The Administration Series (253 page)

Avis jerked the screen back across the table and stood. He turned to the blond man.

"Okay, I'll believe you. Thousands wouldn't. You can tell the sainted bloody saviour of I&I that I don't appreciate sloppy IIPs. I've wasted my best people for days on this."

"Yes, Para." The aggressive tone didn't seem to faze the investigator. "But, to be fair, it's not the Para's fault if the system failed to register the outside agency authorisation. It was all properly processed, but they're still dealing with systems disruption from the revolt."

"If you wanted internal systems security testing, you should have gone to the systems section. Or come to us." Avis's voice now held more grumbling than anger.

"I can't speak for the Para, but everyone's under pressure to save time and resources. Given the staffing problems and so on . . . " The investigator gestured vaguely.

"Huh. And don't I know it. CC is right down at the bottom of the pile for new kit, new people, you name it. I'm working with half a team, and most of those are junk from the pool."

"Yes, Para, I heard that. General Criminal is right down there with you. Political and Corporate Fraud are taking the cream, as usual." There was a moment of almost tangible shared resentment against the other sections, then the blond man coughed again. "If I could . . . "

"Oh, right. Of course." Avis removed Warrick's handcuffs and slipped them onto a loop on his belt. When Warrick stood, the para-investigator faced him squarely. "I'm sorry about all this, Doctor. But I'm afraid that I couldn't do anything else, given that you refused — "

Warrick waved the apology aside. "I understand completely. I, of all people, ought to appreciate the importance of system security. I'm just glad that the Administration is so vigilant."

"Thanks for being understanding." Avis turned to the investigator and made a shooing gesture towards the door. "Well, go on, then. Take him, take him. Some of us have real work to get on with."

Outside the room, Warrick paused. "I'm sorry, I don't recall your name."

"Investigator Ainsley Barret-Connor, sir." He glanced up and down the corridor. "If you could, um, come this way."

"Is Toreth in his office?" Warrick asked as they headed, presumably, for the lift.

"Yes. He asked me to take you up there." After a moment, Barret-Connor added, "But if I were you, I'd consider going straight home. I can tell him you insisted, if you like."

"Oh?"

"He's not a happy man. I mean,
really
not a happy man."

"No doubt." The idea was tempting but, of course, impossible. "I'd be grateful if you could show me the way."

"When I heard him talking to Sara, he was saying something about the socioanalyst." Barret-Connor glanced at him. "Carnac."

"Ah."

It was fortunate that I&I's designers had fitted the offices with indestructible — if ugly — carpets. They had survived the revolt better than the building's occupants, and now the carpet in Toreth's office had no problem standing up to his frantic pacing as he worked through and rejected increasingly desperate plans for retrieving Warrick from detention.

The rescue plans alternated with more detailed and more enjoyable plans for exactly what he was going to
do
to Warrick once he did have him back. Warrick, he vowed, was going to regret his trip to Strasbourg. The deceitful, treacherous fuck would never —

The door opened, and B-C appeared for exactly long enough to say, "He's here, Para," let Warrick go through the door, and rapidly close it again. A question from Sara was cut off midsentence.

Before Warrick could speak, Toreth grabbed his shirt front in both hands and slammed him against the office wall.

"You stupid fucking bastard!" Screw what the office could hear. "I told you!"

Warrick didn't even have the grace to look surprised. "Toreth, I'm sorry. I — "

"I don't fucking care. Idiot fucking — " He struggled to keep his voice down. "I told you you'd get caught. For once in your life, couldn't you have fucking
listened
? You were
this
close to screwing both of us." He shook Warrick again, the sweet rush of violence feeding the underlying turmoil of fear and anger. "
This
fucking close. And you still might."

"Perhaps you could take your own advice," Warrick said breathlessly.

"
What
did you say?"

Toreth tightened his grip, twisting his fists and pressing Warrick back against the wall. Warrick's hands closed over his wrists, fingers digging in — painful, but nowhere near breaking his hold. Futile, and somehow infuriating.

"Why don't you do it like you fucking mean it?" Toreth said. "That's not what they taught you in corporate safety school."

