The Administration Series (125 page)

Small shrug. "I suppose so."

Well, that was a slight improvement. "Anyway, I didn't say thanks properly, did I?"

She looked at him blankly. "For what?"

"Getting me out of there. I mean, it was your idea, wasn't it? Calling Kemp? I'd have been far more fucked up if he hadn't arrived when he did." Dead in the river, in fact. "So, thanks."

"No. I mean, um, I was only trying to — "

"So we can call it quits. Right?"

Another shrug. "All right."

"Then are you going to stop this guilt crap? It's pissing me off, and I'm getting caffeine shakes."

She smiled wanly. "Sorry."

Progress, at last. Time to get things back to normal. "Right, that's it — final warning. If I hear you say sorry one more time, I'll spank you."

"You'll what?" Her smile turned into something almost worthy of the name. "You wouldn't dare."

He took his feet off the desk and sat up. "Try me."

"That's harassment, you know. Even admins have rights." She slid off the desk, jolting it and spilling his cold coffee. "Oops. Sorry."

He let her beat him to the door, then went back to his chair. He meant to get back to work, but instead he found himself thinking about Kemp. The conversation this morning had been worrying. Kemp didn't strike him as the kind of man who made empty threats. If he said he had friends at I&I, he probably had. Which meant that Toreth's career prospects had sharply nosedived.

Worst of all, he wouldn't be able to fight it. A call here, a word dropped there — invisible, immune to retaliation or even discovery. He'd seen it happen to others, watching as their lives unraveled. People who'd played the game, fucked up and lost. Stupid or careless enough to have pissed off someone bigger than they could handle.

Not him.

He wasn't helpless. He couldn't be. If Kemp wasn't willing to let it go, Toreth wouldn't be the one who sat around waiting for the next move. He needed something on Kemp, some pre-emptive defence he could use to persuade the corporate that it would be easier to leave him alone. Or, better, something to shaft the bastard good and hard. To take him down and pay him back for what he'd done, although that was too much to hope for.

He had an idea of where to start, too.

Finding Chris's full name was easy. Toreth had a good memory for faces and it took him less than an hour to put a profile together and come up with the address. A search for Chris had none of the risks associated with putting Kemp's name through the I&I systems.

Chris, last name Harper, had a very uninteresting record of a few minor Justice-level offences. The rest of his file was equally dull: married; privately rented registered living address in an insalubrious part of the city; personal contract with no name supplied, which was legal enough if a little unusual; no known political affiliation, which wasn't a surprise. Standard issue corporate muscle, except without a corporate job.

Closing the file, Toreth smiled. It would make a welcome change to deal with someone he didn't have to treat with kid gloves. Still, it would be easier and safer with some help.

Toreth decided to go looking in person, rather than use the comm. Chevril's office was empty, but Toreth found his fellow senior in the coffee room, staring at the newly installed coffee machine with an air of baffled irritation.

"Do you know how this bloody thing works? I'd only just got the hang of the old one when they changed the damn thing. Kel's off and if I don't get a coffee soon, I'm going to kill the next prisoner I work on."

The coffee rooms were theoretically not under surveillance, but it wasn't a theory Toreth had ever wanted to test over anything serious. "Come out for lunch, and I'll buy you one."

Chevril tended to regard unprovoked offers like that as possible chat-up lines, in which he was extremely uninterested. His expression of guarded suspicion prompted Toreth to add, "I need a favour."

After a moment, Chevril shrugged. "Okay. I was thinking about going out anyway, since it's so nice."

Like yesterday, the day was bright and summery. It was pleasant to get out of the office, even if Toreth's muscles weren't yet keen on prolonged exercise. At least the aches slowed him down a little — Chevril, barely touching one meter sixty, and so thirty centimetres shorter than Toreth, was normally hard work to keep in step with.

As they walked through the Int-Sec grounds towards one of the commercial complexes on the periphery, Toreth explained what had happened, as non-specifically as he could manage, leaving out the names and as many details as possible.

Chevril — who was fond of Sara — reacted just as he'd expected. "So that's what happened to her. Kel didn't know. I hope you broke his bloody neck."

