by S J Hunter
That made the placement of the bomb that much more impressive. He’d parked in a guest space in his apartment building’s secured garage, although the effectiveness of these private securities was an open joke in Enforcement, and neither a radical bomber nor Chris considered them an obstacle. No, what was impressive about this bomb was that Chris didn’t usually drive home and he’d gotten home after 10 PM, so whoever had installed the bomb had almost no notice that there would be an opportunity. This wasn’t meticulous planning. Someone was out there scattering a lot of resources around in the hopes of getting lucky.
LLE cars were unmarked and had tamper-proofing that needed to be disarmed, but everyone knew this. The true advantage for LLE officers was that they could check the tamper-proofing remotely to make sure it was intact. This morning, distracted and a little tired after his full day and a night crammed with too much preoccupation to be restful, Chris hadn’t checked the status of the tamper-proofing before approaching the car. It was a rookie mistake.
It was Louie, grabbing his hand in an insistent, toothy grip and pulling him away from the car, who saved his life. Chris guessed immediately that Louie had smelled something as they approached the car and alerted, he checked and found the tamper-proofing disabled. After a quick survey of the undercarriage of the car he spotted the device easily enough. Such crude devices occasionally could go off without being tripped, and Chris figured time was of the essence. Also, it looked pretty basic, at least superficially, and Chris had over six decades of experience with similar efforts, during which by observation and pertinent questions he’d picked up an expertise that matched all but the most durable Bomb Squad officers.
“What the hell. I don’t have time for this horseshit,” he murmured fatalistically. He fetched his tool kit and a light, set Louie in a firm stay a reasonable distance away, and slid under the car on his back to examine it more closely.
It was as crude as it looked, and within minutes he had it disarmed, double-checked, and detached.
He was already late, but he took the time to drop the now-harmless thing off at Forensics. He was pretty sure, though, that like everything else lately it would prove to be a dead end. Or if it did yield any information, the bomb and the record of its analysis would end up missing.
*****
Sipping her first morning coffee, Livvy stared through the observation window at Robert Maas, the peasant in the tree from the previous afternoon, and reviewed what they knew about him. He’d been in a bed under guard overnight for observation at the City Central clinic, and was released to LLE this morning with a diagnosis of concussion and advice to keep an eye on him. That they were doing.
She was feeling especially virtuous. This morning she’d taken one of the new routes Meg had outlined for her and still arrived at work on time. She’d walked all the way up through garden after lovely garden. Even though the experience wasn’t as real as her morning jogs in her native San Francisco hills, it was heavenly.
Chris arrived with Louie a half hour later, with no explanation.
The uniforms who’d searched the neighborhood around Isabella’s house yesterday afternoon hadn’t been able to find a vehicle that they could connect to Maas nor had they found anyone who remembered seeing a peasant walking around before the shooting started. Given the neighborhood, Livvy suspected he would have been noticed. Chris was right. Someone had driven Maas to the tree, probably very early in the morning, before Livvy’d even been told about Josephson. The timing showed extraordinary foresight and initiative on someone’s part.
It turned out that the only reason Maas hadn’t started shooting before they went in to Isabella’s was that he’d wedged himself and his weapon in and taken a nap. That much he’d admitted. He may have been hoping to jolt Livvy out of her impassivity, because what he’d actually blurted out somewhat bitterly was, “You’d be dead now, but I fell asleep.”
So she’d probably been wrong to suggest Chris was a preferred target and correct in assuming she wouldn’t be popular with the local fanatical groups.
Irritated at having been strong-armed into the medivan and forced to listen to the prisoner’s incessant harangue during the early part of the trip to Central, Livvy couldn’t resist.
“You mean the nap… the nap impaired your marksmanship?” she’d asked with a faint note of surprise.
It wasn’t her fault that the tech had snickered and the prisoner had clamped his mouth shut and done nothing for the rest of the ride but glare at her. Still, the feeling that she’d let Chris down a little dampened her satisfaction during her morning commute.
Likewise, the gun had proven untraceable. It was a very common gun, freely available through black markets and with clean ID’s at the gun shows, and all of its unique markings had been thoroughly etched out.
This morning, Maas had again awakened in the mood for talking, and that continued during and after his transfer into LLE custody. Unfortunately – still – almost nothing he said was to the point, since most of it was a rehash of the irritatingly vague religious and Naturals Only rhetoric that had so annoyed Livvy in the medivan. For her, it was both reassuring and discouraging that no one else was having any better luck with the man. Any questions elicited repeated claims on the 5th amendment and more rhetoric.
They’d found in the records that Maas was a 32 year-old single man who had been raised in a natural family, and prior to dropping into LLE custody yesterday he’d had no criminal record other than a few nonviolent protest-related arrests that had never led to prosecution. Maas’ distressed family told them that he had recently broken up with a long-term girlfriend who had a good job as a high-class receptionist and who had decided to start getting resets every two years, now that she could afford them. Psych Services sent an officer who listened to the history supplied by Maas’ family, observed him interacting with Chris, and remarked that the recent break-up supplied sufficient motivation for Maas to have reacted violently. The officer asked that they give him a call if anything else developed in the case.
