Garibaldi quickly got on the link to Torres. "The Redstone 4," he said, "have you checked it out?"
"Not yet. Departure isn't scheduled for another eight hours."
"I'm going down there. I'll meet you. I've got a feeling about this one."
"I'll be there."
They arrived at the loading dock while the Redstone 4 was still taking on cargo. Garibaldi briefed Torres on the situation and then, accompanied by a team of security agents, they asked for permission to board the ship and speak to the pilot.
He met them on the bridge. Torres stepped forward. "Mr. Cooper, I'm Ensign Torres, Babylon 5 security, and we'd like to take a look through your ship. We have reason to believe there might be some contraband items on board."
Cooper scowled. "I hope this doesn't cause a delay, Ensign. As you can see, we're busy loading."
"I certainly hope it doesn't, Mr. Cooper. Now, if I could see your records, the bill of lading, customs statements ..."
Garibaldi, standing back with the rest of the security team, could observe Cooper while Torres went briefly through the records. The man looked itchy, nervous. Like he wanted them off the bridge. Torres logged off the ship's computer, having gone through the items mentioned plus the roster of the crew. She shook her head slightly. "Everything seems to be in order, Mr. Cooper. Now we'll just take a look around." But as a precaution against the pilot calling to warn Nagyif Nagy were in fact on boardshe left one security man on the bridge as a guard.
"He's not on the crew roster," she said, once they were off. "Under the name of either Williams or Nagy. But they could have just smuggled him on board. How should we do this?"
"Why don't you check the holds, and I'll take crew quarters," Garibaldi suggested.
The men and women who crewed the Redstone 4 did not live in luxurious quarters, but they were better than some barracks Garibaldi had occupied during the varied course of his career. Bunks were fold-down, wardrobe space adequate, entertainment systems minimal. The rooms were all quiet, apparently empty, which was normal with cargo loading underway. All hands would be at work. All legitimate crew members, at least.
Garibaldi went up and down the corridors, checking each room with his scanner for life signs. One room, another, another. Then he was picking up something. Not from this room, but the one next door, marked Laundry. And with departure only a few hours away, this was definitely not the time for someone to be washing out his unmentionables.
Garibaldi took out his PPG, adjusted it to the lowest power setting. He didn't want to blast this guy Nagy, he wanted him alive for questioning. On the other hand, Nagy was probably desperate and might be armed. Garibaldi took a breath, then abruptly kicked open the door.
There was a gasp of breath, a movement in one corner, and Garibaldi had his gun trained on the man backed into it, partly hidden behind some bags of dirty clothes. "Hold it! This is Babylon 5 security! Come on out of thereslow."
The man in the corner froze for a few moments, as if Garibaldi might have not seen him, or might have meant someone else. Then he slowly straightened, and Garibaldi got a good look at his face. It was Williams, all right. Or rather, Josef Nagy. "Put your hands up," he ordered him. "Step out here."
Nagy did it, taking one step, then another into the center of the narrow laundry room. But Garibaldi saw his eyes darting wildlyto the PPG, to the corridor behind him. He was prepared for the desperate lunge, the last-ditch, futile attempt to break away. He sidestepped, turned, and met the onrushing fugitive with a fist in the gut. Nagy's breath exploded out of him. He folded up and collapsed onto the deck, where Garibaldi pinned him.
But the fight seemed to have gone out of Nagy. He'd taken his chance and lost it. Garibaldi opened his link. "Torres, this is Garibaldi. I've got him."
He pulled his prisoner to his feet. "Come on, Nagy, let's go have another little talk."
Torres and her men showed up when he was halfway down the corridor. "Should I take him to the lockup?" she asked.
But Garibaldi had been thinking about that, and other things, like classified files and who had access to them, even with new passwords. "No, I don't think so. I'll do it." He went on, looking hard at each one of them at a time, "Look, I know this is irregular, but I'd like this arrest kept quiet. No official file on it. No prisoner named Nagy in the lockup. I think you know why. Can I count on your cooperation?"
After a moment's hesitation, Torres said he could count on her, and the others agreed.
