He wasn’t sure. He’d have to look at that warrant himself. If things seemed too bad for him, he wouldn’t turn himself in.
“You’ll be able to find me,” he said with certainty. Whether he let her find him was another matter.
“I’m bringing the change of clothing in here, along with some pastries and a few other snacks. There’s no reason to leave the office,” Van Alen said. “You have a shower, a comfortable couch, and a computer system. With that, the clothing and the food, you won’t need anything else.”
Except the freedom to go anywhere he wanted. He wouldn’t have that, not until this warrant was resolved.
“You any closer to figuring this out?” Van Alen asked.
Flint shook his head. “I’m not sure why she saved these files. I hope it’ll become obvious over time, but right now, I don’t have that time.”
“We could get you some help,” Van Alen said.
He ignored that. “Can I ask you one question?”
“Sure,” she said.
“Say I’m a lawyer in your firm. Do I have access to your files?”
“Everyone here is bound by the same confidentiality that I am,” Van Alen said, a bit defensively.
“No,” Flint said. “I’m not talking about here. I’m talking in general.”
“In general,” Van Alen said, “it’s all privileged. A lawyer keeps her own records, but her secretary and her assistants are all part of that privilege. And so, by extension, is the rest of the firm and anyone we might hire from the outside for that particular case. Can I ask why?”
“If I were that lawyer in your firm,” Flint said, deciding not to answer directly, “and I take all of the firm’s records—”
“Is that what you have?” she sounded breathless. “All of the records of WSX?”
“—if I were to take all of the records,” Flint said, a little louder. Her reaction had disconcerted him. “If I had done that, but hadn’t released them to anyone, am I violating anything?”
“You mean if you copied them and took them out of the building?”
Flint nodded.
“It depends,” she said. “If you took them without permission, you’re probably violating something, but it would be an internal matter if you hadn’t given them to anyone else. If you took them and gave them to someone outside the firm, then that’s a violation of privilege. If you took all of this firm’s records and gave them away, I’d prosecute you to the end of time. I’d find every charge I could make and I’d double it. I’d make sure you were ruined.”
“But I could ruin you,” Flint said.
“In that instance, you could,” Van Alen said. “The law firm would be forever known as one that lost all of its records to a junior associate. There’d be no amount of talk or spin or even legal wrangling that would repair the damage.”
Flint nodded.
“So, is that what you have? All of WSX’s records?” That breathlessness again. She’d gone up against Justinian enough that she probably wanted to see what was here. Flint couldn’t let her do that.
He stood, shoved his hands in his pockets, and paced. It felt good to move. “If I had the records, and I made sure you knew about it, but I assured you they were somewhere safe. If I did that, and then vowed I’d never use them unless you pissed me off or violated some agreement or something, we’d have a stalemate, wouldn’t we?”
Van Alen crossed her arms. “You’re not going to tell me what you have, are you?”
“It’s need to know, remember?” he said. “I’m not sure what you need to know yet.”
“Then why are you asking these questions?” she asked.
“I’m trying to figure things out.”
“If you had the records and you threatened to release them, and if I couldn’t find them but I knew you had them, yes, we’d probably have a stalemate. Although if you were a junior associate, I doubt you’d be smart enough to take me on like this. I’d outthink you.”
“What if I’m your partner?” Flint asked.
“You mean like Lucianna Stuart and Claudius Wagner?” Van Alen asked.
Flint nodded.
“If I were Lucianna Stuart,” Van Alen said, “I wouldn’t threaten exposing the firm. It has my name, too.”
“But she changed her name,” Flint said.
Van Alen smiled. “Then I’d threaten one of two things. Either I’d threaten to steal all the important clients and build a firm of my own—”
“Which she clearly didn’t do,” Flint said.
“Or I’d leak information, bit by bit, stuff that no one wanted out.”
“But you could get in trouble for that. All that confidentiality that we discussed,” Flint said.
Van Alen’s smile grew wider. “There are ways around that if you’re smart enough. Subtle enough. Tough enough.”
Flint felt a chill.
“WSX still stands,” Van Alen said, obviously noting his changed expression.
“But they want something that was on that ship,” Flint said.
“You think she had them in a tough position?”
“I think that’s obvious,” Flint said, “but I don’t know why, and I don’t know if this is even connected to her death.”
“But you can find out, right?” Van Alen asked.
“Given time,” Flint said.
“Well, then,” she said, shrugging one shoulder in an almost careless gesture. “We’ll have to get you the time.”
She headed toward the door.
“One more thing, Maxine.” It felt odd to use her first name, but she had used his. He wanted to keep them on equal footing.
“What?” she said.
“Are you helping me because I’m your client or because you hope I hold the key to destroying WSX?”
“I don’t see those reasons as mutually exclusive,” she said, and let herself out the door.
Forty-one
Flint was good. There was very little on the systems in his office, and what was there could be confirmed in the public record. There seemed to be some irregularities, but given the state of the equipment, Nyquist couldn’t be sure.
