by Jeff Edwards
My immediate dealings complete, I returned the phone to my pocket. The senator was still too busy ruling the world to acknowledge my presence, so I figured it was time to throw a wildcard on the table.
I reached over, thumbed the door control button, and got out of the car. The senator looked up in surprise as I was making my exit.
The flunky’s voice came through the open door. “Mr. Stalin! What are you doing?”
I fished out my Marlboros and lit one. “I agreed to give Senator Bigshot a few minutes of my time. He’s had them. We’re done now.”
“You can’t be serious,” the flunky said.
I walked away from the limo, toward the entrance to the parking lot. There was so much room here. So much open space and greenery. I wondered if old Bel Air had been like this, before the domes.
I enjoyed a long pull from the cigarette and checked my phone. The taxi’s estimated arrival was now thirteen minutes and counting.
I heard the flunky’s scurrying footsteps behind me. “The senator wants to talk to you,” he said breathlessly.
“He had his chance,” I said. “Tell him to call during business hours and make an appointment. I have an opening a week from Thursday. But he should call soon. My calendar stacks up fast.”
The flunky made one more try to regain the power position. “Do you have any idea who you’re dealing with?”
“I’m not dealing with anyone,” I said. “If your boss makes an appointment, then maybe I’ll deal with him. Or, maybe not…”
I checked my phone again. “Tell you what… My cab is due to arrive in just over twelve minutes. Your boss has got until then to talk to me.”
The flunky was aghast. “You’re not serious…”
“You just wasted five seconds.”
“Let’s go then,” the flunky said, taking a step toward the limo. “Hurry.”
I took a hit off the Marlboro. “Here,” I said. “And he can take his time. Because I frankly don’t give a damn whether we talk or not.”
With a look of mingled dread and consternation, the flunky scurried away to deliver the bad news to the big man.
I’d have paid a hundred marks to hear the conversation that transpired when he got back to the car. I don’t know what he said to his boss, but it must have worked, because the anointed-one came striding across the parking lot a minute or so later, looking distinctly put out.
“I don’t know what you hoped to accomplish with this little show of machismo,” he said. “But this charade ends now. You’re fired, Mr. Stalin. Your services are no longer required, or wanted.”
Instead of responding, I touched the softkey for Vivien’s phone number. She answered on the second ring.
“Good evening, Ms. Forsyth,” I said. “I’m having a nice chat with your husband. He informs me that I’ve been fired.”
I could hear her sigh. “Are you really talking to my husband?”
“Yes, I am. He’s standing about two meters away, giving me the death stare. Would you like to say hi?”
Another sigh on her end. “No. I don’t want to talk to him. I assume you’re calling because he’s throwing his weight around.”
“That’s a fair assessment,” I said.
“I’m not surprised,” she said. “Elden has been trying to convince me to leave the investigation to the police. He’s afraid that you’ll muddy the waters, and interfere with the work of the professionals.”
“Does that mean I’m fired?”
“Of course not. You work for me, and I’m not firing you.”
“Thanks,” I said. “That’s all I need for now.”
Vivien sighed again, and hung up.
I looked at the senator. “Apparently, I’m not fired. But it was nice of you to try.”
I could practically hear his teeth grinding.
I glanced at my phone. “We’ve got about nine minutes. What would you like to talk about?”
He paused and made a visible effort to quell his rising temper. Like his flunky, he wasn’t accustomed to people who refused to play the game by his rules. But unlike the flunky, the senator had the mental fortitude to shift strategies when the situation demanded. He swallowed his frustration and changed his demeanor.
When he spoke again, his voice had lost the haughty tone of authority. He spoke calmly, with tired resignation. “As you’ve just proven, I don’t have the power to fire you, Mr. Stalin. So I’m going to try a different tact instead. I’m asking you to give up this case. I’m speaking, not as a senator, but as a grieving father. Please, leave the investigation of Leanda’s disappearance to the police.”
His newfound courtesy deserved a bit of courtesy in return, so I throttled my own attitude back into the reasonable zone. “Do you mind if I ask why you think that’s a good idea? If you’ll forgive me for speaking bluntly, I see two possibilities… Either your daughter is still alive, in which case we need to find her as quickly as possible. Or she’s dead, and the best we can do is to bring the perpetrators to justice.”
“It’s the latter possibility that I’m thinking about,” Senator Forsyth said. “I’ve given up hoping that my daughter is alive. Too much time has passed. There have been no ransom demands. No communication. No contact from anyone. It breaks my heart to even think about it, Mr. Stalin, but I have to face the fact that my daughter is dead. We’re not looking for kidnappers. We’re looking for murderers.”
“You could be right,” I said. “But I don’t understand why you want to close off another route of investigation. I’ve read the files. The police have been extremely thorough, but they’re getting nowhere. There hasn’t been a new lead in weeks, and I think they’re out of ideas. What this case needs is someone who’s not out of ideas. Another set of eyes, and a mindset that hasn’t been conditioned to operate within the boundaries of established police procedure.”
