Anniversary Day (34 page)

Fifty-eight

Something was bothering Flint. DeRicci didn’t know what it was, exactly, but it was serious enough to make his entire face go blank. After he had asked DeRicci not to call the assassins clones, she noted that Talia looked worried as well.

Did they know these men? Had DeRicci compromised the investigation somehow?

She hurried down the hall, away from the small room where she had set up Flint and Talia, giving them desks to work on, non-networked screens to get information. Popova had found two computers that hadn’t yet been assigned and put them into the room. One computer was a tablet, which Flint gave to Talia. The other was built into a desk, which Flint seemed to prefer.

Popova managed to get them some food and two comfortable chairs as well. If it weren’t for her puffy face and swollen eyes, Popova would have seemed her normal, efficient self.

But, DeRicci knew, Popova would seem efficient for a little while, and then the efficiency would fade. Popova must have really loved Soseki. And DeRicci had missed it all.

She was back in her office, coordinating information. Hänsel was getting the information she requested cobbled together. He still looked panicked. DeRicci wasn’t even certain he had noticed Flint and Talia, or if he had cared.

DeRicci wanted the old Popova back. She wanted the day to stop and to be as calm and orderly as yesterday.

She wanted her biggest problem to be the Anniversary Day itself, and the reminders that the ceremony usually brought her.

Not this.

She had to check in on all of the investigations. She wasn’t sure if she should move Romey to the governor-general’s case or if she should leave those uncombined. She needed people in all of the other cities as well. It would take time for her people to get there, and to get up to speed.

Flint hadn’t been the solution to all of her problems. DeRicci herself still had to coordinate these investigations, and she didn’t have the authority to do so.

She had promised herself after the Disty crisis to get more authority, and she had worked with some of the councilors for the United Domes, but that effort had gone by the wayside with some new political crisis she hadn’t entirely understood.

Then she had talked to the governor-general who had promised to try something.

But remember, Noelle
, the governor-general had said.
We’re fighting an uphill battle. The mayors don’t want to give up their fiefdoms, not even in the name of security.

The governor-general, who was dying by inches, a handful of kilometers from here. Or, for all DeRicci knew, might already be dead.

She sank into her chair. She always ended up being the default person in charge. And she hadn’t signed on for that.

When this crisis was over, she was going to quit, take a long vacation somewhere, maybe even ask Flint if he needed some kind of assistant. Anything to take this pressure off.

Her emergency links pinged. When she was a detective, she would occasionally ignore messages like that.

She couldn’t now.

She answered, scrambling the connection and putting it in the very center of that damn screen.

Nyquist’s head filled the box assigned to this message. Behind him, she saw white corridors and a white ceiling. Nothing and no one else.

“It’s worse than any of us thought, Noelle,” he said.

Her stomach clenched. How could it be worse? He had no idea what she had been going through today.

But she wasn’t going to contradict him. “Where are you?”

“I’m still in the Port,” he said. “I have been interrogating Ursula Palmette.”

He told DeRicci exactly what happened—from the attack and how severe it could have been, to the vest Palmette had worn.

Another hole in the Dome, this one in the ideal spot to create the most damage.

DeRicci shuddered.

“But that’s not the worst of it, Noelle,” he said. His voice was shaking. She had never heard his voice shake, not even when he was bleeding out from that Bixian attack. “She told me that she was the primary actor, not those clones. She called herself a facilitator, and she is, if you think about it. She got the zoodeh, she gave them the way into the city—”

“What’s she planning?” DeRicci asked. She could hear the analysis later.

“It’s not her anymore,” Nyquist said. “I got her to divert her attack on Armstrong, but she tells me it doesn’t matter. Each clone, each one, had someone like her to facilitate the meeting with the mayor or the governor-general. And those facilitators are the ones who are going to cause the most damage.”

“How?” DeRicci asked.

“If I knew, I’d tell you,” Nyquist said. “But she said the assassinations were supposed to be a diversion from the real destruction. And she said the attacks are going to start now.”

What had Soseki’s assassin said?
These killings today. They’re just the beginning.

And she had gotten similar reports from other domes.
Just the beginning
. Diversion to destruction.

DeRicci felt lightheaded. Then she remembered: she needed to breathe.

And she did. She took in a deep breath, and let it out slowly.

“She didn’t give you any idea what the other attacks would be, did she?” DeRicci asked.

“No, Noelle,” Nyquist said. “But if she had succeeded, she would have made that bombing four years ago seem small. The destruction, not just with the bomb, but with the chemicals, and the quarantined material—I have no idea how many people would have died.”

And these attacks were being planned in every single dome, maybe even being carried out.

The governor-general was incapacitated. Some of the mayors were dead, some injured, the rest incommunicado.

DeRicci was on her own.

And this time, she had absolutely no idea what to do.

Fifty-nine

The assassins had all arrived through the Port of Armstrong two weeks ago. They arrived in a group—twenty of them—and they didn’t even try to hide the fact that they were clones, or that they were traveling together. They did dress differently, but they carried similar bags, and their clothing seemed to have the same manufacture.

They ate lunch when they got off the transport, in the same restaurant, talking and laughing like members of the same family. Then they peeled off as they headed to different destinations on the Moon.

