The Administration Series (247 page)

She didn't looked surprised, but she did shake her head. "Impossible, I'm afraid. You'll see why when you get here."

He did indeed. The Justice Department was turning into a fortress, with a new double perimeter fence being erected. At the locked main doors, the armed officers on guard checked his ID twice, even with Lee standing there beside him. Before the pair of them could move into the main building, his ID and Lee's were checked at a second reinforced door.

"Jesus," Toreth said as they walked down the corridor. "
We
don't have this much security now. I thought you didn't get hit so badly?"

Lee shrugged. "We all saw the pictures from I&I. And we're the ones who are actually out on the street. The revolt blew off some steam, but it also made people realise what was possible. There's a lot of anger out there, Para-investigator. If the new Administration doesn't meet the expectations raised, there'll be more trouble. Maybe worse trouble." She looked at him sidelong. "Unless it's still treason to say that the Administration might be fallible?"

Toreth shrugged. "No one's told me otherwise. But I'm afraid I'm too busy to arrest you. You're not the only ones who're short-staffed."

"I heard you lost a lot of people," she said, her voice suddenly sympathetic.

"Yeah. And they were a lot of the best people." He gave her an appraising glance. "Want a job? I can guarantee a good starting grade."

She smiled wryly. "I don't think so. I'd rather keep a few names above me in the lynching list."

In her office, the other desk was occupied by a harassed-looking young man who was staring at a comm screen. Judging by his tapping fingers and clenched jaw, the soothing hold picture of a flickering shoal of fish wasn't doing its job. Toreth tilted his head towards the man, and Lee nodded.

"Palano, can you give me ten minutes?"

The man looked up, startled. The dark rings around his eyes complemented his heavy five-o'clock shadow, and Toreth wondered if he'd been there all the previous night.

"What?" Palano asked.

"Can I have the office for ten minutes?"

For a moment Palano looked as though he'd protest. Then he slammed the comm connection closed and stood. "Sure, why the hell not?" He groaned softly as he bent down to pick his coat up from the floor, and straightened slowly with his hand to the small of his back. "Have it all evening. All night, for all I care. See you sometime."

"Vin, your shift doesn't finish — "

"Why don't you tell the Inspector? They can sodding well sack me."

Palano banged the door shut hard enough to rattle a shelfful of commendation certificates, which had even tackier plastic frames than the I&I variety.

"Maybe I should offer
him
a job," Toreth said.

"If you catch him before he gets a good night's sleep, he might even say yes." Lee sat down at her desk and pointed to a chair. "Now, what can I do for you? I hope it won't take too long, because
my
shift finishes in half an hour."

"I'd like a copy of a final case report," Toreth said as he sat down. "And I'd like to make sure there's no official link to your passing it to me."

Her eyebrows rose. "That sounds interesting."

"You don't want to know how interesting. But I can promise that no one will care about you pulling the file."

"Just if you pull it?"

"I'd rather not have people know I was looking. It'd put some noses out of joint. Besides, it's one of your files — I'd have to put in an official departmental request. These days it might take weeks, or it might never turn up at all."

She looked at him narrowly. "Okay," she said eventually. "But remember — "

"I owe you a favour. A big favour. I'll remember."

She took the case number and turned to her screen. "And I'll try to make sure I collect on it before someone strings you up. Right . . . here you are."

Peering over her shoulder, he scanned down the file. "Twenty suspect names?" he said in dismay.

"That's right." She flicked through the file — unfamiliar with the Justice format, Toreth couldn't follow her. "Very bad picture, apparently. Whoever it was knew enough to keep his face away from the school surveillance systems, or maybe he was just lucky. The best they sent us was a ten percent profile. These names are the twenty best fits who came up as resident in New London." She glanced over her shoulder. "At least, they were resident here before the revolt. Now movement notification is gone, your guess is as good as mine."

"They told the school they'd identified the man and he wasn't a threat."

"I'm sure they did. That isn't in the file, but — " She looked round again. "What would you have done with a case like that?"

"Called the school to get them off my back and then not put it in the file in case the guy turned out to be a psycho. Did whoever ran the case check them out?"

"I shouldn't think so. No one's going to devote much time to a vague report like that. Let me see . . . no, just automated basics: a check for family links to pupils, basic c&ps looking for suspicious movement patterns or signs of kidnap preps like travel tickets or drugs. A search of the pupil roll in case there were any high-target parents listed, which there weren't. That was pretty much it."

Twenty names to choose from, and only the twenty best-fit names at that. Annoyingly — but not surprisingly — the criminal record files didn't contain the full biographies or the historical image files. That meant no current photographs to compare to Cele's sketch, or pictures to compare with the young Leo Warrick, unless Toreth risked pulling their security files himself. Or unless . . .

"Can you pull the security files for me?" Toreth asked.

Lee raised her eyebrows. "Got a Justice case code and security authorisation?"

"Of course not. Can't you do it anyway?"

"Nu-uh. Not unless you tell me what it's about, why you want them and why you can't do it at I&I. A favour is one thing, but that . . . " She paused. "Well?"

No plausible lies came to mind and the truth was out of the question. "'Fraid I can't."

"Well, then, there we are. Do you still want the case files?"

"Yeah, might as well. Thanks."

As she walked him out, past the tight security, he pondered the differences between Justice and I&I. For a senior at I&I, pulling a basic security file didn't need a case number, a special authorisation or, in fact, anything more than a desire to see the file. He'd used and abused the privilege on many occasions.

