by Guy Haley
"It is inconvenient," said Otto, thinking of Tufa.
"It's a drag, that's for sure. Outsiders seem to think it's all peace and love in CA since the dippies took over, but I tell you, this place is crawling with scum. We've got a major gang war on, massive people-smuggling to the south, every criminal meathead in Latin America has decided to come here since the reds took over and started executing anyone connected to the cartels and drug businesses, and it's not helped by the reds trying to smuggle their spi es in with the genuine refugees. So, even something like this, it's all hardlined. None of it, bar the simplest commands to these drones, is broadcast."
"It is the safest way," agreed Otto. Qifang's house was large. They passed over a wide hallway where the main entrance to the building was situated. More masked and suited bodies pored over this.
"It is a pain in my ass, is what it is," she said. "Even the numbers bitch about it. Right, here we are." Under the grand staircase was a small door that Otto had some trouble squeezing through. This led onto a short flight of stairs that brought them down into a basement workshop, harshly lit, with a concrete floor covered with a smooth application of carbon plastic paint. It was a large space, big enough for a couple of workbenches. Tools on pinboards lined three of four walls, while the fourth opened out into a garage where a modest aircar sat, the ramp leading up from the garage to the driveway outside stamped with a hard rhombus of daylight. More officers bustled about the basement. Otto had counted seventeen in all in the house.
In the corner of the workshop stood an industrial fabrication unit, one of the biggest Otto had seen in a private home, large enough to put out auto components. The service hatch had been taken off without much care, optic cables left spilling out of it. Mulholland shooed an officer out of the way, and pointed within.
"The central chipset, patterning unit and cache have been removed. Bits of them are on that desk over there." She indicated a pile of shattered components. "We have the chips back at HQ, but they've been thoroughly wrecked. It looks like someone, Qifang I presume, took out anything that could give us a clue and smashed it to bits with a hammer."
"He made something before he died?"
"Yes, something he did not want us to know about."
"You are attempting to reassemble the chip fragments?"
"Yeah, we're not making much progress. They're useless, if you ask me. I don't think we'll find anything."
"I'll take a scan of them if I may."
"Be my guest. Speak to Martez upstairs." She leaned on a bench. "He's logging the evidence. He'll give you access to whatever you need."
The house was well kept, and Otto was impressed by the way the police were going over it. They weren't always so careful back home; probably Qifang being so famous helped. After the police finished, this place would be crawling with the media, then it really would be trashed. "It is a good team you have. But is it not large for this case?"
"A suicide, you mean? Maybe, but Qifang was an important man, and there are a lot of eyes watching, most of them not of the human variety, and what the numbers say goes around here. There were a lot of people that were not very happy with Qifang's civil rights movement for the other sapients, lot of religious, lot of extreme dippies. Some of them have the money and the expertise to stage something like this and make it look like suicide. And his assistant, she's a lot younger than Qifang, but some of those mentor/ student relationships can get very messy one way or another."
"What is your opinion, detective?"
"You want my opinion? Wow," she said sardonically. "It's a long time since anyone wanted that, but, OK, you can have it." She crossed her arms. "My opinion is that he killed himself. Why? Beats me, maybe we won't find out and maybe we will. Sure, he had cancer, but they might have been able to fix that. In my opinion it doesn't really matter. In my opinion these officers here could be covering something else, say, solving the schoolyard massacre we had two weeks back. Thirty-eight dead kids, because one wetback didn't like the way another looked at him. Or the serial killer offing virtporn addicts in Downey, Lynwood and Compton. By our count he's up to seventy-six victims now. Or any one of the other million active cases we have. This state is gutting itself while the fucking dippies clang their bells, and one dead professor who chose an early exit does not mean much one way or another to me. But that's my opinion, and my opinion doesn't mean anything to the State, the VIA, the Feebs or the machines that run them."
"It is a difficult job. I understand," he said.
"Do you understand?" Her expression softened as she lingered on the scars on his face. "Yeah, yeah, maybe I guess you do." She looked round the room, as if searching for something she'd misplaced, then looked back up to him. "Now, is there anything else you need to see here?"
"No, thank you. I will take the scans of the chip fragments and send them to my partner, maybe he can do something with them."
"Really?"
"He is skilled in this area. If he finds anything I will let you know. I also need any information that you may have on Qifang's assistant, Veronique Valdaire."
"I'd like to speak to her myself. She skipped town, suspicious, but her Gridsig, forensics and so forth suggest she was never within two miles of this place. The night he died we have a bar full of witnesses to testify that she was dancing until the early hours. Whatever she's done, it isn't killing."
"That does not mean that she is not responsible."
"No, no, it does not. She vanished in suspicious circumstances two weeks ago, not long after the victim killed himself. She's off the Grid. It's not surprising. If he knew how to fool the system, there is a good chance she knows how to too. The UCLA Six has lodged complaints against her: a couple of illegal searches, theft and an assault."
"Assault?"
