That got Van Alen’s attention, and Flint’s as well.
“To what?” Van Alen asked.
The assistant looked at Flint as if she wasn’t sure she should speak in front of him. Apparently, she sent a message to Van Alen’s link because Van Alen frowned and said, “Well, I don’t know. I can’t make up my mind without information. Is the person who wants to see me a client?”
“Not exactly,” the assistant said.
“Does the visit concern a confidential case?”
The assistant shrugged.
“Then what is the problem?” Van Alen snapped.
“I can step out of the room,” Flint said.
“And I can hold client meetings in the conference room. Prunella is being deliberately obtuse.” Van Alen peered at her assistant. “Well?”
The poor woman with the unfortunate name gave Flint an apologetic glance. “It’s just so odd.”
“And getting odder,” Van Alen snapped.
“Ignatius Wagner is here to see you.”
Flint froze. Van Alen’s frown deepened. “Ignatius?”
The assistant nodded. “He said this does not concern a case.”
“Okay,” Van Alen said.
“He also said he knows you represent Miles Flint and that’s why he’s here.” She gave Flint a sideways glance, as if the unusual aspects of the last twenty-four hours were his fault, which, he supposed, they were.
“Well, then, I don’t see what the problem is,” Van Alen said.
“He said there might be a conflict of interest,” the assistant said.
Van Alen rolled her eyes, then she sighed. “Give us a minute, would you?”
“You and Mr. Wagner?”
“Me and Mr. Flint,” Van Alen said, waving a hand.
The assistant backed out of the room, closing the door quietly. Flint set aside the remains of his meal. He stood. “He knows I’m here.”
“So?” Van Alen said. “You’re not wanted by the police any longer.”
“But the Wagners aren’t real happy with me right now,” Flint said, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to deal with the younger son, not after all the files he’d looked at the night before. He wasn’t sure how to handle a man who seemed to know what was going wrong with the family business and whose solution seemed to have something to do with stealing files for his mother.
“We’re going to have to deal with them sometime,” Van Alen said.
Flint frowned at her, then got up and went to the desks. He shut down their screens, made sure the handheld went into his pocket, and cleaned up all evidence of his late-night work session. Van Alen had the ‘bots come in and take away the remaining food. She kept the coffee and the fresh-squeezed orange juice, something that had proven both too sweet and too acidic for Flint’s tastes.
“All right,” she said, wiping her hands on that black suit and leaving no crumbs. “You ready?”
“No,” he said, even though he knew it wouldn’t make any difference.
Van Alen gave him an indulgent grin, then had her assistant send in Paloma’s youngest son.
Ignatius Wagner hadn’t changed in the two years since Flint had last seen him. He still looked like a man who used slimness enhancers to control his weight, but overate to compensate. His fingers were manicured, like his brother’s, but he didn’t use enhancers that helped project his emotions, and for that Flint was relieved. If his emotions projected, the entire room would reek of sadness.
“A Wagner in my office,” Van Alen said. “Such an honor.”
Ignatius gave her half a smile. He didn’t look like Paloma, except around the eyes. Flint had never noticed that before. Ignatius had the same birdlike look, an almost alien intensity that made him seem shrewder than he was.
“Don’t play me, Maxine,” he said. “May I sit?”
He didn’t even look at Flint. Flint remained beside the desks, watching him, waiting to be noticed.
“Feel free,” Van Alen said. “Mind if I lean?”
And without waiting for an answer, she leaned on the edge of her desk, like she had when she first talked to Flint. That, apparently, was the posture she took with potential clients who made her nervous.
“To what do we owe this visit?” she asked.
Now he glanced at Flint. “My brother has decided to hate you.”
It was an interesting choice of words. Flint kicked out the chair that he’d been sitting in most of the night and eased himself onto it. “Your brother should know better than to let emotions cloud his judgment.”
“You don’t really know my brother, Mr. Flint,” Ignatius said. “He frightens ruthless people.”
The folks who frightened ruthless people were generally reckless people, but Flint didn’t say that.
“Are you here for Mr. Flint or for me?” Van Alen asked.
“Both of you, if you’d believe it,” Ignatius said.
Van Alen looked at Flint. “You know Mr. Flint isn’t a lawyer.”
Ignatius nodded. “And I also know that Mr. Flint’s presence negates confidentiality. I’m hoping he’ll see me as a potential client, like you will, and we won’t have to deal with the legalities beyond that.”
Ignatius was a lawyer, too, and a good one. Just not as good as his brother. But, Flint recalled, few people were.
“Will you be able to keep this conversation confidential, Miles?” Van Alen asked.
He wasn’t sure. “You’re not a client, and your brother has threatened to sue me. I’m not sure it’s in my best interest to talk to you.”
Ignatius gave him a small, almost rueful grin. “In the world my brother plays in, that’s correct. It’s not. But I’m not him. My mother trusted you. She believed you could do all the things she couldn’t. I have a hunch she loved you more than she ever loved us.”
“Mr. Wagner,” Van Alen said, “let me remind you that so far this meeting isn’t confidential.”
