by Sage Walker
So some of the Seed Bankers had, in fact, seen the figures, and not said anything about them. As Helt thought he would have done himself—for a few hours.
“Where did you find the list of names you gave Doughan?” Helt asked.
“From the deposits.” Archer looked up at Helt with a puzzled expression, as if he’d just noticed someone else was in the room.
“Not in Cash Ryan’s records?”
“No.”
“Not in the Odell Chalmers stash?”
“I haven’t studied those documents at all,” Archer said.
“Ryan couldn’t have done it?”
“No. I thought he might have used right-to-forget protocols on some of the information, but they don’t work and never did and aren’t legal anyway. To fake his transcripts and such he used something so transparent it shouldn’t have worked.”
Archer sounded bemused, as if he were thinking out loud and no one was around to listen to him.
“It took me longer than it should have to sort out what he’d done. I was expecting sophistication. Ryan simply copied the documents to his own files, changed the numbers he wanted changed, reformatted them to match the styles of the websites they came from. And then he put up links to the original documents, but nobody bothered to follow them. They were legit links, but, after all, the info David I wanted was already right there in front of him.” Archer sighed. “And I imagine David II simply followed his lead. Trust is a dangerous thing, Helt. Never trust it.”
“Where’s Doughan?” Helt asked.
Archer turned back to his screen and brought up a locator map. He pointed at Doughan’s dot on it, in the SysSu building. In Archer’s office. “Right here.”
On Archer’s desk, close to the visitor’s chair, Doughan’s interface stared blind at the ceiling.
He’d seen Archer like this before, lost in his work, in pursuit of something he was determined to find, Helt told himself, except that really wasn’t so. He’d never seen Archer quite so detached from the room around him, so unaware of his actual physical space. “Doughan’s right here.” Right.
Helt would have to review whatever Archer found here tonight, and he knew it.
Please, not senility, don’t let it be that, he pleaded to the forces of entropy. Maybe there’s a way to march him to Calloway for some diagnostics and maybe Nadia could help get him there. It might be diet. It might be fatigue; it might be shame that he had done something remarkably stupid and should have known better.
One of ours. If he didn’t find the culprit Helt would be forced to accept that it was Archer. Archer would do it … to protect the ship. To protect a friend. Archer wouldn’t do it.
Helt wondered if Mena had taken on the job of making sure Archer got the occasional balanced meal; Archer had said she brought him galaktobourekos, but maybe she brought him other things as well. For tonight, it was unlikely Archer, or SysSu’s records, would come to further harm. Copies of the Seed Banker stuff were in NSS records, and Helt was being a hovering old maid.
Helt reached down and picked up Doughan’s interface. “I guess Doughan forgot this. I’ll take it to him. Good hunting, Archer.”
He left the old man there, facing a screen filled with strings of code.
* * *
Out in the damp dark, he zipped up his windbreaker and shoved his free hand in a pocket. Doughan might have gone to his office. He might have gone home. Both of those locations could be checked easily enough. Helt walked toward The Lab. Elena was in Stonehenge.
Helt. I’ll be working late.
Elena. I missed some of it, but wow. Just wow. Audio?
“Sure,” Helt said.
Elena was in her dark lab with her embryos, and all that her camera saw of her face was a doubled red dot, an indicator light reflected from the lenses of her infrared goggles.
“I’m working late, too” Elena said. “The path reports came in from Mass General.”
“Any surprises?” Helt asked.
“Some news. Some important news. He had a small, deformed amygdala. I texted Jim. He was right about that.”
The man really had been a psychopath. There were physical defects in his brain. It felt so cold, so useless, to have proof of it now.
“I ran methylation assays on his neural DNA. I was looking for elevations, like you see with intrauterine stress or PTSD syndromes, but he’s remarkably free of them. As if he’d never been stressed by anything. It’s a marker on how he saw the world. The lack of markers is also a mark.”
The hums of quiet motors and a gentle, tidelike swishing sound filled her lab.
“Really, truly a psychopath?” Helt asked.
