Extremes: A Retrieval Artist Novel

by Rusch, Kristine Kathryn

  Ten years ago, Flint had been mourning his only child. He hadn’t paid attention to anything else. “I don’t recall anything about the case.”

  “Then this is going to take longer than I thought.” Wagner crossed his arms. “Frieda Tey was a really well known scientist. She was doing medical research, trying to find out how quickly diseases spread and mutated in enclosed environments. She had a lab on Io, and she managed to get permission from the governments of the Earth Alliance to set up a small domed colony there, as an experiment.”

  Flint was beginning to remember some of this, but he let Wagner continue.

  “She had done enclosed-environment studies before, mostly working with the common cold virus. She had worked in large ships before, but they had had short runs. This experiment was supposed to be of a working colony, so she set that up with human volunteers, and then she introduced the virus.”

  Flint let out a small breath. “She was the one who didn’t let her subjects out when they got sick.”

  “Yeah,” Wagner said. “That’s the case. You do remember it.”

  “Vaguely,” Flint said.

  Wagner nodded, then clearly decided to continue rather than rely on Flint’s memory. “The colonists got sick, then they got better, then they got sick again. The virus she’d put in there had been tampered with. It mutated quicker than any cold virus scientists had seen before. Earth Alliance charged her with deliberately infecting these people with a dangerous disease, not the common cold.”

  “She’s Disappeared, then, I take it.”

  “She stuck around for a while, trying to defend herself and her research assistants. But they didn’t stand by her, saying she prevented them from releasing the dome doors, cut off the decontamination units, and wouldn’t allow medical supplies inside when it became clear the mutated virus was lethal.” His voice rose. This topic obviously bothered him. “She claimed that the virus’s mutation was spontaneous, and that the decontamination units wouldn’t fix it. The last thing she wanted to do was release that virus into the known worlds.”

  “So she let hundreds of people die?”

  “She claimed there was no choice. The virus mutated quickly. By the time she got word out, asking for help, everyone was dead. She actually had some sympathy for a while.”

  “And then what?” Flint asked.

  “Then her assistants spoke out, making the charges I mentioned and saying there had been time to save the colonists.”

  Flint shuddered.

  “That,” Wagner said, “was when she Disappeared.”

  “Ten years ago,” Flint said.

  Wagner nodded.

  “And your firm would like to what? Prosecute her?” Not that Flint blamed them, but that wasn’t why he had become a Retrieval Artist. “If you want to find her for that, you need a Tracker, not a Retrieval Artist.”

  “I understand the difference between the two jobs,” Wagner said. “I know that it’s a subtle difference, but an important one to you guys.”

  Flint wasn’t sure if he meant to Retrieval Artists, to Trackers or to both, but he didn’t ask for clarification.

  “Frieda Tey’s father relocated to Armstrong about fifteen years ago. My father handled all of his business, and then when my father retired, Tey became my brother’s client.”

  Flint shifted slightly in his chair. This, apparently, was the unethical part.

  “When Tey died two years ago, he left his entire estate to his only child.”

  “Frieda,” Flint said. He was beginning to understand where this was going now. It was quite common for attorneys to hire Retrieval Artists to find beneficiaries of a will.

  “There’s a lot of money involved,” Wagner said. “More than enough to justify the expense of a long search, and still have money left over. In fact, my brother argued that even without the will’s other provisions, setting up a trust for Frieda Tey would be unethical.”

  “What other provisions?” Flint asked.

  “Frieda Tey’s father thought she was innocent. He wanted part of his estate to go to proving that she had simply suffered bad fortune. He wanted us to clear her name.”

  “He couldn’t do this while he was alive?” Flint asked.

  “He was trying. He had gathered a lot of rather contradictory information. When my brother presented it at the partners’ meeting, it even convinced me that the entire sad thing might have been an accident of fate.”

  “What do you mean, even convinced you?” Flint asked.

  Wagner walked around the room, then clasped his arms behind his back, like a lecturer in front of a difficult class.

  “I followed the case when it first broke,” Wagner said. “I’ve always been mildly phobic about living inside a dome. I went to school on Earth, thinking I’d like the open air better, and I found that it scared me even worse. So I figured I’d spend the rest of my life in a dome, and that meant I was subject to things—fires, bad air, fast-spreading disease. What happened to those people was—hell, is—my worst nightmare, so I kept track of that case.”

  He tugged at his chin, the chips on the back of his hand glinting in the light.

  “And you know, I gotta think that human compassion would force you to open those dome doors. Maybe find a way to get those people to one of a ship’s decontamination units or find a way to get one of those units to them.” His gaze met Flint’s. “You don’t let them die like that, choking in their own fluids, and you sure as hell don’t let them do it in front of you.”

  “I thought you said the fact that she watched was an exaggeration.”

  “She was a scientist,” Wagner said. “She didn’t just watch. She kept notes. That’s what got her indicted in the first place, and then convicted in absentia.”

  “She wasn’t convicted when she Disappeared?” Flint asked.

  “She wasn’t even indicted yet,” Wagner said. “It just looked like she was going to be.”

  “But her father thought she was innocent.”

