy. Goes by ArkFree?”
“I’d have no way of knowing. The lab’s not giving anything away.”
He turned around to look at the screen again, making a gesture with his hand, and a flurry of pictures ran over the screen. He must have had a haircut; for the first time, I could see the circular exterior of the implant, where one faint green light pulsed.
I forced myself to look away, disturbed, as I always was, by the thought of electronic technology actually fused to someone’s brain. It was dangerous as hell—after all, that’s how the computer viruses went blood-borne in the Tech Wars—but also a terrible idea. And I wasn’t just saying that because I was a telepath and an implant would likely shred my brain through competing fields. It just was.
Now, a biology-based enhancement . . . maybe that might be worth looking into. The military project sounded legal, if extreme. But extreme was what the military did; half of my students back in the old days had been training for specialties in black ops and surveillance. Military paid very well for what it did.
Nearly three minutes passed while Bob searched. Three minutes was an eternity in his world, in which he could sort through data faster than I could think. Finally he made a small noise.
“What?” I asked.
Bob turned back around in the chair. Behind him on the screen was a picture of a paper document, with a red stamp printed on it and everything.
“They almost got it all,” Bob said. “I had to raid a newsgroup’s disaster recovery site.”
“Um . . . thank you?”
“No big deal,” he said. “It’s printing now on the main printer.”
Usually he was more helpful with summaries. “What is it?” I asked.
“A folder with several documents,” Bob said. I could almost see the data swimming behind his eyes. Then: “ArkFree signed his handle to it and everything and kept the original lab marks there, if you know what you’re looking for. The longest document seems to be an internal progress report on what they’re calling the Galen Project. You’ll have to read it for details; I’m getting an internal notification that there’s a meeting in five.”
“Thanks for doing this,” I said.
“Make sure the first six donuts are here tomorrow,” Bob said, and turned away. “Sprinkles. There’d better be sprinkles.”
• • •
I fetched the thick set of papers from the printer without getting stopped, staring out the frost-rimmed window at the parking lot below. Then I walked out past the guard with the confident step of someone who had somewhere to be. He even waved.
Candy from a baby.
Now, onto the really hard part of the day: facing Clark. I had to do it, tired or no. I was here and the interview rooms were my real job. Even if I’d take a nap on nails.
• • •
Clark stopped in the middle of the basement hallway when he saw me.
“Hi, Clark,” I said.
He didn’t move. His anger bubbled up like a cloud of steam. “You—you—”
“Paulsen says I owe you an apology,” I said. I was tired enough and stressed enough that the apology reference didn’t hurt. Well, no more than eating glass.
Clark’s face moved to a shade of burgundy, like the color change of a chameleon. “You left. With no notice. You haven’t called in. In days. You can’t do that.” He spoke in a dangerously quiet voice.
“Well, I can—”
“You can’t. Other people have lives. Other people have to pick up the crap—”
“Nobody asked you to be in charge!”
He took one, long, deep breath, and I felt the anger crystallize into something dangerous. “If it was up to me, you’d have been fired a year ago.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I knew he didn’t like me, but what was I supposed to do? “What’s the schedule like tonight? I’ll take the shitty ones.”
“I’m giving you the whole damn pile—with no explanation. It’s better than what you did to me. I’m getting my coat. I’m on vacation next week. With any luck, you’ll screw it up so bad you’ll be fired by the time I get back. Here’s to not seeing you.”
Clark pushed past me, hard, bruising my shoulder, his contempt and disgust leaking through like acid.