“Someone like you?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Someone like me. Or at least someone who isn’t trained to follow the same paths that the cops are following.”
“That’s what I’m worried about,” the senator said. “If you throw police procedure to the wind, what happens if you do catch the killers? Will we be able to get a conviction, if you breach the rules of evidence? What happens if you accidentally contaminate some vital forensic trace, or violate the civil rights of the perpetrators? My daughter’s killers could end up walking free.”
“I’m pretty careful,” I said, “but I’ll concede the possibility. You should bear in mind, though, that the most scrupulous adherence to evidentiary procedure is completely worthless, if the cops can’t identify the perps.”
“I have confidence in the police,” the senator said. “It may take them a while, but they’ll get there.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But they’ve been working this investigation for fifty-seven days, and they’re at a standstill. I’ve been on the case for less than seventy-two hours, and one of my lines of inquiry is already paying off.”
This got me another look of surprise from the senator. “How so?”
“I’m getting close to something,” I said. “In the past twelve hours, I’ve been tortured, threatened, and bribed by some exceptionally nasty characters. They want me off your daughter’s case, right now, before I delve any farther. And they’re willing to pay me a half-million marks, or kill me to make my investigation go away.”
I couldn’t resist the next little barb. “So you see Senator, you’re not the only one who wants me to walk away from this investigation.”
It was a cheap shot, and I regretted it immediately. I could see that he hadn’t missed the implication. I had just lumped him in with some very unsavory people, but he didn’t seem to take offense.
“I think you should take whatever lead you’ve got, and turn it over to the police. Let them run it down.”
I finished off the cigarette, and shook my head. “It wouldn’t do any good.”
“Why not?”
“Because your wife is determined to run an
independent inquiry,” I said. “If I decide to pack up my marbles and go home, she’ll just hire another private investigator to take my place. And anybody she hires will automatically be farther behind the curve than I am. The case loses momentum, and you end up with a less-informed PI investigating your daughter’s disappearance. There’s no up-side.”
My phone bleeped, announcing the imminent arrival of my taxi, a good four minutes ahead of schedule.
“I understand your concern,” I said. “And I really will be careful to ensure that the perps will be prosecutable when I track them down. But I can’t desert this case.”
“I’ll make it worth your while,” the senator said. “I may not be quite as wealthy as my lovely wife, but I can afford to pay you many times what those thugs offered you.”
Headlights appeared over a crest in the road. My taxi was approaching.
“I can’t do it. If this was about money, I would have accepted the first offer, and retired to live off my savings.”
The senator said something, but his words were overpowered by the sound of the taxi’s blowers. They were not the whisper-quiet models carried by the senator’s limousine.
The taxi was a battered yellow Fiat. It settled onto its apron with a groan of poorly lubricated joints.
I opened the rear door and stepped in.
“If it’s not about money,” the senator said, “then what do you want?”
“It may sound a little corny,” I said. “But I want the truth.”
I pulled the door closed, and the taxi’s blowers spun back up to speed. A few seconds later, Senator Elden Forsyth was a dwindling spec in the rear view mirror.
CHAPTER 16
My phone buzzed as the cab was passing out of Dome 9 into Dome 12. I touched the screen and was rewarded with seven frame-grabs of Messenger-boy, skimmed from security cameras in the international terminal at LAX. The most recent time stamp was about ten minutes old.
I’d expected Jackal to take a couple of days to tap into the anti-terrorism feed aggregator. She’d managed it in only a few hours. I made a mental note to see that she got something extra for such quick performance.
Messenger-boy was no longer dressed in his carbon-polymer ninja suit, and his face had lost its threatening scowl, but it was definitely him. The strap of a single travel bag was slung over his left shoulder. Apparently, he was about to take a flight. If it turned out to be necessary, I could have Jackal ferret out his destination. For now, it was sufficient that he was far enough away not to pose an immediate danger.
I would have been nice to know the whereabouts of Nine-fingers and Arm-twister as well, but I couldn’t expect everything all at once. Jackal had mentioned that the updates would be intermittent, and would likely come hours apart.
Maybe the next update would give me their locations. In the meantime, I’d have to do the best I could.
I called House, and asked if either of the other two nasties had come within range of his surveillance sensors.
“No, David,” he said. “But for the past several hours, I’ve been deflecting almost continual attempts to hack into my security subroutines.”
“Can you keep them out?”
“I believe so,” House said. “I’m rejecting all external data feeds, no matter how innocuous they seem. Currently, I am only allowing incoming traffic from your phone, and I’m restricting that to voice only. I’m converting every phoneme to analog audio and then rendering it as non-executable text before examining it for content and message. This precaution creates an average delay of about three milliseconds in each of my responses to you, but that falls below the detection threshold of the human ear, so you shouldn’t notice it.”
“Have you spotted any signs that someone is staking out the house?”
“No,” House said. “I’m maintaining visual, IR, UV, and auditory monitoring of everything within range of my sensors. There has been no unusual activity, and no indications of surveillance. Of course, I don’t know what happens outside of my sensor footprint, but the area within a hundred meters of my perimeter is not currently showing any detectable threats.”
