The Administration Series (84 page)

That's what she'd wanted him to tell her. "I don't know."

"Quite. I have to stand by what I told him. I can't unsay it, still less can I go back on it. Frankly, I don't want to, however unpleasant the consequences. Beyond that, I have no idea how to tell him, without doing exactly the same damage as Carnac would. But I'll bear what you've said in mind."

Bear it in mind. He was worse than Toreth sometimes. Pair of bloody control freaks — they deserved each other.

There was one last question she had to ask. "Will you take him back? When Carnac's . . . finished with him?"

He hesitated for so long she didn't think he would reply, and she hadn't really expected him to, but in the end he answered with a question. "Do you think he'd want to come back?"

She didn't say anything. She didn't need to. Of course he wouldn't, not if he realised what Carnac had done to him. Most especially if he thought Warrick might know.

Fine. If Warrick couldn't, or wouldn't, do anything, she'd just have to make sure by herself that it didn't come to that.

Eavesdropping was a bad habit Sara couldn't get rid of. She'd stopped biting her nails years ago, she'd given up sugar in tea (but not coffee), and she even ate a moderately well balanced diet (if you counted vitamin supplements as a food group), but she couldn't give up listening to conversations she wasn't supposed to.

For one thing, at I&I it was a required survival trait. So much went on unofficially that the only way to stay ahead of the game was to be plugged into the network and to have enough juicy tidbits to buy the good stuff in return.

On Tuesday morning she'd got in very early and performed a small readjustment to the comms unit on Toreth's desk. She'd felt slightly guilty, but not much. It was for his own good, after all.

She'd listened on and off all yesterday without hearing anything either useful or too alarming. Now it was getting towards late afternoon on Wednesday. She'd had the comm switched off for a couple of hours while she ate a late lunch at her desk and dealt with stupid queries regarding Toreth's offloaded cases. Some people couldn't manage to follow instructions, even written in words of no more than two syllables.

The last one complete, it occurred to her that it was long past time to offer them a coffee. Not for the first time, she wondered how she'd ever got into the routine with Toreth, since refreshments appeared nowhere in her job description. A bad habit she'd picked up from the other seniors' admins, probably. She didn't actually mind, not when it
was
Toreth, but she objected to having to make coffee for Carnac as well. Maybe she should just poison it.

She tapped the official link and after a few moments Toreth answered.

"Yes?"

"Does anyone want a drink?"

Brief pause. "No. No thanks, we'll go along to the coffee room in a bit."

He sounded breathless, and she only needed one guess to work out what was going on. "Okay."

She cancelled the connection, listened while her conscience explained that this would be a bad thing to do, and then commenced spying.

After a couple of minutes, she began to wish she'd taken the extra risk of setting up the visual link as well. She'd only have got line-of-sight from the desk, but from the sound of it they were quite close to it and the curiosity was beginning to feel potentially fatal.

The only one she could hear was Toreth, which meant that Carnac either had his mouth full or was naturally very quiet. What she could hear from Toreth backed up her first guess.

It was strange, listening to them screwing, able to glance up and see the other admins working away at their desks. It would be a fairly safe bet that none of them were listening to anything half as interesting. She wondered briefly what she could charge for broadcasting the audio.

Toreth was getting close to coming, and it surprised her that she could tell so easily. It was the change in pitch of his voice more than the words. She'd only heard it once at very close range, as he'd held her close on top of him during their one and only fuck, and then a few times since when she'd overheard him under more conventional circumstances.

She shifted in her chair, getting a little uncomfortable now, but unable to bring herself to switch it off. As a compromise, she lowered the volume, Toreth's voice fading to a faint whisper.

"Deeper. Take it deeper. Yes. That's it, that's, uh . . . "

There he goes, she thought, catching herself in an oddly affectionate smile.

Suddenly she heard Carnac coughing, quite violently, and then after a while Toreth speaking over it, sounding almost concerned.

"Fuck, I'm sorry. Are you okay?"

