Shadow of Victory - eARC (4 page)

“For God’s sake, Agnieszka, everybody with a working brain knows it’s a whitewash.” She carefully omitted the word “another” in front of “whitewash,” but she knew Krzywicka heard it anyway. “That airbus driver never had a clue he was in restricted airspace. For that matter, he wasn’t—not legally, anyway—and by now, thanks to that air-traffic hack, at least two thirds of Lądowisko knows there was no warning at all. By the end of next week, two thirds of the planet will know! I told you even before the hack that it would be a whole lot smarter to just admit Lewandowska screwed up and throw her to the wolves. God knows she deserves it! I still think that’s the smart move, especially now that the cat’s out of the bag on the gray web. But once this inquiry’s report’s been made official, there won’t be any way in hell we can do it later.”

“Oh? And do you want to explain to Hieronim why his cousin is facing one hundred and twenty-three counts of reckless homicide?”

Krzywicka tipped farther back in her chair and raised her eyebrows as she steepled her fingers across her chest, and Pokriefke felt her jaw tighten.

Of course she didn’t want to be the one to tell Hieronim Mazur anything of the sort! Krzywicka might be the most powerful person in Włocławek’s government, but as the head of the Stowarzyszenie Eksporterów Owoców Morza, Mazur was the most powerful person on Włocławek…period. The “Seafood Exporters’ Association’s” name was even more innocuous—and misleading—than many another Włocławekan institution’s title, but it was the true stronghold of the Oligarchia. It was just over three hundred T-years old, and despite its name it actually represented a broadly diversified alliance of fishing interests, bankers, industrial magnates, and interstellar shipping houses.

And Wiktoria Lewandowska, the head of Mazur’s personal security—and the SEOM’s in-house security forces—also happened to be Hieronim’s third cousin. That would have been enough to inspire any self-respecting oligarcha to quash any investigation into her actions, and the fact that Mazur knew he could count on her to follow any instruction he gave without questioning it or even thinking about it—assuming she could think, which seemed even more doubtful than usual, given recent events—only made him even more…disinclined to permit anything like an honest inquiry. He certainly wasn’t going to allow anything that concluded she had not, in fact, warned the airbus before she ordered her people to shoot it out of the sky. And especially not when it had been in a public transit lane across privately owned airspace rather than in the closed spaceport airspace cited in the soon-to-be completed inquiry.

Which also just happened to conclude that it had been an SZW sting ship covering the air above the Lądowisko spaceport which had fired the fatal shot rather than the SEOM private security air car two a half kilometers outside the spaceport’s eastern perimeter.

Of course, it also didn’t mention what had happened to that air car ten seconds later, did it? That sting ship pilot had better be thanking his lucky stars Mazur was more interested in keeping the heat off Lewandowska than in hammering him. Bringing that lieutenant up on charges for shooting the bastard who’d pulled the trigger out of the sky would risk opening the entire can of worms to public scrutiny, and they couldn’t have that, could they? No, no. Best to handle this discreetly and quietly, one hand washing the other, as always.

But this one’s different, Pokriefke thought bitterly. This time it’s kids who got killed. Maybe just a load of kids from the Projects, but still kids, damn it! People’re willing to accept a lot—or to at least keep their heads down, their mouths shut, and their opinions to themselves—but this one’s different. There’s a lot of anger out there already, and there’s going to be more. Especially when people start comparing the official conclusions to that bootleg copy of the air-traffic transcript. And wouldn’t I love to know how the hell that got out!

She thought about saying that out loud, but not very hard. She hadn’t headed Biuro Bezpieczeństwa i Prawdy for so long without learning how the game was played. And she really didn’t want Krzywicka or Mazur to ask her how the files in question had been hacked. Technically, security for those files belonged to the Policja Federalna under the umbrella of Teofil Strenk’s Wydział Kryminalno-Dochodzeniowy, the Criminal Investigation Department. But the Policja Federalna had never had custody of the files in question, and the last thing Pokriefke wanted was to give the KOD an opportunity to go poking around inside her files, instead. Once upon a time she’d been Strenk’s junior partner and protégé in the Wydział Kryminalno-Dochodzeniowy. She knew exactly what he thought of what she’d done with her life since then, and the thought of how an investigation under his aegis might play out was enough to make her stomach hurt.

