Masterminds (30 page)

“He’s not dead,” Popova said, glancing at the door.

“No, he’s not,” Berhane said, “but I’m sure some of the Peyti clones died on Anniversary Day too. Believe me, his face is one of the ones we were looking at just this morning.”

“You identified Lawrence Ostaka?” Clearly, Popova wasn’t following this exactly.

“
No
,” Berhane said, grabbing Popova’s arm and pulling her close. “No, don’t you see? We had no idea he was here. We just have the faces and the names of the originals. He looks just like one of them.”

Popova’s mouth opened, then she seemed to get a grip on herself, and she nodded.

“You need to show me all of this,” she said, “and you need to show it to me right now.”

FORTY-THREE

NYQUIST SANK INTO
his chair. He wondered if he had raised his voice too loudly when he was speaking to Romey. He had let his feelings take over.

He ran a hand over his face. He needed to concentrate. He didn’t dare make a mistake on the Zhu investigation, particularly after that semi-public conversation with Romey.

But right now, he was too shaken to concentrate, at least at the levels he needed to make a perfect case against Romey and her cohorts.

He would look up the information for Flint, instead.

The case Flint had sent him was eight years old. Nyquist had been a detective then, and going through his usual troubles trying to hang onto a partner.

He felt a moment of private amusement. He’d always gone through partners because he had been too harsh on them, because their investigative skills weren’t up to his standards, and, because he had no real manners, he let his former partners know it.

Romey had had a similar approach to investigation, and she had been as thorough as he wanted.

Apparently, the only problem he had with her was her moral compass.

He shook off the thought and opened the case file.

He was stunned to see that the case was a property case, not a homicide case. He scanned through the information, uncertain why Flint wanted him to look into a property crime.

Then Nyquist paused.

The original detective on the case had been DeRicci. And she’d been working homicide at the time.

So Nyquist went deeper into the file and found that they’d been dealing with the death of a clone who, like other clones before her, had been dumped into the compost buckets near the port.

Flint had mentioned clones, but not what kind. He was more interested in the case’s connection—if any—to a man named Ike Jarvis. Flint also wanted to know if the person of interest in the case, a man named Cade Faulke, worked for Earth Alliance Intelligence.

Before Nyquist dug into those names, though, he got lost in the case file. In familiar names besides DeRicci’s. Luc Deshin was briefly a suspect, and DeRicci ruled him out.

Then she was forced off the case by Gumiela, who assigned the case to Property. Property actually did some work—or claimed DeRicci’s work as their own—and sent a unit to arrest Cade Faulke.

By the time the unit arrived, Faulke was gone. His little office was messy, and his android guard had been disabled. No one in the area wanted to talk about where he went, which was pretty common for the neighborhood near the port.

But what wasn’t common was that all of the security footage within a several-block radius had been shut off.

Nyquist dug in, searching for even casual references to Cade Faulke. Nyquist found several in older files. Faulke had served as an informant to a large number of detectives, including one Andrea Gumiela before she had received her promotion to chief of detectives.

All of Faulke’s tips had been about activities inside the homes of major crime figures.

The dead clone had been embedded into Deshin’s household. According to DeRicci’s meticulous case file, Deshin had told her he thought the clone was the daughter of an old friend.

Nyquist leaned back.

Designer criminal clones. He’d heard a lot about them, particularly the way they were used to fight crime outside of the main part of the Alliance.

He hadn’t realized that was going on
inside
the Alliance—at least to this extent—and he hadn’t realized it had been going on here, on the Moon.

He almost got up and went to Gumiela’s office. He could use some of this to get out of the Zhu investigation. Gumiela wouldn’t want it known that a former murder suspect had been her go-to source for her most high-profile cases, particularly when that go-to source appeared to be embedding clones into households across the Moon.

But after that confrontation with Romey, Nyquist no longer wanted off the Zhu case. It didn’t matter that the case would take a lot of work.

Romey had crossed a line. She seemed to think herself immune from the law.

And he’d learned that people who felt that way lost track of the line. They seemed to believe
they
were the line, and that their judgment was impeccable.

His certainly wasn’t. Witness his attraction to Romey. Especially while DeRicci needed him.

He loved DeRicci, and he hadn’t been able to stop his eye from wandering.

Or his brain, apparently.

He went back to the file, to see what else he could find.

He needed to track down Cade Faulke, the clones, the intelligence service, and a man named Ike Jarvis.

Nyquist finally understood why all of this interested Flint. It was one of those pieces that might lead to a breakthrough in the investigation—maybe more than the Peyti corporation information that Nyquist had gotten from Uzvaan.

He felt the same kind of excitement he usually felt when he was about to close a case.

He was close to something, something important.

Something big.

Something that might lead them to whoever it was that wanted to destroy the Moon.

FORTY-FOUR

IN THE MAIN
conference room at the Earth Alliance Security Division Human Coordination Department, someone had stacked all of the beautifully carved wooden screens into one corner. Some of those screens were antiques. Careless handling could cost thousands in simple repairs.

Odgerel winced as she saw that. She stepped past them, trying not to frown at the lack of respect accorded to ancient things inside this room, and rubbed the knuckle of her forefinger against her forehead.

