The Resurrected Man (6 page)

“I don't doubt it, sir.” Marylin remembered the look in Jonah's eyes: not fear of being caught, but fear of not knowing what he was supposed to have done. “But it'd be an enormous risk to take.”

Trevaskis snorted. “This whole
thing
is an enormous risk. If he wanted to up the stakes, this'd be the way. Do you agree?”

Marylin nodded reluctantly.

“So what do you suggest we do?” Whitesmith asked. “Nothing?”

“We need to check every possibility. He's being examined at the moment and the results will either corroborate his story or not. If he is a skin, there'll be nanoware, or traces of nanoware, all through his body. There'll also be teleop relay systems in the house and intelligent software to link it all together. I want a team to go over the place from top to bottom. I want every link checked.”

“Jonah wouldn't have the first idea how to use that sort of technology,” she said. “He dabbled with wetware and body-related tech, not remote consciousness and displacement add-ons.”

“Yet McEwen's father was Lindsay Carlaw, one of the early SciCon founders.” Whitesmith leaned forward. “And there's an office full of hardware off the main bedroom.”

“Well, then…” Trevaskis raised an eyebrow at Marylin.

“That hardware belongs to Carlaw. The sort of equipment needed to develop AI isn't the sort you'd use to hack into KTI,” she said.

“Still, take an inventory and run it by Herold Verstegen. See what
he
says.” Trevaskis sank back into his chair. “There's no reason not to check. Until we prove that McEwen doesn't have the right sort of setup at his disposal, and/or the ability to use it, we have to treat him very carefully.”

“Guilty until proven otherwise?”

“Convicted by your own testimony, Marylin.” Trevaskis' smile was amused, but the tightness around his eyes didn't see the joke. “It's too late to take it back.”

“I don't intend to, sir. Just don't rely on it exclusively. I believed Jonah wouldn't ever use v-med, and may soon be proven wrong about that. I could've been wrong about a lot of other things, too.”

“Quite.” Trevaskis held her stare for a minute. She didn't look away,
even though she felt like a microbe under a scanning-tunnelling microscope. She wasn't afraid of airing her opinions—especially when she had been invited to share them in a private meeting. If Trevaskis didn't like them, she told herself, that was his problem. Better that he be offended than allowed to bend the MIU's charter to suit his own agenda.

The ends never justified the means. She had learned that through painful experience. Sometimes the
process
of seeking justice was more important than justice itself.

Trevaskis eventually looked away. He placed his hands palm down on the desk, as though preparing to stand, but instead pushed himself backwards.

“I think that's enough for now,” he said. “No doubt you've both got a lot of
bok
-work to do following this morning, and I don't want to take up any more of your time. File your reports as per usual, delegate the rest and go home. When the results of the body-scan confirm where he's been for the last three years, things are going to be busy around here.”

Marylin stood, conscious of how much taller than him she became by doing so.

“There's really only one way to be sure he was in the bath,” Whitesmith said, remaining seated.

“And that is?” Trevaskis asked.

“His UGI.”

“We can't access it. He's covered by Privacy.”

“But with his permission we could.”

Trevaskis raised an eyebrow. “And how do you propose we get that? The medic said twenty-four hours before he'll be awake and ready for interrogation.”

“We can start sooner than that. Talk to Fabian Schumacher. Tell him I want QUALIA to talk to Jonah. She's performed REM probes before, far earlier than anyone in psych.”

“On volunteers, not suspects.”

“Effectively, either way. She can do it, and that's what counts.”

“I'm yet to be convinced.” Trevaskis rolled his eyes. “Besides, QUALIA's an ‘it' not a ‘she.'”

“Strictly speaking, sir, QUALIA's an ‘e,'” Marylin corrected him. “SciCon prefers to use EsErE pronouns.” She pronounced the nickname of the Third Gender Protocol to rhyme with “yessirree.”

“Regardless,” Whitesmith interrupted, “it's worth a try.”

