Inescapable (17 page)

Pythia,
however, came with everything that might be needed for handling
forensics work, if at the level of a portable laboratory. Fox
watched as microbots swarmed over the scattered components which
had been hauled out of the bottom of an air duct by maintenance
robots. The hunter-killer swarm had spotted the pieces, but there
was nothing to kill.

‘One or both of
its engines failed,’ Fox said, peering at a twisted shape which had
been the propeller of a ducted fan unit. ‘It dropped from a pretty
significant height, right down one of the main vertical ducts.’

Jarvis’s eyes
scanned over the pieces. ‘Hell of a jigsaw.’

‘Yeah.’ There
were circuit boards, sections of the robot’s shell, things which
might have been cameras, but no sign of anything which looked like
a weapon. Which did not mean that all of the robots they were
dealing with were unarmed, but it did suggest that murder was not
their main goal.

‘I have
completed the basic reconstruction,’ Pythia announced, not a hint
of smugness in her tone. An image appeared on the table the
components were spread out on. ‘Identification confirmed from
component identifiers. This is a modified Turmfalke unit, one of
the standard products of Baum Elektronische Instrumente Fertigung
GmbH.’

‘Suggesting
industrial espionage out of the NU,’ Jarvis muttered.

‘You buying
it?’ Fox asked.

‘It’s…
possible. BEIF
do
engage in that kind of thing occasionally,
but MarTech has some pretty big facilities in the Nordeuropäische
Union. I mean, why drag their asses to Chicago when they could
probably get more in Oslo?’

‘I’ll make a
detective out of you yet. Pythia, any chance of us extracting its
programming?’

‘I will attempt
to do so as soon as the structural analysis is complete.’

‘Great. Full
precautions, Pythia. Something about this feels like a trap.’

‘I will enact a
full firewall and software barrier system before interfacing to the
system. I will ensure complete safety.’

Fox winced.
‘Pythia, we are going to have to talk about the term “tempting
fate.”’

~~~

‘The isolation
processor worked exactly as expected,’ Jackson said, his image
standing at the window of Fox’s suite. ‘As soon as the infection
was detected, the power was cut and the virus was contained.’

‘At least that
worked,’ Fox replied. ‘I had a full check run anyway. The broken
bot was a trap. We have to assume the others are intended to cause
deliberate damage.’

‘It seems like
a reasonable supposition. The analysis of the processor memory dump
indicates quite a sophisticated virus, but it could have come from
a large number of potential sources.’

‘We can’t prove
it’s NIX.’

‘No, we can’t.
I have analysts working on it and I’ve sent instructions out to
Pythia to get the focus of the hunter-killers redirected.’

‘Where to?’

‘Up. I suspect
they plan to get into the main computer room.’

Fox grinned.
‘Yeah. I’ve got the security cameras in the computer room watching
for them. We have something of an issue due to the fragile nature
of the room’s contents, but Jarvis thinks he’s got something that
can handle it.’

‘I’m quite sure
he has. I’ll leave you to it and let you know if anything new comes
up.’

‘Thanks,
Jackson.’ Fox caught a flicker of a grin on his face before his
avatar vanished. Turning, she unzipped her jacket and slipped it
off her arms, tossing the battered, purple leather over the back of
a sofa as she headed for the bathroom.

‘Miss Vaughn is
at the door,’ Kit stated.

Turning around
with a sigh, Fox came to a halt. ‘Okay, let her in.’ She waited for
the door to open and the facilities manager to step through,
dressed as she had been earlier in a pale lemon, flower patterned
blouse and a beige skirt, and matching kitten heels. Alice came to
a sudden stop at the sight of Fox in her figure-skimming bodysuit.
‘Anything I can do for you, Alice?’

‘Uh, sorry, I’m
interrupting…’

‘I was just
going to take a shower. What’s up?’

‘Oh… I just
wanted to go over the work for Mister Clarion’s house. Check that
everything is… well… as requested.’

‘You’re the CMO
of Palladium Security Services and you’re checking on the specs for
a small, private commission?’

Vaughn smiled,
timidly. ‘Well, he
is
a personal friend of the CIO.’

‘You, Miss
Vaughn, are a conundrum,’ Fox said, moving a little closer so that
she could rest a hip on the back of a sofa.

‘A, uh,
conundrum?’

‘Yeah. You’re
one of the top executives in a company which Jackson and Mariel put
together from scratch. You’re good at your job, because you
wouldn’t be doing it otherwise, but you
really
don’t seem
like the type.’

‘The
t-type?’

‘Yeah. There’s
that stutter right there.’

‘St-tutter?’
Vaughn’s lips pursed and her brows furrowed.

‘Stutter, yeah.
And I simply don’t believe that the executive officer of a company
like Palladium stutters.’

‘I get jittery
around people I find attractive,’ Vaughn snapped, the stutter
abruptly gone.

Fox’s lips
twitched. ‘But you tend to get assertive when you’ve got a snit on.
Now I get it.’ The flicker of a grin became a smile. ‘Let’s go
through Sam’s stuff, but you should really take time to contact him
directly.’

Vaughn’s cheeks
coloured and the anger drained out of her face like water. ‘Oh no,
I couldn’t do that. I’ve seen his picture.’

