Masterminds (21 page)

He stopped, stood, and walked around.

Jarvis had rented a building to a one-man employment agency staffed by Cade Faulke, killer of clones.

Jarvis, clones.

Talia thought Zagrando was listed as dead in the databases because someone had killed a clone of him to make him look dead. Zagrando had said,
They used a clone to kill me. You know that? It’s why I’m dead. Should’ve been a clue.

At the time, Flint had dismissed the statement. Zagrando had accused Jarvis of killing him after Zagrando killed Jarvis, so Flint just figured a clone was involved, as well.

But if there had been a clone of Zagrando on Valhalla Basin…

Flint ran a hand over his face.

He was swimming in information, in theories, in too much data and not enough context.

He needed help, and he had finally hit a place in the investigation where he could bring in help, help he trusted.

He opened one of the links he had previously shut down.

Hey, Nyquist
, he sent.
Can you investigate a case file for me?

Sure,
Nyquist sent back immediately,
because I’m doing absolutely nothing with my life.

Even though they weren’t speaking, the sarcasm came through loud and clear.

It’s time-critical,
Flint sent.

Isn’t everything?
Nyquist sent back. There was a slight pause, and Flint could almost hear Nyquist’s put-upon sigh.
All right. Tell me exactly what you need
.

TWENTY-SEVEN

IT HAD NOT
been the day she had planned.

DeRicci ran a hand through her hair and wondered when she had last washed it. She could barely remember when she had last slept. And she knew she had eaten because her stomach still ached. Besides, she had shared that lunch with Wilma Goudkins, and had sent her to research some of the inside-the-Alliance names that Flint needed help with.

Flint, who had his own mystery to deal with. Who, apparently, had sent Talia to deal with part of it.

And now, a marshal from the Earth Alliance Frontier Service had shown up, unbidden.

With Popova’s help, DeRicci had looked over all of the information that was quickly available on this marshal. Judita Gomez had a spectacular reputation, with more commendations than almost anyone else in the marshal service.

Until five months ago, she’d had her own ship, the
Stanley
. She had taken a leave of absence ahead of a possible retirement, but she had arrived in Armstrong on a ship called the
Green Dragon
, which seemed to have been fitted out with a forensic lab, oddly enough—something the ship had to declare as it made its way into Armstrong’s port.

The ship’s pilot hadn’t answered a question the port posed: whether or not the crew was mixed. DeRicci found that odd—not that the pilot hadn’t answered, but that the port was asking questions like that now.

The port should have been just as worried about humans as it was about Peyti and other aliens. After all, the initial attack on the Moon had been by human clones, not Peyti clones. DeRicci should probably assign someone in her team to talk to the head of the port, just to make sure this behavior didn’t continue.

As if talking to the Port Master was part of her job description.

She was doing a lot of things that were not part of her job description.

Like meeting with marshals from the Frontier. DeRicci wasn’t even certain where they stood in the security hierarchy. DeRicci worked for the United Domes of the Moon, and Gomez was as high as a law enforcement officer got inside the Frontier Department of the Earth Alliance Security Division.

Gomez had lots of experience dealing with other cultures and had been working in law enforcement longer than DeRicci had been alive.

That alone made DeRicci respect her.

But her trip here was strange. Gomez hadn’t been this deep in the Earth Alliance in a very long time. She had stopped in Hétique City for a job interview with a government-owned cloning facility, an interview dutifully logged into her record along with a query from the interviewer, stating he wasn’t certain why a woman of Gomez’s skills would want a security position, no matter how well paid it was.

That job application was the only real red flag that Popova had found in Gomez’s record. Gomez had stopped other places, but DeRicci couldn’t find a pattern. Most of those places had been resorts or vacation spots inside the Earth Alliance.

If Gomez hadn’t had the
Green Dragon
, and if her chief forensic officer, Lashante Simiaar, hadn’t been traveling with her, DeRicci would have thought that Gomez really was thinking of retirement.

But old law enforcement officials—particularly those with high-adrenaline jobs, jobs with an unbelievable amount of autonomy, like the ones on the Frontier—never really retired. They usually died at work, sometimes in a dangerous situation that went awry, but more often still running their ship, but not doing the hands-on stuff any longer.

DeRicci wished she looked better. She wished her office looked better. She wished the Moon looked better.

That last thought made her smile ruefully. She had to remember what had been going on the last six months.

The least she could do, however, was be courteous.

She opened the door to her office and walked past Popova’s desk. Popova had gone to check on another visitor who was arriving.

DeRicci wasn’t certain if people were arriving out of the woodwork because they were some kind of strange disaster groupies or because they actually believed they could help with the disaster.

She knew that Popova had dealt with a lot of them in the past six months, and even more in the past two weeks. And those were the ones that the building’s security system had vetted and the security personnel that DeRicci had hired long ago believed worth Popova’s precious time.

Apparently, the current visitor was worth Popova’s precious time. DeRicci was just glad Popova was handling things like that. Because DeRicci had more than enough to handle on her own.

DeRicci found Gomez in a small grouping of chairs not too far from Popova’s desk. Gomez was a little heavier than DeRicci expected for such a high-ranking security officer. She had a square face, lined, no obvious enhancements, and her hair was threaded with just enough silver to make it glisten in the artificial light.