Watching them through old security footage, tracking them, made Flint uneasy. They had been so visible. With the benefit of hindsight, they looked sinister. But he had seen clumps like that before, humans who looked alike. Some were clones, some were siblings—twins or triplets or quadruplets—and he had never thought anything of it.

He glanced at Talia. She was sitting sideways in her chair, knees hung over one arm of the chair, her back against the other. The pad she was working on was braced against her thighs. Her eyebrows curved down toward her nose in a slight frown, and her lips were pursed in concentration.

She was tracking the transport. She already had its origin, which was some starbase just outside the solar system. It was clear the assassins didn’t begin their journey at that base. So she was tracking the passenger manifest and comparing it to the security identification provided through the vids.

As soon as she had the names of the twenty assassins, she would give it to Flint. He would see if he could find them, and see if they were using their real names.

He suspected they were: they weren’t about hiding. They wanted to be seen, noticed, and eventually caught. They wanted everyone to know what they had done.

Which chilled him.

He had just switched his screen to a list of long-term cloning companies—companies that had existed for more than twenty years and had no trouble with human cloning—when DeRicci contacted him on his link.

Miles, can you come to my office? I need to pick your brain
.

He glanced at Talia. She was biting her lower lip. Then he sighed.

“Bring your pad, kiddo,” he said. “We have to talk with Noelle.”

“What’s wrong now?” Talia asked, her body instantly tense.

What isn’t wrong?
Flint wanted to say, but didn’t. “I think she just needs to toss some ideas around.”

He hoped. Because he didn’t want to believe that things had gotten worse.

Sixty

Keptra hadn’t brought her own vehicle. She had flown down to the hospital in the stupid ambulance, thinking that was the best way to handle this crisis.

And it had been. She had to remember that. If she hadn’t ridden with that bastard, she wouldn’t now know that they were still in trouble.

Someone—a woman, a
facilitator
—was going to do something, something worse than the assassination attempt on the mayor.

And she was going to do it in the Top of the Dome.

Keptra commandeered an emergency vehicle in the parking lot outside the hospital. She was flying it back up to the Top of the Dome, avoiding other emergency vehicles transporting hostages and staff and God knew who else.

She told Strom to take a team to the eleventh floor, suite 8C. Not that she expected them to find anyone there, but at least they’d know who they were looking for. Not just who—they could get the name from the building directory—but a bit about her as well.

Strom hadn’t gotten back to Keptra yet. And that worried her.

She had been complaining about the Top of the Dome for years, and no one had listened to her. No one cared.

But someone who worked in the Top of the Dome would know about its strengths and weaknesses. Particularly someone who knew the back ways into the restaurant.

As Keptra drove, she sent messages along her links. She needed her team to remain. She needed more officers. She needed—God forbid—a bomb squad. She needed sniffer bots and robotic equipment. She needed full-fledged emergency gear.

And she needed someone on the ground, investigating other venues, just in case the damn bastard had been lying to her.

Oddly enough, she didn’t think he was lying about another attack. But she wasn’t sure it would happen today. She wasn’t sure when it would happen. She just needed to be prepared.

She was nearly to the parking structure at the side of the Top of the Dome when Strom reached her.

“First,” he said, appearing as a small hologram on her dashboard. He was still wearing all his gear, and he looked tired. “Her name is Gronberg. Eugenia P. Gronberg. She’s a mid-level bureaucrat who has worked here for about ten years. And I think she’s been doing something to the computers.”

Keptra was driving the vehicle herself, not using the automatic controls. She didn’t want to switch over to the automated system, not when the driving was so tricky, when she was speeding, and when there were so many other emergency vehicles in the small airspace around the Top of the Dome.

So she switched off the holographic projection, leaving only the audio on.

“What do you mean, doing something?” she asked.

“Well, the in-house locator says she’s in this office, and if she is, then she’s invisible,” he said. “Plus, when I tracked her actions for the earliest part of the day, and tried to see how she helped that would-be assassin, I still got information that she was at her desk all day. But when I looked at the video, the room was empty. She hasn’t been here at all.”

“Crap,” Keptra said, narrowly avoiding an edge of the building. “If she was going to do some damage, what could she do? What are her skill sets?”

“I don’t trust any information I have on her,” Strom said. “Everything looks like it’s been tampered with.”

Keptra steered the vehicle into the parking garage and headed for premium parking. Not that she had to worry; the parking structure was nearly empty. Everyone who could leave the Top of the Dome had already done so.

“Then we need old information, something she wouldn’t have thought to change,” Keptra said. “Get her image out to everyone in the Top of the Dome, and send it to me as well.”

“Already done,” he said.

“Good. I’ll join you in less than fifteen.”

She hoped she had fifteen minutes. She was really worried about this. She had always known something bad would happen on her watch. This morning, she had thought it was the attack on the mayor.

Now she knew that whatever it was, it was going to be a lot worse.

She stopped for half a second, called up the image of Eugenia P. Gronberg. The woman looked harmless, like most of the human bureaucrats throughout the Moon. She had short brown hair in some kind of weird puffy do that didn’t accent the rather plain features of her face. She was matronly, poorly dressed, and she had frown lines near her mouth. The frown lines were shiny, which meant she had already had enhancements to make the lines go away, but they had returned, taking over her face again.