Safe house, fifty kilometers west of Uptarlung
“Hey, Joel?” Garet wandered back into the kitchen, having cleaned up a little. “I can’t get a signal on my holo…?”
Joel was clearing up the breakfast dishes from earlier, and Molly sat nursing a lukewarm mug of mocha. This had probably been the most intense day Garet had ever lived through.
The drained look on his face said it all.
They’d been back in the safe house nearly twenty minutes, and all Garet had done was dump his gear and head straight to the bathroom to clean up. Molly suspected he was probably giving himself a pep talk, or whatever it was boys did when they needed to pull themselves together.
Molly glanced up as he walked in and sat down at the kitchen table, still fiddling with his holo. The sphinx who had seemed to have taken up residence with them padded over and rubbed up against his leg, saying hello and surreptitiously checking him out.
She answered. “That’s because we’re jamming the signal. You can’t let anyone know where you are, and until we reconfigure your holo we’re jamming everything.”
His eyes opened a little. “But I have to let Paige know that I’m safe. The last she heard, I’d just picked up the data drop and was heading out of town. She doesn’t know that you guys are involved yet.”
Joel shook his head. “You can contact her as soon as we figure out what’s going on and sort out your holo. Until then, you can’t trust, or contact, anyone.” He was in team leader mode, even with a dishcloth in his hand.
It was Molly’s turn. “So, tell me, Garet…how did you come across this proof of vote-fixing?” Molly’s curiosity was getting the better of her, and Joel had suggested they keep the questioning for after he had had a chance to come down from the emotional experience he’d just been through. Molly had agreed, but if they were going to keep him safe, they were going to have to know everything.
Joel glanced at her sideways as he popped some more dishes into the sink. So much for their emotionally sensitive game plan.
“I have a source,” Garet finally replied, flatly.
Knew he wasn’t a hacker.
Shut uuuup! Busy now with adulting stuff, Oz.
Fine. Shutting up. This is one of those instances when you are being boring, just FYI.
Fine. Go and research those ships we talked about.
She rapped the table with her knuckles. “Garet, listen to me carefully. If you want to stay alive, you’re going to have to tell us more about this source.” Molly hoped to hell this guy wasn’t going to be a dick. “So I’ll ask you again…how did you come across this intel?”
Joel swiveled around from washing the dishes in the sink to look over at him. It was the push he needed.
Garet folded. “Okay, okay. There’s a girl…Paige.”
“Oh, man. There’s always a girl in the middle of trouble!” Joel noted, turning back to his washing.
Molly shot a glare into the back of his head. “Not cool, Joel.”
“Sorry.” His small smile disappeared. “But it’s true. You women have that effect on us…” Realizing what he’d just said, he suddenly found himself very focused on getting dried pancake off one of the plates.
“Go on,” said Molly, concentrating again on their client, and noticing that he was half-smiling and a little more relaxed as a result of the brief banter.
“Well, as I was saying, her name is Paige. She’s Dewitt’s assistant. Half human, half Estarian. It’s a very exotic mix, as you may know. Very rare. Anyway, when I first started working out of the downtown office, we met, and it was…well, electric.”
Garet had a distant look in his eye for a moment.
“And… how did she come to have this intel?”
“Well, there’s a group that Dewitt is involved with; something to do with donors from the healthcare sector. All very hush-hush. But Paige handles all the admin for the group. You know, meeting notes, logistics, contracts, that kind of thing. So she has access to a bunch of data on a separate server. Some kind of shielded special security server, which is separate from the normal Senate Office stuff.”
He paused, dropping his head into his hands. Still wearing his suit, with the top button of his shirt undone, he looked like he’d been working in the office all day. And now, talking about Paige, his shoulders dropped another inch and he aged another ten years.
Molly wondered if he was going to cry.
Shit, that’s the last thing I need. Thank fuck that Joel is here.
Patience, Molly. By most standards, he’s been through a lot.
Ugh, Oz. I’m being patient. But this guy really doesn’t have to take all day to tell us this. I just need to know what he knows so we can solve this. Emotions are like the little pieces of sand that makes the inside of engines get all fucked up. They slow down the communication cycle.
If you needed to run a search on a server, you’d end up having to wait for the search to run. This is no different. What do you do when you’re waiting for searches to return results?
You don’t want to know.
You’re right, I don’t, Ms. 4077.