"She turned it off," she explained. "It put the initial call to us, but the specifics of that information have not been made available to us by the VIA. If you find her before we do. I want to talk to her before the VIA. It's been a nightmare here since the Tolman administration. Federal and out-government agencies at each other's throat in a way that'd make… What was his name, that twentieth-century guy?" She frowned at Otto, looking for an answer, before providing her own. "Hoover, that's it. That'd make him proud. Paranoid nuts everywhere, no cooperation, especially on these section 73s."
"You don't think she was involved in Qifang's murder?"
"No." She shook her head. "It's very unlikely. There's not much evidence. Granted that she's smart enough to hide it and herself, but she didn't go to any effort to cover her tracks until the morning she vanished. Besides, her psychs suggests a high degree of loyalty, and I'll go with that every time. She's running all right, but not from this. It'd be better for her if we got to her before the VIA did. What she's done is enough for the VIA to hold her indefinitely, murder or not."
"What do you think?"
"Me? I think Qifang killed himself. How Valdaire ties in exactly, I don't know. I expect the VIA to deal with her, bad news for her. I expect the VIA to come to me soon, because despite what they think, we local cops are not schmucks, and if we can't find her, I'll bet they can't find her either." She rubbed her face again. Her skin took a while to crawl back into place, fatigue compromising its elasticity. "Now, Mr Klein, I have a lot to do. If there's nothing more you need to see, I will escort you out."
After Otto had secured scans of the fabber chip fragments and Gridcast them to Richards, he caught a cab over to Richards & Klein's LA office in an unprepossessing mini-arco out near the landward end of Wilshire. His first stop there – he'd gone straight to the crime scene when the Stratoliner landed.
He interrogated the near-I secretary, to make sure that Richards hadn't been ignoring potentially lucrative cases. If they bored him, he tended not to bother telling Otto, which was one of his more irritating habits, so Otto checked up on the offices' minders every week. There wasn't much, a bauxite freighter heist that he might look into later. He instructed the machine to inform potential c
lients that they were likely to be unavailable for a month.
The office was small, a reception area equipped with a holographic receptionist, and a sheathed AI One on security which did not come out of its closet for Otto's visit. There was a conference room out back and not much else. All the important workings of their agency were back in New London.
The extra business such places generated was useful, but the main function of the offices was their attached garages. Otto went up to a plain diamond-weave door, hidden at the back of the premises, submitting himself to the usual scans before it opened and allowed him access to the garage's staircase.
Richards referred to the garages as walk-in wardrobes, and for him that was the case. They contained multiple sheaths for him to inhabit and a rack of his favoured attire of hat, trenchcoat and suit. Richards & Klein, Inc, Security Consultants, had twenty-three such installations around the globe. In form they varied greatly. In the relative peace of the northern world they were overt, with offices where Richards could meet clients by pinging himself over from the main branch in the Londons. In the most dangerous of places they were little more than hidden weapons caches with a secure Gridpipe and a couple of heavy-duty sheaths.
In LA, the stores were extensive: a single large foamcrete room, weapons and sheaths neatly racked on the walls, lockers of equipment lining one side. An airbike and a groundcar were parked in the middle on hydraulic rams. Keeping all this stuff licensed was a nightmare, but that was Richards' job. Otto got to buy the weapons. It was a good arrangement.
Otto had not been permitted to bring arms on the stratoliner from the UK, so he picked out a clutch of EMP grenades, a flechette railgun, a grenade launcher, one of his favoured Hechler caseless 9mm pistols, a bunch of ammunition, a heavy-duty nanoBabbage laptop – slow compared to optic computers, but immune to EMP – and a change of clothes. He put it all in the boot of the groundcar and signed it out. He got into the car and activated the ram. The ceiling door slid open and the ram took him out into the bottom of a multi-storey carpark. He drove past a preserved nodding donkey, a relic of oil-age LA, its concealing wall replaced by glass and a plaque. He drove through the car park, turned off onto Wilshire and set off toward Valdaire's house.
Valdaire's place was a small duplex hidden amid thousands of others, nothing showy, but the neighbourhood was a relatively good one, away from the refugee camps and gang wars of the south. In the main LA had fared better than London; there had been no bomb, for a start. A few key areas were underwater, Long Beach, Malibu, places like that, but the Californians hadn't had to contend with the massive increase in rainfall the UK had seen and the swollen rivers that had brought. It was a little cloudier, a little wetter, cyclones were a yearly occurrence, but the winds were brief and most of the rain hit the coastal ranges and the Rockies. LA also did not have to contend with the storm surges that broke onto London with the regularity of waves on a beach. A few lengthy dykes safeguarded much of Los Angeles. Besides the seaward walls, and few score arcologies, it hadn't changed that much in the last hundred years. If the Big One ever hit, the cities might be on a more even footing disruption-wise, but it had not yet.
Valdaire's flatmate knew very little; Otto could tell that from the moment she opened the door and began to complain about being interviewed three times by the cops. He watched her face in IR as they talked, but his near-I could find no evidence of untruth either in her thermal signature or vocal patterns.