"I probably should have."

When he reached the end of the account, glossing over the river with what was becoming practised ease, Chevril shook his head. "Jesus, if there was ever a candidate for re-education. You were bloody lucky — but then you always are, aren't you? Alive, and a nice corporate job offer. Some people."

"I didn't take it."

Chevril stopped dead and looked up at him. "You what? You turned him down?"

"That's what I said."

"Why, for fuck's sake?"

He couldn't tell him the real reason, so he settled for the general one that had kept him at I&I for so long. "I'm not selling myself to a corporate."

"You mean he's not offering enough?"

"He's offering plenty. I mean I'm not doing it, whatever he offers."

"So what was the deal?"

Toreth had to admit he'd been hoping Chevril would ask. "More or less twice what I'm on now. Housing paid for on top of that, training debt cleared."

"More or less . . . Christ all-bloody-mighty." Chevril's face screwed up in what looked like genuine pain. "If I turned that down, Elena would rip my heart out and casserole it."

"I don't fancy the idea of being someone's property, and that's what a personal contract makes you."

This was one of Chevril's favourite arguments, and this time he had the added outrage of a genuine opportunity being refused right in front of him. "Bollocks does it. Besides, even if it did, it's no different to where you are now. The Administration owns your soul and Tillotson gets the rest of you."

"That's not the same as belonging to some
one
. Tillotson works for I&I, just like us. He has a bigger office, that's all."

"Right. Of course. So you're staying principled and poor." Chevril shook his head. "You're completely bloody mad. Or am I missing the whole point, and he pays for everything these days?"

Stupidly, Toreth didn't realise what Chevril meant until he added, "The bloke with the corporate car and the expensive suits. The suspect you weren't — " he grimaced slightly, "fucking all the way through that dead-end corporate murder."

Although he knew Chevril was only saying it to get a rise, he couldn't help responding, not with the new alarm system in his flat. "You can fuck right off. No, he doesn't. And he was never a suspect."

"If you say so." Chevril grinned, leaving it unclear which part he was referring to. "But anyway, apart from making me puke with envy, is there a point to any of this? What's the favour?"

"I've got a nuts-on-the-chopping-block feeling about the father. I don't think he's willing to have me running around out here, where he can't control me, knowing what I know. I want to find something to give me some leverage if he won't back off."

Chevril shook his head firmly. "Not through me, you bloody well don't. I'm not running any searches on corporate higher-ups, if that's what you want to ask."

"No. But there's someone who might know some things. I want to have a nice little unofficial word with him, but I don't want to go on my own."

Chevril, who despite his pan-European competition standard whinging was good at his job, thought for a few seconds, then asked, "Bloke who picked you up?"

"That's him."

Chevril considered for a moment longer. "As long as you remember that you owe me for it. When? Tonight?"

"Tomorrow morning. I don't want to risk missing him and having to go back."

"Okay. You know," he added after a moment, "you could solve the whole thing if you'd take the bloody job. You'd make
me
feel better, anyway."

When he'd woken up for the second time that night, gasping for air, Toreth gave up on the idea of even trying to sleep. Instead he got up and kicked through the pile of washing until he found something to wear. The air felt cool against his damp skin, which made a good excuse for the shivering.

His wrist ached, as did the muscles in his shoulders, so he detoured to the bathroom for painkillers. Once in the living room, after switching on the heating, he poured himself a drink, sat down, and thought about drowning. Thinking it through sometimes stopped him dreaming about it later. Sometimes.

Or sometimes he worked himself up to near hysterics, and couldn't go to bed at all until he was drunk enough to pass out instead of fall asleep. Worth a try, though, because he knew that otherwise he
would
have the dream again, and he needed some sleep. Tomorrow he had things to do and he had to be sharp enough to get them done without screwing up.

So. A couple of mouthfuls he didn't even taste, and then back to his first year of training.

They'd known, of course. It would have been in his psych file — accident on a family holiday, no permanent physical consequences, but . . . that's why they'd picked him out first, hoping he'd put on a good show to scare the rest of them. Well, that part had worked out.

