Masterminds (22 page)

If Armstrong’s dome didn’t section, then it wouldn’t take a large explosion to kill everyone inside. A very small hole in the dome would do. In fact, a hole small enough to conceal behind a building or a car or a box would be almost impossible to find in the short few moments that anyone would have to look for it.

His heart was pounding.

He needed to let the authorities know. He’d never done that before, and he had to be careful who he spoke to.

He would do that.

But first, he needed to do something else.

He would re-established the old access codes so that the engineers had control of the dome and its sectioning equipment again.

Then he would travel back to the part of the substructure where he had seen Petteway and make sure no one had tampered with the sectioning equipment.

And as Ó Brádaigh thought of that, his breath caught.

He would need help, not just here in Armstrong, but with the other domes, too. Because if the Anniversary Day pattern ran true to form, then what happened in this dome was going to happen in nineteen other domes as well.

His heart pounded faster. He made himself take a deep breath and calm down.

First, he had to reset the controls.

Then he would take action—one important step at a time.

TWENTY-NINE

BARTHOLOMEW NYQUIST STOOD
near his desk, wishing to hell he’d gotten some sleep the night before. He’d been doing too many things at once, and now Miles Flint wanted him to look up a case file, see what exactly was left out, and figure out how—or if—that case was connected to an Earth Alliance Intelligence officer named Ike Jarvis.

Yeah, sure, easy. Something Nyquist could do in an afternoon—if he weren’t already handling a delicate murder case and trying to find time to interrogate one of the Peyti clones in prison.

Technically, Nyquist wasn’t supposed to talk to the clones. S
3
had issued an injunction against all interrogations of the clones without lawyers present. It had been done in the name of the Peyti government for some damned reason Nyquist didn’t want to think about, but knew he had to.

So, he had gone into the Armstrong’s euphemistically named Reception Center and told them that he had to see Uzvaan, the clone who had tried to kill Nyquist personally—and who, just the day before, had been such a good lawyer that Nyquist had recommended Uzvaan’s services to Nyquist’s former partner, a human woman who had been involved in the Anniversary Day bombings.

Ironies of ironies. Nyquist was the only police official with legitimate access to one of the clones, based on the previous case, because Uzvaan was still the lawyer of record for Ursula Palmette, the former partner.

But a real case had taken Nyquist away from all of that, a case that had its own irony built right in. Nyquist was the only detective that Andrea Gumiela, the chief of detectives, trusted to handle the murder of the S
3
lawyer who had handed out the Peyti clone injunctions to every single law enforcement agency a week after the Peyti Crisis.

Gumiela wanted that case wrapped up quickly, before one of S
3
’s senior partners arrived on the Moon and took over all of the cases.

Nyquist wasn’t sure he could act that fast. He knew who murdered Torkild Zhu, but Gumiela wanted an airtight case that would go to court. And that, dammit, would take time.

As would Flint’s request.

Except that Flint said his request might lead them directly to the masterminds of this entire mess. Nyquist had thought Flint had enough to do, researching the information that Uzvaan had given them, but apparently not.

Flint had acquired yet another task.

Something had led to an eight-year-old case file with a flagged and missing perpetrator—and Flint wouldn’t say what that something was. All Flint would say was that he was buried in information, and Nyquist was the only person he could trust to investigate this new lead.

How marvelous for him. For all of them. As if Nyquist didn’t have enough to handle.

He towered over his desk and looked at the chair longingly. One little nap. And lunch. He might have had lunch, but he didn’t remember. Up until a few days ago, he was the guy who brought lunch to everyone in the Security Office. Plus he had taken care of DeRicci when she stumbled into his apartment for her four hours of sleep.

He had been worried about her for weeks. What would happen if he got just as overwhelmed?

Then he sighed. “Got” was the wrong word. He
was
just as overwhelmed. Like her, he had been unwilling to admit it to himself.

“Hey, partner.”

He looked up. Savita Romey had walked into the Detective Unit. She was smiling at him.

His heart was pounding. Until a week ago, he had thought her the most attractive woman he knew. She was still attractive, which irritated him. His heart shouldn’t have done that school-boy skip when he saw her—not because she had changed, but because he had.

Like everyone right now, she was a bit ragged. Her dark hair needed a trim, and she had shadows under her eyes. She wore an oversized t-shirt with the name of her son’s high school basketball team and the dates for the moon-wide championship they’d won just before Anniversary Day emblazoned across the front.

She had been wearing a variation on that outfit off and on since the attack.

But she hadn’t been wearing that outfit when she and two of her colleagues had kicked Torkild Zhu to death for representing the Peyti clones.

Nyquist swallowed back bile. He still found her attractive. But he was no longer
attracted
to her. Now he found her disgusting.

And he didn’t dare arrest her until he had the kind of evidence that would hold up in court.

“Savita,” he said, because he couldn’t bring himself to flirt with her any longer.

“Tired, partner?” She clearly recognized that his tone was off.

“We’re not partners on this one, Savita,” he said, mostly because he couldn’t stomach the conversation. They had partnered on two cases—the Whitford case, which had nearly cost Nyquist his life, and Arek Soseki’s murder on Anniversary Day, in the hours before everyone realized that the attack on the mayor hadn’t been an isolated event.