“I know,” he said again. “It’s just that I need both of you.”
Flint slouched even more in the chair, pretending a relaxation he didn’t feel.
Ignatius looked at Flint. His round cheeks quivered as if he were holding back an emotion so great it threatened to consume him.
Van Alen sighed. “Why do you need us?”
Ignatius turned back toward her. “Because you’re the only two people I know who can help me disappear.”
Fifty-five
The law offices of Wagner, Stuart, and Xendor filled one of Armstrong’s oldest buildings. But unlike most old buildings on Armstrong, this one had been kept up. It was in the center of the city—what had once been the very edge of the dome—and it was the first building made of Moon brick. The bricks themselves were more like blocks, huge bits of manmade stone piled on top of each other, reinforcing the fact that the building (and, by implication, its occupants) had great weight.
Nyquist had walked by the building hundreds of times, but he had never gone inside. He’d actually first seen it as part of his history class in high school. The teacher had taken everyone on a walking tour of Armstrong to show the old landmarks.
He remembered this one, partly because the building’s style mimicked Old Earth fashion in a way that no one thought possible on the Moon, and partly because the building had once been the City Center. Forty years after it had been built by one of the Moon’s first real estate developers to prove that solid, permanent buildings could exist in this odd environment, the city had taken over the building in lieu of tearing it down.
The building still had the pretension of a city office building. It occupied its own block, and had matching (but smaller) buildings across the street. The WSX building ruled the neighborhood—and it didn’t look like a benevolent despot, either. Buildings several blocks away mimicked its Moon-brick style, though without the same kind of success.
The entire neighborhood here seemed large, pretentious, and stuffy. Nyquist couldn’t imagine Flint anywhere near this place. Paloma the Retrieval Artist seemed out of
place as well. But Justinian Wagner looked like a man who’d been born in this building. His façade wasn’t as weighty as the building’s, but it would be over time.
Nyquist splayed his fingers against the door’s reader, letting it know who he was. The building attached to his links, and with a force that only government offices used, pulled his identification. He felt the pull because he was meant to. Apparently, Wagner, Stuart, and Xendor wanted its visitors to know what kind of clout it had.
The door swung open, and an android so lifelike that it looked more human than a number of the criminals Nyquist had arrested bowed to him. The android wore a black silk suit with a red ascot. Its face was modern Armstrong handsome—a solid chin, firm features, and high cheekbones.
The android’s eyes, however, were off. They were a bluish-silver that seemed unnatural against the café au lait skin and black hair. The eyes had a moist look that was clearly fake—no android needed moist eyes—and a shine that didn’t come from within.
“Detective,” the android said in a surprisingly deep, masculine voice. The few androids Nyquist had seen—and that was very few, given how expensive and mostly useless the things were—had androgynous voices even if they had definite masculine or feminine features. “Your visit is unplanned.”
The android made it sound as if Nyquist had arrived naked and unshowered. “Justinian Wagner.”
The android swayed a moment. Nyquist looked past it into darkness. The front of the building had some kind of holo blocker, not allowing the entrant to see inside, even though he had gone through the main door.
The android’s swaying stopped. Nyquist wondered if the swaying was some kind of design flaw or a way to let people know the android was accessing information, like a wait message on a particularly slow link.
“Mr. Wagner generally does not take visitors before 9 A.M. He also does not see anyone without an appointment. But considering the case you are working on, he will make an exception at this time.”
The android’s wet gaze moved toward Nyquist, as if seeing him for the first time. Those eyes had to be some kind of camera, to be used not just by the android’s recording systems, but by whatever poor human slob had the job of monitoring the thing.
“Mr. Wagner’s generosity knows no bounds,” Nyquist said, deliberately heavy on the sarcasm.
The black wall opened very slowly, revealing little except bits of light and color.
“You have thirty minutes,” the android said. “Then Mr. Wagner must insist that you leave.”
“I’ll take all the time that I want,” Nyquist said, slipping through the open door.
“Wait!” The android followed him. “You didn’t get the instructions to Mr. Wagner’s office.”
“Send them to my link,” Nyquist said.
He really didn’t want them. He wanted the chance to examine the offices. He wanted to see what the wealthiest law firm on the Moon looked like.
A map superimposed itself over his left eye, with specific instructions in a multitude of languages as well as little footprints along route, showing him where to go. Another image, larger than the map, appeared, demanding that he choose a language before he continued.
He tried to avoid doing anything, but the system wouldn’t let him. He also couldn’t walk more than a meter without an alarm going off in his head.
Normally, he would have ignored it all and simply blundered through it, but he’d had enough of invasive noises in the past twenty-four hours. Even though his own private systems had repaired the damage to his hearing, it was still on shaky grounds. Too much blaring sound would give him a headache he didn’t need.
He picked English, just to be perverse, and all the other languages disappeared. The silly footprints did not.
At least he could see. The map was a sophisticated one that used the images he saw to help him find his way.
