by John Scalzi
“Sorry about that.”
It’s kind of cool, actually, they sent. Like being in a movie. Now that it’s over, anyway. How is Donut?
“He’s fine. He’s in Tony’s room.”
If Tony wanted Donut to visit all he had to do was ask, they said. The rest of this wasn’t necessary.
“I’ll tell him you said so.”
Chris?
“Yeah?”
Is this going to be a regular sort of thing?
“I really, really hope not,” I said, and then hobbled over to Tony’s room.
“Don’t let the cat out,” he said as I opened the door, which was smart of him, as Donut was at the door, ready to bolt. Tony walked over and picked up the cat, who protested loudly. I came through the door and closed it behind me. Tony sat Donut back down. The cat immediately went back to the door and stood by it, looking at us. Let me out, you assholes, was clearly the message.
“You wanted to show me a pissed-off cat?” I asked, looking at the cat.
“No,” Tony said. “I want to show you what the pissed-off cat unlocked.”
I turned back to Tony. “What?”
“Come into my office,” Tony said, and sent me an invite to his personal space. I went in, and his room in our house, filled with him and an annoyed cat, disappeared, replaced by a neon-themed cavernous space.
“Look,” Tony said, and pointed to a monitor window he’d pulled up. On it was an index of files.
“The data vault,” I said.
“Bingo,” Tony said. “Turns out that what we needed to unlock the data vault on the cat’s collar was the actual cat. Donut’s got an implanted key transmitting in him somewhere, probably powered by his own body heat. But again, he has to be within a couple of meters of the data vault for it to unlock. If you’d kept the collar with the cat, we would have unlocked it days ago.”
I pointed at the files. “So what are these?”
“Well, some of them are spreadsheets and some of them are emails and some of them look like transaction records, and from what little I know about them, all of them look like what you really want to do is get stacks of forensics accountants in here to dig into them, fast, because no one locks all this stuff on a data vault hanging on a cat collar just for the fun of it.”
“Can you copy any of this?”
Tony shook his head. “Not a file. It’s all tied to the vault. I can try to make visual captures of the information but I will bet you there’s a shielding program on it that will register any capping effort and deny it.” He pointed to the data. “I’m guessing this can only be opened someplace like a personal space, too. Try to open it up on a standard monitor and it won’t port in. I mean, I’ve done that before, on proprietary information I don’t want others to see.”
“I assume there’s a way around that.”
“There’s a way around everything, Chris. But it takes time. Easier to bring the accountants here.”
“Or not,” I said.
“What are you thinking?” Tony asked.
“I’m thinking that whoever came here came to kill the cat.”
“Right.”
“Which means that they know Donut’s only good to us alive.”
“Yes.”
“So I think what I’m going to do right now is go back down and tell the Metro police that aside from the damage to our house and our threeps, some asshole in a tank threep made our cat run out into the street, where it got hit by a car.”
“Our poor cat,” Tony said, dryly.
“Right. And then I want you to very quietly take our furry friend over to the FBI building and get to work with those accountants you’re talking about.”
“Got it. Overnight rates apply, by the way.”
“I’m glad that you can still think about money,” I told Tony. “And before you go, talk to the twins about it. They’ve had a long day already.”
Out in the street I got with the Metro police, told my dead cat story while privately messaging Tayla to go along with it, and finished up just as Vann pulled up in her car.
“We’ve had an exciting night here,” I told her as she walked up.
Vann looked up, saw the carnage, and seemed about to comment on it, but stopped. “Your night is about to get more exciting,” she said. “Or at least longer.”
“What’s going on?” I said.
“You haven’t looked at the news tonight,” Vann said.
I motioned to the wreckage of the house and of the tank threep. “We’ve been kind of busy on our own,” I said.
“They found Marla Chapman,” Vann said.
“Where?”
“Outside Kim Silva’s house. She’s dead, Chris. And it looks like she tried to take Silva with her.”
“So we’re going to Boston, is what I’m hearing.”
Vann shook her head. “I’m going to Boston. And then Brookline, which is where Silva’s house is.”
“Why aren’t I going?” I asked.
“One, look at your threep. You’ve wrecked another one.”
“I didn’t wreck it alone,” I said, defensively. “I had help.”
“Two, you don’t need to go to Boston. You need to speak to Kim Silva.”
“I thought you said Marla Chapman tried to kill her.”
“She tried. She didn’t succeed. She’s in Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s ICU unit, but she’s alive and she’s conscious, and she wants to talk. She said the only person she wants to talk to is you.”
Chapter Eighteen
“I don’t recognize this place,” I said to Kim Silva, after I entered her private space and looked around. It was a beach, and a lush, green woods came straight up to the sand.
“That’s because it doesn’t exist,” she said. “Well. Doesn’t exist like this now. It’s Dauphin Island. It’s in Alabama.”
“Does it not exist anymore?” I asked.
“There used to be more of it,” she said. “It’s a barrier island that’s getting eaten away by the ocean. But we used to go to Dauphin Island when I was a kid. Before I got Haden’s. My mother’s family was from the area and we’d go and visit my great-aunt every summer for a couple of weeks. We’d run around the beaches and chase birds. After I got Haden’s I didn’t go again. I missed it.”