  Wagner nodded. “And the evidence he had showed that whatever scientific curiosity she had was irrelevant. Getting help was impossible, predicting the deadly mutation was unlikely, and all the circumstances—including the setting—combined to create a situation in which everyone died.”

  “Everyone.” Flint rested his elbows on his desk and templed his fingers. “You’d think someone would survive.”

  “That’s what I said. Say, actually.” Wagner glanced at Flint’s chair. A contest of wills.

  Flint pretended not to notice.

  “But,” Wagner said, “the scientists Tey’s father hired had reasons for that too. They said that cold viruses will affect anywhere from one-quarter to three-quarters of the people they come into contact with, depending on the type of virus.”

  “The type?” Flint asked.

  Wagner shrugged. “I don’t remember the terms. Just that what Earth calls a cold is really five different virus families, and they all infect at different rates and all cause similar symptoms.”

  Flint’s security screen flicked on. He hadn’t lowered it when Wagner entered—he hadn’t had time—but with the audio off, Wagner had no idea that anything had changed.

  “Tey’s original virus had a pretty standard infection rate,” Wagner was saying. “About fifty percent.”

  Flint nodded, and maintained eye contact with Wagner, but all the while monitored the screen. Wagner’s driver had gotten out of the limo and was standing in the middle of the street, staring at Flint’s office.

  “But each mutation—and I guess there were several—had a higher infection rate. What the scientists said was that the sample was too small.”

  The driver put her hands on her hips, glanced at the limo, then looked at the door again. She was going to come in here, and it was going to annoy Flint.

  “Chances were,” Wagner continued, “that by the end, one person in five hundred or one person in a thousand would have survived the virus. But there were only two hundred people in that colony, n
ot nearly enough—”

  “Sorry,” Flint said. “Your driver is getting worried about you. You want to calm her down?”

  Wagner didn’t even look surprised that Flint knew what was going on outside his office. “Has it been thirty minutes?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s just following instructions. I’m not supposed to be out of touch that long.” Wagner went to the door and pulled the door open just as the driver reached it. Flint watched the interaction before him, and on the screen. He could barely see the driver over Wagner’s shoulder, but through the security system Flint saw her take an involuntary step backwards.

  “Not done yet,” Wagner said, his voice carrying back to Flint. “Give it thirty more.”

  “You know that I’m not supposed to do that. I’m supposed to notify the firm if you’ve been out of contact for thirty minutes—”

  “And I just contacted you,” Wagner said. “So start the clock from right now.”

  Then he slammed the door. The entire building vibrated. Flint hit a key on his security system so that it would recheck Wagner for any links that reactivated.

  The driver stood outside, staring at the closed door. She rubbed the back of one of her hands, and Flint wondered if she had contacted someone after all.

  Not that it mattered to him. It would just be inconvenient to have more people swoop down on his office, demand entry, and be refused. The only person it might matter to was Wagner, and he seemed more intent on continuing the conversation.

  He gave Flint a crooked grin. It seemed familiar, although Flint knew that he had never seen Wagner before today.

  “Think I deserve a chair now?” Wagner asked. “I’ve been a good boy so far.”

  “You could have one if I owned another,” Flint lied. He wasn’t about to go into the back and pull out the extra chair.

  “With all the money you earn, you should be able to afford an army of chairs.” Wagner started to pace again. “Where was I?”

  “Almost convinced that Frieda Tey was innocent.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Wagner sighed. “We decided to pursue the case on two fronts—we’d assign a Retrieval Artist to finding Frieda Tey, and while that search went on, we’d see if we could get enough evidence to provide her with an airtight defense in court. Because if she came back, she would have to go to court. There was no doubt about that.”

  “You think anyone accused of a crime like that would want to face that sort of trial?”

  “For this kind of money, maybe,” Wagner said.

  “Most estates that go to Disappeareds go to them whether or not they return.”

  “This one was tied to proving her innocent. Otherwise, she would get a smaller lump sum.”

  “Her father was going to bribe her to return to her old life?” Flint asked. “That made no sense, not if he was dead.”

  “I think the old man cared more about the Tey name than he did about her. Not that it mattered. You know how it is. The client’s wishes are our wishes.”

  “Actually.” Flint smiled. “I don’t know that.”

  Wagner did not smile in return. “We assigned the search in-house. Rabinowitz was the best man for the job. He was an old-fashioned Retrieval Artist. Cautious, meticulous. No Tracker had ever piggybacked on him.”

  “Not even ones you assigned to do so?” Flint asked.

  Wagner’s cheeks reddened. “I never worked with Trackers.”

  “But your firm has.”

  Wagner nodded. “Trackers are one of the points of contention in the firm. My brother likes them. I don’t. Unfortunately, my brother has more clout than I do.”

  So the hints that Flint had seen of an internal power struggle were true.

  Flint frowned. “I’m still not understanding why you need me. Why not reassign this to one of your other Retrieval Artists?”

  “I’m going behind Justinian’s back to hire you.”

  “I gathered that,” Flint said. “But you have the resources. You don’t need me.”

  “Actually, I do need you. You have police contacts. You know how to investigate a murder.”