Trevaskis studied both of them in turn. “Very well. I'll ask Fabian if he'll play along. I'm sure he'll be interested in field-testing his little toy. But I can't promise anything more, understood?”

“Understood.” Whitesmith finally stood and joined Marylin by the door. “I'll wait for your call.”

“Yes.” Trevaskis wheeled himself around the desk, almost shepherding them out of the room. Whitesmith in turn ushered Marylin ahead of him. Before the door could shut, the Director of the MIU looked both of them in the eye. “Whatever happens, I want you to know that I have the utmost faith in your abilities. When the time comes, you'll give one hundred percent. Just keep an open mind and do your job and I know we'll get there in the end.”

What the hell do you
think
we're doing
? Marylin thought.

The door to the office slid shut behind them with barely a sound.

An hour later, after filing her report to Trevaskis' AI secretary, Marylin took a transit cab to the cramped laboratories of the MIU home team. There, the body parts had been parcelled, tagged and filed for future reference with the others in a refrigerated store deep in the cold heart of the habitat. After entry into the MIU's Twinmaker database, the remains of the woman had become superfluous; a funeral was out of the question.

Marylin was officially off-duty until the next phase of the investigation began, and would normally have left for home by now rather than dwell on the day's work, but she was reluctant to leave just yet. Jonah's reappearance had unsettled her more than she would admit in
public. Having him aboard the station made her feel restless; she didn't know whether to visit him or to get as far away from him as she could.

Instead of doing either, she opted for a compromise. The home team had a dedicated line open to the KTI medical centre. A single 3-D monitor in one wall displayed his physical condition in real-time. Another available input was devoted to flatscreen video, and showed him in a low-g hospital bunk surrounded by a bewildering array of medical equipment. Repair agents required large amounts of raw materials not normally found in the bloodstream; most of the tubes were devoted to feeding the nanomachines that would, eventually, return him to full health. His face and scalp were covered in a nanowire cage, as tight-fitting as skin but thinner than spider web. He was held in place by an elastic sheet pulled tight around his torso and limbs. Occasionally he stirred, thin limbs twitching in uncoordinated motor spasms.

The nanos were in his brain, too, she realised, triggering reflexes. Either that, or he was subconsciously trying to escape.

Indira Geyten, head of the home team, noticed her watching the monitors and let her be. Marylin was grateful for that, but not surprised. Having been raised by a family of British refugees, Geyten was renowned for keeping an emotional distance from the people she worked with. That made her an oddity in a world where there were so few natives of any culture left—not to mention hours of privacy—but one Marylin appreciated at that moment.

She watched Jonah in silence, not ready to open herself up to anyone just yet—not until she was certain where he stood. The Twinmaker hung over him like a shroud, coloured every memory she had of him, perhaps unfairly. Although she had trusted him with her life, once, she knew it would be well-nigh impossible to bring that feeling back.

Indeed, it was hard to believe that it was him at all. There was almost nothing left to recognise. His face was all angles, and skin gleamed where snow-white hair had once grown. His bright blue eyes
remained, but she couldn't see them now. Only his voice sounded right: a baritone that could be either commanding or peevish, depending on his mood. It could even be warm. She remembered it well.

The last time they had seen each other, they had been working in the agency for eighteen months and had just closed their most difficult case. Despite a standard three-day week, he had worked hacker's hours—six, sometimes seven days straight—and had expected her to do the same. His drive had both amazed and appalled her; she had felt like a fish sucked into the wake of an oil tanker, enjoying the ride for a while but beginning to panic when she had realised that she was trapped. She had needed to escape, to get away from him. They had been too close, too complicated.

And then there had been Luiz. If her professional life had been out of control, her emotional course had been one bound for self-destruction. The day she had resigned from the agency was also the day she told Jonah that she had decided to move in with and make an exclusive commitment to her lover.

That had been just hours before his father died. She hadn't gone to the funeral. If she had, that would have been the last time she would've seen him—until now, three years later.