The headache had never quite left after her rather rude awakening. Her head still buzzed with the aftereffects of all the emergency klaxons sent through her links. Even a solid (if quick) breakfast and the large cup of oolong tea she had downed before her arrival hadn’t eased the aches.

She didn’t wake to emergencies well any more.

But she was calmer than she had been an hour before. She had taken the time to center herself, knowing that everyone around her would be panicked.

Most of them were. Her staff, while brilliant and experienced, tended toward drama.

The only other calm person in the room was Mitchell Brown. His serene presence seemed like an island in the middle of stormy seas.

Only tension lines around his eyes belied his physical composure. And those tension lines faded as his gaze met hers.

“Sir,” he said, bowing slightly.

She nodded to him, and then at the rest of the staff. She had fifteen trusted department heads and assistants, counting Brown. They had gathered around the beautifully carved mahogany table that she had brought with her when she had taken over the Human Coordination Department. She had had an invisible nanocoating (removable, of course) placed on the table’s surface so that no spilled beverage or sharp-edged jewelry would damage the wood.

She now wished she had had the foresight to do the same with the screens.

She pulled back her chair, carved to match the table, and sank onto the soft golden cushion. Beneath her calm, a thrum of exhaustion already threatened.

Perhaps she was getting too old for this job. When she awoke, she thought she might be too old for emergencies, but emergencies were what the job was all about.

“I had asked you, Mr. Brown, to prepare an update for me when I arrived. Have you one?”

“Yes, sir.” He waved a hand over the center of the table. Semi-solid holographic images appeared, showing ships in low orbit, firing on the planet below.

Brown’s information had been right when he contacted her; the ships were clearly not part of a fleet of ships. They were as dissimilar as they could possibly be—high-end space yachts mingling with weaponized cargo ships fighting alongside re-commissioned warships.

“We didn’t recognize any ships except these three.” He highlighted three of the ships. “I’ve seen two of them used in crimes before. The third has a sales record history that we could trace.”

“And I assume you have.” Odgerel hated it when a presenter paused for effect. Brown would learn that.

“The first two ships belong to two different organizations, the Ibori crime family, and the Kee crime family. The third ship traces back to an underling who works for the crime lord Gahiji Palone.”

“The crime families are working together?” Odgerel hadn’t expected that. “Why?”

“I think we have our answer in this next security footage that I will show you,” Brown said. “It automatically updated at the first sign of trouble, and kept transmitting until the on-the-ground system was destroyed.”

He waved his hand over another section of the table. The images were larger. Small ground-to-orbit vehicles had landed in the center of what appeared to be a large industrial complex. A pilot waited in each. Groups ran toward the vehicles. The groups appeared to be armed adults and several people holding very young children.

Brown moved the imagery forward until the ships—which had come and gone more than once—were surrounded by angry young people. He enlarged their faces.

“We believe these young people, and the children, are clones,” he said. “We did a recognition search and discovered that by face, at least, they match images of several members of the named crime families on a ninety-nine point nine percent point system. We obviously don’t have the DNA, but we don’t really need it, since the area attacked held one of the Alliance’s major clone factories.”

Odgerel rubbed her eyes. They ached with tiredness. “They
are
clones. For decades, the Hétique factory has worked alongside part of the Security Department to infiltrate these families. Apparently, the families are not happy with what we have done, and are showing their displeasure.”

“Then why steal the clones?” asked Eu-fùnh Pirizoni. She was one of Odgerel’s most insightful division heads.

“We don’t know,” Brown said. “The theft looks haphazard. If I let the security footage play out, you’ll see a lot of the young people get left behind, only to die a few minutes later as the attacks continue on the factory.”

“It looks like a rescue,” Odgerel said, more to herself than to the team.

“It does,” Brown said. “But the ships used here are affiliated with Luc Deshin, perhaps the biggest crime boss on Earth’s Moon.”

“The Moon.” Odgerel looked at Brown. He seemed as tired as she felt. “This is our link to the Moon?”

“The only link,” Brown said. “The attack is different, the methodology seems different, the goal of the attack seems different. The reports we are getting now say that much of the city was not harmed, only the areas nearest the factory. The attack happened at night, when there were fewer employees, and we now know that the younger children, at least, were removed from the factory before it was destroyed.”

“Should we even be calling them children?” asked Sadbhuj Barbier.

Odgerel looked at him in surprise. She didn’t think he had such a hard heart. “What else would we call them?”

“They’re clones,” Barbier said. “They’re not human.”

“Then what are they, exactly?” she asked.

His lips thinned and he leaned back in his chair. He clearly realized she disliked his response. Either that, or he really didn’t have an answer for her.

“Continue,” she said to Brown.

He turned slightly so that he faced Odgerel directly.

“We don’t know if this attack on a clone factory, done with the cooperation of at least three crime lords, is coincidental to the attacks on the Moon or if they’re related. We did intercept some communications about a meeting at one of Deshin’s properties recently, but we couldn’t tell if the meeting was going to be held or if it had already been held.”

Odgerel folded her hands together. Brown’s eyes tracked downward. He clearly noted the move, but he didn’t slow down because of it.

“We’ve had word through various departments that Deshin had been looking for designer criminal clones, which was not something he’d pursued in the past. Some of the rumors concerned the Anniversary Day bombing clones. We do know that many criminal organizations are trying to track the bombing clones’ origins so that they can purchase the same kinds of clones.”