Kilel was livid. “Knowingly interfering with a natural process in a protected area without permission is a crime.” She rarely caught environmental criminals red-handed, and finding an illegal wildlife camera so soon after a devastating fire unhinged her. She tore the camera from its mount and held it out to Anne. “This is why the earth is in so much trouble. People like you have no sensitivity for nature. You never let anything alone. You never let nature take its course. When will you stop trying to make nature into something it’s not?”
“It’s just a camera,” Anne said, not understanding Kilel’s rage. “We’ve done nothing wrong.”
Kilel regarded the tiny device as if it were a weapon. So much death and destruction in the last centuries. If only oil was never refined and the internal combustion engine was never invented, then we wouldn’t have the carbon problem and the Warming. If only Martin Scribb and Algid hadn’t caused the methane spike. If only, if only, if only...
Kilel did not voice her rage. Her professionalism kept her from spitting at Anne Penn for the girl’s interference with nature’s order. She reached into her breast pocket and pulled out a small manila envelope imprinted with the word “Evidence.” She dropped in the camera and returned the envelope to her pocket. She realized she had more leverage over Anne than before. The girl was liable for an environmental crime. She would not arrest her, for now. Perhaps the threat would loosen Anne’s tongue about her father.
Kilel walked back toward the ranch house, then made a sharp turn to the campsite. She opened the flap to the nearest tent.
“Hey,” Mike said. “That’s my property. You have no right—”
Kilel saw a sleeping bag and a lamp. She moved on to the other tent, presumably Anne’s.
Anne spoke with resolve. “I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
Kilel continued to rummage through Anne’s tent. She had a few books, and a box with scorched items salvaged from the fire. Kilel took the box outside. “Let’s see what we have here.”
“How dare you!” Anne reached out to grab her things, but Kilel moved away, like a child playing keep-away.
“Get off my property right now.”
“Or what? You’ll call the police?”
“Anne asked you to leave. My father is a police officer.” The younger Schmidt exploded in anger. The basset hound barked as if agreeing. “This is why we hate you. You don’t care anything about the environment. You’re nothing but a fucking bully.”
Kilel carelessly tossed the box on the trampled grass. “You forget that I’m investigating an environmental crime. No, a series of environmental crimes on your property, Anne. I’m perfectly within the law.” A good lawyer would challenge her search of the campsite if it ever came before a judge, but Kilel needed more information from Anne, and a judge’s wrist-slap was nothing. “Anne, I’ve tried to be reasonable, but you haven’t been very helpful.”
“What are you talking about? I told you that he might go to Yesler City and find a ship. That’s what he did. You said so.”
“True, but it wasn’t enough. I think you know more. I think you know where your father is.”
Anne shook her head, disbelieving.
“And once I find your father,” Kilel said, eyes blazing, “I’ll deal with you.”
CHAPTER 16
♦ ♦ ♦
THE FIFTY-THREE STORIES OF THE David Maynard Medical Center towered over Colonel Raleigh Penn like a gigantic doom-predicting stele, intensifying his foul mood. The indecisive Seattle weather reversed itself from spring sun to winter rain, and the prospect of poking, prodding, sampling, and interminable waiting for a doctor—even the best one of his specialty on the planet—irritated him like a splash of raindrops down his back.
A call from Kilel irritated him further. “You found nothing?” The tires of the colonel’s car squealed as the AI turned the vehicle into the medical center’s underground parking garage. “The information I gave you is extremely reliable.”
“We may have missed the target.”
“What about the sensing equipment?” The colonel rubbed his eyes against the throbbing in his skull. “It’s brand-new and cost half my equipment budget. I expect it to work.”
“We analyzed the samples again and the data is inconclusive.” Kilel sighed. “We didn’t have enough to justify a further search.”
“We’ve seized property and arrested people on less evidence, Inspector.”
“I believe petroleum was on board, somewhere, but I can’t prove it.”
The auto’s headlights reflected off a concrete wall. “I asked you to take on this investigation because you get results. You need to be more aggressive, Inspector.”