Garibaldi marched Nagy out with him through the Redstone 4's cargo hatch, toward the lift tube. "You can't do this!" his prisoner protested in a low voice that lacked real conviction. "You can't get away with this!"
"Shut up," Garibaldi told him without rancor. "I'm doing this for your own good, whether you believe it or not."
Nagy clearly didn't believe it, but he shut up anyway and went without a struggle, the path of least resistance. He seemed completely defeated as Garibaldi brought him into an interrogation room and shoved him down into a chair, taking the seat opposite.
"All right. Now we're going to talk. For real this time."
Nagy said nothing, looking around warily, as if he were wondering when the instruments of persuasion, the drugs, the Psi Corps were all going to materialize.
Garibaldi knew he had to shock him into speech. "First of all, where's the real Val Williams? What'd you do with himknock him over the head, take his ID?"
Nagy's head jerked up. "No! I mean, there is no real Williams. It's just a name. Made-up."
"Where'd you get the ID, then? From your terrorist pals in the Free Mars group?"
"That's a lie!"
"That was a question."
"Free Mars isn't a terrorist organization! I'm not a terrorist!"
"So what are you, Nagy? Why did you come to Babylon 5, anyway? What were you planning to do here? Sabotage? Blow up the station, maybe?"
"No! I'm a patriot! Only my homeworld is Mars, not Earth! Is that so hard to understand?"
"I don't get paid to understand. I get paid to enforce the rules and stop trouble. Right now I'm getting paid to figure out why two men are dead here on this station. And at least one of them was a suspected terrorist from Mars. J. D. Ortega. Funny thing. He worked for the mines, too, just like you."
Nagy shook his head.
"What does that mean?" Garibaldi prompted him.
"Ortega was no terrorist, either. He wasn't even part of the organization."
"You knew Ortega?"
"Who he was. He worked for the company."
"What company? AreTech?"
A nod.
"What did he do there? Wasn't he an engineer, something like that?"
"Metallurgist, I think. One of the guys in white coats, worked in the lab. I don't know exactly what he did, I was just a clerk. I kept the records."
"Do you know why someone would charge him with being a terrorist?"
A shake of the head.
"Why someone was trying to kill him?"
"No. I don't know about any of that stuff. Look, when you worked for the company, you didn't want to know about anything that wasn't your business, all right? You didn't want to ask questions. There was always talk about under-the-table deals, bribing the safety inspectors, closing down the whole mine. But if they found out about it . . ."
"Would that maybe be when a guy named Fengshi Yang would step in? Company enforcer? His job to keep the workers in line, stop the rumors? That kind of thing?" A sullen nod.
"So if Ortega had gotten into trouble with AreTech, they might have sent somebody like Yang after him?"
Another reluctant nod.
Garibaldi pressed on, "So Ortega could have come to Babylon 5 because he was in trouble with the company, not because he was a terrorist."
"If they sent Yang after him, yeah."
"But you didn't think it was a good idea to tell me about any of this when we talked before in the machine shop, before you had me mugged. I suppose you knew there was a team of special inv
estigators nosing around the station, probing into Ortega's death. But you talked to me. Why?"
"They took Sonia! And ... I heard . . . that you weren't part of them. The ones who arrested her."
"So you decided to talk to me. But right after that you decided it was a real good idea to send a hit team of your friends out after me, to stuff me into that locker. Just like Yang did with Ortega's body. You knew about Yang, didn't you? You knew he killed Ortega." A very slight nod.
"So the question is, who killed Yang? Was it you, Nagy?"
"No!" The prisoner's face paled with shock. "Then who did? Someone else who worked for the company? Some more of your patriot friends from Mars? Did they kill the company enforcer, chop up his body, stuff him into the recyclers?"
"I don't know! I swear! I don't know who did it!" Now Nagy was volubly eager to talk, to deny it. "All anybody knew was, he was here on Babylon 5. He'd already killed one guy, no one knew who else he was after. Anybody could have done it!"
Garibaldi nodded in understanding. "So somebody figured they had to get rid of Yang. But I kept coming around, kept asking questions. Better get rid of me, too. Isn't that right?"