~~~

Multiple streams of hot
water were washing away Fox’s worries for a few minutes when Kit’s
voice broke in. ‘My copy in New York is taking receipt of the case
files for Felix Kenan’s homicide investigation.’

‘She’s handling
the Doran historical analysis, isn’t she?’

‘Yes, Fox.’

‘Then let’s get
that data sent over here and we can begin going over it. I’d like
to see it anyway.’

They had
Brownlow’s reports, the autopsy results, and the forensics analysis
of the scene by the time she was stepping out of the shower’s
drying jets. With little expectation of an exemplary investigation,
Fox began working through the case notes while Kit checked over the
technical reports.

‘Cause of death
was the throat wound,’ Kit reported. ‘No sign of defensive wounds,
but there were bruises on Mister Kenan’s arms commensurate with him
being physically restrained.’

‘He was held by
one man while another cut him.’

‘Yes, that is
the coroner’s interpretation. Someone hacked the house’s computer
system from outside to bypass the locks and eliminate the security
system. However, they didn’t do a perfect job of it, causing a soft
reset in the AI which is what made Sam wary and left a quite
obvious disruption. Not that that is particularly useful. There is
also evidence of a mild sedative in Mister Kenan’s system. It would
have been sufficient to stop him from fighting too much.’

‘How old was
he?’

‘Eighty-three.’

Fox mulled that
over as she read Brownlow’s notes. Someone had gained entry to the
house by disabling the security system, probably used some sort of
aerosol tranquilising agent to subdue a man who did not appear to
be in the full bloom of youth, and then killed him. Modern medicine
meant that someone that age was likely to be fit; it was quite
possible that Felix Kenan had another fifty years to live, and that
was assuming some medical advance did not push that out further.
But Felix had not kept himself in the best of shape and it was hard
to believe that it needed a narcotic and two men to kill him.

Brownlow had
rejected that hypothesis quickly and with little thought. The drugs
had been self-administered, the bruises had been caused in an
altercation with a lover, and the lover had been the one to slit
Felix’s throat. There was no evidence that any such lover had
existed, but Brownlow had been convinced of it. He had placed the
file into the ‘closed, unresolved’ list after seventy-two hours,
but he had stopped writing any regular updates after twenty-four.
Canard had signed off on the closure.

‘That is pretty
amazingly slipshod work, even for Brownlow,’ Fox muttered.

‘The lack of
any forensic evidence of the killer or killers suggests they were
wearing sealed bodysuits,’ Kit said. ‘Detective Brownlow’s enraged
lover theorem does not seem to fit
any
of the facts.’