“Sir, with respect, you asked for my help only a few weeks ago. I can’t be held responsible for sources I don’t know.”
“My sources are the best.” The colonel’s voice was edgy.
“My training, sir, requires me to find evidence, then act.” Kilel spoke her next words with care. “How would it look if an inspector, just assigned, acted on impulse, made an indefensible arrest, and you were blamed?”
The colonel had to grant that option was a bad one. Kilel impressed him with her fearlessness. Years ago, when he came across her name on a list of candidates for recruitment, he had noticed a methodical approach to problem-solving, coupled with a relentlessness that was awe-inspiring. She once donned an atmospheric diving suit to get a firsthand look at the ancient remnants of an oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. If he convinced her to join BES, she had the potential to crack the most difficult cases of environmental crimes. She had one weakness: a temper. Janine Kilel was an angry woman.
“Kilel, I didn’t realize you were a politician as well as a police officer. I’m grateful for your foresight,” the colonel said. “Keep an eye on that ship.”
“I have other information, Colonel.” Kilel cleared her throat. “Your niece, Anne Penn, said Port Simpson was the most likely place where her father, your brother, would turn up. One of our contacts reported a man fitting his description had checked into one of the Yesler City flophouses.”
“Apparently, you didn’t find him, Inspector.”
“The Aganippe’s crew manifest was not in order. He may have been on that ship.”
“All the more incentive for you to keep it in your sights.” Bill may be on that ship. “It would be interesting if he were connected to the smuggling.”
Venom flecked her voice. “It would compound his crimes.”
“The one is a small thing compared to refusing to obey the laws against the transportation and consumption of earth-destroying fuels.”
The colonel closed the connection. He doubted his brother had anything to do with the smuggling ring; Nothing about his record suggested recklessness. However, Raleigh knew his brother marginally. When he had left home at eighteen to join the military, Bill was six at the time. They had never really known each other; it was differences with his parents that had driven Raleigh away. For most of his career, Raleigh kept thoughts of his brother at bay. His illness broke down these defenses, and regrets snuck up on the colonel like an unwelcome secret.
For her part, Anne intrigued, disturbed and surprised the colonel. She was a bright young woman who might have been his daughter in another life. Are blood ties that powerful? The decision to deposit the video file in her com account was an impulse borne on an instinctive trust of her. Could she be an ally, even a friend? She would accept the file as an odd gift from a distant relative, and not even BES techs would think to look there for notes and scraps of evidence embedded among the pixels of an innocuous family holo-vid. Instincts honed to needle-sharpness warned Raleigh that he was a layer or two from the center of a petroleum conspiracy that could wipe him from public memory. They’d find a way to disidentify me, just like Martin Scribb. The laughing images of Bill, Molly, and the infant Anne were his insurance against failure.
In the Medical Center’s lobby, Colonel Penn removed his raincoat, and he attempted
to ignore the ever-present pressure deep in his head, like a gagged demon. The pain was a reminder that in this building, he wasn’t a powerful law enforcer who made his own rules and had the power to pluck anyone off the street if they so much as littered. Instead, Colonel Raleigh Penn was a test subject, no different than the caged rats and mice from the days of animal experimentation.
Furthermore, the colonel resented his dependence on the godlike—from the rat’s perspective—Dr. Maureen Pierson, the most brilliant cancer researcher and treatment specialist of the century. She was why the colonel was in Seattle. His doctors referred him to Pierson after they had exhausted all the other treatment options for his terminal illness. The researcher’s experiments offered the colonel hope of survival, but it meant handing over control of his life to a stranger in exchange for a promise of time. After months of treatment by Pierson, Colonel Penn suspected the specialist may have lost the razor-sharp scientific mind attributed to her.
In Pierson’s office, the colonel sat in a plush, stained chair in front of the doctor’s desk. He imagined the faint spots on the upholstery as the dried tears of those who had lost hope, or had found it. Ten minutes passed. Fifteen. Pierson walked through the door, and after a handshake, the doctor wrote a novel’s worth of notes on her tablet, pushing the colonel to the edge of madness.