  “If it was a murder,” Flint said, “the police’ll handle it. The Armstrong detective units are overworked, but they eventually get the job done.”

  “I’m the only one who thinks Rabinowitz was murdered,” Wagner said.

  Flint crossed his arms, and rocked his chair back. “The police don’t think so?”

  “They haven’t even been called in. I argued with Justinian. I said that they should be called, but he says I’m being paranoid.”

  “Paranoid about what?” Flint asked.

  “Rabinowitz,” Wagner said. “He died of complications from a virulent cold.”

  SEVENTEEN

  THE COFFEE the marathon organizers had brought DeRicci was the real stuff. Real beans with real caffeine, strong and potent and extremely delicious.

  Unfortunately, she was already feeling the effects. Her hands jittered and she had too much energy. Her stomach churned too; the brew was much too strong. She had switched to water about a half an hour ago, but that didn’t help much. She had to pace herself, keep her blood sugar level and her reactions under control. There were a lot of people left to interview, and not a great deal of time.

  But she was taking a break from the interviews for the moment. Van der Ketting had the results of his investigation, and he wanted to see her personally. Part of the reason was so that he could ask for some interview time all his own, but there seemed to be something else he didn’t entirely trust to links.

  Van der Ketting sat next to her at the table in the main room of the bungalow. Together, they stared at the tiny screen on van der Ketting’s handheld.

  On the wall in front of them, the marathon played in real time. The crush of runners had slowed to a trickle, and they no longer flew across the finish line. They still jumped when they got there—but it was a weak jump, with height and distance gained only because of the low gravity.

  These runners were exhausted and showed it. A few of them had even collapsed when their feet touched the pavement on the other side.

  A small screen on the corner of the wall reran the press conference from earlier that afternoon. Against DeRicci’s wishes, her boss, Andrea Gumiela, had notified the media about Jane Zweig’s death. Gumiela’s reasons—or so she told DeRicci when DeRicci paged her across the links—were simple: someone might have information about Zweig’s murder, someone who wasn’t anywhere near the marathon.

  And, DeRicci had said to Gumiela, you just gave that someone a good reason to leave Armstrong.

  Gumiela had missed the point, as usual. She wasn’t really an investigator, never had been. Or, as one of DeRicci’s old partners, Miles Flint, had once said, Gumiela had always seen investigation as one step closer to promotion.

  The Gumiela announcement had also put more pressure on DeRicci. Now there were press inside the dome, waiting around the cordon the police had established. Usually the press couldn’t get into the marathon. They had to rely on the feeds provided by the organizers, who had been controlling information ever since the marathon’s first accidental death.

  The organizers couldn’t have been happy about this announcement, and DeRicci wondered if the Mayor was. Perhaps Gumiela had finally screwed up for good.

  DeRicci hoped so, because that announcement had made her job a lot harder. A few enterprising reporters might have actually sneaked in—or even had seats in the bleachers, against marathon organizers’ best plans, of course.

  DeRicci supposed those reporters were already interviewing people, ruining any advantage the police might have in this case.

  “Okay,” van der Ketting was saying, “are you going to pay attention to me or are you going to stare at the reruns of Gumiela ruining our investigation?”

  DeRicci made herself look away from the small screen. She hadn’t even realized she’d been watching it again. The sound was down, but she almost had Gumiela’s words memorized.

>   There will be inconvenience, of course, Gumiela had said in that unctuous tone she seemed to think was soothing, especially for the participants and their friends and families. However, the sooner we resolve what actually happened on the Moon Marathon course today, the sooner we can put this entire case to rest.

  At least, DeRicci thought, she hadn’t said that they could go back to celebrating the riches the marathon brought into Armstrong, although that subtext was there. A few reporters had even asked Gumiela about it.

  The woman hadn’t been too dense. She’d managed to deflect those questions.

  “Noelle.” Van der Ketting was sounding annoyed.

  “Sorry,” she said, forcing herself to look from that small screen to the even smaller screen he held in his hand. “What’ve you got?”

  “Some strange stuff.” He extended his arm so that the screen was between them. “Look at this.”

  He pressed the side of his handheld, and an image started to play. Runners thronged around the organizational table and the starting area, picking up singlets, standing with heads together, or pacing to and from the starting line. Every runner in the race had to be in that grouping, but on the tiny screen they looking like little stick figures, players in a drama she knew only the ending to.

  “Let’s feed this into their wall system.” She didn’t ask his permission; she just took the handheld from him, and checked the links built into the wall. It only took a moment to figure out how to synchronize the systems.

  She hadn’t quite finished when van der Ketting said, “They’ll know what we were looking at.”

  DeRicci shrugged. “You got all this information from the organizers, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Then they’ll know anyway. And what they know today may not matter tomorrow. Despite what Gumiela says, we have a lot of work ahead of us to figure out what’s really going on here.”

  Van der Ketting slumped in his chair like a schoolboy who had been rebuked. DeRicci still wasn’t sure how she felt about him. Sometimes she liked his combination of paranoia and enthusiasm, and sometimes she thought it interfered severely with his job.