“Or really, truly, an unexpected death. I wonder if Jim ever talked to his mother.” Elena was only a voice; she had moved away from the indicator light.
“He was trying. Could you ask him?” Helt stood outside the faux-oak door of the tavern called The Lab and stared at the black screen of his interface. There was information to be found inside; who had come with Jerry and Nadia, who had not, and why. But he couldn’t sit in the warmth and nurse a brew and let the chatter fill in some of the blanks for him; Doughan had gone missing.
“Tonight?” Elena asked.
“It’s not that late. If I finish up early”—yeah, right, his inner voice told him—“should I come up to Stonehenge?”
“I don’t know,” Elena said. She looked away. “Jim’s calling. Check in now and again, okay?”
“Okay.”
* * *
The group from SysSu had picked a big round table crowded with mugs and glasses, dotted with red glass lights and pitchers of beer and bowls of salted peanuts. Severo faced the door, as always. He was deep in conversation with Martin Kumar, who sat next to Nadia. Jerry was on her other side. Then Akila Shenouda beside Officer Evans; Ueda and Giliam next. They had their heads together about something. Brugera and Yves were diagramming football plays, four hands drawing air pictures over a barrage of Spanish and Italian that may have been mutually comprehensible to them, but perhaps not to Kelly Halkett. He sat between the two of them and watched the display with a pleased expression on his face.
Susanna wasn’t there. Andrea Doan wasn’t, either. Jerry looked up from his unfolded screen and gave a wave. Helt waved back and took one of the empty chairs between Giliam and Yves.
To Jerry. Helt. I’m going walkabout with Yves. Alibis on Luseno and Halkett yet?
Jerry. Not yet.
Helt. More Ryan info here?
Jerry. Go away and we’ll get some. We’re having fun.
Helt figured that meant Jerry and Nadia were building some bridges with this group and Helt was, as yet, too heavy to walk on them. Trust is a tender thing, and Helt didn’t really deserve it, not with this group. It would take time to develop some, if it could ever be done. If he was here to do the work after the last shuttle left.
“And that was the win for Real Madrid,” Oriol Bruguera said, in English.
“Well played,” Kelly Halkett said. “You bring back the game as if you had watched it live.” He shoved a glass in Helt’s direction and lifted a pitcher. Helt waved it aside.
“Can’t tonight,” Helt said.
“I did watch it live,” Oriol said.
“From your mother’s lap?” Yves asked.
“From my dad’s. I was two years old. I remember it like yesterday.”
“And the next game?” Yves asked.
“I remember nothing about that one. Nada.”
Yves shook his head in sympathy. “I understand, brother.”
Helt grabbed a handful of peanuts and put them in a pocket. He took more and began to munch them.
Kelly Halkett looked at his companions and then at Helt. “So you’re still working tonight.”
Helt swallowed his peanuts. “I am,” Helt said.
“There was another thing this group of accused asked me to tell you before we came up to the big room. It’s that we, any and all of us, want to help find these killer
s. What we might offer is unclear, but we’re trainable.”
Yves and Oriol added grave nods of assent.
“Thank you,” Helt said. The statement had been the group’s decision after they had been told they were singled out as Bad Guys. Even knowing that, they’d offered their support. Yeah, maybe they thought the offer would make them look more sympathetic to a hostile observer, but Helt didn’t think this was a PR maneuver. It felt more like an expression of an ancient imperative. The tribe is threatened; we must protect it.
Doughan had told Helt he had a character flaw, that he would have sympathy for the devil himself. And here sat Kelly Halkett, whose whereabouts on the night of the murder were still unknown, saying he wanted to help with a criminal investigation that could possibly lead to charges against him. Doughan’s comment had been close to the mark, but what Helt felt for Kelly Halkett was both sympathy and admiration. “You’re still willing to say that, even though we stalked you due to a mistake we made?” Helt asked.
“My calculations say that you began corrective action to rectify your mistake with all due speed, Mr. Borresen. That implies you’re knowledgeable about the structural limitations of the materials you work with.”
