by Malka Older
“Still,” Roz says, busy digesting this new intel. How can he not be married? “Still. It’s impossible; it really is. I don’t even know why I like him. I mean, he’s nice and he’s hot and he’s a leader here and people look up to him and he seems principled, and all those are things I like, but I don’t know why I like him this much.”
“We never do. We don’t have the words for those things. That’s why matchmaking algorithms are so hard to design well.”
“Okay, but … I’m just waiting for him to say something that will make it impossible for me to think about him this way. You know, that women should be subservient to their husbands, or that unbelievers are going to hell, or…”
“That gay people deserve to die?” Maryam suggests.
“Yes, that would do it,” Roz agrees, wishing she had used that example sooner.
“Or that political advancement is more important than love.” Maryam’s tone sounds like she’s trying to lighten the mood after that last comment, but she can’t quite pull it off.
“That doesn’t seem to be his particular problem,” Roz says.
“Why not just ask him about his beliefs?”
“It’s impossible anyway,” Roz grumbles. “Let me just enjoy it a little longer?”
CHAPTER 22
Maryam leaves early the next morning, catching a ride on an Information crow traveling between Kinshasa and Baghdad and willing to drop her off in Doha. “Take care, habibti,” she tells Roz during their long hug on at the landing area. “And thank you for inviting me. You were right; I think it helped.”
From the airstrip it’s only a short walk to Zeinab’s; it would be a shame to go all the way back to the compound when there’s better coffee on the way. Still, there’s a shiver of the illicit as she walks to the café, and Roz reassures herself that there’s nothing clandestine about these meetings. They are perfectly public. Anyone could walk by and see them, not to mention the constant, curious surveillance of Zeinab’s various waiters and cooks. Who must also be some of the premier gossips in town, given their position.
Roz starts pulling up the various DarFur plaza discussions but manages to stop herself before she enters any potentially incriminating search terms. She doesn’t know this context well enough to catch code words, and besides—glancing around at the camel lumbering past, the three women sitting by their market wares—most of the gossip here is probably analog.
Instead, she looks at what she knows: data. Yes, she reassures herself, it’s perfectly visible, a handful of intersections between her timeline and his. The flat fact of it is comforting: nothing to see here, no one trying to hide anything. She tries to look at it impartially, from a distance: true, informal meetings are unusual but a distinct positive in building relationships with locals.
To know why it feels so wrong, you would have to see Suleyman, his beautiful face, his bearing of restrained power. Or see Roz trying so hard not to give anything away. You would have to feel the odd electricity that blossoms between them.
Their table at Zeinab’s is empty. Roz drops into the chair and starts doodling an algorithm for rendering the unseen visible on Information. She doesn’t for a second think that she can come up with a way to catch burgeoning attraction through surveillance and number crunching; she’s just used to trying to design algorithms for impossible data collection problems. It’s how she thinks through issues. Besides, this doesn’t have to be about … her mind, dancing around the l-word, reverts to attraction. Stupid, irrational, short-term attraction. No, it could be about conspiracy, too.
She looks up from her reverie to see the boy waiter hovering, grin on his face. “Coffee,” she says through her yawn, blinking away her doodles and turning to the cartoons. The debate obviously has pride of place. Looking at the panel in front of her, which shows the stage more or less as it looked yesterday, Roz can feel the excitement of the kid drawing it: the faces printed from Information are people who exist, here, in this world!
The coverage of the debate extends out in the panels to Roz’s right, but to the left she sees that rumors of secession have finally reached the world. The panel in front of the café, which she has begun to think of as the front page, shows a caricature of Cynthia Halliday, ubiquitous Heritage head of state, straining to pull away from a jumble of other figures, Nougaz’s Information-representing face prominent among them, all tied together by what looks like a bungee cord labeled INFORMATION. Interesting, Roz thinks, that it’s not called “micro-democracy,” but she supposes Information makes a better bad guy. In the cartoon, Halliday has pulled out a pair of scissors.
