Final Inquiries (30 page)

"Describe it," said Wolfson.

Frank allowed himself a moment of annoyance, and the luxury of letting it show. "Don't tell me you're not playing cute, Wolfson," he said. He tapped the mug she had brought him that morning. "Just like this one. And just like about fifty or sixty or a hundred or two hundred that we've handed out to visitors and members of delegations and so on in the last year."

"There's the same and there's identical," said Wolfson. "That mug is brand-new. I swiped it out of a case of them in the back of the Snack Shack. Was yours old? New? Worn-looking? Chipped?"

"Yeah, my mug was worn and chipped--two weeks ago. But
that
one I dropped myself. Smashed to bits. I threw it away. So I got a new one. Stole it from the same place you stole that one."

"If there are so many of them around, how did you tell yours from all the others?"

If that wasn't a leading question, it sure as hell was the next best thing to one. "I marked it, of course. But you knew that."

"How? How did you mark it?"

"I used an indelible marker pen and wrote my name on the bottom of it."

"Your full name?"

"Yeah. Right. 'Special Agent Francis Xavier Milkowski.' With smiley faces instead of dots on all the 'i's. And I drew in pink and blue flowers all around my name."

Wolfson just sat there, staring at him, waiting. Finally he gave in. "I wrote my nickname. 'Milk.' What my
friends
call me."

"Something tells me you want me to stick with 'Frank,'" she said.

"For the time being," he said. "Anyway, I'm not feeling that friendly toward
you,
right now--Hannah."

"I'll bear up somehow--Frank," she said, her voice stiff, but not unkind. "For what it's worth, I might be the best friend you've got in the world--in all the worlds--right now." She glanced down at her notes, but Frank had no doubt that was just to make him sweat for a beat or two before the next phase of the duel. But it worked.

"All right," she said. "Back to the narrative. You see Emelza. She looks pretty dead. You see the coffee mug. All correct?"

"All correct."

"How closely did you examine the coffee mug?" she asked.

I saw it was mine. I saw my name written on the bottom and I broke out in a cold sweat and stayed the hell away from it like it was radioactive and covered with plague germs. That part I didn't expect.
Frank kept his poker face on and shrugged. "I saw it was a coffee mug. A white BSI mug. I think it was a little broken. Maybe a chip had come out of it. I didn't look at it that close. There was this dead alien right in front of me that sort of drew my attention."

"Nothing else about the mug?"

"Nothing," he said, and instantly wished he hadn't said it quite so belligerently.

Wolfson looked at him closely for longer than he would have preferred, and then spoke. "All right, then, we'll move on. You see the body, you see the mug. What next?"

"I grab my commlink and call the ambassador."

"From right there? From the main ops room?"

"Right there. Kneeling over the body. Maybe thirty seconds after I got there."

"Why so fast?"

So no one could possibly think I had time to do it, dummy!
"What was I going to do instead that should have come first? Conduct a funeral service? And yeah, I gotta say, I was a little in shock. I figured I'd better do something, and fast, and that seemed like the best thing. Besides, like I said, she looked dead, but I'm no expert. Maybe she's not dead, and the Kendari could do something fast." And he hadn't thought of that explanation until a day too late either, but Wolfson didn't need to hear that.

"Why didn't you call the Kendari? I know the embassy commlink doesn't connect with the Kendari embassy directly, but there you were in the joint ops center. There must be some sort of comm system that would get you direct to the Kendari."

It was his turn to stare long and hard at Wolfson. Didn't she get it? If not, then, okay, he'd run it all past her. "One--the joint ops center is suddenly a crime scene. I don't want to touch anything I don't have to. I don't want to shed a hair, or lose a drop of sweat, or plant a shoeprint anywhere I don't need to. I might muss up whatever evidence is there--or leave behind misleading evidence that might implicate me.

"Two, I pick up the phone and say 'Hello, deadly enemies of humanity. It's me, the BSI agent who obviously hates your guts. You know, the one you don't much like either. I'm standing over your dead cop. Please come take a look.'
Then
what happens? Maybe two minutes later I'm lying dead next to her.