He was halfway through that search when the arrest warrant finally got issued. At that moment, he felt good enough to bring in a tech team.
Before they arrived, he went over every centimeter of that messy office, making certain no bomb would surprise them, no booby trap would get anyone whom he’d called in to work on this case.
When the team finally got there, Nyquist was reasonably sure nothing would harm them.
He couldn’t be positive, though, because he knew that Flint was better at computers than he was. The best Nyquist could do was warn the team, and remind them that this man had killed by remote control earlier that evening.
“There’s no reason to doubt,” Nyquist said, “that he won’t try it again.”
Then Nyquist left. He needed to go to his office, but he went to his apartment first because he couldn’t go any longer without a shower.
His apartment looked neglected, probably because it was. It was three small rooms, barely enough for one person, and certainly not enough to show off to a certain female security chief, not without fumigating it and throwing away all the clutter that had accumulated in his few hours at home every night.
The shower felt like heaven. A shower with real water was one of the few luxuries he allowed himself. The hot water peeled off Moon dust from Flint’s office. Nyquist watched the dust swirl in the water and realized that Flint’s clothing had been covered in the stuff when he hurried to the scene of Paloma’s murder.
Flint had been in his office when he got the news of the death—or the message from Paloma, as he had insisted. Or he had killed her, then changed his clothes, gone to his office, and walked around in the dust, knowing how trace evidence worked. He had hurried to Paloma’s building, still covered in dust, and planned to use that as an alibi.
Except he had worn a tech suit when he had gone into Paloma’s apartment,
and he had taken that suit with him. If he had planned to use the dust as evidence, he would have left the suit, right?
Nyquist sighed. He had no idea. Flint had outthought him more than once, and Nyquist simply had to concede that Flint was smarter.
Once a cop started from that premise, he was often able to overcome the smarter opponent. He wouldn’t try to outsmart the opponent; instead, he would use good old-fashioned police work to establish a solid case with a lot of evidence.
Nyquist shut off the shower, got out, and looked at the pile of clothes he had forgotten to put into the cleaning tube. They were covered with dust, and some of it had gotten onto the floor. The problem with that stuff was that it was impossible to remove once it had gotten on things.
If Flint had had the environmental problem in his office for more than a few days—and judging by the depth of that dust, he had—then he would have tracked dust everywhere he went. If he had murdered Paloma, he would have left moon dust inside her apartment.
Nyquist would simply need the techs to check for it—and then, of course, they’d have to match it to the samples removed from Flint’s office.
He sent a message down his link asking the techs who’d worked Paloma’s apartment to look for Moon dust. He also sent a message asking the team in Flint’s office to take samples of Moon dust from various areas, and from various depths, just in case.
He got clothes out of his closet, then paused. Flint’s reaction in Paloma’s apartment had seemed real. No matter what Nyquist thought of Flint now, that much seemed true. And if he started from that premise, then he knew Flint wasn’t a suspect.
Nyquist sighed. How many times had he told rookies that gut wasn’t enough to go on? Gut could get confused—like his was right now. His gut hated Flint for setting that bomb, and yet knew that Flint hadn’t faked his reaction in the apartment.
Nyquist decided not to focus on that. He would investigate as best he could. He got dressed, spending a little more time than usual with his hair and his clothing, just because DeRicci was on his mind (he smiled at himself for that). He put one pistol against his hip, like he always did, and another near his ankle. He checked his chips, making sure the warning chips were functioning and the recording chips didn’t need downloading. Everything seemed fine, despite the explosion. Then he grabbed an apple—one of the expensive greenhouse-grown ones instead of the synthetic nutrient filled things (another of his luxuries)—and headed out the door.
As he hurried down the stairs, he checked his links one final time to make sure nothing serious had happened while he was cleaning the crawly stuff off himself. Nothing had. Just the techs, acknowledging his requests.
It was nice to know that other people worked through the night just like he was.
Sometimes he wondered how far he could stretch himself before he collapsed into a puddle of nerve endings.
He supposed he would eventually find out.
Forty-two
Ki Bowles had had three cups of tea and she was wired. She couldn’t sit still, so she read files on her left eye link as she walked around the room. The little ʼbot followed her, so she finally shut the damn thing off, glad that she didn’t have a cat.
The Retrieval Artist system all started because of a corporation named Environmental Systems Incorporated. Bowles recognized the name. What local wouldn’t? ESI had been around forever. Before she had started her research, she would have said that ESI had been around since the beginning of time, but that wasn’t accurate.
ESI had simply been around since the beginning of colonization.
Two Earth-based entrepreneurs founded ESI before anyone even thought of colonizing the Moon. In the beginning, ESI had created environmental systems for Earth’s more dangerous landscapes—deserts, oceans—all those places humans wanted to dwell but couldn’t without help.