Besides, it wasn’t as if any further protest on her part was going to make a difference in the end. Mazur had already decided how it was going to play out, and Krzywicka wasn’t going to argue with him over something as unimportant as an airbus load of dead kids when none of them had been hers.

* * *

“God, it’s good to be home,” Tomasz Szponder said, dropping into the worn leather chair in the tiny office at 7707 Bulwar Heinleina. Its old-fashioned springs creaked as he leaned back and ran his fingers through his brown hair, and he puffed his lips and exhaled noisily. “The food’s always good, but it tasted like sawdust today.”

He shook his head, and pointed at the equally aged chair on the far side of the desk.

“Sit,” he said, and Jarosław Kotarski settled into the indicated chair a bit more gingerly than Szponder had flopped into his. Partly that was because Kotarski was a considerably larger man, with limited faith in the chair’s physical integrity. It might also have been due to his awareness that the chair in question was over three T-centuries old and had once sat in the office of the very first Prezydent of the Republika Włocławek. As a former professor of Włocławekan History at Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika he had rather more respect for the chair’s lineage than Prezydent Tomasz Szponder’s namesake seemed to feel.

Or perhaps not. Even after all these years, there were parts of the current Tomasz Szponder which had never been shared with anyone except, possibly, his wife, Grażyna.

“Why do I think it took more than just the food to spoil your dinner?” Kotarski asked as Szponder opened a refrigerated desk drawer and extracted two frosted glasses and a bottle of vodka.

“Because you know me so well?” he suggested as he uncapped the bottle and poured. “Or is it because I’m such a transparent fellow?”

“‘Transparent’ isn’t the very first word that comes to mind when I think of you…thank God.” Kotarski accepted one of the glasses and raised it in a brief, silent toast, then threw back its contents and slapped the glass back down on the desk. “So! Aside from indigestion, how did it go?”

“About the way we expected.” Szponder massaged his temples wearily. “I talked to Szymon—uselessly, of course. It was like talking to Krzywicka’s sock puppet!”

“That’s not really fair, you know, Tomasz. I know how frustrating it is, and he’s certainly not the man Włodzimierz was. But then,” Kotarski smiled sadly, “
Włodzimierz
wasn’t the man he used to be by the end, was he?”

“No,” Szponder sighed, lowering his hands to his chair arms. “No, he wasn’t.”

“Did you get a chance to talk to any of the others?”

“I managed to ‘bump into’ Teofil in the lobby, but I wouldn’t say we really had a chance to ‘talk’ about it. From his expression when I took the opportunity to drop a cautionary word in his ear about the rumors I’d heard from the street, though, he’s not very pleased with where this is headed. I took the opportunity to drop in on Justyna and Bjørn while I was at the Kancelaria Partii, too. I don’t think either of them was exactly overjoyed to see me, but they were civil enough. And I don’t know about Bjørn, but Justyna is obviously worried about something. At the moment, I only see one real candidate for what that something might be.”

“Kudzinowski isn’t worried about it? That’s interesting,” Kotarski said. “I’d’ve thought it would be more on his plate than Pokriefke’s right now.”

“Apparently he doesn’t think so,” Szponder said sourly and poured more vodka.

Kotarski nodded, but his eyes were thoughtful. Bjørn Kudzinowski headed the Komisja Wolności i Sprawiedliwości Społecznej, the Commission for Freedom and Social Justice, which was the most powerful non-police agency in the Republic. The combined functions of the old ministries of industry, labor, and commerce had been folded into his commission, and the airbus school tours were part of a KWSS outreach program. One would have thought…

“I wonder how much hand he had behind the scenes in crafting Krzywicka’s and Sosabowska’s response to this,” he murmured out loud.

“I don’t think Sosabowska wants to come within a thousand kilometers of ‘this,’” Szponder said, recapping the vodka bottle. “As Szymon pointed out, the actual inquiry’s being conducted by the Inspektorat Sił Zbrojnych. That’s Brigadier Pawlikowski’s shop, and he’s a hard-core career officer. Unfortunately, that means he’ll sign whatever he’s told to sign, whether he agrees with it or not. I’m pretty damn sure he doesn’t, but he’s got a wife and kids of his own. And, after all, it’s not like his objecting to it would change anything, would it?” He shook his head unhappily and sipped vodka. “He’ll sign off on this one, too, and that insulates Sosabowska from the entire mess. I doubt she could do anything about it if she wanted to, but this gets her off the hook so she doesn’t even have to try. And,” he added grudgingly, “it does get her pilot out of the line of fire, too. That young man did exactly what I’d’ve done in his place. I’m just as happy he’s not going to stand trial for it in the end.”