"No . . . lasting harm inflicted." More coughing, then, "I'll take it as a compliment."

Toreth laughed. "If you like. I don't have any serious complaints anyway."

"No. It didn't feel as if you did."

The voices stopped, so she turned the volume back up to catch the sound of chairs moving, a zip fastening.

"Do you fancy coffee now, or do you want to finish things here?" Toreth said at length.

"Finish off, I think." The movements settled down, a distance from the comm. They must be at Carnac's desk. She turned up the volume again, wondering whether she should set up his desk as well. Probably too much of a risk.

"What are you doing tomorrow?" Toreth asked.

"Ah . . . the remaining interrogation specialists' interviews. Provided they go according to plan, and there are no more 'unavoidable absences', that should be the last day of those."

"Do you need me for them? Only I have some things I ought to do on my remaining case."

"Please feel free to take the morning, but I would appreciate your attendance in the afternoon."

"That's fine. Have you got the transcripts?"

"Yes. Sara has arranged it all, with her usual efficiency."

"I hope you're going to say something nice about her in your report."

Well, at least he hadn't entirely forgotten
her
.

"Alas, she lies outside my area of enquiry. But I shall make sure I mention to the powers that be that she's been most helpful."

"Thanks."

"There is nothing to thank me for — I would've done it in any case. Working with her has been a pleasure. I've visited a lot of divisions, and she is undoubtedly one of the most effective administrative assistants I have encountered. In fact, I'm tempted to offer her a job at Socioanalysis."

Disgusted with herself, she still felt a little glow of pleasure at the compliments. Eavesdropping wasn't all bad.

Toreth laughed. "I'm afraid I can't let you do that. She's mine."

"Are you quite sure that she isn't open to offers? We pay very generously."

"You won't get anywhere. People have tried to poach her before."

"Really? Yes, I imagine that they would have. And she's been here for nine years? You're very good at this, left-handed."

For a moment, she didn't understand the comment, delivered in exactly the same tone as the preceding ones. Then Toreth said, "I'm ambidextrous, for all the important things. But I'm still better right-handed."

A squeak, as a chair swivelled, and Carnac said. "Oh, yes. So you are. A little tighter. Yes, that's good. Really . . .
very
good."

Then silence for a while, broken only by a sharp, cut-off gasp. Eventually, slightly breathless, Carnac said, "It must be gratifying that she's so loyal."

Oh, Jesus. Oh, God, no. Carnac had been talking about her, and at the
same
time
he'd been . . . She felt sick. Really, genuinely sick, so that she missed a section of the conversation while she concentrated on keeping her lunch down.

When she caught up with them again, Carnac was saying, "Sara mentioned that she volunteers for testing in the sim."

"Yeah, she does. I don't mind giving her the time off. I think she had some holiday booked this week. Though she might have cancelled it."

Of course she'd cancelled it, because she was doing a ton of extra work for the oversexed prick sharing his office.

"The sim sounds fascinating," Carnac said. "I imagine the waiting list for volunteers is quite long."

"Yes, I think so. Months, at least. Sara jumped the queue, mind you." There was a brief hesitation, then he added, "Warrick arranged it."

"I see. As a favour to a friend? Perhaps you might ask him if I could try it some time?"

Sara smiled with twisted satisfaction. Oh, no Toreth wouldn't, and he wouldn't say why, either.

"Sorry, I can't. I'm not seeing him at the moment."

She actually yelped out loud in sheer horror. Looking up, she was relieved to see that most of the rest of the section had gone for coffee, and that the couple of people left seemed not to have registered the noise.

For a moment, her hand hovered over the comm, not wanting to hear the rest.

"Ah." Delicate exclamation from Carnac, followed by a delicate pause. "Nothing to do with us, I hope?"

Us
? Where the fuck did Carnac get 'us' from?

"In a way," Toreth said.

"When I said that — "

"Forget it, Carnac. It's . . . well, it's no big deal. He'll get over it."

"I'm glad to hear I shall cause no lasting damage."