After two hours listening to Maas, Chris asked Meg Dalton to give it a try. Livvy didn’t need to ask why Chris turned to her. Meg had decades of experience and she was a lovely woman, about 30 biol, with warm brown eyes and soft brown hair that, as far as Livvy could tell, owed nothing to enhancements. The shooter wasn’t fooled. He stared at Meg with disdain and refused to talk to her other than to tell her that she was a disease and that if she and others like her weren’t stopped she would infect decent families until there were none left. There was a lot more in the same vein before Meg too gave up.
“Thanks for tossing that my way, McGregor,” Dalton said. “I haven’t had a good old-fashioned incoherent theological debate with a looney in a month, and I was missing it. Also, all the colorful vernacular. A real treat. You’d enjoy yours, Hutchins, if Maas even deigned to speak to you. Which he wouldn’t.”
“Ah yes. Abomination,” Livvy said. “I heard that one.” She paused. “While my partner went to search Josephson’s no doubt luxurious mansion, I got to ride to the Clinic in the cozy medivan. All because of a tiny scratch on the arm that had stopped bleeding.”
“I wanted you along in case he said anything,” Chris said.
Livvy opened her mouth.
“Anything useful,” Chris amended quickly.
“Thanks, Dalton. It was worth a try,” he added as Meg smiled and started to walk away.
“Hey McGregor,” Williams called from the other side of the room, “I don’t suppose you could have done us all a favor and put that moron back into the tree and let him drop out again a couple more times? Might have saved us all some trouble.”
“Well, you know Williams, I did think about it,” Chris called back, “but then it occurred to me that as he is now, he’s a candidate for your future brother-in-law.”
Williams grinned and Agnew, who had been the target of a campaign to set him up with Williams’ sister, hooted.
“You’re not buying it, are you?” Li
vvy asked quietly.
“That he’s from one of the radical groups, with on deeper agenda? That I believe.”
“But he knew where to wait for us,” Livvy said. “And there was something said earlier, something that seemed to connect for you in terms of Maas’ incompetence. You said no one would have paid him ‘unless they had a lot of money to spend.’ What did that mean to you? And there was something I said, too, but I can’t remember what it was.”
“It’s of no consequence. I doubt we’ll find anything to connect Robert Maas to Josephson,” Chris said. He was going through everything in Maas’ record for the third time.
“McGregor, that’s not what I asked you. I need you to catch me up. If you even think there is a connection between Robert Maas, and Josephson, and someone… someone with a lot of money, who do you think that would that be?”
Chris leaned back in his old-fashioned desk chair with his hands locked behind his head. Livvy’s desk faced his, perpetuating an office layout that had reappeared after every attempt to modernize, or realign, or reorganize LLE. He continued to stare at her until she waved at him.
“How’s your arm?” Chris asked.
“Who would that be?” she said, ignoring his question.
Chris pushed off from his desk and still relaxed, with a single push slowly spun his chair through a 360 degree rotation. When he was facing Livvy again, he said quietly, “Not here.
“Let Maas’ family and lawyer wear him down for a while, then we can try him again. I want to go talk to Josephson’s coworkers and get his notes from the clinic,” he said, raising his voice back to normal levels. He stood up and grabbed a memopad.
“Despite an exhausting search, Louie and I couldn’t find anything in his luxurious mansion that appeared to be work-related, and there wasn’t a single clue as to where he could have gone.”
“Your call,” Livvy said, frustrated.
Chp. 7 Intelligence (Wednesday)
Livvy was determined not to ask again. Her partner, who seemed to be uncommonly comfortable with long, thoughtful silences, hadn’t opened up on the trip over to Josephson’s downtown clinic, either, and after pressing him once at the start of the trip she resolved to wait him out, although she found herself drawing breath and then having to press her lips together to hold back a question at least once a minute.
“Not yet,” was all Chris said at the beginning of the ride, glancing at her face. “One question will just lead to another. Let’s finish with this, first.”
The clinic’s two receptionists were more forthcoming, and Livvy found that she hadn’t misread her sources on Josephson’s unpopularity at work.
“Yeah, if you find him murdered in an alley we’ll all gather after the funeral for the best office party ever,” said one receptionist.
“And if he suffered first, we’ll all chip in for champagne and a cake, with ‘Karma’ printed on it, and sparklers,” added the other.
“That bad, huh?” said Livvy. “What about the other practitioners and researchers?”
“You can try, sweetie,” said the older receptionist, “But the man didn’t like to mix, and I’m not just talking about socially. He didn’t share. Work, I mean.”
It was true, Livvy found. None of them knew anything useful. Livvy believed it. Not only were they required by law to tell her anything pertinent, but everyone’s story was consistent and they seemed to hold him in aversion, which means they should have been happy to share any information that might be detrimental or pertinent to his disappearance. Josephson was a secretive man.
