Extremes: A Retrieval Artist Novel

by Rusch, Kristine Kathryn

  Tey had probably counted on that, as well as the stress, exhaustion, and sheer terror that a race like this sometimes provoked in its participants.

  Tokagawa was bent over a table, studying a small screen. Oliviari wanted to get behind him, look over his shoulder, and point out all the similarities in the two viruses. It should have been obvious to anyone with experience; he certainly didn’t need a double- and triple-check.

  But he hadn’t trusted her, and with good reason. She hadn’t been honest with him.

  Oliviari had been afraid that Tey would eventually release the virus again. Oliviari had monitored news reports and medical journals for any strange outbreaks, and had seen none.

  But Tey could have continued her experiments under new names and covered her own tracks as well. She knew how to use various aliases, and she knew how to leave false clues. Even the journal articles she wrote—brilliant pieces of analysis which became chilling when you realized who wrote them—had pen names upon pen names, little traps that would (and had) led Oliviari down the wrong path many times.

  Why would Tey risk everything to release this virus here, in heart of the Earth Alliance? Why would she call attention to her own presence on the Moon? It made no sense.

  Unless someone else Tracked her, someone else found her, and someone else wanted her to pay.

  But that didn’t make sense either. If Tey knew she had been tracked, she would have escaped rather than risk being identified. She wouldn’t have left the virus behind.

  One of the med techs hurried past Oliviari, carrying three diagnostic wands. Another scurried by, holding a bag filled with a vomit-covered T-shirt, the stench making Oliviari gag.

  As she stepped out of the way, she hit the small of her back on a small table. Pain shuddered through her. She used the table to brace herself, and glanced at Tokagawa.

  Still comparing. Damn anal, meticulous man. She mentally urged him to hurry, sending her thoughts to him as if he could hear them. She didn’t dare speak aloud. Not yet, anyway.

  She glanced at the cot again. The dead man was more than a cipher. He got into the tent early, so he had to be one of the race’s leaders. He might have crossed paths with Tey, and gotten infected accidentally.

  Could this have been a setup? Was someone framing Tey, thinking that perhaps if she couldn’t have been arrested for the crime on Io, maybe she would get charged with this one? Had her death been unplanned after all?

  “Goddammit,” Tokagawa said, “you’re right.”

  He had left the table and approached Oliviari, and she hadn’t even seen him. She had been concentrating so hard on the beds, on Tey, on the virus.

  Tokagawa’s face was gray, his lower lip trembling. Taut lines appeared around his mouth and eyes. He looked years older, and it had been only a few minutes.

  “This is a disaster,” he said. “It’s already gone too far.”

  Fortunately, his voice was low. Oliviari hoped no one heard him over the rhythm of coughs and groans that were echoing in the room.

  “We still have a chance,” she said.

  He shook his head. “That disease—”

  “That virus,” she said, “is defeatable, with the right equipment. We have to check the decon unit. There’s one in here. If you let me see the specs, I can see if it’s the one we need.”

  “Decontaminate everyone? It doesn’t work. You know that. If the virus has progressed to a certain point—”

  “I know.” Oliviari didn’t want to think about that. “We’ll deal with what we have. Where’s the decon unit?”

  He was looking at the beds. She wasn’t even sure if he had heard her.

  She hadn’t expected him to panic. Doctors were trained in emergency situations, weren’t they?

  But they were trained in things like familiar diseases and trauma wounds. Not mass epidemics. Only doctors who specialized in colonial medicines and interstellar travel had to worry about things like that.

  “Dr. Tokagawa!” She said his name loudly enough to catch his attention.

  He turned to her like an old man, his movements so slow that she wondered if he even knew what was going on around him.

  “It’s the most lethal version of that virus,” he said. “That’s what I was double-checking. It’s the one that killed everyone in her experiment. And fast. Like it’s come on here. Why would it be here?”

  “You specialize in sports medicine, don’t you?” She kept her tone reasonable.

  He nodded, as if they were having a conversation at a dinner party.

  “You’re probably not trained for things like this.”

  “No one is,” he said, and she was relieved to hear him speak again. “No one on the team, except you. You’re the only one who knows how to treat this disease, and you’ve got a fever. I can tell from the way your eyes glitter—”

  “I’m fine,” she said, and she was. At least, she was better than he was. He wouldn’t take charge. That was clear now. She was going to have to do it, and she would have to do it through him. He had forgotten that she had falsified her credentials, or maybe he hadn’t realized that she had falsified her medical experience as well.

  “Now listen to me.” She got as close to him as possible, speaking softly so that no one else could hear. “If you panic, we all die. Every single person in this race, connected with this race, or who had the misfortunate to wander into areas around the race. Thousands of people. And maybe we’ll miss somebody who got touched by this thing, and everyone in Armstrong will die. Do you understand me?”

  “I’ve already thought of that,” he said. “There’s no hope. This thing spreads too fast.”

  “There is hope,” she said. “There’s plenty of hope, but we have to act quickly. You have to act quickly.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said.

  “That’s all right,” she said. “I’ll tell you. First things first, you have to get me to that decon unit.”