She looks up to see Suleyman walking toward her (along the Heritage section, she notes, wondering whether he’s already looked at the images of himself).
“Ah, good morning!” He raises his hand as he sees her. And that smile—everything the algorithm would miss is there. Roz can’t help smiling back. “I’m glad you’re here,” Suleyman says, dropping into the chair beside her, her smile apparently invitation enough.
“Ef camo,” Roz says automatically, although they have mostly dropped the language lessons. “Your party was a great success last night.”
“It was only the secondary event. It was the debate that was the great success.”
“It did go fairly well,” Roz reflects. “No violence, good questions. All the candidates behaved.” She smiles at him. “Not all elections are so decorous.”
“Oh, yes,” his smile fades. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I remembered something in the course of our conversation last night—”
“Conversation?” Roz is trying to remember if at any point she spoke to him alone the night before, or even spoke to him at all.
“About the Information blackout. What I said was true, for myself, but as I was thinking about it, I remembered. Al-Jabali was very upset about the blackout. I tried to calm him down. You know, not so many people here had individual connections to Information then, so most of the population hadn’t even noticed. But he felt that it was a betrayal after he had thrown his political reputation behind Information.” He falls silent, and Roz thinks that maybe this mission is a direct result of the election debacle after all.
“I hope we regained his confidence eventually,” she says.
“Oh, yes, once the story came out and after some time had passed and we became accustomed to your ways. Yes, these past few months, he was very happy with the deal with Information.” He stops. Roz is biting her tongue, remembering what Fatima said. “I wonder if…”
She waits.
“Perhaps while he was upset, perhaps he said something he shouldn’t have?” Suleyman sounds unusually hesitant, almost as if he’s afraid of offending her. And then Roz realizes what he’s trying to ask.
“You think Information killed him because he was angry about the blackout?” She wants to laugh or cry. “I don’t think so. First of all, there’s no record of him confronting us or saying something he shouldn’t have—that would have been in the file when we first came to meet him.” The smile drops off her face as she remembers that this mission was not supposed to be a murder investigation. “If we killed everyone who criticized us … well. There would be a lot of people in line ahead of him. Even just from that particular episode, the heads of state of Heritage and Liberty certainly did much more egregious and damaging actions than he could have.”
“You’re right, of course,” Suleyman says. “I’m sorry; I should not have suspected Information. But perhaps…” He pauses again, and Roz doesn’t think he’s formulating something new. He’s still trying to explain what he wanted to tell her. “Perhaps he spoke hastily to someone else.”
“Who?” Roz asks.
The governor shakes his head. “I don’t know. But I thought you might.”
“Me?” Roz asks.
“I thought Information knew everything.”
* * *
Kei finds a reason to leave work early. It’s not difficult: even if Deepal is no longer exactly o
n her side, he’s too withdrawn to care. Mishima forges out into Geneva. She’s considering whether one of the formal options open to her—Information, or LesProfessionnels, who are the official investigative body on the bombing—might be useful, but as she’d rather not reveal her identity until she has to, she decides to work a little further on her own first. She passes the lake with its jet d’eau, long since airscaped into a sleek spiral, the water corkscrewing up into the sky and then falling smoothly in the opposite helix, DNA as imagined by Escher, the tower of Babel as a transparent drill bit. Half an hour later, she is in a distinctly less salubrious neighborhood, where concrete apartment buildings in a Heritage centenal on the outskirts of the city lift higher and higher in proportion to population pressure. Mishima could have gotten there faster on a public crow, but it’s much easier to search for faces on public transportation than on every possible pedestrian route. Besides, Kei hasn’t had time to get much exercise.