Pierson removed her glasses. “So, Raleigh, how are you feeling today?”
“Fine, apart from the fact that I’ve got a brain tumor.”
“Sarcasm isn’t helpful, Raleigh.” Pierson returned her glasses to her nose. Her hair was gray, and she carried herself in a way that resembled Italian renaissance portraits of powerful matrons. “Your general health is good? Apart from our problem?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
Pierson made a note on her tablet. “Your meds. Are the novo-opiates working for you?”
The colonel glanced at the patch on the flesh between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. The headaches had warned him something was wrong. He never caught cold and never took a day off, but the pain was crushing, the way he imagined the depths of the Arctic Ocean would compress his body to the size of a rice grain if an enemy sub in the Three Degrees North war took out his boat. No amount of drugstore pain pills or Siskiyou sensimilla deadened it. “Yes, they’re working. At least I can get up in the morning.”
“I see you’ve reported no seizures since we saw you last.”
The colonel flashed back to his first seizure. An hour before seeing someone for the headaches, he was in a routine meeting. In the middle of a sentence, his mind went blank, and he woke up in an emergency room. The ER doctors said he had suffered an atonic seizure and had fallen off his chair, hitting his head on the edge of a table.
Within days, he was diagnosed: glioblastoma multiforme, the worst kind of brain tumor. The surgeons pronounced it inoperable; too deep and spread out. The good news: he’d hardly notice it—except for the headaches—until his last weeks or days. How much time did he have left? Six months, maybe seven. Four were gone. He had told no one, apart from his doctors. “The anti-seizure meds seem to be working, too.”
“Very good.” Pierson touched her stylus to the tablet. “You had your last chemo treatment three months ago. No effect.” Her speech slowed as she read and talked at the same time. “The DNA modification therapy is in the final stages, and again, no effect, I’m sorry to say.”
“Why are we wasting time with these treatments that didn’t work for me before?”
“Because our human trials protocol requires us to keep trying, in case they begin to work, even during our tests. Perhaps our nanobot and AI treatment will be the weapon that works on a weakened tumor.”
The colonel acquiesced.
Pierson brightened. “I see your blood work has come in. Will you give me a minute to look it over?”
Fidgety, the colonel got up from his chair. He was drawn to the Ivy League diplomas. “Tell me, Doctor, how did you wind up here at Doc Maynard’s?”
“Seattle has always been the place to go if you want to be on the cutting edge of anything in medical or intelligent tech.” Pierson turned from her tablet. “This place is future-oriented. The city survived the Warming and the Spike because of that.”
Seattle’s two-hundred-year-old traditions of environmental awareness and activism had nurtured the colonel’s world view, that the earth’s biosphere was sacrosanct, and Raleigh was proud of Seattle’s engineering prowess, which was known world-wide. As sea-level rose, and the Puget Sound estuary threatened to overtop the seawall, the city lifted the streets nearest saltwater ten feet. Dozens of other coastal cities around the world had followed Seattle’s lead.
The colonel tapped the doctor’s engineering degree. “You got your software engineering degree just a few years ago from the Delhi New School. Midlife crisis?”
Pierson chuckled. “The Spike caused a lot of people to reassess their lives, and I needed the background for my AI work.”
Pierson’s mention of the Spike relaxed the colonel. The event had become a common excuse for people to share their personal experiences.
“What’s your Spike story, Doctor? Where were you when you heard?”
“You mean heard about the incident?” Pierson recalled the time. “I was driving home from defending my dissertation. It was on AI applications for nanobots. I flipped to a chan with a report about a catastrophic methane release. I knew enough about the Warming to have a terrible feeling in my gut, terrible as in ‘terror.’ What about you?”
“I was doing some policy work on the first carbon law proposals. The teevs were on in a conference room.” The colonel paused. “Usual chattering, but there was a crawl on the bottom of the screen saying something about a methane release in the Arctic Ocean. No details, but I remember my stomach turning.”