Warrick released his hold. "No. Not at all. They taught me how to break someone's arm. But I'd rather not have to."

His hands flexed again, almost involuntarily, and Warrick gasped.

"Toreth, if you would
listen
for a moment and let me explain . . . "

Toreth considered the idea. If he was going to kill Warrick, right here in Toreth's own office wasn't the place to do it. Better to wait until they got home, where he could do it with proper care and attention to detail and the right amount of screaming.

"All right," Toreth said. "Make it good."

Warrick took a deep breath, then glanced down at Toreth's hands. He took hold of Toreth's wrists again, lightly this time. "Do you think you could possibly let go? It really isn't helping my concentration."

Deja vu. Almost the same position, in the same office, as after Marian's death. Back here, after all this time. He pressed closer to Warrick, hips against his, and, unbelievably, the bastard was hard. He was actually fucking getting off on the fact that Toreth was one breath away from breaking his ungrateful neck. Anger flared again, then suddenly evaporated, and he started to laugh. Warrick looked at him warily, hands still loosely clasping his.

After a few seconds, Toreth managed to regain enough control to gasp, "You are sick, do you know that? Completely fucking sick."

"Oh, yes." Warrick's mouth twitched. "Yes, I know. If it's any consolation, the cell was no fun at all."

"Jesus. Jesus fucking Christ." If Toreth didn't shut up, the rest of the office really would wonder what the hell was going on. Releasing Warrick, he leaned on the wall beside him, swallowing down the noise. He looked sideways at Warrick, who also seemed to be fighting laughter, and the hysteria threatened to break through again. Thinking about the danger helped.

"Fucking idiot," he said.

Warrick closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall. "I am sorry."

"So what's the excuse?"

"No excuse." Warrick stood away from the wall and faced him. "You were absolutely correct. I couldn't get into the systems and I had to give up. I thought I'd cleared up all traces, but obviously I was wrong. Avis didn't tell me what they'd found, but whatever it was, it is entirely my fault. I'm sorriest of all that you had to take the risk to help me and I'm more grateful than I can tell you."

And that was it. Apparently that was supposed to be enough. He should kill Warrick for that alone, for expecting Toreth to just accept that pathetic apology as recompense for scaring the living fuck out of him. But somehow, with Warrick in front of him — alive, touchable, safe, not down on level C, not in an interrogation room — the anger stubbornly refused to reappear.

Maybe he could get it back, because if he let himself start to think about where Warrick had been before he was arrested, and who he'd seen there, he felt the muscles in his shoulders start to tighten. But he suddenly discovered that he didn't
want
to think about Carnac. Not now.

He pushed away from the wall and strode over to the door. When he jerked it open, Sara scooted her chair away from right outside. B-C was by her desk — she must have been relaying the news to him. Beyond him, at desks and in groups, admins, investigators and paras stood frozen. There was a moment of silence, then the rest of the office busied themselves with screens and conversations.

Behind him, Warrick started forward, but Toreth glanced round and pointed to a chair by his desk. "You. Sit."

Turning back, Toreth leaned on the doorframe. "B-C?"

B-C cleared his throat. "Para?"

"Good job, well done. Thanks. Now the show's over, so fuck off."

"Yes, Para." B-C almost tripped over his feet in his haste to comply.

"Sara?" Toreth asked.

She turned round from her desk, just as innocent as if she hadn't been eavesdropping. "Yes?"

"I want a couple of — "

"Coffees?" She picked up two self-heating mugs from the table and handed them to him, far too smug for someone caught with her ear against the door.

"Anything else?" she asked.

"No. No need for a mop and bucket."

She grinned and turned away.

"For the blood?" Warrick asked after Toreth had closed the door.

"Yeah." Toreth sat down heavily. "For some reason, there seems to be a widespread conviction these days that I'm some kind of fucking psychopath. Which is funny, because I
used
to have a pretty stress-free life. Wonder what changed?"

Warrick sensibly left that one alone. He prised the lid off his coffee and took a sip. "Ah. That is very welcome. Even — " He had another mouthful. "Even if the flavour leaves something to be desired. Now. Exactly how much trouble are we in?"