  He opened his mouth as if he were going to argue, but he nodded instead. “Come on.”

  He grabbed her hand. His fingers were strong. Maybe she had snapped him out of the panic. She hoped so.

  She wondered if this was what had happened on Io, panic once everyone in that colony realized the scientists in charge wouldn’t help.

  He pulled her between the beds past people coughing and crying and looking generally miserable. Oliviari couldn’t see the larger mass of runners, but she wondered what they thought of this, if they even knew.

  As she stumbled forward, she thought briefly of her post, how important it had been to gather all that DNA, to talk to all the runners coming in, and how unimportant it was now.

  Strange to think that Jane Zweig was dead, that possibly—probably—Frieda Tey was dead, and her virus was spreading like a giant re-creation of the experiment that had convicted her the first time.

  Tokagawa pulled Oliviari past a group of runners huddled together on the floor and drinking miracle water. None of them appeared to have symptoms, but they kept touching their own foreheads as if feeling for a fever. A med tech with a diagnostic wand stood near one side of the group, as if worried about going in there.

  Maybe Frieda Tey had planned this. Maybe, as she ran the marathon under the name Jane Zweig year after year, she daydreamed about doing her experiment right. Maybe she realized that with all this organization, with all this medical knowledge, she might be able to do it right this time, with a large enough sample population to see if her theories worked.

  So far, they didn’t seem to. If extreme crises brought out the best in human beings—forcing them to stretch themselves beyond their own personal limits and make important discoveries or difficult intuitive leaps—then maybe this crisis wasn’t extreme enough.

  Or maybe Tokagawa’s reaction was a normal one. Panic. Confusion. The willingness of a brilliant man to suddenly be led by a not-as-brilliant woman simply because she was the one who had a plan.

  Oliviari stepped into the curtained back area. The dec
on unit here was a self-contained one, of a make she’d never seen before. Tokagawa stopped in front of it.

  “I don’t know what you’re going to do with it,” he said.

  She did, though. She had read all the literature. She knew that after the Tey virus became known, it became one of the recognized viruses, and the newer decon units could all destroy it. The older ones couldn’t be modified to handle this, not even with a patch.

  Oliviari just had to find out when this decon unit was built, and if it was programmed for the Tey virus.

  Sounded simple, but it wasn’t. She had to familiarize herself with the unit first.

  She climbed inside, smelling the recycled air. The interior felt clammy—or maybe her body temperature had changed again. She searched for the panel, knowing that once she found it, she would get the information she needed.

  Tey never respected the fact that time played such a crucial factor in her experiments. She never acknowledged it in her journal articles; she never once considered that had the colonists had more time with that last, lethal, mutated virus, they might have found a way to stop it.

  If Tey had infected the marathon to start a new experiment—a so-called contained one (although that wasn’t really accurate, given the space ports and the surface trains)—then she would find that the time factor was as great a problem here as it had been in her first dome.

  And then the realization hit Oliviari. She finally knew what Tey was about.

  Zweig was Tey, absolutely, positively. Oliviari didn’t need the DNA scan. She didn’t need anything other than logic.

  Zweig and Tey had to be the same person for everything to make sense. Tey had studied the marathon, and other extreme events. She had thought about the way humans reacted and interacted. She had felt bad that there weren’t enough resources in the original dome to give all of the colonists a chance, and there weren’t enough colonists to make for a reasonable sample once the experiment got too big.

  She had stated all of that stuff in the articles she wrote under pen names, the ones that Oliviari had traced because they so clearly matched Frieda Tey’s writing and speaking styles.

  Tey thought she had everything covered here, all the flaws from the previous experiment.

  Which meant that Tey was also covering her own ass as well. The last time, she had been blamed for something she didn’t think she should have been blamed for. Her name was at the top of that experiment. Frieda Tey had been the person in charge.

  By making this seem like a random release of the virus, her name wouldn’t be involved—well, the Tey name would be involved, but not the Zweig. And if anyone discovered, through new research or complete luck that Frieda Tey and Jane Zweig were the same person, it wouldn’t matter, because Jane Zweig was dead.

  Truly, obviously, and completely dead. Even if everyone in Armstrong died of this hideous virus, the records would remain. And they would show that Zweig died of something else before the virus started to spread.

  Before. So that she couldn’t be blamed.

  Or if she was blamed, it would be posthumously. No warrants, no arrests, no trials in absentia.

  “Brilliant,” Oliviari muttered.

  “You all right?” Tokagawa asked.

  No, of course she wasn’t all right. She wasn’t all right at all. She had been outsmarted by the woman she had been tracking all these years.

  Of course Frieda Tey would have planned everything through. That was what scientists did. They set up the new experiments so that they did not replicate the problems of the old.

  One of the problems of the old was that Tey was forced to Disappear. So why not Disappear first?

  After all, what was one life if Tey’s discovery could save millions? What were a thousand lives in that context? Tey had argued that from the beginning.

  Oliviari needed to speak to the police. They needed to check that body. She needed to check that body, to see if the DNA matched Tey’s—or failing that, to see if it matched Zweig’s.