Toreth had always liked the feeling of being higher up the food chain than Justice. Now he had the feeling of shadows circling, bigger fish who had slipped into the I&I pond and who might take an unhealthy interest in him and his unofficial investigations. Lee had told him once that she preferred the anonymity of politically unimportant crime, and right now he understood the feeling thoroughly.

He checked the files out in the taxi on the way to Sara's. He didn't want to do it at her flat in case she asked what he was working on.

As far as occupation went, none of the twenty men in the file were helpfully listed as a Cit Surveillance undercover operatives. A third of the men worked for the Administration; one of them — sixty-five-year-old John Sable, unmarried, parents deceased — was a senior administrator at the internal audit section of the Data Division.

Sable's job rang faint alarm bells because the Data Division name masked a multitude of sins from public scrutiny. The Administration knew well that knowledge was power. The DD was the only major cross-departmental division, working under the direct control of the Bureau of Administrative Departments. In its respectable guises, the DD gathered and organised the vast quantities of data on every citizen and corporation that was necessary to keep the Administration running smoothly. All the other departments fed information into it and took information out.

On the shady side, a collection of Administration organisations whose main function was to keep a clandestine watch on citizens claimed the Data Division as home, or at least used it as a postal address.

However, there were plenty of perfectly legitimate administrators at DD. If he'd pulled this file up himself in the course of an ordinary investigation, he wouldn't have assumed Citizen Surveillance — maybe wouldn't even have thought of it. The huge amounts of data collected and controlled by the division required an equally huge staff. Nothing in the file looked out of place or remarkable in any way. Given that the man at Valeria's school was probably an undercover operative, he could just as easily be one of the other nineteen and listed as an accountant.

Still, it was something.

He closed the file and decided to call Warrick. Warrick would probably make a fuss about Toreth hiding the Justice lead from him, but with luck Toreth could find out what Warrick was doing and maybe use this new lead to stop him.

He called Warrick's personal comm, which was switched off. Better not to leave a message. Toreth called Warrick's flat with a similar result. Shit. The inability to contact him made Toreth edgy. What the hell was the man up to? Eventually, he called the flat again and left an utterly neutral 'call me when you've got time' message.

It was only as he finished leaving the message that he realised it must be the system at the new flat. Weird to think that Warrick would be there when he heard the message. The movers had been booked for yesterday and Warrick would've left some kind of message if things had gone disastrously wrong. So everything would be there, Toreth's own belongings included.

Toreth hadn't seen the place since the decorators had finished, and as he closed the school suspect files, he thought he really ought to go take a look. Maybe not today, if Warrick wasn't there. Tomorrow for sure, since, as Sara had reminded him again before she left, it was Warrick's birthday tomorrow.

The taxi was still three streets from Sara's house when Toreth told it to stop. He didn't fancy the idea of another evening of romantic comedies, not even in pursuit of his plan to end Sara's irritating nerviness around him. She wouldn't be surprised if he came in late, and the kind of fucking he was in the mood for wouldn't take too long, anyway.

Abandoning all thoughts of Warrick and Sara for the night, he ordered the taxi to turn around, and directed it to the nearest bar.

On Monday the move began as smoothly as could be expected, which was to say that Warrick loathed every second of it. He'd planned to stay in the flat all day, watching the removal company staff packing. However, although they were quick and efficient, seeing strangers handling his possessions — all his possessions — proved to be impossible, so in the end he went in to SimTech, despite having officially taken the day off.

Once there, the temptation of taking another crack at the unyielding Citizen Surveillance computers nagged at him. Using SimTech's systems for something so dangerous would be utterly unforgivable. In an attempt to distract himself, he decided to take full advantage of a day free of planned meetings to impose himself on various sim trials and room tests. It didn't noticeably improve his mood. Everyone he spoke to probed him, more or less discreetly, about whether there would be budget cuts. The less optimistic were really fishing for news of staff cuts. In all honesty, he could say nothing to reassure them.

On Tuesday, the trauma of packing transmuted into the trauma of the cross-city transportation of his belongings and unpacking at the other end. At least he trusted the SimTech engineers who arrived to move the contents of his office, which had been deemed too sensitive even for corporate-screened removal agents.

Now he was in the new building, the SimTech security guards had been withdrawn just when he could have used an extra few pairs of hands. However, when the movers had, thankfully, gone, Dillian and Cele arrived to help. He couldn't turn Dillian down without offending her — hurting her wouldn't be too strong a word for it — but neither was he in the mood for confrontations and peacekeeping. Consequently, he was both relieved and disappointed when Toreth failed to appear.

By midafternoon he'd unpacked enough of the kitchen contents to make tea. The kettle had just boiled when Cele stuck her head round the door. She looked fetchingly hot and mussed, with an artistic smudge of dust on one cheek.

"Did you put that there deliberately?" he asked, pointing to his own cheek.

She grinned. "Of course. Basic rule of anything dirty — you only ever get one big smudge, so put it on yourself and you know it looks good." She scrubbed her face with the back of her hand, which rather made the situation worse. "I got it moving the boxes with 'Toreth' written on them. Where are they going?"

"Ah . . . the smaller bedroom which isn't the one opposite the bathroom."

"Right. Knowing you, I'm surprised you haven't got a floor map and codes." Instead of leaving, she sat down on one of the new kitchen chairs. "Classy furniture in here. Not cheap, either. I thought you were on an economy drive."

"I am. Dillian bought it for me."

"Mmh, of course. Perfect for her, a bit — " she sketched unmistakable feminine curves in the air, " — for you. Fits the flat, though."