“It’s nice,” I said.
“Thank you. When I signed with the Bays, one of the very first things I did was upgrade my personal space. I had my designer look at maps from the island from the twentieth century, so I could have the whole island back. And then I took out every bit of human existence, except for my great-aunt’s beach house.” Silva pointed east, down the beach. “It’s down there a ways.”
I nodded to the bit of beach we were on. “So this is your public entrance,” I said.
“Actually you’re only the second person I’ve ever had here,” Silva said. “The first was Duane. I had him come in from here because I liked walking down the beach with him.”
We had a nice moment watching the smallish waves come in from the simulated Gulf of Mexico, while pelicans glided down and dipped their beaks into the water.
“How are you feeling?” I asked Silva, after a minute.
“I’m not feeling anything right now,” she said. “I’ve got a bullet wound in my abdomen and some glass shards from where that bitch shot out my windows, but they gave me a nerve block right below my neck. I’m in worse shape than I feel. If I suddenly zone out on you, or disappear, that’s why.”
“I understand.”
“I’m tempted to get my tank threep, find Marla, and punch her into next week.”
“Marla Chapman’s dead,” I told Silva. “They found her body in your yard.”
Silva took this in. “A suicide?”
“Everything points to one.”
“But you don’t think so.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m curious what you think. And why you decided that I was the only one you wanted to talk to.”
Let’s walk,” she said,
and started walking down the beach of Dauphin Island, away, I noted, from where she said her house there was.
“You met Marla?” Silva asked me, as we walked.
“After Duane died,” I said.
“Did she strike you as the suicidal type?”
“It’s hard to say after one meeting,” I said. “Especially one in a situation like that. She was distraught, definitely. And angry.”
“Angry is her thing,” Silva said. “At least that’s how Duane explained it. I knew her, of course. Everyone on the teams knows everyone else’s partners. There’s nothing about her that makes me think she would kill herself.”
“Her husband died and she discovered he was having an affair,” I pointed out.
“That would make her want to kill me,” Silva said. “That’s the part I don’t have any problem believing. Normally, anyway.”
“Ms. Silva.”
“Go ahead and call me Kim,” Silva said. “You’re here in my personal space. That counts as being on a first-name basis.”
“Kim. I think there’s something you want to tell me, and I think all things considered it’s probably something we should get right to.”
Silva stopped and looked at me. “First. Did you go to the press about Duane and me having an affair? Please don’t lie to me.”
“No, I didn’t,” I said.
Silva held up her hand, pinky up. “Pinky swear.”
I smiled at this despite myself. “Really?”
“Really. Chris—I’m going to call you Chris, okay?”
“If I’m calling you Kim, that seems fair.”
“Chris, right now my body is in a fucking hospital with a gunshot wound. And while I’m making chitchat with you on the beach at the moment, what I really want to do is run screaming and never stop running.”
“You’d run out of beach eventually,” I said.
“It’s an island.”
“Fair.”
Silva waggled her hand. “I’m asking you for a pinky swear because I’m shot, the man I loved is dead and so is his wife, I’m tired and I’m hurt and I don’t know who to trust at this point, but I need to trust someone. I want you to be it, Chris. I kind of need you to be it.”
I hooked my pinky into hers. “Pinky swear,” I said. “I didn’t go to the press. I didn’t go to anyone. I told my partner. She would rather push a reporter down a stairwell than talk to one.”
“That sounds vaguely totalitarian.”
“It’s not. She’s just cranky. Reporters are just one group on the list.”
“I’ve been blackmailing the league,” Silva said.
“How?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Give it to me as simply as you can.”
“The league is funded by bad people, and they’re setting up their upcoming foreign leagues to launder a shitload of money.”
“You have evidence of this?”
Silva nodded. “Lots of it.”
“How did you get it?”
“I have a fan in St. Petersburg who is very good at getting into confidential files. He asked if he could trade them for some signed merchandise.”
“You didn’t ask for them?”
“It wouldn’t have occurred to me to ask for them. Once I had them, though, I decided I was going to put them to use.”
“Your contract,” I said.
“What? No,” Silva said, scornfully. “I earned that thing on my own. I don’t know if you noticed but I dragged the Bays to the championship last year.”
I smiled. “So I heard. But then what?”
“A place for Duane in one of the international leagues.”
“I thought he was going to try to be in the expansion draft for the new teams in the NAHL,” I said.
Silva shook her head. “He was eligible but he’d never have been a franchise player in the NAHL. I loved him, but I also played with him every week and practiced with him every day. He wasn’t at that level. Not here in North America, at least. But he could have been a star in Europe or Asia. He could have helped the league develop talent there as a player and then as a manager. It would have given him what he wanted. It would have made him happy. Then we would have been happy.”
“May I ask an indelicate question?”
“What is it?”
“Couldn’t you have just asked? You’re one of the sport’s biggest stars. They have a vested interest in keeping you happy. You wouldn’t be the first celebrity to get a sweetheart deal for a sweetheart.”
