He didn’t need them, not really. Not having their access would slow him down, but not enough to risk his work, his systems, or the solution to this case.
“It’s your decision,” he said.
Something changed behind Goudkins’ eyes. He was going to double-check her story about her sister’s death.
“But,” Flint said, and this time he was talking to Ostaka, “there are still other facets of this investigation that need coordination. It would be better to have Earth Alliance investigators working with the Alliance instead of detached from it.”
Ostaka’s eyebrows made that slight twitch. They had hoped Flint would jump on this. He wasn’t going to, not in the way they wanted.
“He’s right,” Goudkins said. “You can leave the room when we talk about weapons if you want.”
“I’m sure Noelle will join you,” Flint said, partly because he was feeling bitter, but partly to make it easier for Ostaka to stay. Flint almost added, She likes following orders, too, but he didn’t.
He wasn’t being fair.
Not that anything about this investigation was fair.
“You think she’ll cooperate with us now?” Ostaka asked.
“I don’t know what she’ll do.” Flint nodded toward Popova. “But, I suspect, I have given her no choice.”
“You’re a complicated man, Mr. Flint,” Ostaka said, and Flint wondered if that comment came because he hadn’t acted as they had hoped.
“Not really,” Flint said. “I didn’t lie to you when I came in this room. All I want to do is prevent another attack, so my daughter doesn’t live in fear. It’s really that simple.”
Goudkins’ eyes narrowed.
“Nothing is that simple,” she said, and sat down. “Should we see what else we don’t know about each other’s investigations?”
“Yeah,” Flint said, and sat too, knowing that he would share only what he had to. He hadn’t lied about the other part either. He was going to coordinate this entire investigation, even if no one else would.
Thirty-three
The hotel room had been beautiful, but DeRicci couldn’t stay in Tycho Crater any longer. Not with Flint acting strangely. It felt like the investigation was spiraling out of her hands and she wasn’t quite sure how to stop it.
Not that the investigation had been going well.
She sat in a private train car, the curtains down. Even though the bullet train went faster than any other Moon-based vehicle, it still took hours to return to Armstrong. She should have been sleeping—in fact, her annoying assistants all thought she was.
This car had three different rooms, including the bedroom. She sat cross-legged on the bed, the covers pooled around her legs. Even though the bed had shaped itself to her preferences, it felt uncomfortable. Some of that was the movement of the train, but most of it was in her head.
She couldn’t forget Flint’s curtness. He’d judged her harshly before, back when they were still partners in the Armstrong Police. She had been willing to comply with some of the Earth Alliance laws; he hadn’t.
Although she would argue that the word comply was too harsh. She wanted to find every legal solution that she could. She was willing to bend the rules; she just hadn’t been willing to break them.
Flint had broken them.
She had looked away. She had considered looking away as far as she could go. She couldn’t break the laws along with him, or so she had thought at the time.
Chief? The voice belonged to Popova.
DeRicci frowned. Popova rarely used her voice through the links. If she used her voice, she usually used visuals as well.
I didn’t go in.
Was it DeRicci’s imagination or did Popova sound tentative? In where? DeRicci sent.
The room with Flint and the investigators, Popova said.
Why not? DeRicci sent. I ordered you to.
I know, Popova said. He invited me in. I just couldn’t bring myself to go. I did record it, though.
Flint got everyone to do what he wanted. DeRicci didn’t know how, but he always managed it. And he would probably find a way to destroy that recording if he had to.
If it’s any consolation, Popova said, it looked like they were fighting.
No, it’s not, DeRicci sent. I gave you a direct order.
Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir.
Go home, Rudra, DeRicci sent. It’s late.
I just figured I’d wait for you, Popova said.
No need, DeRicci sent, and signed off.
Not even Popova was listening to her anymore. Had DeRicci become that ineffective? She certainly hadn’t gotten as much done as she would have expected from herself. She had thought this entire investigation would be wrapped up by now, or at least on the right track.
She couldn’t even get the cities to cooperate with her.
She needed Celia Alfreda, but the Governor-General was dead. The best leaders on Armstrong were gone, and she was alone. Even her friends had stepped away from her.
Flint always had his own sense of right and wrong. She had used that in the past. She had let him do stuff she would never have done. Not that she could control him.
She closed her eyes, and felt the train sway around her. Maybe she should resign. There really wasn’t much of a government any more anyway. She was trying to hold together something that hadn’t had much stability in the first place.
And why was she doing it? Because it was her job? Or because Celia Alfreda had asked her, and she felt guilty that she survived while Alfreda died?
Or was it because DeRicci felt like she could have prevented all of this if only she had solved that first bombing four years ago?
She didn’t know the answer to any of that.
Or maybe she didn’t like the answers that she did have.
She sighed and scrunched down in the bed. When she got back, she’d have a long talk with Popova and Flint. DeRicci would make decisions she needed to make—not for Armstrong or the United Domes of the Moon—but for herself.
And maybe by making those decisions for herself, she would be doing what was best for everyone around her.