"Three, I couldn't call my normal liaison officer. She was lying dead on the floor at my feet. I could call in Saint Brox--but he doesn't like me too much, and the deader is his girlfriend. That might make him a little
extra
angry at me--plus it also makes him a pretty good suspect. Four, the ambassador is my direct superior, it's blindingly obvious right off the bat that this thing is going to mushroom into as big a deal as it has--and I'm supposed to advise him first in an emergency. Something that might blow the doors off the Pentam negotiations and maybe start a war ought to go into that category. Good enough reasons?"

"Good enough," Wolfson said evenly. "And that answer gets all those very reasonable reasons on the record right away, instead of leaving the point hanging for six months until the board of inquiry or whatever. So you call the ambassador. How does that conversation go?"

"The ambassador can be a little--well, not slow on the uptake, but sometimes if he doesn't like the news, you have to give it to him more than once. It took a minute or two for him to really understand what I was telling him."

"What, exactly, did you tell him?"

"As much as I knew, which wasn't much. That Emelza 401 was dead, sprawled out on the floor of the main ops room. He asked me 'are you sure?' two or three different times, and I kept telling him yes, I was. I think he was hoping it would all be a misunderstanding. If he kept double-checking enough times, somehow Emelza would wake up and that would be that. Finally I convinced him that I wasn't mistaken. Then he got decisive. He ordered me to leave everything untouched, to do nothing else but get out of the joint ops center and meet him at the entrance. He said he was going to call the Kendari whatzit--whatever they call him instead of ambassador."

"The diplomatic xenologist."

"Yeah. Him. So our ambassador cut comm with me. I stood up, went through the inner and outer blast doors, locking up behind me, and waited there at the human-side entrance for the ambassador."

"Did you photograph the corpse or the crime scene? Do any sort of crime scene work at all?"

"No. I didn't have a camera, or any other equipment with me, and even if I had, the ambassador gave me a direct order to get out of there at once. Once I was out of the ops center, it was sealed off--at least from our side."

"And that's it." Her voice was flat, hard, unconvinced.

"That's it. I know it doesn't seem like much, but you and I have spent about ten times longer talking about my finding the body than it took for it to happen."

"All right," she said. "We're done. At least with that topic. Let's play a new game. Let's say that we all totally agree that you didn't do it. So now we're not interrogator and sort-of-suspect. Now it's agent to agent. Talking shop. Who did it? You've been locked up here with nothing to do but think about it. What's
your
theory?"

"Zamprohna," Frank said instantly. "I have been thinking about it, a lot. Maybe not him, personally, but maybe one or two--or three or four--of his true believers." This time, he didn't care if he sounded eager. He
was
eager. If she was pumping him for information, trying to get him to make a slip, so be it. There were things she needed to hear from an agent with local knowledge and experience. She obviously knew it herself.

"Why him?"

"Look, all the info I have is from that thirty seconds over the body," said Frank. "You probably know more. I
hope
you know more. But from what I know, it's not just that Emelza was killed. It's
how
she was killed, and where. She died from ingesting a substance associated with humans, and literally right in the middle of the building that symbolized cooperation with humans. It's a cold-blooded attempt to bust up not just the Pentam deal, but any shot at human-Kendari cooperation."

"I thought you didn't like aliens that much yourself."

"I don't. I really don't like the Kendari. I've cleaned up after a few fights with them. But there's such a thing as dealing with the available reality. They exist. We have to live with that. What are we going to do? Kill them all to give ourselves
lebensraum
? My family was on the receiving end of that a zillion years back in World War II. Most people these days barely know what the Nazis were. Good. Better than our deciding to imitate them." He fiddled with his empty coffee mug. "Bet you're surprised to hear me talk like that, huh?"

"Not so surprised as you might think, Frank. But go on. Why Zamprohna?"

