by John Scalzi
“Something wrong?” Beresford stopped and waited on me.
“You weren’t kidding when you said this thing didn’t move,” I said. “I think something’s rusted up in this thing.”
“I can get you a can of WD-40 if you want.”
“Nice,” I said. “Just give me a second.” I fired up the threep’s diagnostic system to find out what was going on. “Great, it’s a Metro Courier.”
“Is that a problem?” Beresford asked.
“The Metro Courier is like the Ford Pinto of threeps.”
“We could try to find you a rental threep if you want,” Beresford said. “I think Enterprise might have some at the airport. It’ll just take forever and you’ll spend your day filling out requisition forms.”
“It’ll be fine,” I said. The diagnostic said there was nothing wrong with the threep, which may have meant there was something wrong with the diagnostic. “I’ll walk it out.”
“Come on, then.” Beresford started off again. I followed, limping.
“Agent Chris Shane, Officer Klah Redhouse,” Beresford said, after we reached the lobby, introducing me to a young man in a uniform. “Klah went to Northern Arizona with my son. As it happens he was in Phoenix on tribal business, so you got lucky. It would be a two-hundred-eighty-five-mile walk to Window Rock otherwise.”
“Officer Redhouse,” I said, and held out my hand.
He took it and smiled. “Don’t meet a lot of Hadens,” he said. “Never met one who was an FBI agent before.”
“A first time for everything,” I said.
“You’re limping,” he said.
“Childhood injury,” I said. And then, after a second, “That was a joke.”
“I got that,” he said. “Come on. I’m parked right outside.”
“Be right there,” I said, and then turned to Beresford. “There’s a possibility that I might need this threep for a while.”
“It’s just collecting dust with us,” Beresford said.
“So it won’t be a problem if I keep it in Window Rock for a while,” I asked.
“That’s going to be up to the folks up there,” Beresford said. “Our official policy is to defer to their sovereignty, so if they want you away when you’re done, head to our office in Flagstaff. I’ll let them know you might be on the way. Or get a hotel room. Maybe someone will rent you a broom closet and a plug.”
“Is this a problem?” I asked. “I’m not really versed in the relations between the FBI and the Navajo.”
“We don’t have any problems at the moment,” Beresford said. “We’ve cooperated with them just fine recently, and they have Klah taking you up, which says they don’t have a problem with you. But other than that, who knows. The U.S. government gave the Navajo and a lot of the other Native American nations a whole lot more autonomy a couple of decades back, when it downsized the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Health Service. But that’s also given us an excuse to ignore them and their problems.”
“Ah,” I said.
“Hell, Shane, you might be able to sympathize,” Beresford said. “The U.S. government just pulled the plug on the Hadens, didn’t it? It’s something you folks might say you have in common with the Navajo.”
“I’m not entirely sure I want to be going around making that comparison,” I said.
“That’s probably wise,” Beresford said. “The Navajo have a two-hundred-year head start in the ‘getting screwed by the U.S. government’ category. They might not appreciate you jumping on the train. But now you might understand why some of them might decide to be touchy about you showing up and asking questions. So be polite, be respectful, and go if they tell you to go.”
“Got it.”
“Good,” Beresford said. “Now go on. Klah’s good people. Don’t keep him waiting.”
Chapter Ten
THE RIDE UP to Window Rock took four and a half hours, with Redhouse and me passing the time in innocuous conversation followed by long lapses of silence. Redhouse seemed to enjoy my stories about getting to travel the world with my father and noted that his own travels had been far less extensive.
“I’ve been in the four states the Navajo Nation sits in,” he said. “And the most time that I spent away from it was when I went to Flagstaff for college. Other than that, been nowhere but here.”
“Have you wanted to go anywhere else?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “When you’re a kid all you want to do is be somewhere else.”
“Pretty sure that’s a universal thing,” I said.
“I know,” Redhouse said, and smiled. “And now I don’t mind it so much. I like my family better now that I’m older. Have a fiancée. Have a job.”
“Did you always want to be a police officer?” I asked.
“No,” he said, and smiled again. “I went to college for computer science.”
“That’s kind of a left turn,” I said.
“Just before I went to college the Council decided to invest in a huge server facility outside Window Rock,” Redhouse said. “It would serve the needs of the Navajo and other nations, and then also be used by the surrounding state governments and even the federal government for nonconfidential processing and storage. Solar powered and zero emission. It was going to employ hundreds of Navajo and bring millions of dollars into Window Rock. So when I went to college I studied computing so that I could have a job. The Flagstaff news site even did a story about me and some of my classmates at Northern Arizona. They called us ‘The Silicon Navajos,’ which I didn’t like very much.”
“So what happened?”
“We built the facility and then none of the promised state or federal contracts came in,” Redhouse said. “We were told about budget cuts and reorganizations and changes in agendas and new governors and presidents coming in. We have this state-of-the-art facility now and it’s operating at three percent of capacity. Not so many people got hired to staff it at three percent. So I went to the police academy and became a police officer.”