Because right now, she had a hunch she wasn’t doing anything good for anyone.
Thirty-four
They were relying on old-fashioned tradecraft: eyesight recognition, a verbal cue, a passphrase, a gesture. Zagrando had requested this, not Jarvis. Zagrando didn’t want to risk using his Earth Alliance identification anywhere in this sector.
His cover was too deep, and too many people knew him by his undercover name.
Jarvis didn’t like the decision, but Jarvis didn’t work here. Besides, what Jarvis liked or didn’t like didn’t matter.
Zagrando had picked Javier’s Corner because of its size and terrible reputation. The space station was barely larger than some battleships he’d seen. Most people came here because it was the only free place to stop in this part of the sector. Every other place had docking fees or arrival fees or some other kind of fees.
Of course, anyone who stopped here paid in other ways, from the exorbitant prices in the two terrible restaurants to the price of supplies.
Two restaurants and six bars, all of them different. Zagrando didn’t choose the exact location of the hookup because he didn’t want that going over the secure link, but he knew the person his partner sent wouldn’t have a lot of places to hide.
He landed and coded the luxury ship to his DNA, a nice feature that most ships didn’t have. He was beginning to fall in love with this vehicle, and he didn’t like that. He hadn’t been in love with anything, from a person to a location, in a very long time.
He came in dressed well—he had to look worthy of that ship—and decided to walk through Javier’s Corner first, just to see if he knew anyone here. Then he would scope out the bars.
He had just started his first pass through the narrow, tube-like corridor when a woman said, “Jarvis told me you’d be taller.”
Zagrando smiled. A combination of two passphra
ses: Jarvis told me you would be here, and Somehow I imagined you would be taller. Good agents did that. In fact, combining passphrases was a recommended, if old-fashioned procedure that many outside the Agency didn’t know.
Still, he didn’t turn, but continued forward. He heard heels behind him, the heavy step of a woman in the wrong shoes.
He went into one of the bars—the only one he knew that served halfway decent alcohol—and sat at the farthest table. The woman following him was wearing a formfitting dress, her black hair piled on the top of her head. She had great legs and, like he expected, terribly impractical shoes.
Had she gotten a room from the awful hotel near the docking ring, or had she left her ship dressed like that?
She leaned across the bar, slipped some kind of payment card into one of the machines, then picked up two honey ales, the bar’s specialty.
So she’d been here before. He found that even more interesting.
“I don’t know if you drink alcohol,” she said as she brought the ales to his table, “but I’d recommend it here at least. The booze’ll kill whatever germs are thriving in this place.”
A third passcode. The one about the booze. The least reliable of all the passcodes just because it was about the booze.
He took one of the ales. “Thanks,” he said, but didn’t offer any passphrases in return. Instead he ran his hand over the place hers had just been. He had a DNA coder chip in his thumb, with more storage than he thought possible.
If she had her DNA on file with the Alliance or if she ran with the Black Fleet, he would know.
An identification appeared over his right eye in black, which meant she worked for the Alliance. He had set up the color coding, not anyone else, so no one would know where she worked, even if they somehow got their hands on his chip.
Her name was listed as on file, but he couldn’t get it from the simple DNA. He could get any one of sixteen aliases if he chose.
Instead, he extended his hand. “Zag.”
“Elise,” she said.
The chip double-checked her DNA and confirmed the name as one of her aliases.
“I understand you’re coming with me on the meet,” he said.
She shrugged one shoulder. “Apparently, the person we work for is too far away, and feels that he shouldn’t be there, anyhow. It was a dangerous suggestion.”
Zagrando didn’t know if she were role-playing or telling the truth. The negativity sounded like pure Jarvis, but Zagrando couldn’t be sure. After all, they had agreed that the so-called buyer wouldn’t arrive with Zagrando to do the meet.
“You have the instructions, I take it?” Zagrando said.
“As much as I’m privy to,” she said. “I’m amazed you couldn’t do this yourself.”
“No more amazed than I am,” Zagrando said. “This is what the seller wants. You realize this entire thing could be dangerous.”
She smiled. “I may be here as our client’s attorney, but I can handle myself in a crisis.”
He bet she could.
“We should take my ship,” she said.
“But we’re not going to,” Zagrando said. “I’m taking you there.”
He’d learned his lesson. He wasn’t going to let anyone ferry him anywhere ever again. He needed to have a ship that responded to his commands and no one else’s.
“Why don’t we meet there?” she asked.
He smiled. “Either you come on my terms or you stay behind.”
“You’re the one who needs a second,” she said.
“I need my client,” he said. “No one else.”
She stared at him for a moment. “It’s going to be like that, is it?”
“Yeah,” he said with a cold smile. “It’s going to be like that.”
Thirty-five
The apartment was quiet. The only light streamed from Flint’s home office, but he didn’t sit in there. He sat on the uncomfortable couch in the living room, in the very center of the apartment, and held his breath.