Don't say any more, she begged silently, but he didn't hear her.

"No damage at all. We don't see each other all the time anyway — it's not a serious thing."

She wished that his voice wasn't so transparent when he talked about Warrick. 'Not a serious thing.' Oh, God. She'd like to think she only noticed because she knew Toreth so well, but surely Carnac could hear it, too?

"That's good," he said, and she knew that he had. Hearing the smug smile in Carnac's voice, she felt tempted to fix the problem then and there by going in and braining the spook with a chair.

After a moment, Toreth said, "Coffee?"

By the time they came out she was industriously reorganising interrogation schedules, seething fury hidden under her best professional shield. She would fix this, somehow. She'd make up for her stupid, careless blabbing. Carnac wouldn't get what he wanted, even if Toreth did kill her for it.

Carnac didn't drink, as a rule. He enjoyed clarity of thought too much, and organic solvents were not healthful companions for the human nervous system.

If the occasion merited celebration, though, he would allow himself a glass or two of wine. It was good for the heart, after all, and his family had a tendency towards mild heart problems on the distaff side. All genetically audited and perfectly adequately monitored for, but he found the small excuse amusing.

This evening, he was celebrating the conclusion of his first set of objectives with Toreth — three conversations of a personal nature. He suspected that he had continued to underestimate the depth of Toreth's attachment to Warrick. Certainly what he had read from Toreth today suggested as much. Luckily for his current project, the man seemed perfectly oblivious as to the strength of his feelings or, possibly more accurately, to be capable of deceiving himself to a remarkable degree.

Carnac sipped the wine, paying close attention to the cool slide of liquid over his tongue. Rare treats were to be savoured, or they became commonplace and pointless.

He and Toreth had an evening appointment on the coming Saturday. Carnac had decided that this would be the time to press for his next goal of a visit to Toreth's flat. He felt confident of success, given his progress so far. The only disappointment was that it would leave four more days at I&I until he could legitimately return to Socioanalysis, hand in his report and get on to some real work before his brain atrophied entirely from disuse.

He was too good, sometimes. Or Toreth had proved an easier target than he'd anticipated. As he rarely made mistakes, Carnac's first instinct was always to attribute errors to faults in the original data supplied. Perhaps he should suggest a review of Toreth's psych file, with some more extensive assessments with higher discriminatory power. Not part of his remit, though, and he had no particular inclination to help I&I refine its recruitment and staff management criteria.

Instead, he wondered about adjusting his sights upwards. Changing the scoring system after the game began wasn't really in the spirit of self-appointed challenges, but he was bored enough to waive the rule in this case.

What further intimacy could one reasonably aim for with Toreth, assuming the upcoming evening went as planned?

He still seemed, in Carnac's judgement, reluctant to initiate sex, or to suggest activities outside working hours. Passive resistance, proving that there was still more to take from him. What would serve as a demonstration that Carnac had completely broken through?

The obvious thing was a request to see Carnac again after his assignment had ended. Was that too ambitious? Perhaps. On the other hand, one didn't learn unless one was prepared to stretch oneself.

A request, then, for a continuation of the liaison. A request that Carnac would refuse in no uncertain terms, with a full and detailed explanation as to why. Toreth would be left in no doubt as to how expertly and easily he'd been played, although naturally he'd do that part by comm. There was no point risking life and limb and he'd still be able to see Toreth's face.

Really, a para-investigator ought to appreciate the elegance of the scheme and the depth of pain inflicted using nothing but words and a little patience for the set-up. The sophistication of the approach was probably outside his reach, though. Even if it were within his grasp under normal circumstances, he would be in no condition to admire it. With his profoundly limited resources, Toreth was not emotionally equipped to handle a shock of this kind without serious consequences.

One of those consequences would be that Toreth's relationship with Keir would be damaged or, more likely, destroyed completely. His trust was so fragile a thing that to have it so comprehensively violated by one person would very probably render him unable to maintain his limited affections towards the only other two people with whom he had connected.