“They can’t really think this is all just going to…go away, can they?”

“I don’t think they care whether or not it goes away.” Szponder set his glass very precisely in the center of his blotter, formed his index fingers and thumbs into a triangle around its base, and stared down into it for several seconds, like an oracle consulting his crystal ball. Then he looked back up. “I think they think it doesn’t matter how the man or woman in the street reacts to this—or to anything else, anymore. They’re that far gone, Jarosław.”

“Damn.” The single word came out with sorrow, not surprise, and Kotarski drew a deep breath, then shook his head.

“It’s not like we haven’t seen this coming, Tomasz,” he said. “There was a reason you set up the Krucjata—yes, and gave me a job after the University threw me out on my ass.”

“I know. It’s just that…that it hurt so much, sitting there across from Szymon this evening. He looks so much like Włodzimierz, and he was totally oblivious to any reason he ought to be doing something about this. That’s the worst part of it, Jarosław. I think he’s genuinely oblivious to it, not just closing his eyes and pretending he doesn’t see, like the rest of the aparatczyków. He’s that far removed from everything his uncle ever tried to accomplish. You know as well as I do that even at the very end Włodzimierz would never have stood by and watched the Party sweep over a hundred dead kids under the carpet! Never!”

“Probably not,” Kotarski agreed, although deep inside he wasn’t so sure. He’d known Ziomkowski even longer than Szponder had, and he wanted to agree. But by the end, the man who’d created the Ruch Odnowy Narodowej had been so thoroughly captured by the system—and been so tired and worn out—he might, indeed, have let this pass. Yet perhaps he wouldn’t have, either, and one of Tomasz Szponder’s greatest strengths was his loyalty. It would have been not just unrealistic but cruel to argue with him about a friend so many years dead.

“Unfortunately,” he said aloud, “we have to deal with Szymon—or, rather, with Krzywicka and Mazur—not Włodzimierz. And from what you’re saying, that situation’s about to get a whole lot uglier. If they’re willing to ignore something like this, it’s only a matter of time until they ignore something even worse. And from what we’re hearing from the lower level cells, there’s enough anger building over this one for genuine disturbances. Tomek and I went over the latest reports while you were not enjoying dinner, and it’s pretty clear there’s a lot of pressure building out there. We could see riots coming out of the Projects…and that doesn’t even count our people’s reaction.”

“Wonderful.”

Szponder stood and crossed to the small office’s single window and gazed down on the street so far below. It looked so calm and peaceful at the moment, but it wasn’t hard for him to imagine a very different scene. He’d seen street carnage enough when he, Włodzimierz Ziomkowski, and the idealistic college students who’d provided so much of the National Renewal Movement’s initial fiery enthusiasm had assailed the corruption of the old Republic.

Much as he’d loved Ziomkowski, he’d have shot him dead in the street himself if he’d even suspected then what the RON would become in the end.

“It’s going to be bloodier than the Agitacja ever was,” he said softly, leaning his forehead against the crystoplast. “The BBP and the KWSS are a hell of a lot more deeply embedded than the old police and security services were. And more ruthless. And the Oligarchia’s learned its lesson, too. If they’d been willing to resort to the sort of tactics Pokriefke and Krzywicka are willing to embrace, we’d never have seen the Party legalized in the first place. They won’t make that mistake a second time.”

“Of course they won’t, and you knew that from the beginning. That’s why we’re organized the way we are. The question is whether or not the time’s come for us to get more…proactive.”

Szponder nodded against the window, his eyes closed, because Kotarski was right. He would so much have preferred to be able to agitate for new elections the way he and Włodzimierz had agitated so many years before, but he’d known long before Włodzimierz’s death that that wasn’t going to happen a second time. That was why he’d started building the Krucjata Wolności Myśli, the Free Thought Crusade, three T-years before Ziomkowski’s final stroke. He hadn’t taken that step lightly, but he’d taken it with his eyes wide open. And he’d known then that it had never been a question of whether or not the time would come, only a question of when.