‘You’ve got
those body images from the street cameras. Let’s see what we have.’
Kit displayed a set of eight images showing two distinct, male
figures, their faces obscured by hats and whatever form of mask
they were wearing. ‘So the mask is part of a suit, sealed to stop
anything being left at the scene and light enough to be worn under
street clothes. I’m thinking the kind of programmable camouflage
coating hunters use rather than military, dynamic stuff. But they
sliced Kenan’s throat so they’d have been covered in blood. They
had to have a means of covering that up before they left. And
there’s the computer hack… No, this was
heavily
premeditated. This was an
assassination
, not a murder. Who
would want to assassinate a harmless old man?’

‘Great Park
Holdings?’ Kit suggested.

Fox nodded,
slowly. ‘Yeah… It does all seem to be coming down to property. We
really
need to find out who they are and we have
nothing
to go on.’

New York Metro, 16
^th
April
2060.

He watched her as she
emerged from the bedroom she had entered an hour before. She was
going out soon: it was Friday night and Katrina Hopethorne liked to
party. He could tell the kind of party she was expecting too, just
from the clothes. The skirt so short and tight it barely covered
her crotch, and the flouncy little top which was cut to show off
her cleavage and then made from a net material that did not really
conceal anything anyway. She was slipping on platform heels which
had to put six inches on her height.

And she had
forgotten he was even there. He knew it. He could tell as she
chatted aloud over her telepresence system to some girlfriend,
ignoring the man working so diligently for her. His hands trembled
as she bent to put on her right shoe. His blood boiled as she
straightened and turned, and her face became almost puzzled as she
saw him sitting there. She
had
forgotten him, because he was
nothing to her. He slipped a hand into his jacket pocket and closed
it around the thin canister hidden there. Well, soon she was going
to know
exactly
who he was. She was not going to forget it
for as long as she lived.

~~~

Kit was a busy AI. Even
though her copy on Fox’s implant was handling the job of personal
assistant while they were in Chicago, it fell upon the primary
copy, back at home, to handle the mundane tasks of a PA
and
work through the analysis of all the conspiracy theory noise to
determine what was real.

Luckily, Kit
was well equipped to handle that kind of multitasking. In some of
her research on human sexuality, she had discovered a number of
articles suggesting that females were better at multitasking than
males. She was fairly sure that this did not apply to artificial
intelligences which were, in any case, gendered only as far as
their programming identified them as such. On the other hand, an AI
running on a quantum processor was
substantially
better
equipped to multitask than a human of either sex and Kit knew how
to make the most of it.

Equally, some
things were just not amenable to the kind of parallelisation a
quantum processor was good at, and Kit’s only advantage in some
areas of the Doran investigation was the speed her mind operated at
and her ability to organise and access memories. She could absorb
documents with speed and efficiency, cross-linking information to
other documents, and performing verification and extrapolation to
determine both the truth of an assertion and whether she could make
anything out of it the individual had not noticed. And there was
one thing no one seemed to have connected up, one small fact which
seemed to be running as a thread through too many of the cases.

She was closing
on what she considered final proof of the link when a process
running on her second quantum processor sent up a bunch of flags
with such urgency that Kit focused all her attention on the data it
had discovered. A building on the western side of the MCD had
contracted to Palladium for internal security three months earlier.
At twenty-three hundred, an alarm had been raised there when one of
the residents’ biomonitors had detected critical condition
indicators and informed the central computer system. Palladium
Security personnel had responded immediately, even as the call was
going out to the city’s EMT service: all of Palladium’s security
personnel were trained in first aid. As Kit scanned over the images
being sent through the Palladium network, she knew that they had
not been trained for this. She also knew that Fox was going to need
to come back from Chicago to deal with it.

17
^th
April.

‘Katrina Hopethorne,’
Kit said, ‘aged twenty-six. Daughter of Johnathan Hopethorne of
Hopethorne–Briggs Shipping.’

Fox looked down
at the naked girl tied to the bed by thin cord. The binding was not
tight, she would have been able to struggle, and there was bruising
and abrasion on the wrists and ankles to suggest that she had,
quite violently. It had done her no good.

‘NAPA has been
informed of the unattended death and that Palladium are handling
the initial investigation,’ Kit went on. ‘We can hold them off for
forty-eight hours under current regulations, but they are already
pressing for us to hand the investigation over to precinct
eighteen.’