Bowles skipped most of that. Corporate history, especially the kind written for encyclopedias and schoolrooms, was as dry as history got. But she started to pay attention when she got to the Moon.
ESI developed the first functioning dome, which was initially used by researchers and early entrepreneurs, the folks who had eventually deemed the Moon livable. The first dome was named Armstrong after the first person to walk on the Moon. The dome barely covered enough area to house Bowles’ apartment building and the apartment building next door, and the dome’s ceiling certainly wasn’t high enough to accommodate either of them.
As Armstrong grew, that dome got incorporated into other domes, and so when local historians said the original dome remained in Old Armstrong, they were technically correct. Only the original dome was in pieces slabbed together with other pieces, instead of in its original formation.
Finally Bowles got tired of pacing. She went back to her desk and continued the research, learning that ESI expanded its services to other Moon domes, and then to Mars, and then to all of the colonized regions in the known universe. Wherever there were humans, there was ESI in one form or another.
ESI often brought the first team of humans to a hostile environment. The humans used ships or temporary domes and then examined the environment, figured out what they needed to do to sustain human life, and often did it.
Without contacting the indigenous population.
In fact, in this solar system, the indigenous population was often unrecognizable as life to the early colonizers. It wasn’t until some scientist realized that the mold attacking a temporary dome was actually an army of tiny creatures trying to save its major city that anyone within Earth’s government realized they were doing something wrong.
Over time, the politicians and diplomats got involved. Various Earth governments made different treaties with newly discovered alien governments (sometimes to great misunderstanding, since neither group could communicate well with each other) and corporations sometimes made agreements as well.
ESI had its own first-contact wing in the early days, and it made fewer missteps than the Earth governments did.
But it made missteps, some of which became major issues decades later.
Eventually, Earth formed a single government that actually governed the entire population of the planet (before, Earth had forms of a single government, none of which had any real regulatory function on a worldwide basis). Once that government formed, it began negotiating with other alien groups, like the Disty.
Human scholars worked with businesses and politicians so that trade could expand throughout the known universe, which was also growing. Trade expansion meant that rules and regulations had to have some kind of wide-ranging legal basis.
Finally, what the various governments agreed on was that each legal entity (sometimes a planet or a moon had more than one ruling government) continued to govern its own territory. Crimes committed in that territory by aliens would be prosecuted according to the territory’s laws.
This reduced havoc and allowed trade, but it also caused all sorts of cultural repercussions, including the famous one that all Armstrong’s schoolchildren learned. Early human colonists on one planet were put to death for stepping on a particularly rare flower.
That was the beginning of an internal revolt among humans themselves.
Bowles scanned much of this. It was familiar territory for her, even as an art history major.
Humans, so the internal mythology went, hated unjust laws. Even ancient religious texts like the Bible and the Koran dealt with humans who refused to follow laws that they did not believe in. Human philosophers from Henry David Thoreau to Alain Nygen argued throughout Earth’s history that humans had a right to disobey any law they felt was unjust, so long as they paid the consequences.
Unfortunately, within the Earth Alliance, those consequences weren’t just jail time or the loss of a hand, as they had been on Earth. They often meant the loss of a firstborn child or the hideous death of the so-called perpetrator, usually without any public hearing or trial.
Old ways of civil disobedience did not work any longer. Human companies had
to choose between working with nonhuman members of the Earth Alliance or giving up on interstellar trade.
Environmental Systems Incorporated was at the edge of all the debate. ESI often went into the new cultures before anyone else, setting up systems, digging into whatever ground was there, looking for water supplies or minerals or ways of setting up septic systems. ESI employees were dying by the hundreds, many of them subject to laws that humans couldn’t stomach, and ESI was facing an internal crisis.
So some smart CEO came up with the first Disappearance Service. It was a subcorporation of a subcorporation of ESI, something other cultures couldn’t track without extensive knowledge of Earth-based business law, which those cultures did not have. The service helped the law-breakers’ entire families start a new life, with new names and new skills and in a new place.
Other corporations started the same thing, and then independent Disappearance Services appeared. Such services were illegal, but their illegality couldn’t be proven without actual proof that the service knew the person who disappeared was a wanted criminal. Record keeping became baroque, then byzantine, then nonexistent.
After a while, nonhuman governments within the Alliance refused to do business with humans, saying that humans reneged on the legal sides of the agreement. So human prosecutors’ offices and police departments developed wings that tracked Disappeareds. Trackers found Disappeareds and brought them to justice. Eventually, some Trackers founded their own business and charged a premium for finding missing humans.
And some of those Trackers realized they could charge even more if they refused to bring the Disappeared to justice. They would find the Disappeared for the family—to let the person know that the charges had been dropped, or that they’d inherited a fortune, or that their uncle was wanted for murder and they were the only witness and could they come home? These Trackers were even shadier than the original group, and finally, in an effort to build up their image, they started calling themselves Retrieval Artists.
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