Shut up, you half-witted data string.
Name calling now? My, my!
Molly ignored Oz’s last jibe. Telling him “you started it” wasn’t on the table.
She continued with Garet. “Okay, so she had access to this special server. Where did you come into the picture?”
“Well, one night we were lying in bed talking about our day and Paige happened to mention that this server existed.” Garet leaned back in his chair a bit, “I had been struggling to impress Dewitt for some time, and I figured if I was more in the know, I could be more useful.” He looked up at Molly.
“So you arranged to take a peek at the servers?” Molly intuited.
Garet nodded, “Right. It was to help. I wasn’t spying. But when I found the evidence of the vote-fixing in order to get certain bills passed, I had to rethink what I was going to do. I mean, they probably knew I knew, but I’d not taken a copy of anything. That was two weeks ago. It wasn’t until I asked Paige to take a copy of the file that the shit really hit the fan and those guys started coming after me. Before I knew it, I was on the run. But when I spoke to Paige earlier this morning, everything was fine at her end, as if Dewitt had no idea she’d been involved.
Garet paused a moment before asking hesitantly, “How is that possible? It’s not possible, is it?”
Molly glanced down at the table, and sensed Joel turning around. Feeling his gaze, she looked up to meet his eyes. She knew that look.
From his experience, he would guess that Paige was probably already dead or someone had killing her on their to-do list.
“Okay, so here’s the problem as I see it…” Molly began, unofficially starting a meeting that needed to happen.
Joel took the cue, and abandoned what was left of the dishes to take a seat at the table as well.
She continued when he sat down. “First we need to figure out a way to get hold of Paige. She’s compromised. There’s no way that they don’t know about her involvement. Then, longer term, we need a way to make it safe for Garet to go back to his life, or something close to it.” She paused to think, then continued.
“Stopping Dewitt from wanting Garet and Paige out of the picture isn’t going to be possible while he still has something to lose if they expose him. So we need to find a way of taking away any reason to care about what they do, or make it so that even if this intel did get out, it wouldn’t make any difference. We need to neutralize the threat that Garet poses, in other words.”
Joel scratched at the back of his head. “While I don’t know much about politics. It’s never been a world that I understood, but what we’d do in a military scenario is isolate the threat from his resources: lights, comms, weaponry, food, shelter, and so on.”
Molly picked up the thought-baton, “Yes, that would be applicable here. Except we need to go after the resources that make him powerful—allies, friends, and
political relationships that he’s leaning on to get away with something like this. Then we take away the reason he wants our guys dead, so there’s no point in him pursuing Garet and Paige.”
“I wonder…” she continued again. “Why do we think Dewitt was keeping a file that was clearly a danger to him if it got out? Why not just destroy it? Why put it on a server where hackers and prying eyes could find it?”
Joel answered. “My guess was that it was some kind of protection against whoever else was involved. Garet, what do you remember about these donors? Do you have any names?”
“Sure, I have a bunch of files on a data tag in my briefcase. There were lots of people on there I know, and know of. They’re pretty prominent figures. Let me see, there was Mac Kerr, Luc Andus, Jessica Newld…”
“Mac Kerr and Luc Andus. Could this be the Syndicate?” Joel wondered, half to himself and half to Molly.
“The Syndicate? That rings a bell. I’m sure I’ve heard Paige mention a syndicate before. Does that mean something?”
Joel’s eyes turned a little more serious than they had been. “Yes, it means helping you just got a whole lot harder,” he confessed.
This wasn’t going to be just another easy job.
“But it also gives us a target,” added Molly. “Those resources we need to separate Dewitt from? The Syndicate would be the top of that list. Without them, he likely has very little power, and also very little incentive to silence you. And if we turn him against them, they’ll likely do what they need to do to take care of him without us lifting a finger. Honor among thieves and all that,” she said as her eyes unfocused in thought.
“Okay, so how are we going to go about separating him from the group, then?” Joel looked skeptical, but after seeing Molly in action—and her saving his life and all—he was on board with whatever needed to be done.
“I’m not sure yet, but if Paige is still alive she would be the best person to speak to. I think it’s time we let her know you’re okay.” she said, turning to a very distressed Garet.
“Do we try calling her?” asked Joel.