“Meaning humans.” Helt swallowed hard. He’d need to get some water before he left. “Myself among them. I accept the offer of help, with gratitude. For tonight, I’d like to borrow Yves.”
Yves, a man he scarcely knew, a man he hadn’t managed to find time to talk to since he’d asked him to take a portfolio to David II, a man whose partner had been grilled, and not pleasantly, by him and the execs. Yves, who could have killed Cash Ryan out of jealousy.
“Just Yves?” Oriol Bruguera asked.
“For tonight, yes.” Oriol looked disappointed.
Yves narrowed his eyes and gave Helt a look-over. Assessing for structural damage, maybe. Assessing for vulnerable points where damage might be inflicted, by Yves, physically. The sculptor shrugged and pushed his beer mug aside. “Yeah, sure. Let’s go.”
“As soon as I get some water.” Helt grabbed a clean mug and got up. He headed for the bar to beg water and stopped on his way past Severo. “Have you seen Doughan?”
“I thought he was with Archer.”
“He’s not there now. He left his interface in Archer’s office. If you see him, tell him I have it.”
“You might try his quarters. It’s time for dinner, you know.”
“I know,” Helt said. “I’ll see if he’s home.” On his way back to the table, drinking water while he walked, it was just so perfectly damned clear that Jerry and Nadia and Martin Kumar were a trio, and happy about it.
Helt put his empty glass down on a table. Yves was waiting at the door, and he looked impatient.
* * *
Yves beside him on the clean, rain-washed street. The night was programmed for cloudy skies.
“I owe Susanna a personal apology,” Helt said. “I hoped she would be with you guys.”
“Nah, she went home to sleep for a while. She has the night shift at the clinic.”
“Then I shouldn’t bother her.”
“You bother her already,” Yves said. “You knew she was with me when the murder happened. She knew that you knew that.”
But there was still the possibility that Yves could have killed Ryan outside the SM hour and stashed the body to wait until there was a safe way to move it. There was still a possibility that Susanna might have helped him do it, or killed Ryan herself.
“Susanna says half the time she was wondering what had you so uncomfortable and the other half she wanted to choke you. Yeah, you have some explaining to do,” Yves said.
“Maybe I could talk to her at the clinic,” Helt said. The clinic would be quiet. Helt liked night shifts. The camaraderie was different, the pace slower. For most jobs, anyway.
“You didn’t haul me out here to tell me that,” Yves said.
“No. I’m looking for a cold place with air in it, between Navigation and the Athens elevator,” Helt said. And to find out if Yves had anything to hide, and to find out if the Special Investigator could sort if Yves was faking the scenario. “So I came to the expert.”
Yves muttered some words that might have been Italian, but he didn’t deny his expertise. “You mean a place a hardhat might know that a farmer or a nerd wouldn’t.” They turned a corner. “This isn’t the quickest way to the elevator.”
“I thought I’d drop off Doughan’s interface. He left it in SysSu.”
Doughan’s street was lined with four-story townhouses, vaguely reminiscent of medieval Europe, maybe Amsterdam, set back from the street with plenty of greenery to look at rather than a canal. Light showed behind the drapes on the ground floor at Doughan’s address. Helt called the house unit; it should be live. The request went to Doughan’s study, here, and to his office in Navigation below. There was no answer. Helt climbed the stone steps and knocked on the door. Wi-Vi showed no motion inside. Helt’s records said no voice, no noise in there since this morning.
“No one’s there,” Yves said.
“Maybe he’s in his office.” Helt looked at the street camera view of Doughan’s house on his interface. He waved to himself as he and Yves walked away, followed by invisible snail trails of position locator blips. We were here, Doughan. We are looking for you. And if I’m at risk from Yves, I’m as covered as I know how to be.
“Cold places with air,” Yves said. They took the elevator down and got on the train for the shuttleport.
Helt sent him the scenario for Ryan’s death, the chilling that caused uncontrolled spasms of Ryan’s heart, and then death, and then, later, the push from the tower.