There was a slight new sheen of nervous sweat on Nagy's forehead. "Like I said, some people said you weren't part of it. That you were ... all right. But, then, you knew about Yang, about the mine ..."
"Part of what?" Garibaldi asked. "The whole thing! The company! Earthforce! All of you! You're all in it together! God knows what they've done with Sonia"
"That's right. Your friend. From the assay office. The one they took away. Did she know about you? Your background?"
"No! God, I don't think so, I was careful. If she knew, I'd have been dragged in days ago. She ..." Nagy dropped his head into his hands for a minute, then raised it, took a breath. "I never knew her on Mars. We only met after I got here and started to work. As far as she knew, I was Val Williams, from Earth, I was a clerk for a survey company."
"She never worked for AreTech?"
"No, she worked in the assay bureau. That's a government office."
"What about Ortega?" Garibaldi asked. "Do you know how he came onto Babylon 5? Did he have a fake identicard like you did? Under another name? Where do you think he might have gotten such a thing if he wasn't mixed up in the Free Mars organization?"
"I don't know." A pause. "Maybe. If he knew the right people."
"What right people?" But Garibaldi's link interrupted him. "Mr. Garibaldi, you're wanted at the Shuttle Bay. There's been another killing. It's Lieutenant Khatib."
Khatib? Murdered? As if things weren't already complicated enough!
Jumping up, he said, "I'll be right there." But he paused, turned back to Nagy. "You're a lucky man, Nagy He was out there looking for you, too. And, take my word for it, you're glad he didn't find you before I did."
CHAPTER 24
"Alpha Leader, this is Alpha Three. Are you all right out there?"
"Everything's under control, Alpha Three. I'm just stopping to pick up a piece of ... salvage. What's the situation there?"
"Raiders are all scragged. Alpha Four sustained minor damage, but Moy is all right. And we've made contact with the Duster, we're going to rendezvous with her now." He gave the coordinates.
"I'll meet you there, Three."
Ivanova returned to her work, making the grapples fast between her ship and the raider. She meant to tow the crippled hulk over to the Duster, now that it had shown up, and transfer her prisoner to the transport for the trip back to Babylon 5. She was worried that her prisoner's sudden willingness to talk might take on less urgency, now that he was no longer at immediate risk of being hosed with charged plasma.
Not, she thought sourly, that he'd stopped talking yet.
"Say, Earthforce, how long's this little trip going to take? I haven't got all the oxygen in the universe, you know. Even scum like me needs to breathe. What are you going to do if I start to run short on air?"
"Watch you turn blue," Ivanova snapped, which she regretted a moment later. It only seemed to encourage him.
"Kinda hard to talk without air, Earthforce."
"Then why don't you start saving it?"
"I got a lot to say, you know. About our operations, contacts. It'd be too bad if I ran out of breathing room before I got a chance to tell you all about it."
But when she no longer responded, the raider eventually went silent. In fact, he was quiet for so long that Ivanova finally started to worry: maybe it hadn't been a bluff, maybe he'd really run out of oxy. She ran a quick scan, saw he was still alive. And the Duster was just ahead now, just about ten minutes away.
"Alpha Three, this is Alpha Leader, how do things stand?"
"This is Alpha Three. The Duster has room in its shuttle bay, so we're stowing Alpha Four in there for the trip back."
"You say Moy is all right?"
"She's fine, Commander. But her ship's got one wing that doesn't look like it wants to take a lot of stress."
This suddenly appeared to Ivanova as a solution to her problem. "Do you think she's in shape to fly my ship home?"
"One minute, Alpha Leader, I'll check." A moment later, "She says no problem. Are you all right, Commander?"
"I'm fine. I just want to stay with my salvage on the way back to the station."
"We'll be expecting you, Alpha Leader."
A few minutes later, Ivanova cut thrusters and came in on a slow approach to the Duster, with the three intact Starfuries clustered around its bulk. The Duster was definitely in the supersized class of carriers.
She opened a channel to the transport's bridge. "This is Earthforce Commander Susan Ivanova, from Babylon 5. I'd like to speak to the pilot of the Duster."