As time passed and he had not contacted her, she had assumed that he respected her decision and let her be. When, in a moment of weakness, she had once tried to contact him, he had disappeared, and she had thought that he might have died or fled the country—either course of action perhaps forced on him by his line of work.

She never tried again. She had cut her ties with the past too cleanly, too efficiently, to consider retying them; even Luiz, in the end, had fallen by the wayside. Yet because of the distance she had imposed between herself and Jonah, she had found it easy, later, to make the connection between him and the Twinmaker: he was out there, somewhere, brooding over her rejection of him and his dreams; plotting revenge while she went about bettering herself, finding a new career, a new life.

But did she really believe it? Was she, if she honestly sat down and considered the evidence, truly convinced that he was the sort of person who would murder sixteen innocent people just to prolong a grudge?

Jonah had bordered on being a loner when she had known him, but he had never displayed any grossly sociopathic tendencies. Likewise, he was intelligent without being brilliant. On the other hand, although she didn't believe he had the ability to penetrate KTI on his own, she would credit the possibility that he might have conned someone else into telling him how. He knew how to get what he wanted.

And he had killed someone, once. That was something he had never tried to hide: partly because an EJC inquest into the death had upheld his plea of self-defence, more because it had accorded him greater respect from some of the individuals he had been forced to deal with.

It had also led to their working together in the first place, for he had finally realised that he couldn't run such a business on his own. But the fact had always bothered her, now more so than ever. He was no stranger to murder. Who knew where that introduction had led?

She didn't know. She had forgotten so much about him, had quashed her memories of him with the same determination that she had shown when she walked out of his life. It was hard, now, to tell which was real and which the by-product of a convenient explanation for the Twinmaker murders. There was no way, any more, that she could be certain.

And now, reality had walked back into her life, and she was unable to avoid it.

Avoid
him
, she thought. Perhaps she had been the one brooding, after all.

Don't think
, she reminded herself;
just do.

Her overseer flashed to indicate a call from Whitesmith, which she took, overlaying his image on the view of Jonah before her.

“I've just had word from Trevaskis,” he said, not smiling but clearly satisfied. “QUALIA's on board for the probe.”

“When do you start?”

“In a couple of hours, when he settles a bit. I'll let you know the results once we have them.”

“So…” She struggled to concentrate. “With his UGI in our hands, we'll be able to trace his past movements. If there are any in the last three years, we'll know he wasn't in the bath.”

“More than that.” Whitesmith looked almost smug. “We can trace him now, too.”

“Why would we want to do that? We know where he is.”

“Exactly. And there's a third possibility that Trevaskis didn't mention. What happens if we get a cross-match?”

She began to see where he was heading. “Odi, the profilers agree that a partnership of that sort would've dissolved months ago—”

“You know as well as I do that profiles aren't perfectly accurate. Anyway, that's not quite what I meant. Have you ever wondered what it would mean if Jonah was a patsy?”

Realisation suddenly dawned. In a way it didn't surprise her;
nothing
surprised her any more. Maybe she was a victim of constricted affect after all.

“I honestly hadn't thought of that,” she admitted. “It's plausible, given the Twinmaker's MO, but it still doesn't explain how he bypassed the energy budget—”

“No, it doesn't—but we don't know he's doing any of this, remember?”

She grimaced. “True.”

“And Trevaskis himself said that we have to investigate
every
possibility.”

“He did. But I don't think he intended you to throw it back in his face like this.”

Whitesmith grinned, briefly. “What's the matter, Marylin? You don't look terribly enthusiastic about the idea.”

“It's not that.” She wished she could hide her face from the medical centre's monitors. “It's just—I don't know. Tired, I guess.”

“Or not used to the idea yet that he might actually be innocent?”

She hugged herself, stung by the word. “Definitely not.”

“Well, we'll probably find out tomorrow, if he agrees.”

“I guess so.”

He signed off a moment later. She hardly heard his words of farewell. Her attention was back on the 3-D monitor before her, in which Jonah had stirred again, his skull-like face frowning as though in the grip of a terrible dream.