“I did ask. I was told that wasn’t how it worked. Then I asked again, and I was told I shouldn’t ask again. So I said, fine, and told them I had the receipts and if they wanted them to go away they should do what I tell them.”
“I imagine that didn’t go over well.”
Silva smiled. “No, it didn’t. But it did escalate me upwards. Before I was just talking to Pena and Kreisberg,” she said, naming the Boston Bays’ coach and owner. “After I made my threat I was dealing with Alex Kaufmann.”
“Why Kaufmann?” I asked.
“Because he was the league’s point man for developing the foreign leagues. Also, he was the league’s go-to guy for driving hard bargains and dealing with difficult partners. You know. An asshole.”
“And he went along with your plan.”
“We were still negotiating it.”
“Then Duane died.”
“Yes. And then so did Alex. And then you found the apartment and our threeps, which implicated me. That’s when Medina told me to talk to you, with him and Pena in the room. He wanted to make sure I didn’t talk to you about the foreign leagues.”
“Medina knows you tried to blackmail the league.”
“He’s its general counsel, of course he knew.”
“And he also knew about the plan to launder money through these foreign leagues.”
Silva looked at me. “He’s the general counsel,” she repeated.
“A lot can happen in the lower ranks without the people in the upper ranks knowing,” I said. “Or at least without them having a direct link to it.”
“Come on,” Silva said. “If he knew what I was doing, he knew what else was going on.”
“Medina didn’t want you to tell me about the foreign leagues. But you’re telling me now. Without counsel of any kind, I should add, which isn’t necessarily smart from a legal point of view. I feel obliged to tell you that because we pinky swore.”
“Thank you.” Silva reached down and picked up a shell on the beach, examined it for a moment, and then set it back down. “Duane’s dead. Marla’s dead. Alex Kaufmann’s dead, for some reason I just can’t figure out. I’m not dead, but it’s pretty obvious someone wants me to be. That’s why the news about me and Duane leaked in the first place. To give a reason for Marla to take a shot at me. I’m Haden. It’s hard for me to run and hide, Chris. At this point, possibly being hauled up on blackmail charges is the least of my problems.”
“You still have this evidence,” I said. “Of the money laundering in the foreign leagues.”
Silva looked away. “Yes.”
“And you’re willing to give it to us.”
“Yes.”
“And it’s reliable.”
Silva looked back at me. “I have a bullet hole in me, Chris. It’s not there because the information I have is bullshit. That’s why we’re talking right now.”
“Because the information isn’t bullshit?”
“Because I’m in the hospital with a bullet hole. Medina isn’t a Haden. He forgets I can talk to you without him seeing me do it. And no one is going to think that I’ll do it right before surgery.”
“And what are you going to do if someone asks if you’ve talked to me or Agent Vann?”
“I’m going to lie my ass off, is what I’m going to do.”
I smiled at this. “Seems reasonable.”
“Just one thing, Chris,” Silva said.
“Yes, Kim?”
“Whatever you’re going to
do, do it soon. I don’t think they’re done with me. I’d like not to die.”
“Imagine being worth eighty million dollars and still being afraid for your life,” Vann said, after I had caught her up. “On second thought that might not be a stretch for you.”
“Thanks,” I said, dryly. I was standing in my personal space while she, in Boston, ported in from Boston through the use of her glasses. She was represented by a relatively rudimentary avatar. She looked like herself but in a lazy, computer - animation - from - the - turn - of - the - century way. Tony was also there, looking like himself. It was past midnight by this point. “That said, her fear at this point is entirely reasonable.”
“And entirely her own fault,” Vann said.
“That’s not entirely accurate,” I said.
“All right, let me ask you: You’ve been sent a stack of documents suggesting your employer is in bed with the mafia in Europe and Asia. Is your first impulse to say to yourself, ‘How excellent, now I will blackmail my employer with these incriminating documents to get favors for my boy toy, surely neither my employer nor the mafia will mind in the slightest’?”
“She’s not wrong,” Tony observed.
“I wouldn’t have put it that way,” I said.
“Of course you wouldn’t, you did that dumbass ‘pinky swear’ thing with her,” Vann said. “You’re best friends forever now.”
“You saw Marla Chapman’s body,” I said to her. “Was it a suicide?”
“It looks like a suicide. Single shot to the head, with the same handgun used to shoot up Silva’s house in Brookline. The shots went through a bedroom window. Silva used her home threep to shield her body once the shooting started. We have it on video because of Silva’s home-monitoring equipment.”
“Anything of the shooter?”
Vann shook her head. “Nothing useful.”
“So it could have been someone else,” I said. “If it was meant to be a pro hit, they would have made more of an effort than just shooting through a window with a handgun.”
“Silva was shot,” Vann pointed out. “You didn’t get this because you were walking beaches with a virtual version of her, but she was seriously injured. If that bullet had carved a slightly different path in her torso, she’d be dead. It’s luck she survived, not luck that she was hit. She’s not playing in Friday’s opener, that’s for sure.”