"This is Bogdonovich, Senior Pilot. We were sure glad to see your reception committee."
"Glad to hear it, Mr. Bogdonovich. I understand you're taking one of our crippled ships onboard?"
"We've got plenty of room, Commander, it's no problem."
"Good. I'd like to know if you also have some kind of secure room onboard that I could use as a lockup."
Bogdonovich had obviously scanned the wreck of the raider ship she had in tow. "Prisoner, Commander?" he asked curiously.
"Let's say an item of salvage, Mr. Bogdonovich."
"If you say so. Sure, I have a place where you can stow your salvage. You can dock and bring it onboard through cargo hatch D."
"Good. And be careful loading it. I suspect it's still hazardous."
"I read you, Commander."
Ivanova opened the channel again to the raider ship. "This is Commander Ivanova. We're going to be bringing you onboard the transport shortly. This is just a reminder not to try anything. If you still want to keep on breathing."
"Whatever you say, Commander."
The raider's voice was a whisper now. Maybe he was really short of air. But Ivanova didn't waste time wondering about it. With practiced efficiency, she let loose the grapples to the raider and docked with the transport ship. She'd let the experienced crew handle the job of taking on the cargo. Before leaving her fighter, she took out her handgun and powered it on.
Moy was waiting, suited and helmeted, at the lock. "You're sure you're all right?" Ivanova wanted to know. "No problem with flying my ship back?"
"I'm fine, Commander. No problem at all." The transport's crew had already gotten the hulk of the raider's ship onboard through a cargo hatch when Ivanova arrived. She noted with satisfaction that she wasn't the only one armed. The crew seemed to have a security officer, that was good. She nodded at him, and he came over, spoke to her through his helmet radio, since the cargo bay was still unpressurized. "I'm Massie, Commander. Anything I can do to help?"
"Thank you, Mr. Massie. Just keep an eye on him for now."
While they were securing the wreck of the raider's ship and closing up the cargo hatch, Ivanova spoke to her prisoner again. "All right, as soon as your ship is secure, you can climb on out of there. Just remember, everyone here has more th
an sufficient reason to want to blow you out of that cockpit."
There was no reply, but the canopy of the pirate ship slid open slowly. Ivanova watched with her PPG trained on the cockpit as a helmet emerged, then the rest of the suited figure. He hung for a moment at the edge of the canopy, hesitating, then jumped down. For a moment his knees didn't seem to be able to hold him, then he grabbed hold of the remains of a wing strut and pulled himself upright with one hand. As soon as he did, he unlatched his helmet and pulled it off, taking great gasps of air, despite the fact that Ivanova's indicator showed the air pressure in the hold wasn't quite completely equalized yet. So maybe he did almost run out of air, she thought. The business end of her PPG still didn't waver in its aim, even when she unlatched her own helmet, handing it over to a crew member. "Can you keep this for me?"
"Sure, Commander."
She stepped up to the raider, who saw her approaching, straightened up, and turned to her with a wan, bloody grin. "So you're Ivanova, huh? Hey, from what I'd heard around, I was figuring on an old ice-axe. I'm Zaccione, but everybody calls me Zack."
Ivanova had no trouble recognizing his type and dismissing it. "Are you in need of medical attention?"
He waved a hand nonchalantly. "Hell, no. Just a scratch, like they say." But with his other hand, he was still clutching the base of the wing strut.
The transport's security officer had come up on the other side of the prisoner so they both had him under guard. "Commander Ivanova? What do you want done with him?"
"Does your ship have a medic?"
"Yes, we do."
"Good, we can get him patched up and scanned to make sure he has no hidden weapons."
"I have a scanner here with me." Massie ran the instrument up and down the raider's body. "Nope, he's clean."
"Good," Ivanova said again. To the prisoner, "Last chance. Do you want to see the medic, or not, before we talk?"
"If you insist."
Zaccione's injuries proved to be cracked ribs and a broken nose. "Clean him up," Ivanova ordered, "but don't be too generous with the painkillers. He's got a lot of talking to do and I don't want him nodding off."
Babylon 5 02 - Accusations (Tilton, Lois) Page 18