"It
could
have been one of the other xenophobe groups, but Zamprohna's got the biggest group, the most money, the loudest voice, and the shadiest past of all of them. And he's got thirty or forty of his people with him--including some guys I won't call goons, because they're too smooth for that. Ex-military. Special Forces types. They could know how our security works, what our procedures are, that sort of thing. Heck, they could be the ones screwing up our entry key systems. Getting us used to not trusting it could be part of softening us up so they could pull this stunt. Those guys are
good.
I think probably three or four of them working together could bypass our security, get in there, do the job, and get out."

"Three or four team members making it look like one person did it?" asked Wolfson. "Maybe. It would make a few impossible-looking details easier to arrange. Plus Zamprohna doesn't like the BSI any more than we like him. If they could blow up human-Kendari cooperation, making it look like one of our guys did it would just be the icing on the cake."

Aside from breakfast and coffee, the hints in those words were the first things Hannah Wolfson had given away since she came through the door. She stared at him thoughtfully for about the count of five. "All right, then," she said. "You might want to be ready for us to have another little chat--on the off chance that I just happen to think of some tiny little detail in your story that doesn't
exactly
make perfect sense. But one last not-quite-leading question. It might seem a little strange, but bear with me."

She reached into her pocket and dumped a pile of pens and pencils and markers and so on out on the table. "I tried to grab one of each kind I found in the main embassy BSI office," she said. "And please notice I've had them in my pocket and touched them and so on if you're afraid of my trying to get your prints on something incriminating. You don't even have to touch them. Just point. If you remember--what kind of marker did you use to write on the bottom of your mug?"

Frank looked at Hannah, not at the pens. "I hope it looks like I'm staring at you and wondering if you're nuts," he said. "Because that's the expression I'm trying for."

"You're about the third or fourth person I've asked to indulge me this morning," said Hannah. "And I'm asking very nicely.
Very
nicely. And I hope it looks like I'm staring you straight in the eye, and telling you that I'm trying to save your life--because that's the expression--and the goal--
I'm
trying for."

They locked eyes for a count of ten, a count of twenty, before Frank looked down, looked away, looked anywhere but at her. He shifted his eyes to the clutter of pens on the table, and grabbed at one, very deliberately touching it, holding it, making all the fingerprints anyone might want.
If she's inviting me to demonstrate how little I trust her, why play along?
"This kind," he said. "That's the kind I use to mark stuff."

Wolfson snatched up that pen, let the camera have a good look at it, then stuffed it in her shirt pocket right next to the camera. The rest she scooped up and dumped on the tray. She gathered up his plate, his eating utensils, hooked his coffee mug through the handle with one finger, and got them all back on the tray as well. She stuffed her datapad in her pocket, picked up the tray, and stood.

"Thanks, Frank," she said. "Thanks for everything. It's been great." She turned and headed for the door. She paused, a bit theatrically, just as the door slid open. "Oh--by the way," she said. "Stay clear of the joint ops center, and your own office. But other than that--you're free to go." And she turned back, and walked out, and the door slid shut behind her.

Frank gave it the count of ten before he exhaled in a long, drawn-out sigh of relief. Well, he had
thought
he knew how to play interrogation. That was, beyond doubt, the most polite, most friendly, most respectful working-over he had ever gotten. Like being skinned alive during a massage.

Thank God she's on our side,
Frank thought.

But that only brought him up face-to-face with one more uncomfortable question.
What about you, Frank?
he asked himself.
Whose side are you on, exactly?

SIXTEEN

ENGINEERING RESPONSE

Jamie scraped the tamper-detecting tape off the door to Chief Engineer Subramanian's stateroom, entered the unlock code into the keypad--and didn't get any further than that on his own.

The door slid open, and a young, very tall, very thin, eager-looking man with South Asian features was looking down at him. "Greetings!" he said. "Please, please do come in."

Jamie stepped in cautiously and looked around the tiny stateroom, half-expecting the real chief engineer to be tucked away somewhere. This fellow looked too young to be chief of anything. "Ah, you're Dr. Subramanian?"

"Yes, yes, that's right. Of course. Otherwise, why would I be in his room?" Subramanian asked as he pulled out a chair for the visitor and gestured him into it. "And you're the BSI agent they sent the
Eminent Concordance
to fetch. Am I right?"