The younger receptionist filled a D-card with the records of Josephson’s recent appointments and his client lists, and then took her to show her Josephson’s suite: his office, laboratory, and clinic spaces. That’s when the trail got especially tortuous.
*****
Chris was also trying to find staff members who might have worked with Josephson most closely, and quickly got the impression that no one had much in the way of useful information. According to the office manager, Josephson rented facilities and utilized the assistance of the clinic’s staff for both research and performing enhancements and resets, but beyond giving simple orders he wasn’t communicative.
“We got rent from him for the facilities, and took percentages for any appointments, but it was pretty much automatic,” the office manager said. “If you want to know about his work, the best one to ask might be Brian,” she added.
This, Chris soon learned, was good advice.
“So the doctor wasn’t big on remedial work? Not much for helping out the common people?” Chris asked shortly into his questioning of the head lab tech, Brian Clifford.
“Are you kidding? He talked like they, or I guess I should say we because I think he would include me, should be rounded up and sent to Antarctica or something, anything to keep them from taking space away from… well, people like him. And as far as people having children, especially people who couldn’t afford to be plugged into Longevity and might have more than one or two… He was like one of those guys from ancient history. You know, the ones who thought people should stick to their own kind or class or whatever you call it, and expose the babies on the hillside as soon as the food supply got low. Have you met his girlfriend yet?” Brian gave him a knowing look. “It s like I half expect her to offer to tip me.”
“What can you tell me about his current research?”
“I can tell you he was especially careful to keep things locked up when he wasn’t around, and he wasn’t the type to tolerate any questions,” Brian said.
“But when you worked with him, you must have had some idea…?”
“You got me there.” Brian gave a slightly sheepish grin. “Look, I was just curious; it’s not like I was trying to steal any ideas. I’m going for a molebiol degree and I just wanted to see if I could figure it out.
“Some of it was just weird, you know. I mean, the guy is brilliant, but he was always looking for ways to make people seem younger. You know, even though Longevity puts the brake on senescence, there are ways of telling biol age if you do the right tests. I thought at first that he was just looking for ways to make someone look younger. You know, in case someone got started late (here he looked a little apologetically at Chris, who thoughtfully hid his amusement) or for some reason couldn’t afford resets for a while, being able to make them look younger might be useful.
“Then I started thinking that he was trying to figure out ways to beat the tests, which would be illegal, wouldn’t it? He never used that research on anyone, though, as far as I know,” Brian added scrupulously. “And it wouldn’t matter anyway, would it? Since full scans serve as unbeatable identity records. You guys know when everyone was born, and what their allotment should be. No way to beat that.”
“Uh huh,” Chris said. “That’s the idea.”
“Anyway, with Josephson, it was all a little creepy. The weirdest part, though, was when he worked on things that would make people seem older, if you can believe that.”
“Not just look older, but for the testing?” Chris asked.
“Yeah. Why would anyone want that?”
“Maybe he was just curious about these things,” Chris said. “Is that possible?”
“Could be,” Brian said doubtfully. “He did love his research. I always had the feeling that it really pissed him that he wasn’t allowed to experiment on people. I mean, the guy liked money, don’t get me wrong, but I think what he really got off on was playing around with this stuff. Made him feel god-like, I guess. It certainly wasn’t to help people.”
“Was he working on this ‘weird stuff’ with anyone else? Another doctor or a tech?”
“No. He basically worked on his own, except for the times when he really needed a tech. The way we had it arranged was, when he needed someone, he called me for a tech, and I’d come in. We used to take turns working for him, because no one wanted to be stuck with it all the time, but the last year or so everyone begged me to do it, because I could
handle it. Over the years we had some good techs quit because of him, and I got tired of interviewing replacements and listening to complaints. I figured as head tech, I had to do it.”
“And did he ever talk about his work, to anyone?”
“Other than rant at techs when they weren’t quick enough, no. The guy didn’t like to explain things, even when he needed to. No patience, if you know what I mean.”
“Then how do you know about the weird stuff?” Chris asked.
Brian smiled outright this time. “A guy like that will be a little careless with leaving memopads around if the only one to see them is a tech. He’d just figure that we couldn’t understand. And mostly, a tech wouldn’t. It’s just that…”
“You’re going for a degree, and he’s not interested enough in the staff to know that,” Chris said, grinning. “And you made a point of being a little slow on occasion, just to aggravate him.”
Brian laughed. “Got me again. Hey, if you ever met the guy, you’d understand. I let him rant. I figured he might blow the lid off and do us all a favor.”
“In fact, I met Dr. Josephson decades ago, and I still remember it as an… unwholesome experience. What my partner would call ‘a seriously bad dude,’” Chris said.
“Whatever that means. Your partner, huh? Now that’s what I call lucky,” Brian said. “A rare prize, that one.”
“You’ve been very helpful. If you want to make an impression, you can give me, or if you prefer, Livvy, a call if you hear anything else, and most especially if you hear from Josephson,” Chris said.
Almost as though on cue, Livvy came into the small break room that Chris had appropriated for interviews and both men turned to her attentively.