“Sorry about the switch,” I said.
“It’s not so bad,” Redhouse said. “I had family who were officers before me, so you could say it was a tradition. And I’m doing some good, so that helps. But if I’d known my degree was going to be useless I might have not scheduled so many eight A.M. classes. Did you always want to be an FBI agent?”
“I wanted to be one of those CSI agents,” I said. “Problem for that was my degree is in English.”
“Oof,” Redhouse said. “We’ll see the computer facility as we drive in. You can get a look at what wasted potential looks like.”
An hour later, just south of Window Rock, we rolled by a large, featureless building surrounded on three sides by solar panels.
“I’m guessing that’s it,” I said.
“That’s it,” Redhouse said. “The one positive thing about it is that since we don’t need all the solar capacity we installed, we sell energy to Arizona and New Mexico.”
“At least you’ll make a profit somehow.”
“I wouldn’t call it a profit,” Redhouse said. “It just means running the computer facility bleeds us more slowly than it would otherwise. My mother works for the Council. She says that they’re going to give it a couple more years, tops.”
“What will they do with the building?” I asked.
“That is the question, isn’t it, Agent Shane?” Redhouse said. He sat up, pressed a button on his dash, and took over manual control of the police car. “Now, let’s get you checked in at the station and then we can take you to go see Johnny Sani’s family. My captain is probably going to want to have an officer accompany you. Is that going to be a problem?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Okay, good,” Redhouse said.
“Is it going to be you?” I asked.
Redhouse smiled once more. “Probably.”
* * *
Sani’s family lived in a well-kept double-wide in an otherwise less-than-spiff trailer park outside of Saw
mill. The family consisted of a grandmother and a sister. Both sat on a couch looking at me, numbly.
“Why would he kill himself?” his sister, Janis, asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was hoping you might be able to tell me.”
“How did he do it?” asked the grandmother, May.
“Shimasani, you don’t want to know that,” Janis said.
“Yes I do,” May said, forcefully.
I looked over to Redhouse, who was standing next to the chair I was sitting in, holding the glass of tea they had offered him. They offered me one as well. It sat on the table in front of me, between me and Sani’s relatives.
Redhouse nodded at me. “He cut his throat,” I said.
May looked at me balefully but said nothing else. Janis held her grandmother and looked at me, expressionless. I waited for a couple of minutes and then began again.
“Our records show—” I said, and then stopped. “Well, actually, we don’t have any records for John.”
“Johnny,” Janis said.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Johnny. All the records we have for Johnny are from here. From the Navajo Nation. So our first question is why that’s the case.”
“Until last year Johnny never left here,” Janis said.
“All right,” I said. “But why is that?”
“Johnny was slow,” Janis said. “We had a doctor test him when he was thirteen. He said his IQ was seventy-nine or eighty. Johnny could figure things out if he worked at it, but it took him a long time. We kept him in school as long as we could so he could have friends, but he couldn’t keep up. He stopped going and we stopped making him go.”
“He wasn’t always that way,” May said. “He was a smart baby. A smart little boy. When he was five he got sick. He wasn’t the same after that.”
“Was it Haden’s?” I asked.
“No!” May said. “He wasn’t crippled.” She stopped and considered what she had said. “Sorry.”
I held a hand up. “It’s perfectly all right,” I said. “Sometimes people get sick with Haden’s but they don’t get locked in. But it can still do damage. When you say he got sick, did he have a fever? And then meningitis?”
“His brain swelled up,” May said.
“That’s meningitis,” I said. “We scanned his brain after he died and we saw the brain structure there that was consistent with Haden’s. But we found something else, too. We found that he had something we call a neural network in there too.”
Janis looked up at Redhouse for this. “It’s like a machine in his head, Janis,” he said. “It let him send and receive information.”
“I have one in my head back home,” I said, and tapped my head. “It lets me control this machine here so I can be here in the room with you.”
Janis and May both looked confused. “Johnny didn’t have anything in his head,” May said, finally.
“I apologize for asking, but are you completely sure?” I asked. “A neural network isn’t something that’s accidentally put into someone’s head. It’s there to either send brain signals or to receive them.”
“He lived with me his entire life,” May said. “He lived here with his mother and Janis, and then when his mother died I looked after him. No way this could happen to him here.”
“So it would have to have been put in after he left,” Redhouse said.
“About that,” I said. “Why would Johnny decide to leave here if he’d never gone anywhere in his life?”
“He got a job,” Janis said.
“What kind of job?” I asked.
“He said he was an executive assistant,” Janis said.
“For whom?”
“I don’t know,” Janis said.