He sent himself into the history of Archer Pelham, skimmed past his early brilliance in IT circles and found some surprising barriers about personal information. Helt came in sideways on one of them and found Archer Pelham’s mother’s name, and in two clicks he was in Silicon Valley, briefly, and then in an overlay of the world’s wealth. Archer was a black sheep billionaire, never mentioned in public, and worth three times that from his own early IT work. He could have popped the money in the Seed Banker accounts via his connections with the Northern Coalition. The amounts were trivial to someone with Archer’s resources. But his qualifications to be here weren’t based on his grandmother’s money. They were his own, and Helt grieved for him.
“So that’s how it was,” Yves said. He meant the murder.
“We think so.”
Yves looked out at the stone tunnel rushing by. Helt was looking for any reaction, any certainty, that would tell him whether or not Yves Copani had been involved in Ryan’s murder. Yves seemed to be treating this request as a problem to be solved, nothing more.
The sculptor was wearing his work coveralls, good protection against a wide range of temperatures, but Cash Ryan had died in civvies. Helt might get cold tonight, but he wasn’t planning to stay anywhere long.
Doughan wasn’t in his office on Level Two. The shuttleport complex was empty except for the watching eyes of its cameras. Helt used Doughan’s interface to call Severo.
“You don’t look much like Doughan,” Severo said. He was at home.
“Who’s that?” Daria asked. Severo’s daughter was sitting next to him, reading a book to her father. Bright primary colors from the screen painted both of their faces. Daria was wearing blue pajamas with feet under a pink tutu with sequins on it. She was a five-year-old ballerina tonight, and looked the part.
“It’s Helt,” Severo said.
“Oh.”
“I’ll leave Doughan’s interface outside his office door,” Helt said. “Is the book exciting?”
“It’s not exciting. It’s soothing,” Daria said. “I’m reading him to sleep!”
“Does it work?” Helt asked.
“Every time,” Severo said with an exaggerated yawn. He leaned back in his big chair and closed his eyes.
“One thing. Is anybody on duty in the shuttleport at night?” Helt asked.
“Nah,” Severo said. “The officer on night duty watches the place unless a shuttle’s incoming. Everything we could do for an emergency response is automated. Fire, flood, intruders, even, just push a button.”
“Thank you. Good night,” Helt said.
“Shhh!” Daria put her index finger on her lip and frowned at Helt. She looked down at the book in her lap.
“… Thyme flies,” Daria read. “Daddy, that’s not spelled right.”
“English spelling doesn’t have good rules like Spanish,” Severo said. There’s T, I, M, E, time, and the owl in the story is confused. T, H, Y, M, E is a plant. There’s some growing in the kitchen.”
“There’s some growing in the kitchen.” Helt looked down to hide the tears in his eyes. He was back in his mother’s lap, and the book was the same, and he’d questioned the same word in the same place and she had said exactly the same thing.
He’d had ten years with her before she changed, and all of them had been good.
Helt blew Daria a kiss and put Doughan’s interface down in front of the Navigation office door, in plain sight of the cameras.
“The whole industrial park is full of cold places with air in them,” Yves said. “It would take us two, three days to look at them all.”
They walked to the center of the lobby. “We can narrow it some,” Helt said. “I need a place where people won’t stare when you walk by, because this whole thing began after a day shift. Whoever works near Nav offices would still have been there.”
“Stick him in the airlock,” Yves said. “Nobody goes in there unless there’s a shuttle.”
“I’m looking for a room-sized space. That one’s too big.”
“Too big for what?” Yves asked.
“Too big not to show on power use monitors if somebody cycled the airlock. There were no blips down here on Wednesday.”
“You’re thinking like a nerd. You need to think like an architect.”
“Why?”
“If you design a structure, you have to design in places for somebody to be when they build it. You have to have access space to hide the machinery you don’t want to look at and a way to get to it to fix it.”
“Is there a way to get back to the elevator so the security cameras wouldn’t see you? We don’t show Cash Ryan anywhere after he got off shift on Wednesday. He worked out on the skin and then he changed into civvies and went somewhere and vanished.”