Authors: C J Cherryh
He drew a deep breath. “
Thank
you, Anthony GA. It’s locally right. Will you personally try to get a message to the Director of Reseune Security that Yanni Schwartz wants to talk to her on an urgent basis? Thank you. Thank you very much.” He hung up and muttered, “Could have lucking told me that in the first place. So why hasn’t she—”
His
phone went off. He grabbed it.
“Uncle Yanni?”
“Well?” he snapped.
“Sorry about that,”
Ari said.
“I couldn’t warn you. I had a little trouble with Hicks. Is Frank with you right now?”
“Yes.”
“Hicks’s azi Kyle? Defense Bureau. He’s a Defense Bureau plant, is that the right word? It’s possible he messed with Abban and Seely, a long time ago. I’m kind of sure Frank’s all right. I think you have real reason to know he is. Are you sure of him?”
Damn the brat!
“I know. Yes, I’m damned sure! And I’m absolutely sure you’ve had your fingers into my computer, where I’d rather you stayed out of, young lady.”
“I checked just to be sure you were safe, inside. But there’s really good reason to think you could be in danger from outside, Uncle Yanni. I’d really like you to just come home. Fast. Defense is going to find out what I just did real soon, if they don’t already know. I’m sure they’re going to be monitoring as close as Moreyville, and they’ll know.”
“Well, that’s fine. I’ve finally gotten hold of Jacques and we’re just about scheduled to talk—I’m not about to come home.”
“Yanni—”
“No, I’m telling you. And don’t you contemplate coming down here. I know there’s a risk, I have that figured out for myself, young lady; just don’t pile another one on top of it by your coming down here.”
“Then don’t you go anywhere outside the hotel. You make Jacques come to you. I think your security’s all right. I ran a fast check on everybody you’ve got. You know about the B-28’s.”
“I left Raul home, thank you.”
“Good. That’s good. You understand what I’m worried about.”
“I understand. I understand a lot of things, and I can be trusted with a little advance warning. Do you mind turning my access back on, voting lady?”
“I’m terribly sorry about that. It’s back on now. It’s how I’m talking to you. We just had to be sure we didn’t have anybody loose in the network that we couldn’t lay hands on.”
“All agents accounted for?”
“All accounted for. I have Hicks and Kyle AK both in custody. We’re just going to ask some questions. Particularly of Kyle.”
“I’ve got a question. Am I going back to lab work, am I going for a long vacation in your new township, or am I somehow supposed to finish my job down here without any further interruption?”
“I’m just acting Director, here in the labs. You’re still Director. Besides, you’re still Proxy Councillor. I can’t change that. Only Lynch can. But I’m just really worried that their blowing up the tower—”
“Yes?”
“Catlin thinks it could have been a signal to anybody inside Reseune to take certain measures. Maybe I just took care of that when I got Kyle. And I haven’t been easy to get at, where I’m living. Maybe I didn’t, though. Just take care of yourself.”
“Do me a favor. Go a little easy on Hicks.”
“Because he’s a friend of yours? Or because you think he’s innocent?”
“If he’s not innocent he’s not a friend of mine. You can tell him that. Tell him I said cooperate with you or I’ll break his neck.”
“I will. You’re recorded and I’ll use that. Take real good care of yourself. Your ReseuneSec guard is going to get the news in about five minutes because I’m going to tell them, since I’m their Director. Are any of them with you in the room?”
“No,” he said.
“Good,”
she said.
“Just in case. If any of them leave the hotel, just let them leave. You’re not safe to investigate and don’t risk the status quo trying to stop anything of that sort. I already know enough answers that I can deal with anybody who’s going to go over to the other side. Just whatever you do, don’t go into the Defense Bureau to meet anybody. Meet whoever you meet outside, or at best over in Science, but I don’t like you traveling through the streets, and be very, very careful who you let through. Make them all come to you. Be a complete bastard.”
“That’s not hard,” he said. “Just you watch yourself, young lady. Trust the old wolf to watch his own back.”
“Love you, Yanni.”
“Love you, too,” he said, and thumbed the connection dead.
“Is it all right?” Frank asked anxiously.