“You mean, you saw the future?”
“One of other teevs was set to our special video feeds from the surveillance satellites over the Arctic. I was amazed and frightened at the same time. The ocean boiled like enormous pots of water on a stove, these huge bubbles bursting. They were miles across. Some of these, well, cauldrons—I don’t know a better word—were on fire, like something out of a children’s book on witches.” The colonel sat down in the chair in front of Pierson’s desk. “The predictions came in: more warming, almost at one time. A nightmare was coming true.”
“It changed everyone’s life.”
“My work was no longer theoretical. The carbon laws were approved. The final drafts made my first drafts look like rules for a grade school. BES was created. The Tribunal was established. I was put in charge of the BES investigation of the incident. Special Inquiries’ first job. I prosecuted the case.”
“The pressure must have been enormous.”
Memories flooded the colonel’s consciousness. “We had to hold someone accountable. The obvious choice was Martin Scribb.”
“The CEO of the Algid Project, as I recall. He was as arrogant as they come.”
“That’s an insult to arrogance, doctor.” The colonel’s smile was thin. During the probe, the colonel came to know Molly Bain, and learned of her brilliance as an AI engineer. The investigators determined that one of her software robots had gone on a digital rampage, setting off a chain of events that culminated in the disaster. It was enough evidence to disidentify her. No one had heard of her, though, and Raleigh wanted to take down a giant. He offered her freedom for Scribb’s virtual head. He knew she was Bill’s ex and Anne’s mother, but it mattered little.
The colonel revealed nothing of these details to Pierson, instead saying, “I watched the executioners burn the brand into his forehead.”
Pierson breathed in and returned to her tablet. “Well, I see that the nanobot replication rate and saturation ratios are fine. Decay rate is within expected range as well. I’d like to schedule another appointment next week to check on your progress.”
“I’m running out of time, doctor. I don’t have a week.”
“I understand perfectly, Colonel, but it’s important that we stick to the protocol. Yours is not the only life at stake. We have to think of the future patients who might benefit.”
Without this treatment, I have no future. Raleigh was tempted to order Pierson to proceed with whatever next steps his protocol demanded, but he decided patience was the best strategy. Molly Bain is my trump card, if only Scribb can find her before it’s too late to play it.
CHAPTER 17
♦ ♦ ♦
MOLLY BAIN WAS JUBILANT. THE Committee reps voted with no dissent to award the Cyprian Association—her association—a monopoly on personal entertainment services in the Arctic Free Economic Zone. The deal was done, and it was time to celebrate. She was throwing a party in Aurora Borealis’ parlor. A black silk, off-the-shoulder, ankle-length gown hugged her trim figure. She adjusted the colors of the holo-tattoo on the left side of her neck where the jaw line curved upward. On her bare shoulders, she touched the stopper of an aphrodisiac fragrance.
On her way to the casino, acquaintances and strangers reached out their hands in congratulations. Her eyes followed the winding teak rail of a spiral staircase, past a twisting water sculpture and through the clear overhead glass set in a gossamer, oyster-colored lattice of titanium. The ship’s navigation AI spread all of Aurora’s snow-white, square-rigged, ultra-thin canvas, as well as the three jibs above the bow, to take advantage of the easterly.
As a former tall ship sailor, Molly enjoyed the measured pitch and roll of Aurora. Sunlight glinted off the hull and two maintenance robots, shuttling around a spot fifty feet from Molly’s position. A thin black streak led away from the clustered bots. One scurried from the other, following the streak, grasping the embedded handholds. It sat on the streak, making it disappear. That’s odd. It’s not red, so it’s not rust.
Inside the gambling hall, she was enveloped by the percussion of samba drums, thick cigar smoke, clanging bells from floating one-armed bandits, perfumed air made languid by sex hormones, and the press of men and women whose aim in life was making the next deal. She stopped at each booth, touching the greeting light first so as not to interrupt a moment of intimacy.
Carbon Run (Tales From A Warming Planet Book 2) Page 15