When Gomez saw DeRicci, she stood and extended her hand. “Chief DeRicci, please forgive the intrusion.”

DeRicci was surprised that Gomez recognized her, then realized she probably shouldn’t have been. If Gomez had come here on some kind of mission, then she would have done research before she arrived, just like DeRicci had done research before coming to speak to Gomez.

DeRicci had no polite way to answer the intrusion comment, so she didn’t.

“Why don’t we go to my office,” she said. “I understand you have some information for me.”

“I do,” Gomez said, “and I hope it’s information that you can use.”

DeRicci did too. She didn’t have the time to lose on a side issue. Popova had said that Gomez mentioned finding PierLuigi Frémont clones fifteen years ago on the Frontier.

DeRicci hoped that Gomez’s information was less than fifteen years old.

Because otherwise, this visit would be a waste of precious time.

TWENTY-EIGHT

THERE WERE A
lot of unnecessary rooms and doors down in the Old Armstrong dome substructure.

Ó Brádaigh tugged on the hem of his shirt, feeling grit on its fabric. His face felt grimy too.

He always felt dirty when he was in this substructure beneath the oldest part of the city. The environmental systems weren’t quite as efficient here. They needed a complete overhaul, and before Anniversary Day, there hadn’t been money in the city budget to do the work.

After Anniversary Day, everyone forgot day-to-day maintenance.

This substructure wasn’t quite as deep below ground as the one he had been in earlier that day. He’d actually had to go down several flights, cross a small landing to another set of stairs, and climb back up several more flights.

When this part of the dome had been redesigned, its pilings had gone much deeper into the Moon’s surface to handle more weight. The dome had gotten heavier and the foundation stronger in the past centuries.

But the engineers kept the old control rooms up and active, and didn’t move them down several flights. That would have taken some digging out and rebuilding, and no one wanted to do that.

Besides, over the past several decades, most of the functions of this old control substructure had moved to newer parts of the dome’s substructure. All that remained here now were the controls to the access codes and the secondary overrides.

And even those were supposed to be moved—or, at least, they had been on the agenda to move—before Anniversary Day occurred.

Ó Brádaigh ran a hand over his face, felt even more grit mixed with a bit of sweat. He probably had some dirt lines on his skin. He probably looked a mess.

The lighting down here was an odd, amber color, probably because the light casings had browned over time and no one had fixed them. The substructure control rooms—mostly vacant—were made of permaplastic so old that it was yellowing and peeling. A few of the really old structures, the truly ancient ones, protected as relics by the historical society, were considered to be among the oldest engineering equipment on the Moon.

Ó Brádaigh walked around all of that, his shoes brushing over the plaque announcing the historic nature of this substructure, a plaque that only engineers had seen for at least a century now.

The access code control room was an innocuous little square structure built against one of the side walls. The building had once been white, but looked brown and dilapidated in the amber light.

All except for the door. The handle—and there was a real handle—glistened.

Someone had used this recently.

Ó Brádaigh slipped on the gloves he always carried, and set them to collect all kinds of information from everything he touched, including DNA samples and fingerprints. He wanted evidence—of what, he wasn’t sure yet.

Or at least, he hoped he wasn’t sure.

He broadcast his own access code, let the door scan his retina, and hoped the door didn’t want his DNA as well. He didn’t want to take off the gloves.

The door didn’t ask for the DNA. Instead, the door clicked as the old-fashioned locks opened. Ó Brádaigh turned the knob, and entered the small room.

It was hot inside, like it always was. There wasn’t enough cooling equipment in here—apparently, the long-ago designer figured the “modern” systems didn’t need anything to cool them down. Ó Brádaigh had always meant to fix that and had never found the time.

He downloaded the access information from the system so that later he could figure out who had been here before. Then he looked at the access codes to see what had changed about them.

Only a handful of codes had changed. The altered codes opened the sectioning equipment and the airlocks to the engineering-only parts of the exterior dome.

Ó Brádaigh stared at all of the changes, trying to figure out the double sets of commands before him.

Then the information tumbled into place.

The codes had been changed, yes, but only for six hours. After that, they would reset.

Ó Brádaigh leaned back, careful not to touch the walls, thinking about what he was seeing. Why would anyone change the codes for just six hours? Why reset them if—

Then he let out a long breath.

The controls were in the substructure because, no matter what happened to the dome, the controls would remain untouched. The damn dome could collapse and the controls would still be down here, protected and unharmed. Even if the environmental systems shut down, the controls would still work. They had been designed that way.

So if something happened to the dome—if someone
tampered
with the dome—someone with the right knowledge could come down here and investigate what had been changed, to see what had gone wrong.

If the controls automatically reset, however, the panicked engineer (or whomever had come down here) would think that nothing had changed with the access codes. It would take a suspicious mind to double-check the code history.

Without a reason, no one would.

It had been the luck of the draw that had put Ó Brádaigh in the substructure at the same time as Petteway. It had been Ó Brádaigh’s nervousness that had caused him to check the access codes to the control room in the main substructure. And it had been his tenacity that had brought him here.

He hated what he was thinking.

He was thinking that Petteway had tampered with the sectioning commands for the dome. Or had left the control room open so that
someone
could tamper with the sectioning commands in the next few hours.