  Because Oliviari knew with the same certainty that had brought her to this marathon in the first place that the body found on the course was not Zweig’s or Tey’s. It was some poor victim’s, someone who had the misfortune to cross Tey’s path at the wrong time.

  Tey had mislead everyone. She had probably planned this for years, with the help of the things she’d learned at Extreme Enterprises. She had deliberately made herself high-profile again, so that people would pay attention when she “died.”

  So that no one would guess that she had Disappeared—again.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  FLINT HAD BEEN EXAMINING the other names on Rabinowitz’s meetings list when the personal link announced a call from a public node.

  Flint almost denied the call, then asked who the message was from.

  Someone who claims to be Noelle DeRicci, the system responded. Claims meant the system couldn’t verify it. But it would be odd to have someone call him, claiming to be DeRicci, right as he had contacted her.

  Patch her through Main, he sent, meaning that the system would guard itself against any encroaching viruses, bugs, or traps while it gave the public link visual and audio access to a single screen.

  That screen rose in the center of the desk, DeRicci’s face on it. Public links often didn’t have the power to handle holographic messages, which was just as well. Flint wasn’t sure he wanted to see DeRicci’s head floating around his office.

  “Noelle,” he said with real pleasure. “It’s been a long time.”

  “Yes. It’s been a while.” She sounded annoyed. Behind her, he caught bits of the marathon, but whether it was on a large screen or a wall, he couldn’t tell.

  “Thanks for calling me back so quickly,” he said. “I guess Booth got the message to you.”

  “What?” DeRicci frowned. “Look, Miles, I don’t have time for chitchat.”

  “I figured you wouldn’t,” he said. “All I need to know is what Jane Zweig died of. I have a case—”

  “You need to know about Jane Zweig?” DeRicci seemed startled.

  “Yes,” Flint said. “Didn’t Booth tell you?”

  “Booth who?”

  “Desk Sergeant Booth. He sent you an emergency message to contact me.”

  “Oh.” DeRicci’s cheeks colored. Flint knew what that meant. She hadn’t checked her messages, even her emergency ones, in quite a while. Which was probably why she was on the public links.

  He wondered who she was trying to avoid.

  “I didn’t get a message,” she said.

  “That’s all right,” Flint said. “You’ve contacted me anyway, and so we can get this out of the way. I heard about the Zweig case and I—”

  “How did you hear about the Zweig case?”

  “A client told me. We think it might be connected to something I’m working on. All I need to know is if Zweig died from flulike symptoms or complications from flu-like symptoms or if the coroner found a viral link to her death.”

  “The flu?” DeRicci sounded as confused as he felt. “Why would you care about the flu?”

  “Another man died of a rather bizarre virus, and just before he did, he met with Zweig. Since she died today, I wanted to make sure the virus hadn’t spread.”

  “Virus? No. She didn’t die of a virus. She died from oxygen deprivation.” DeRicci sounded annoyed, as if she felt that Flint should already know that. How would he know it? Gumiela hadn’t mentioned the cause of death in her press conference.

  “I understand you think she was murdered,” he said.

  “I don’t think,” DeRicci said. “I know.”

  “Murdered by oxygen deprivation?” That had to be difficult to prove, particularly on that course. “You must have had some fairly obvious clues.”

  “Believe me, we do.” She glanced to her right, as if she had heard something.

  Flint still felt off balance. So Zweig hadn’t died of the virus, which was a relief. But it wasn’t much of one. He was going to have to contact the
other women that Rabinowitz had met with, to see if they were ill.

  “Look, Miles,” DeRicci said. “I’m under a heck of a time crunch here. I need to talk to you—Wait. This is too strange. Why are you working on a case with Jane Zweig?”

  “I’m not working on a case with Zweig,” Flint said. “She happened to come up on another case. But you’ve helped me set that part aside. Why did you contact me?”

  “It’s about Zweig.”

  “How could you contact me about her if you didn’t know what I’m working on?”

  “Huh?” DeRicci shook her head. “Let’s start this conversation over, Miles. I’m calling you because I want to barter services with you.”

  “Barter?” he asked.

  She nodded. “I need you to investigate someone who might be a Disappeared.”

  He smiled. DeRicci had been right. It felt better to start the conversation all over again. “Might be?”

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s connected to this investigation I’m doing here, at the marathon, and you have to keep this to yourself.”

  She looked to her right again. He strained to see what she was looking at, but couldn’t see much beyond the race behind her, and a table littered with food.

  “I’ll keep it confidential, Noelle,” he said gently.

  She turned back toward the screen. Her face was lined, and there were circles under her eyes that looked like they’d been etched there permanently.

  “So who is this might-be Disappeared?” he asked.

  Her smile was small. “You already asked me about her. Jane Zweig.”

  He felt a shiver run down his spine. “Why do you think Jane Zweig might be a Disappeared?”

  “She has no DNA on file,” DeRicci said.

  “So they can’t verify the body’s identity?” he asked.

  “They did that,” DeRicci said.

  “And it’s not Jane Zweig?”

  Her lips thinned more. “This is a public link, Miles.”

  “If she’s a Disappeared and it’s not Jane Zweig, then your problem is solved,” he said.