He looked over at Frank, very sure the girl had been into his files, very sure Base One could do it; and she now knew something only he and the first Ari had known for well over a century. Frank was AF-997. Nearly an original, off the same genetic tree as her Florian, not at all far removed. And that
wasn’t
the number Frank had in every other record in Reseune. Damned sure it would be hard for anybody to get to Frank without knowing his real name, and that said something about how detailed young Ari had gotten about her research. He felt a little exposed, knowing she knew that secret.
But at least he wasn’t scheduled for a long semi-retirement out at Strassenberg, and she’d just made him an exception in the revision of Reseune authority.
Him, and Frank. When a whole lot else
hadn’t
been what it was supposed to be—
he’d
let something major get past him, and he was beyond upset, and embarrassed about the fact: he felt sick at his stomach, felt the years reel back and saw a dozen scenes replay, with a certain different knowledge about a certain azi. He stared out the window at the sandstone and concrete towers of Novgorod, at the gray mirror of the polluted harbor, and the barges that connected Novgorod to the upriver—so, so much that had grown up since the War. So much that had changed.
Kyle? Kyle was
old
history. Kyle had been there for nearly—God—he’d come on staff in ‘62 in the last century and lived twenty-four more years this side of the century mark, most of it with Giraud. Six decades. Six decades with Giraud, and then Hicks, leaking God knew what to whoever was running him.
Military agent. Giraud had kept him answering questions on military operations for a few years after his return from service in Defense. He remembered a supper meeting in ‘62, Giraud saying he was finally going to run the axe code, reclaim Kyle to active service.
Giraud had done that. He remembered Giraud saying it had gone pretty much as he expected, that Kyle hadn’t lost any memory or didn’t think he had. No conflicts. No problems. Just like the thirty-odd other alphas they’d recovered from Defense after the War ended…most of them specialists, technicals who didn’t mentally visit the here and now often enough to be a real problem to re-Contract. Some had died.
But Kyle. Kyle had been a psych operator, a military interrogator. Kyle had been on Admiral Azov’s staff, first.
Azov. Damn him. The bastard chiefly responsible for the mess on Gehenna. Azov had, later on, conspired with Jordan—had worked against Reseune, in those days. The first Ari had stung him, stung him badly. Azov and Ari hadn’t been friendly once certain things started coming to light, particularly the handling of azi in the armed forces, and Azov hadn’t lived to find out what else Ari had done to him, at Gehenna.
Meanwhile Gorodin had come, friendly to Science, supposedly a whole new post-War age in the relations of Science and Defense.
But Gorodin had never thrown the off-switch on Kyle or let Ari in on their nasty little secret. Secretary Lu, who’d served as Proxy Councillor for Gorodin, had never told them. Friend of theirs. Close friend of Giraud’s, most of the time.
And the military had still been collecting information hand over fist—learning everything that crossed Giraud’s desk.
They must have known the first Ari’s business, as much of it as she’d trusted Giraud with—which would easily be the whole psychogenesis project, most likely everything involving the feud with Jordan: and, oh, Defense had been able to snag
Jordan
, hadn’t they, just at the right time? Nice piece of psychology, that. Offer Jordan the out he wanted, the transfer to Fargone, right when the relationship had gotten desperate—and then when Ari’d gone for Justin—
That had been a delicious piece of news. And they’d used it. Defense had been all eager to talk to Jordan. If Ari had
ever
questioned Kyle herself, ever gotten into Giraud’s records,
ever
done that—oh, but Ari had been fully occupied with Jordan as the center of her problems in that last year of her life. She didn’t regard Giraud’s psych abilities all that highly, but she knew he was loyal and good at what he did.
And then she’d died.
And after Gorodin? If Kyle had still belonged to Defense and still been reporting to them, he’d been, oh, likely highly active during Khalid’s short term.
His inside information hadn’t saved Khalid from walking right into it with young Ari. Maybe Khalid had ignored the intelligence he’d gotten, hadn’t believed the kid was what she was. He’d found it out—in public, on national vid networks.
Darker thought, still, had Khalid ever really turned loose of Kyle once he’d begun to receive information from him?
Intelligence
, for God’s sake. Khalid had been chief of Intelligence before he ever ran for the Council seat.