“Not for lack of trying,” Romey said. “I hear that the barriers to interviewing the Peyti clones might go away soon.”

It was an open door, one he could walk through and get her to confess. He was recording the conversation, and thought it odd that the very act of recording it felt like a betrayal.

“Where did you hear that?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Around. You haven’t heard?”

He didn’t respond to that. He couldn’t, really.

But she didn’t wait for him to say anything. Instead, a small, secretive grin touched her lips.

“The lawyers got a message to back off,” she said, and then she waited.

Her gaze challenged him. She raised her chin. He had worked with her long enough to recognize her tells.

She knew. She knew he was investigating that case. Investigating was one thing. But only Nyquist and Gumiela knew his mandate was to get the perpetrators into court.

“I had heard that,” Nyquist said. “I also heard that only baby lawyers were left at S
3
. They’re out of their league.”

“Thank God,” Romey said. “Now maybe we can interrogate those clones.”

Did she know he was already interrogating a clone? Did anyone here? He hadn’t told anyone, but that didn’t mean the prison staff hadn’t reported back into the Armstrong PD.

“We gotta figure out who is doing this,” Nyquist said, changing the topic slightly. “I still think another attack is coming.”

She made a dismissive sound. “If the damn lawyers had let us interrogate the clones the way we wanted to, we would know what the next attack is going to be.”

She was feeling him out, trying to see where his sympathies were. Every cop knew that a detective could run a real investigation or he could run an investigation to satisfy the brass.

She clearly wanted to know which kind of investigation Nyquist was running.

“That assumes those clones actually know what’s going to happen next,” Nyquist said. “I suspect that the clones are just tools. You generally don’t tell your tools how you plan to use them to build a wall.”

“Or how you plan to tear one down.” She walked around some chairs and stopped next to him. Too close, in fact. So close that had she done this before the Peyti Crisis, he might’ve leaned in to her.

Now, it took all of his strength to stand next to her without backing away.

“I get the sense you’re not into this investigation,” she said.

He wasn’t exactly sure which investigation she meant. The investigation of the Peyti Crisis? Anniversary Day? Or of her?

No sense in lying to her, whatever investigation she meant. “Honestly,” he said, “I’m way over my head.”

She raised her chin even more, so that her face was close to his. It was as if she were trying to see his thoughts.

“Yeah,” she said after a moment. “That’s why sometimes you have to ignore things in the name of justice.”

“What’s justice, Savita?” Nyquist asked.

“We serve and protect, Bartholomew,” she said. “That’s our job. Sometimes detectives forget that. They get so wrapped up in the investigating, they forget about the serving and the protecting. You’d remember if you had kids.”

That made him bristle. He hated it when people said things like to that to him, even when the circumstances weren’t charged.

“Are you saying I don’t care about the right things because I’m childless?” he asked.

She opened her mouth to answer, but he leaned in to her, so close that he could kiss her if he wanted to—which he most decidedly did
not
want to do.

“I love this city,” he said softly. “I love the Moon. I
hate
what’s happening here. All of it. And what it’s turning people into.”

She leaned in just a bit more. Maybe a centimeter separated their lips. “What’s it turning people into, Bartholomew?”

He could feel her breath on his face.

“Monsters,” he said softly. “Amoral monsters.”

The color left her skin. She pulled back. The flirting had ended.

“Is that what you think I am?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “That’s what I know you are.”

She took one step back and tilted her head as if he had slapped her. She bit her lower lip, then let it go.

“I’m not the enemy here,” she said. “There are people out there in the universe who want to kill us just for being here, on the Moon.”

“And before that,” he said, “there were people who wanted to kill us for being cops, and people who wanted to kill us for being human, and people who just want to kill. You think the fact that there have always been murderers in the universe justifies the taking of a life?”

She squared her shoulders. Two spots of color had returned to her cheeks.

“There are murderers,” she said. “Then there are
mass
murderers. And finally, there are those who look the other way when the mass murderers decide to take over. You don’t let any of them get away. Not the mass murderers or those who defend them.”

That was probably as close to a confession as he would get out of her.

“And you don’t let the murderers get away either,” he said. “You forgot that part.”

“I didn’t forget it,” she said. “Under Alliance law, some killings are justified. Disty Vengeance Killings come to mind.”

“We’re not Disty,” Nyquist said.

“But we accept their vengeance,” she said.

“When
they
conduct it,” he said. “But I’ve investigated a lot of Disty Vengeance Killings, and you know what, Savita? They go after the
perpetrator,
not the perpetrator’s
lawyer
.”

Her eyes narrowed. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes glistening. She seemed hurt that Nyquist didn’t agree with her.

“I just told you about that lawyer,” she said, then caught herself. “All the lawyers who represent those murderers. They’re as guilty as the murderers are.”

“No, they’re not,” Nyquist said softly. “Not even under Disty law.”

She pointed a finger right into his chest. Her fingertip was as hard as the muzzle of a gun.

“You’re taking the wrong side, Bartholomew,” she said.

“I’m doing my job,” he said.

“Like the damn lawyer,” she said.

“So what are you going to do, Savita? Kill me too?”

She froze for a half second, then shoved him backwards. The shove was so hard he nearly stumbled over his own chair. He caught himself.

“You’re a bastard,” she said, and walked away.

He watched her go. So much for being subtle. So much for manipulating her into a full confession.