Jones and Valdaire did not get on well, having being placed together by the UCLA's governing Class Six, supposedly for maximal benefit of each other's personality traits. Valdaire was focused, intense and obsessed about her fitness, Jones told Otto, though Otto dialled down "obsessed" in his mind to merely "concerned". Letitia was big, the kind of big that thinks walking across the room to pick up a twinkie is "obsessed with fitness". The flatshare was a typical odd-couple set-up of the kind the dippy AIs loved. They rarely worked. It was clear Letitia hated Valdaire, and the feeling was probably mutual.
Otto got a picture of a career-driven woman whose only concessions to frivolity were her dancing and her near-I PA Chloe. Chloe was a life-companion, incepted at the birth of a child, in her case when she'd immigrated to Canada, designed to grow alongside them as pet, confidante and playmate. A lot of kids tired of them by the time they hit their tweens. That Valdaire still had hers did not surprise Otto; it all tallied with her psych and gene profiles. Driven people find it hard to make human connections. Valdaire had been an outcast at school, a rebellious student, then a soldier.
Some things never changed.
Otto could have learnt all of this from the files, or the Grid, or he could have gone there virtually and never have left the Londons. But there was no substitute for being in the scene, no digital intermediary to lessen the immediacy. Otto was oldfashioned that way.
He drove across skypasses crossing the Long Beach lagoon then north to UCLA's Computer Sciences campus up in the Chino hills, a twenty-storey, quake-proofed needle. It looked out over the tawny city, the sea a blue promise in the distance.
Otto called the VIA when he reached the AI Department, finally getting through to some high-up eugene after he'd used his AllPass. Otto's near-I had some pretty good truth software, and it said the eugene was not lying when he said they'd not found Valdaire. He said he'd been surprised at Qifang's death, but that their case had closed when he'd died. This also appeared true, but Otto's near-I was only so good, and eugenes were past being human, so he took his statements with a large truckload of salt. The eugene hung up shortly afterwards.
By the time he entered the university it was late in the day. The Six had been forewarned; it was polite but refused to speak to him on the subject of Valdaire or Qifang, pointing out that his AllPass was superseded by a VIA gagging order. He was denied access to the lab. None of the other grad students who worked with Qifang and Valdaire would be made available to him. Good day. The usual fob-off.
Some desk monkey named Guillermo had been the last to see Valdaire. He was poorly educated, unenhanced, fat and lonely-looking. He'd let the agents in at the Six's request. No one would tell Otto what they were there for, or why they'd decided to show up a few hours after Qifang's estimated death.
One unholy inter-agency stink was about to kick off, but that was not Otto's concern. What the VIA might have to hide was.
Either Valdaire and Qifang had hatched some plot together and had come under the scrutiny of the VIA – and if so, it would have to be extremely serious for the agency not to acknowledge their own investigation of it – or Qifang and his assistant had stumbled on to something, and the VIA wanted to cover it up.
Otto sat in the car and considered breaking into the building at night. Burglary here would be hard, but not impossible. He would almost certainly get caught, though, and what little he could hope to find did not justify the trouble he'd have to go to to extricate himself.
He needed to find Valdaire, and Chloe was the key to that. She could be tracked. If someone was following her, they'd know that too, and so no doubt did Valdaire. But Otto had Richards.
Otto put in a Gridcall to England. The new girl, Genie, answered.
"Hiya, Otto!" she said. Fed through his mentaug, she appeared to hover over his dashboard, as a thirty-centimetre-tall woman in dressing-up-box harem wear.
"Get me Richards," said Otto.
"Sure thing," she said, and winked suggestively. "Putting you through."
A square like an old cinema screen arrived in the middle of Otto's field of vision: augmented reality. Velvet curtains rose to the skirl of a Wurlitzer, a tiny homunculus playing it manically at the bottom of the vision, to reveal a grey screen. Flickering numbers played over the screen, and then Otto was looking at Richards sitting in his office, in an image running in monochrome 2D.
"Hey," Richards said. He was dressed ridiculously, with braces and baggy trousers, his hat pushed high back on his forehead. He was speaking in a cod early-twentieth-century American acce
nt. "Here's looking at you, kid."
Otto sighed.
"You have no sense of fun!" tittered Genie.
Otto pushed a button on his dash. Genie stuck out her tongue as she faded out of the feed.
"I got your pictures." Richards said it "pickchewers". "Dis is what I got, dese here documents." He pointed a cigarette at a scatter of paper on the desk. "Looks like some kinda key. Dey said something was missing from da lab?"
"Yeah."
"Hmm. Dey's got a coupla old v-jacks dere, I'll bet one o' dose is missing, sure, right?"
"There is an information lockdown by the VIA. The LAPD did tell me there had been a theft."
"I ain't no genius, but the v-jack is missing. So we haveta assoom she's gone into da Realms. I got my snouts out on the street, big guy, looking for that kid Chloe, we find her, we find Valdaire," he said, reaching the same conclusion as the German. "Knowing what she's got, where she's headed, will make it easy."