“Yes, maybe from another number, so as not to tip them off that Garet is still alive and in touch with her.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
L’Ogg Restaurant, Downtown Spire
“You should be supporting this motion. We’re making healthcare available for all.” Dewitt popped another forkful of food into his mouth, casually chatting with the head of the biggest publicly owned institution in his sector.
All around, Sarkians were eating and talking; the buzz of the restaurant and the clatter of utensils were making it difficult for the pair to really hear each other well. At least this resolves the issue of having our conversation bugged, thought Dewitt to himself, pleased at his own cleverness.
“Yes, but have you read the small print in the second half of the bill? Where it says that it then becomes illegal to not have it?” Dewitt’s lunch companion was much smarter than Dewitt had originally given him credit for.
This wasn’t the first time Dicken O’Farus had tried to block a piece of legislation that Dewitt wanted pushed through. The man had been a thorn in his side for a while now, long before he ever took the CEO position at Medifair. But now, with the weight of the organization behind him, Dicken’s opinion mattered. And it mattered in the Senate.
Dewitt needed him on his side.
“No, I haven’t read it. I wrote it.” He placed his knife and fork down on his plate, and took a sip of water.
Dicken pointed his knife at Dewitt before he used it to cut a piece of his meat. “Well, then you know that the aim of this bill isn’t simply to provide care to people who need it, but to make drug companies rich. Once this is passed, there is nothing to stop the companies from hiking up their prices. And, because the insurance policies pay for it in the short term, they won’t lose a cent. In fact, they’ll make a fortune. But the insurance companies won’t stand for that—they’ll be jacking up their prices in no time. With the whole population on the inner planets locked into the system and penalized if they have no healthcare, they’ll have no choice other than to pay up.”
Now Dicken used his knife as a pointer, twirling it around in the air as he tried to come up with his next statement. “It’s like a tyrannical tax, except the monarch who benefits from it doesn’t sit at the head of the Senate. The monarch is Andus.”
“Well, you’ve got an imagination. What makes you think that anyone is planning to increase their prices, Dicken?” Dewitt smirked, trying to contain his frustration.
“Word on the street is that this is exactly what Health Corp was trying to do, before they got hacked and had half their stock dumped on the market.” O’Farus’ eyebrows were raised, as if accusing Dewitt personally.
Dewitt ignored the bait. “Who said they got hacked?” he retorted instead.
“Why else would they hike up their prices, only to ditch their stock in one go and plummet their share price? It’s got to have been one of their competitors.” O’Farus was onto him. He knew something he wasn’t revealing. Dewitt was going to have to come at this from another way.
This lunch date was a bust.
Shit, he thought. This was the last thing he needed.
“Besides,” continued O’Farus, “what’s to stop any of them from increasing their prices?”
“Well, anyone who did that would be pricing themselves out of the market.” Dewitt deliberately acted naïve to see if he could turn it around.
“Not if they all did it.” O’Farus held Dewitt’s gaze.
Sooner or later, this Medifair thing was going to have to be handled. It was like having a white knight defending the castle Dewitt needed to get into.
“That, my dear friend, would be price-fixing. That’s illegal.” Dewitt tried once more to run the official logic that seemed to have been working with the Senate members the last few weeks, on the rare occasion any of them had actually read the bill.
“Until they lobby to change the laws around that, too.” O’Farus was onto them. There was no hiding it.
Shit, what the hell else could possibly go wrong? Dewitt wondered.
Safe house, fifty kilometers west of Uptarlung
I suggest Joel makes the call. They may recognize Garet’s voice, if they are monitoring her calls.
Good thinking, Oz.
“Guys, Oz suggested that Joel make the call.”
Joel nodded his agreement and pulled up his holo. Oz input the number and dropped the jamming signal.
Encrypting and cloaking. This call will be 99% untraceable.
“Okay, so Oz is cloaking the origin of the call. You know what you’re going to say, Joel? Just like we planned, yeah?”
“Yeah, I think I’ve got it.” Joel swiped through the notes they’d been making on the kitchen holoscreen as he hit dial and waited for the call to connect.
“Hello?” it was Paige’s voice.
Want me to put the call on speaker?
No, we don’t want Garet being too close to this. Leave it with Joel’s implant.
Roger that.
“Hi, Paige? Paige Montgomery?” Joel had his negotiator’s voice on. Firm and confident, but pleasant.
“Yes?”
“Hi, this is Dave. Our mutual friend has put us in touch…about the property viewing?”
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