That was probably as good as I was going to get.
“Thanks, House. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“I do,” House said. “You’d run out of bacon.”
I reached my block without incident, taking a few circuitous turns along the way, just to vary my routine. If someone was tailing me, I couldn’t spot them. That actually made me more nervous, rather than less.
Maybe I was paranoid to be looking over my shoulder for the Nine-fingers gang, but his threats hadn’t seemed like bluffs. I had no doubt that he would kill me, if I gave him the chance.
I made my way to the abandoned office complex, pausing a couple of meters inside the wrecked doorway to give House a chance to scan me.
Instead of the usual “all-clear,” I heard a soft chime, followed by House’s voice. “Welcome home, David. I must warn you that my sensors have detected an electronic tracking device somewhere on your upper torso. I assume it’s attached to your clothing.”
I resisted the urge to frisk myself. I was standing in the dark, surrounded by a bewildering clutter of fragmentary debris. This was not the place to go looking for what would almost certainly be a tiny and unobtrusive object. Instead, I wound my way carefully through the obstacle course of junk that littered the old office, following the low-intensity lighting that House provided to illuminate my path.
“Can you jam the signal?”
“I’m already doing it,” House said. “I’ve been blocking all emissions from the device since it entered my detection envelope.”
I reached the vault-like steel slab of my side door. House opened it as I arrived. I stepped through, and I was home. When the door clanged shut behind me, I was as safe from attack as I was going to get.
The lighting was muted—House giving my eyes time to adjust before bringing the lights up to normal levels.
One of his House’s service drones rolled into the room and used its most delicate manipulators to retrieve the electronic bug from the right shoulder of my windbreaker. The drone held the device up for my inspection, but it was almost too small to see. It looked like an exceptionally tiny speck of lint.
The drone scooted away to its maintenance alcove, where it would undoubtedly hand the miniscule tracking device off to some of House’s more sensitive machinery.
A couple of minutes later, House projected a greatly-magnified image of the tracker on the wall. Seen up close, it was spherical in shape and covered with curving metallic hooks, which were doubtless designed to grab onto the woven fibers of my jacket.
“The device is approximately ten micrometers in cross-section,” House said. “For reference purposes, that’s roughly three-quarters the diameter of a human hair. Unfortunately, I’m not equipped to disassemble objects that small, but I can make certain logical assumptions about its properties.”
“By all means,” I said. “Assume away.”
“First,” House said, “for this device to have any appreciable transmission range, the majority of the interior volume must be devoted to power storage. Assuming that the energy cell isn’t based on classified technologies that significantly exceed the known state-of-the-art, the core structure is likely to be pyrolytic graphene, or something with equivalent properties. Based on the signal strength of the emanations I observed, I would estimate that the power cell accounts for eighty to eighty-five percent of the device, leaving a maximum volume of twenty-percent for the remaining components. This leads to my second assumption, that the actual reception and transmission circuitry is constructed at nanoscale, possibly using nanobot assemblers. I don’t know if this is useful information for you, but it seemed worth mentioning.”
“It could be extremely useful,” I said. “Am I right in thinking there are only a handful of companies that manufacture nanoelectronics?”
“I don’t have recent knowledge of the nanotech indust
ry,” House said, “but I believe you’re correct.”
I nodded. “That limits the source of production to a small number of companies. Can you give me a list of candidates?”
“Not at the moment,” House said. “I’m still experiencing attempts to hack my security subroutines. To establish an external interface to conduct the search, I’d have to open a window of vulnerability in my defenses. I’ll be happy to take the risk, if you need the information immediately.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not an emergency. You keep the hatches battened down until the danger is past.”
“Very well, David.”
Identifying the manufacturer was secondary anyway. What I really needed to know was who had stuck the damned tracker on me in the first place. And when?
I could only think of three places where it might have happened. I’d squeezed past some uncountable number of people in the crowd at Nexus Dreams. There’d been a lot of jostling and bodily contact under conditions of near-darkness. If one of the Nine-fingers gang had been in that throng, tagging me would have been a snap.
It might have also happened in the cop car. I had no reason to believe that LAPD wanted to keep track of my movements, but there’d certainly been opportunities during the ride, and during my interactions with Officer Warren.
And finally, there was my meeting with the senator. It could have happened in the limo, during my wranglings with the flunky, or during my encounter with the big man himself.
Of the three scenarios, the first and last seemed most likely. Nine-fingers wanted to kill me, and I had very little doubt that the ongoing attempts to hack my AI were the work of his gang. He had a vested interest in keeping tabs on my whereabouts.
Senator Forsyth also had a possible motive for wanting to track my movements, but at least he didn’t have any reason to want me dead.
That left me with three candidates, and no way to winnow down the list. Unless there was some unknown fourth party at work, the bug had either come from the Los Angeles Police Department, a United States Senator, or a gang of (apparently) Asian criminals with a fetish for violence-porn.