“Johnny got a friend to take him down to that computer building in Window Rock,” May said. “He’d heard they had an opening for a janitor, and that was something he could do. He wanted to be able to help me out. He went down and asked about the job and then the next day they asked him to come down again. And then when he came back that night, he gave me a thousand dollars and told me it was half of his first paycheck from his new job.”
“The janitorial position,” Redhouse said.
“No, the other one,” May said. “He said when he got there they asked him if he would like a different job that would pay better and let him travel. All he’d have to do is help his boss do things. He said it was like being a butler.”
“So he left,” I said. “What then?”
“Every week I’d get a money order from Johnny, and he would call sometimes,” May said. “He told me to move someplace nice and get new things, so I moved here. Then a few months ago he stopped calling but the money orders still arrived, so I didn’t worry too much.”
“When did the last money order arrive?”
“It came two days ago,” Janis said. “I picked up my grandmother’s mail for her.”
“Do you mind if I look at it?” I asked.
They both looked dubious at this.
“Agent Shane isn’t going to take it as evidence,” Redhouse said. “But it might have something on it that’s important.”
Janis got up to get the money order.
“Johnny never said anything about who he worked for?” I asked May.
“He said that his boss liked to be private,” May said. “I didn’t want Johnny to lose his job, so I never asked more than that.”
“Did he like his job?” I asked. By this time Janis had walked over to me with the money order. I scanned it quickly on one side, flipped it over, and did the same to the other side, then handed it back to her. “Thank you,” I said.
“He seemed to like it,” May said. “He never said anything bad about it.”
“He was excited to travel,” Janis said, sitting down again. “The first couple of times he called he mentioned that he was in California and in Washington.”
“The state or the District?” Redhouse asked.
“The District,” Janis said. “I think.”
“But then he said his boss didn’t like him talking about where he’d been, so he didn’t say anymore.”
“The last time he called, did he say anything unusual or tell you anything unusual?” I asked.
“No,” May said. “He said he hadn’t been feeling well … no. He said he was worried about something.”
“Worried about what?” I asked.
“A test?” May ventured. “Something that he had to do that he was nervous about. I don’t remember.”
“Okay,” I said.
“When do we get him back?” Janis asked. “I mean, when does he get to come home?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I can check.”
“He needs to be buried here,” May said.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “That’s a promise.”
May and Janis looked at me expressionlessly.
“They handled it well,” I said, after Redhouse and I left the trailer and headed to the car.
“Some of us try not to show too much emotion about death,” Redhouse said. “The thinking is if you go on about it, you can keep a spirit from moving on.”
“Do you believe that?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter whether I believe it or not,” Redhouse said.
“Fair point,” I said.
“Anything on the money order?”
“Serial number and routing information,” I said. “You want it?”
“I wouldn’t mind,” Redhouse said. “I don’t know if the FBI would be happy with you for sharing information.”
“I think my partner would tell me that sharing with the local police is the polite thing to do, unless you hate that cop in particular.”
“You have an interesting partner.”
“That I do,” I said, and got into the car. “Let’s go down to the server farm.”
* * *
“Johnny Sani,” Loren Begay said. He was the head of HR for the Window Rock Computational Facility, as well as the
head of several other departments, including sales and janitorial. The staff at WRCF was as bare bones as Redhouse had advertised. “I went to school with him. For a while.”
“I’m asking about something a little closer in time than that,” I said. “His family said he applied for a job here last year. Is that right?”
“He did,” Begay said. “I had to fire a janitor for sleeping on the job. Needed someone who could take the overnight shift. He applied. So did sixty other people. I gave it to one of the other janitors’ sister.”
“Johnny Sani’s family says that you called him back for a follow-up and that’s when he got offered a different job,” Redhouse said.
“I never called him back,” Begay said.
“You didn’t?” I asked.
“Why would I call him back?” Begay asked. “The man’s slow as they come. He could barely fill out the application.”
“You don’t need much of an education to push a broom,” Redhouse said.
“No, but I want someone with enough sense not to touch any buttons he’s not supposed to,” Begay said. “This place isn’t to capacity, but we still have clients.”
“Who are your clients, Mr. Begay?” I asked.
Begay looked over to Redhouse.
“It’s okay,” Redhouse said.
Begay looked unconvinced about the okayness but spoke anyway. “All of the Nation’s governmental departments are in here, plus a few others from nations around the country. Then we’ve got a few private clients, mostly businesses from around here or that do business around here. The biggest of those would be Medichord.”
“What’s Medichord?” I asked.
“Medical services company,” Begay said. “They contract to run the Nation’s medical services. Been doing that for six, seven years.”
“I remember when they came in,” Redhouse said. “Promised to train and promote Navajo medical personnel in return for an exclusive contract.”
“Have they?” I asked. Redhouse shrugged.
“It’s quasi-governmental and confidential medical information, so Medichord keeps all the Navajo data here instead of linking it up with the rest of their network,” Begay said.
“No one else would use this facility to do a job search?” I asked.