The main floor of the building looked like a lobby, but it wasn’t one. Even though there were artfully arranged chairs around rounded wood tables set off from other groupings by what looked like real plants, no one sat in those chairs. A desk toward the back, which would have had a receptionist two decades before, stood empty except for another android, this one with female features and breasts larger than necessary.
Near some of the plants, humans in business suits sat at single-chair desk units, bent over screens or holding clear screens in their hands. The little feet on the map sent him around those desks—presumably, the average visitor didn’t even see them—but Nyquist misstepped, ignoring the warning signs that flashed in front of his left eye, and nodded as he passed those desk-chair combos.
People cursed as he went by. A few of them clutched their clear screens to their chests, as if to hide what was on them, even though the clear screens had gone dark. A few others glared at him, and one woman shook her head, a half smile on her face. She understood what he was doing—disrupting the work, examining the office—and a part of her clearly approved.
When Nyquist reached the far end of the floor, however, he had no choice but to follow the map. None of the elevators led to Wagner’s office. Only a special elevator, with a special passkey, would take him there.
He walked past a row of shabbily dressed men, all seated in wooden chairs, as if waiting for someone to notice them, and headed toward the elevator. One of the men reached for him, then grimaced, as something—probably internal—stopped him.
Nyquist peered at the man with his right eye, then compared the image he got to recent criminal database downloads. The man wasn’t on any of them, but he did match the image of a Tracker who was in trouble with the police department in Glenn Station for asking for triple fee after a particularly tough recovery of a dangerous Disappeared.
Nyquist shook his head to show his disgust. The only Tracker who had enough funds to hire a place like WSX for his defense probably had overcharged all of his clients.
The elevator that took him to Wagner’s office was more of a lift. When the gilded doors slid open, they revealed a mirrored platform. As he stepped on the mirror, his map vanished. He was no longer privy to the layout of the office.
The platform first took him sideways, down a corridor that he hadn’t seen on the map before it vanished. Then he realized he was on a slight incline. By the time he reached the wide-open doorway that led him into Wagner’s office, he had no idea how far up he had traveled, although he still had a sense of how far he had gone horizontally.
Unless he missed his guess, he was in the exact center of the block that the building stood on. And unless architects had changed over the centuries, he was probably on the middle floor, as well, in the exact center of the building itself.
The open doors led to a cone-shaped reception area that was filled with light from the dome. Nyquist glanced up, just like he was supposed to, and saw the dome glittering above him. In this part of the city, the dome had been rebuilt. The material above him was so see-through that the dome looked touchable.
He finally understood why Paloma had wanted an apartment attached to the dome, and he wondered if this office had initially been hers.
A distracted woman—he glanced at her eyes, and sure enough, she was as human as anyone working in this place could be—reached his side.
“Happy to see you, Detective,” she said in a harried tone. “Mr. Wagner only has about thirty minutes—”
“So I heard.”
“—so I’m afraid I’ll have to hurry you through the preliminaries.”
Preliminaries included a body scan, which revealed the two legal weapons he carried as a part of his police duties. No one removed the weapons, just recorded their make, model number, and the fact that the laser pistols were charged. The scan also shut off many of his internal links, but not the emergency links established by the city government. Nor did this scan seem to note the personal links that he didn’t have running. He always received notification when those things went through a hard external shutdown.
Preliminaries also included t
he rules of the office—”Any word spoken in Mr. Wagner’s office is by law confidential,” the woman said as she imparted the misinformation with complete sincerity—and the best way to exit the building, which wasn’t the way he came.
Once he’d gone through all that, he was allowed to step into Wagner’s inner sanctum.
It was as impressive as Nyquist would have imagined, and he wondered how much of it was for show. He had no idea how someone could work in a place that seemed to be composed mostly of light. Light flowed from the modified skylight that opened to the dome, and fake sunlight flowed up from the floor. A mini filter, also composed of a light-like substance—something he could walk through but also see—made sure the light didn’t glare.
The filter around Wagner’s desk had some red tones, for warmth, and some blue tones, probably to impart a sense of intellectualism.
Wagner’s enhancements, which had looked so fake in the detective headquarters, seemed natural here. They seemed to absorb the light and make it part of Wagner. He looked taller than he was, and the glow gave him an importance that he probably had nowhere else.
Nyquist would wager that Wagner insisted on having settlement conferences here, where the other attorneys were not just at a physical disadvantage because of the building’s obvious impressiveness, but they were at an emotional one, too.
This place was Wagner’s stage, and he used it to great advantage.
Wagner left his desk, which was made of some kind of blond substance that looked like wood (for all Nyquist knew, it was wood) that both took in and enhanced the light, and extended his manicured hand.
Nyquist suppressed the shudder that he felt coming on as he stared at that hand, remembering how moist and manipulative it had felt when he first touched it. He shook it and the sensation was just as uncomfortable as it had been before. He was proud of himself for not grimacing.
“To what do I owe this honor?” That was the second time someone had used the word honor to describe this visit, and instead of flattering Nyquist, it put him on edge.
“I need to talk with you about your family,” Nyquist said.
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