The man that Daisy knew as Rolf from Aubonne has vanished, and the identity he gave her doesn’t exist. A collaborative effort between the Swiss police and Information, embodied mainly by Mishima and Donath trading intel over a secure connection, was able to match Swiss vid of a man meeting his description with the identity of an ex-Heritage security officer, Vincent Salonika. He, too, is absent from any tracers Information can put out, but his financial records—traced with some difficulty by Hassan from Maryam’s team in Doha—indicate Salonika’s recent receipt of a staggeringly large sum and subsequent disbursement of a hefty portion of that sum in two tranches to the bomber, Lanover. The second transfer took place shortly after the bombing: probably, Mishima believes, when Lanover was confirmed to have reached Daisy’s waiting car. The first tranche was transferred a week earlier while Salonika was in an apartment on the fifteenth floor of the building Mishima is staring up at.
The building’s security is laughable, an eight-digit code to be punched in and a body scan that Mishima allows to observe her hunting knife and shuriken, since she already knows that it doesn’t even connect to a recorder, much less a live security monitor. Always distrustful of elevators, and especially old ones with no hover capacity, she takes the stairs.
She is cresting the seventh floor when she starts to hear the murmur in her ear. It’s so faint that she has to stop, wait for the echo of her footsteps to fall away, and steady her breathing before she can confirm there is actually a sound and not just a ringing in her ear. Yes, there it is. A voice, almost certainly, but she can make out no words. She climbs on, hand on the hilt of her knife.
By the tenth floor she’s sure it’s a voice, and there is a second one, fainter. Mishima estimates she should have enough definition for voice recognition by the twelfth, even if she still doesn’t recognize it herself. But on the eleventh, something changes: a sudden overwhelming rustling and static, and then the voice is back, both closer and muffled. A sudden vision comes to Mishima: a scarf, wrapped around the lower part of a face to conceal it. Mishima starts to sprint. After a few steps, she hears a door open and close. She pounds up the stairs, trying to lengthen her breaths and hoping the elevators in this building are too old for anticipatory arrival, then comes to a shuddering halt. She can hear the shouting faintly in her earpiece and at the same time echoing from above her: a third person, calling attention to themselves in the hall.
“I’ve […]ee […]! You’re […] here […]!”
The wearer of the scarf: “You haven’t seen me. There is no proof. There is nothing you can do.” The voice is contained, polite, supremely self-confident. Mishima no longer has any doubt: Head of State Halliday in a highly unlikely part of town and finally wearing the scarf with Mishima’s planted recorder.
Mishima starts up again as the voices escalate, then, three steps above the fourteenth floor the elevator doors open and—Mishima teeters precariously for a moment—close again. Too winded to curse, she turns and races down again, letting gravity pull her and leaping the last three steps of every flight. Kei is getting more exercise than she planned. She collides—silently, a trick which requires long practice—with the ground-floor stairwell door just in time to hear the elevator door—opening? or closing? There’s no feed in the lobby. Mishima presses her ear to the door, but it’s the recorder in the scarf that gives her the footsteps across the lobby, along with sharp, mostly incomprehensible spurts of monologue. She waits until she hears the front door open, and then slips out of the stairwell and sprints across the empty, undecorated lobby to peer out of the glass doors.
The two figures are well wrapped, scarves—including one matching the scarf Mishima put the recorder into—around their faces, hats on their heads despite the mild chill, bulky jackets obscuring their bodies. Mishima only gets a quick glimpse, because they walk straight into an incongruous tour group, a milling mini-crowd of foreigners whose guide seems to have led them very far indeed off the beaten path of Geneva attractions. Even with three feeds covering different portions of the street scrolling in her vision, Mishima can’t track the movements of the two people she’s interested in, and when the tour group is bundled onto a waiting bus, she can’t be sure if her suspects—Halliday and an accomplice, who is she kidding?—board the bus with them or make their way into surrounding streets. She scans a few of the neighboring feeds and considers requesting a track on the bus but decides it would be too obtrusive. She’s looking for evidence, which if it is to be found at all, can be found by going through public feeds later. She doesn’t need to follow these people home: she knows where they live.