The dream was everything he remembered; it was more than possible that he was remembering the dream and the real thing had been nothing like that. The rest of it he'd heard from Chevril afterwards: panic stations and emergency resuscitation and finally, reluctantly, a call to the medical unit. The instructors had been shitting themselves, at least according to Chevril. Killing recruits must generate a ton of paperwork.

The next day, though, when he'd discharged himself over the protests of the medic and turned up for training, the chief instructor had merely looked him up and down and said, "Can't you hold your fucking breath?"

"No, sir. Sorry, sir."

He'd won back whatever reputation he'd lost from his performance when Internal Investigations arrived.

He'd told them it had been an accident, a practical joke that got out of hand. No, sorry, he couldn't remember who'd been involved. It had been dark; they'd all been drinking.

The investigators had looked profoundly unconvinced, but they'd finally gone away, leaving him with a confidential contact number in case he changed his mind. After about ten seconds' thought he'd decided that he'd rather have a career, and had deleted it.

That had pretty much been that. Why it still bothered him was a mystery; in fact, most of the time it didn't. The idea of being underwater made him uneasy, even in the sim, but he went swimming at the gym and enjoyed it. Or maybe enjoyed the mastery over what he was . . . what he disliked. Some psych rubbish like that, anyway.

It never, really, went away, though. Months would go past and then he'd get a run of dreams. Sometimes there was no reason he could think of for it. Occasionally he knew what kicked them off.

Once, he'd been over at Justice and he'd stood by and watched them breaking all the rules of due process to do to a prisoner what had been done to him. Screaming nightmares every night for a fortnight, after that one. The prisoner had talked, though. Jesus, who wouldn't?

This time, the river. Worse, because he'd had his hands tied again. Just the thought, and his heart started to race.

No big deal. It had happened, he'd survived, and he hadn't even got his feet wet so there was no reason for feeling like this. It would stop soon, because it always did in the end, and things would go back to normal. In a few weeks, he'd have forgotten all about it.

This was the first time for a couple of years, and beyond the unpleasantness of the dreams themselves, it annoyed him that he couldn't see Warrick. Bad enough that he'd spent the one night at Warrick's flat — those nightmares could be written off to exhaustion and the after-effects of a day that would be an excuse for anyone to sleep badly. He could go round to fuck, but Warrick would want him to stay, and he knew he'd be tempted to say yes, in case being there meant he wouldn't —

If he did, though, if Warrick was there and heard it, again, then he'd know. That was intolerable. He'd stay away until the nightmares stopped.

Still, there was no harm in thinking about Warrick, because he made a pretty good distraction from anything. He'd sleep better once he'd come — he always did. Toreth lay down on his back on the sofa, finding it surprisingly comfortable now the painkillers and alcohol had kicked in, and started flicking through his mental database of Warrick fantasies. Some time ago he'd noticed that the majority of his fantasies involved Warrick nowadays. It had worried him briefly, and then he'd decided not to think about it.

His right wrist hurt too much, so he placed his drink on the arm of the sofa above him and used his left. Ambidextrous, for all the important things — who had he said that to? He closed his eyes, and pulled a memory to the front of his mind. Familiar and comforting. Warrick fucking him, moving against him, slow and deliciously deep inside him; Warrick's mouth pressed against his neck as he breathed faster . . .

The glass was still balanced above him when the light through the window woke him in the morning.

Insalubrious turned out to be something to which Chris's neighbourhood could only aspire. Toreth couldn't recall ever coming to the area before, which was distinctly more of a Justice place than I&I. Ugly high-rise housing blocks, which looked like early second generation, built to replace even less substantial accomodation thrown up after clearance of the contaminated ruins of the old city.

Chris's building was slightly above the average. At least there was a security lock on the door, and a guard in the entranceway — old and deaf, but not too deaf to understand that their visit was one best not remembered or commented on. A glance over his desk showed that the security cameras in the entrance were at least partly functional. He and Chevril were on record, which put a limit on the amount of pressure they could apply, down here or with Chris.