He had learned the sounds of Talia sleeping, and he had learned that he could hear them from here. When she first arrived, he would peer into her room like the anxious parent he was, but then she would say, I’m not a baby, a phrase designed to both hurt and push him away.
Her original, Emmeline, had died as a baby. That day had broken Flint’s heart, changed his life, and, he thought at the time, destroyed his marriage. Only later, only after he found Talia, did he realize the marriage he thought he had might never have existed.
He still hadn’t dealt with his feelings about Rhonda. He set them aside, just like he set aside the fact that Talia was only one of several clones of Emmeline, clones—girls, children, his children who were growing up without him.
It disturbed him that Selah Rutledge, the Aristotle Academy headmistress, knew—or at least suspected—that Talia was a clone. Secrets had a way of coming out, no matter how closely held they were. And right now was not the time to expose Talia as anything other than Flint’s natural-born child.
He ran a hand over his face.
No sound came from Talia’s room. Not rustling, not shifting, not the creak of the floor. Try as she might, she always made noise when she was awake.
She had finally dropped off, and he had to repress the urge to check on her. He didn’t want her to know how worried that incident at the school made him. If anything, it made him even more determined to solve the entire Anniversary Day mystery.
If he could call it that.
He stood up and sighed. He was solving this for Talia, and because of Talia, he couldn’t work the way he wanted to. He wanted to work until he found out all the information he could, no sleep except for a cat nap here and there, meals caught on the fly.
But he didn’t dare do that. He needed to take care of his daughter as well, and he needed to remain alert. Plus he couldn’t investigate everything from his home computers. As sophisticated as they were, as many protections as he had placed on them, he would never do dicey work on them. He didn’t want to anger someone by accidentally (or intentionally) probing a dangerous organization, and then have that organization target him.
Finding where he lived was easy enough, but he didn’t want to invite someone here, particularly when he was doing an anonymous search.
So he couldn’t do a lot of the investigating he wanted to do.
He’d already tried to see which corporations worked on weapons systems for the Earth Alliance, figuring that the search was the kind a journalist or a school student might do.
He immediately ran into a wall. He got a list of corporations, but they were subcorporations of other subcorporations, and the farther he went down into them, the less information he got. He couldn’t even tell what some of their primary businesses were.
He had figured he would be able to see a corporation that specialized in cloning, for example, on that list, but he didn’t find any.
The corporations that specialized in cloning, like the one that created Talia, did most of their work with consumers or with scientific laboratories, not with the government.
At least that he could find.
He went into the kitchen, more as a force of habit than because he was hungry. Talia had helped him pick out this apartment. He had made a fortune after he left the Armstrong Police Department, and until he found Talia, he had spent almost none of it.
This apartment was the most expensive thing he had ever purchased in his life. It was a penthouse apartment, the most secure place in a brand-new building. Flint had watched the thing go up, and knew it had been built to the highest possible standards.
The building had top-notch security, and the penthouse apartment even more so. Plus he had added features of his own.
Initially he had planned on buying a house, but Talia didn’t want one. Her mother had been kidnapped out of their house in Valhalla Basin; Talia had been held prisoner in her own closet for hours until she figured out how to escape.
She felt that she could have gotten
rescued sooner if she’d been in an apartment. Someone would have heard her pound on the floor or scream or something.
Flint didn’t have the heart to tell her that the floors in this very secure building had a secondary floor beneath, so that no one on the floors below could hear anything. The rest of the apartment—in fact, the entire building—was soundproofed, so that the residents couldn’t hear anything anyone else did. They couldn’t hear street noise, either.
It was as close to a self-contained environment that an apartment building could have.
The kitchen was large, with shiny cabinets and the most up-to-date appliances. Talia had chosen this place not for its size or its views of the city, but because of its kitchen and its unbelievably ornate bathrooms. Most apartments they’d looked at together had a great master bath, but the rest of the bathrooms were pedestrian.
Not here. Flint could have lived in one of the bathrooms, and probably had had apartments smaller than Talia’s bathroom suite.
He felt awkward showing his wealth like this, but Talia convinced him they needed the comfort. He believed they needed the security.
If anything, the arrival of Talia into his life had made him more paranoid, not less. And he had been pretty paranoid to begin with.
He touched the pantry/cooler door to see what kind of foods he had in here. He wasn’t that hungry, but he wasn’t tired either, and he needed something to distract himself from the investigation.
He pulled out some real beef—Talia had also convinced him to buy the best-tasting food, not the least expensive—and some freshly baked bread from the deli downstairs, and started to assemble a sandwich.
A notice pinged against his right eye. It was a subtle notice that he had a contact, as if the sender had not wanted to disturb him in case he was sleeping.
Flint tapped the secure link access on the pantry/cooler door, put the sound on low, and stepped back.
“Why doesn’t it surprise me that you’re awake?” Nyquist peered at him. If anything, the man looked even more rumpled than he had earlier, and the parts of his office visible behind him even messier. “Although I gotta say, that’s some fancy digs behind you.”
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