Instead of leaving the building, Mishima turns back to the stairs, keeping the feed that covers the entrance of the building in her vision as she treks up the fifteen flights. She reaches the top without seeing anyone leave the building and makes her way down the hallway with caution.
The door she’s looking for is almost closed and definitely not locked. Mishima eases it open with her palm, stiletto in hand. Inch by slow inch, a tiny apartment is revealed, one of those micro-lofts that were favored some years back as housing for the indigent: a single room with two floors squeezed into one. Standing room is only available in the area covered by the swing of the door and the curtained-off corner shower; the rest of the apartment offers the choice of sitting, crawling, or lying flat. Even for a micro-loft, this place looks particularly bereft. The faint light from the hallway shows a cluster of takeaway containers decomposing around a small cooker on the bottom level, and on the top a few layers of blankets, or maybe a sleeping bag, but no mattress. Mishima is pushing the door toward forty-five degrees when it stops against a soft resistance; she leans in, blinking against the dimness. A cloth over-the-shoulder bag, in muted colors, lies on the floor blocking the door from opening all the way.
Mishima slips inside in a crouch, closing the door quietly behind her.
Once her eyes have adjusted to the dim light—there seems to be at least one window on the far wall, but it is blocked by partitions and possibly curtains—Mishima slides back into the arc of the door to stand up. She couldn’t see anyone on the lower level, although some of the view was blocked by the partitions, so she scans the loft space.
And sees movement far in the back corner.
After staring for a while, Mishima decides she is looking at someone on hands and knees, facing away from her and searching through … something. It makes sense; the upper level of a micro-loft is traditionally used for storage, as well as sleeping and some forms of recreation.
Silently, Mishima sinks down to a crouch again. She takes some twine from her pocket and strings the door handle to the cooker. It won’t keep anyone from leaving, but it will delay them and make some noise. Then she crawls into the lower level, heading for the shower.
* * *
Roz is on her way back to the compound when she gets a call from Maryam. No way she can be in Doha yet. “Everything okay?”
“Yes, fine,” Maryam says. “I was just going over my notes, and—it didn’t occur to me until now, but don’t you
think it’s odd how few feeds they have?”
“It’s taken some getting used to,” Roz says, in a welcome-to-my-world tone. Then she thinks about it. “It’s to be expected, with the remoteness and low population density, right?”
“Perhaps,” Maryam admits. “But even given all that, it seemed extreme to me. So, I just counted.”
“You counted all the feeds in this centenal?”
“I set a program to count, yes. They’re significantly short of the number they’re supposed to have by now per contract.”
“But why would they…” Roz stops, shakes her head. Everyone here has been telling her how suspicious they are of Information. But still, breaking the contract in their first two years? How did they manage it without someone noticing? “Can you count for the other centenals in this government?”
“Already in process.”
* * *
Mishima rises slowly within the narrow cubicle of the shower, gathers her breath, and edges the curtain open. The figure is in the same position: crouched over, about five feet away. Mishima can now see the person from the side, but she still can’t make out many details except their general shape and their fixation on the items being searched or sorted. “We should talk,” she says without raising her voice.
The intruder’s head shoots up, knocking against the ceiling.
“I’m not—” Mishima starts, but the intruder has already scrambled around to make for the door. Mishima ducks down to the lower level and scurries along the path she cleared on her way over, then stands against the door, stiletto out. “Easy there,” she says, as the person she is chasing skids to a panicked halt in front of her. “Relax. I just want to chat.”
They end up sitting against the door, where the extra space above their heads makes the micro-loft slightly less claustrophobic. It only takes Mishima a few moments to decide that she’s not going to need her stiletto; she twirls it around her fingers for a minute or two to drive the point home, then slides it into the easily accessible sheath across her belly. The person she is talking to is androgynous, trim, young but not very young, perhaps thirty (and when did thirty start looking young?), hair cut in an oblong sloping to a point just behind the right earlobe, clothing that wouldn’t look out of place in the Heritage offices: semiprofessional with an edge. In fact …