He’d been managing Kyle’s sort—oh, from way back. Possibly—
Possibly Kyle hadn’t ever reported to Gorodin at all. Maybe not even to Azov. They might not have known what Khalid’s source was, except that Khalid had good information. Azov had died of old age. Lu had. Then Gorodin. Defense had been nominally the ally of Science, most of the time, except the brief stint under Khalid. Jacques—Science had urged Jacques into office to succeed Khalid, when Gorodin had gone into rejuv failure; they’d managed to sway Spurlin…now assassinated.
Along with two people connected to the Eversnow project; them, and the Defense candidate who’d agreed to support it and who’d urged Jacques to vote for it.
Watch out, Ari said, for his own life, at present, in Novgorod.
Khalid. Chief of Intelligence, from the darkest years of the War, a young and ambitious officer in those days, not so old now, when most of that generation were dead. And it was entirely conceivable that his sudden rise in Defense had been precisely because of the quality of the information he had on the inner workings of Science.
“Kyle’s not ours,” Yanni said quietly to Frank, and turned from that gray, misty vista. “He never has been. Kyle’s still Defense. Did you ever see that coming?”
Frank looked at him, just stared in shock. “He never gave a hint. He’d honestly paired with Hicks. It felt that way. It always did, from way back.”
“Could that part be real, even if he was Defense?”
“Could be,” Frank said.
“It’s going to hit Hicks in the gut,” Yanni said. “He said Kyle was like a brother. Relied on him. Trusted him for years.”
“I can’t imagine,” Frank said. “It’s got to have torn Kyle up, too. He was different, around Hicks. He cared. Cared about the people in his command. That’s bad, if that’s true. That’s real bad.”
“Defense must have kept getting reports from him. He can’t have liked it.” A thought occurred to him. Giraud’s office. Hicks’. Access to files. Dossiers. A lot of things. Ari had died, and Giraud had taken the Directorship and increasingly turned ReseuneSec over to Hicks.
That was where Kyle had transferred over, and Kyle had attached to Hicks in a way he never quite had to Giraud. Hicks relied on Kyle as a personal aide, in a way he’d never served with Giraud, who’d had Abban. Giraud had let Hicks handle Kyle, let him have Kyle’s Contract finally even finagled a provisional alpha certificate for Hicks explicitly to allow him to work with Kyle, because the pairing had seemed to work so well.
Ari’d died…and it wasn’t suicide. He’d never liked the suicide notion. Too much had been left unfinished.
If it hadn’t been Jordan, it had been Abban. Basic question of opportunity.
Giraud wouldn’t have ordered it. Without Giraud, Abban wouldn’t have done it—that part of the equation had never made sense to him. But it had never made sense, either, that Jordan had done it. Abban was the one with capability
and
opportunity.
Abban had been upset. Giraud had been upset. Upset had been contagious in the halls in those days after Ari had died. The whole universe had been in upheaval, and for several months after Ari had died, Giraud had been on a hair trigger and so had Abban. You didn’t question Giraud in those days. Secretaries had run scared and Denys himself had said, “Don’t talk to him. He doesn’t want to talk.”
In days when they’d had the vital job of getting the psychogenesis project going and they’d desperately
needed
to talk… Giraud hadn’t been outstandingly well-composed.
Settling into the new job, he’d thought. And mourning a woman he’d greatly regarded. Giraud had been loyal to Ari, he’d stake his life on that.
So Abban couldn’t have done it—could he?
But if Abban had done something that hurt Giraud—there was a little reason for upset in that household, wasn’t there? Abban’s own origins were in green barracks, never shipped out, never left Reseune:
he
had no questionable background. He’d been with Giraud from childhood. Giraud had changed offices; taken Abban with him into Admin; Hicks had already taken over Kyle.
Everything changed when Ari died. He saw it like a chessboard, all the pieces suddenly, massively, shifted on the board: white had castled-up, and young Ari had been a mote in a womb-tank for a whole, mostly peaceful nine months. Once that had happened, Giraud had settled—as if the universe was right again.
“What are you thinking?” Frank asked him finally.
“That Abban never could have killed Ari,” he said, “no more than Jordan could. Unless.”
“Unless,” Frank said.
“Unless he believed it was in Giraud’s interest.” he said. “Maybe somebody told him that. And then, in the aftermath, maybe he knew it wasn’t as true as he thought it was—at least in the immediate effects. Giraud’s upset would have been hard for him to take. A very, very upsetting thing.”