"I don't know." Toreth opened his coffee and breathed in the comforting smell. "Sara made out the most innocuous outside agency form she could under the circumstances, and I asked Jenny to sign it and backdate it."

"Who's Jenny?"

"Tillotson's admin. There's been a lot of backdating and form-fiddling going on since the revolt. Systems keep going down, half the time people aren't quite sure who to report to anyway. Plus I'm running a bit of a reputation surplus right now, which I might as well use while it lasts. As long as Computer Crimes don't make a fuss, it'll all get buried in the rest of the paperwork."

Warrick smiled. "Thank you."

"It's my fucking neck as well as yours. Did you read the form?"

"I didn't want to make it look as if I didn't know what was in it. Fortunately, Para-investigator Avis was too annoyed to ask many questions."

He frowned. "B-C should've been backing you up. Wasn't he?"

Warrick nodded quickly. "Very efficiently. He spirited me up here before Avis knew what was happening."

Always worried about treating the bloody staff well, even when they weren't his. "Good. Right. Well, if anyone asks, you were testing systems security because I thought someone might be pulling corporate security assessments out of the Int-Sec database to use in corporate kidnappings. Exploiting the trouble caused by the revolt."

Warrick frowned. "Those files have nothing to do with Citizen Surveillance."

"Then if anyone asks, you'll have to tell them that you fucked it up, won't you?"

"I would've had to be spectacularly inept." He sounded mortally offended by the suggestion.

"Good." Toreth grinned. "Trust me, that's what you want Computer Crimes to think. Or do you want to be on their lists as a shit-hot systems cracker?"

"Mm. Perhaps a reputation for crass incompetence is more appealing than I thought." He looked at his watch, then drained half his coffee. "If there's nothing else, I should go. McLean must have told SimTech what was happening, and they'll need to be reassured. They'll need to see me in person to be quite sure."

They had a great deal more to talk about — starting with Carnac — but Toreth was always willing to put off an unpleasant conversation. "Okay. See you later."

Glancing down, Toreth caught sight of a note on the screen. A memo from Sara.

"Warrick?"

Almost at the door, Warrick stopped and turned. "Yes?"

Toreth leaned back in his chair and smiled. "Happy birthday."

Building security had let him in downstairs without a murmur, but Toreth paused in the entrance to ring the comm up to the new flat, not really knowing why. When Warrick answered he looked briefly surprised before his expression changed to a smile.

"Come on up."

The flat door stood slightly ajar when he reached it, but Warrick wasn't there. Toreth pushed it open and stood on the threshold, looking at the hallway. Much as he remembered it from the visit with the agent, except that the chequerboard black-and-white floor had been thoroughly cleaned and polished, the walls redecorated.

Once inside he paused, wondering where to hang his coat. Hadn't there been a cloakroom? Yes — he found it again, just inside the door. He might as well get off to a good start. No doubt he'd be throwing his coat down on a chair before long, and watching Warrick grit his teeth keeping quiet about it.

He'd stopped off at Sara's to pick up his things, and carrying his suitcase down the hall made him feel like a visitor.

"Warrick?"

"In the living room," Warrick called.

Warrick was waiting near the doorway, holding a stack of small framed pictures. He set them down on a table Toreth didn't recognise.

Toreth dropped his case and looked around. There was plenty in the room that he did recognise, mostly ornaments and pictures, including Cele's nude portrait of himself seated on a windowsill. However, the rug from Warrick's old flat, the blue one that they'd fucked on plenty of times, hadn't made it here. In its place were three new, smaller rugs in shades of grey. The suite was new, too. Everything looked different, even the familiar things, and he wondered if it bothered Warrick.

Toreth put his hands on the back of the sofa and leaned on it. Nice and strong. "The room looks smaller," he said, as Warrick was obviously expecting a comment.

"Yes. Places always do with the furniture in."

"The carpet's blue."

"Quite so."

"Reminds me of something."

Warrick laughed and moved up beside him, standing half behind him, not quite touching. "I'm sure it does, since you spend so much time in front of the mirror — it's rather close to your eye colour."