As he sat on her desk, letting her description of the wonderful day he'd ruined pass over him without hearing a word she said, he saw Belqola across the office. Had he decided to try working for a change? Too late, if he had.
"Belqola!"
The man looked round. "Para?"
"My office."
In the office, Toreth sat down behind his desk, leaving Belqola standing. "I thought I ought to give you some notice — when this case wraps, I'll be sending you back to the pool. With the reference you deserve."
He watched Belqola's face slipping from shock to disbelief to anger.
"You're throwing me out? You can't!"
"Really? News to me. I've sent the order down already."
Belqola's eyes narrowed. "I did exactly what you wanted."
"Hardly. I wanted a junior para who didn't mess up all the damn time. I gave you more than one chance. You screwed them up."
"You know what I mean."
"The fuck was your idea, not mine. Incidentally, I'm not disputing that you suck cocks like a professional. But I'm running an investigative team, not a brothel."
Belqola flushed — with anger, rather than embarrassment. "You said —" And he stopped dead.
Toreth smiled. "Yes? What did I say?"
"Okay, you
implied
."
"I'm not responsible for your assumptions. A tendency towards making assumptions is a bad habit for a para-investigator. You ought to keep an eye on that."
"You fucking —" The junior clenched his fists, and then slowly relaxed them. "I know I screwed things up, Para. Give me another chance. A real chance. Please. You can have . . . well, anything. Whatever you want."
"I already have. Once was more than enough. You'd need to be a lot better than that to fuck yourself a place on my team."
"You'll be sorry you did this. Sir."
Toreth always loved the empty threats. "If you want to make yourself a laughingstock, go right ahead and lodge a complaint. Tell everyone why you thought the only way you could keep your assignment was taking it on your knees in a toilet. Seniors will be queuing up to sign you on after that."
No answer from the junior, but there didn't need to be. The rage and humiliation, plain on his face, said it all — and warmed Toreth's cock nicely. Pushing his chair back from the desk, he smiled. "I'll tell you what — one more blowjob, and I'll write you a nice transfer reference. How about it?"
Belqola hesitated, and then shook his head firmly.
"Suit yourself." Toreth turned his attention to his screen, dismissing the junior. "If you change your mind before the end of the case, you know where I am."
Without another word, Belqola stalked out of the office.
Reception called up at twenty past two to tell Toreth that he had a visitor. The call produced an unexpected kick of relief — he'd begun to worry whether Warrick would go through with it or not.
Toreth told Sara Warrick was on his way and then kept the comm open. After a few minutes, he heard his voice.
"You must be the inestimable Sara. My name is Doctor Keir Warrick."
A pause, then Sara said, "I'll tell him you're here."
When the door opened to admit Warrick, he looked completely and reassuringly calm. Exhausted, though — far more so than that night at SimTech when he'd shown Toreth the key to the murder contained in the computer code. His face was hollow-eyed, with deep lines around his eyes and mouth. He couldn't have slept much the night before, if he'd slept at all.
"I'll need as much access to the system as you can give me," Warrick said without preamble, as he sat down at Toreth's screen. "It will save a great deal of time if I don't have to find my own way through the security."
Toreth had already drawn up a list of his own access codes for the I&I systems, as well as an assortment of other people's codes that he'd acquired here and there. He handed the list to Warrick. Might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb. Not the most comforting of metaphors right now.
Warrick looked down the list, his eyebrows creeping up as he read.
"Is that going to be enough?" Toreth asked.
"Oh, certainly." Warrick glanced up and smiled. "More than enough, I should say. Now, if I could have a little peace and quiet, I'll see what I can do."
Warrick worked quickly, intent and absorbed. Toreth managed to sit still for a couple of minutes, then gave up and paced aimlessly, trying not to hum. Warrick didn't seem to mind, or even to notice.
This was it. Up until now the danger had been theoretical, if he ignored the basic stupidity of involving Warrick at all. Now they were creating the evidence that could see both of them arrested, and in all probability annexed.
With half of his attention on Warrick's face — his eyes locked to the screen, the occasional frown gathering, then clearing — Toreth passed the time cataloguing all the crimes they had committed or were about to commit. Unauthorised access to I&I systems, attacks on systems security, perjury, falsifying evidence, conspiracy to do all of that, and murder to top it off.
Finally, Warrick sat back. "Everything is in place."
"Right. I'll get downstairs."
"You should check the recordings first. If the doctored ones pass muster, then today's should work too."
Trying to delay the inevitable? "We don't have time."
"At this point I could probably undo what I've done and leave the system none the wiser. It would be a pity to — to go through with the plan, and only then discover that the tampering was obvious. Rather too late at that point to consider other options."
Toreth checked his watch, and then shrugged. "Okay. Move over."
He ran the recordings through the highest level of the interrogation analysis systems, while Warrick watched over his shoulder. The system would pull up any discrepancies in the prisoner's behaviour or indications of tampering in the record. If anyone questioned him, Toreth could claim he ran the analysis to check for tell-tales of interrogation resistance aids.
After an agonising wait, the recordings came back clean. What he would have done if they hadn't, he had no idea.
The feeling of relief was short-lived — they still had most of the plan to go. Toreth stood up and headed for the doorway. He paused there for a last run through the plan, as much to steady his own nerves as because he thought Warrick needed the reminder.
"You don't have to watch," he said, "but keep the audio link open until it's done. I'll be back as soon as I can afterwards, but I'll have things to do first — don't panic if it takes me a while. Whatever you do, don't go anywhere. Right?"
Warrick nodded, already back in his place at the screen. "Good luck," he said absently.
The silence stretched out in the room.
Marian sat in the chair, twisting her wrists mechanically against the restraints, which made her think of the sim. How many times had she watched the technicians tightening those straps, on herself or others? She saw her hands moving, but they felt distant, unconnected. A stranger's.
It reminded her too of her training days — of standing by, listening to the direct neural reeducation guinea pigs pleading for their memories, for an end to the pain, or simply for death. Perhaps there was nothing she could have done even if she had tried to help them. She hadn't tried. She'd run away, grateful to Psychoprogramming for the easy escape. Maybe this was her well-deserved punishment.
A night and a day and a night. It hadn't occurred to her that she would be back here. It ought to have done. She had told the para-investigator everything, but of course he didn't know that. The idea of what had to come — of how long it might take to satisfy him — intensified the fear that had kept her awake since the last interrogation, until she felt herself beginning to shake.
Twisting against the restraints. Stupid and pointless. What would she do if they broke? There was no way out.
The para-investigator stood not far away, filling injectors and occasionally glancing up at the watching cameras.
Where had he been for all this time? Checking her story? How?
Eventually, unable to bear the silence any longer, she had to speak. "What do you want?"
Toreth finished the last of his preparations, moved to sit at the table.
"Nothing. I'm just killing time." She heard the smirk in his voice. "So to speak."
She lifted her head, curiosity sparking. "What?"
"We're all done with confessions now. You put up a good show — even if you'll never know."
She thought about it for a minute, but after three sleepless nights, she couldn't focus. Memories of her shameful performance kept intruding. She had blown her last chance. Psychoprogramming would leave her to twist in the wind now, and she deserved it.
"I don't understand," she said eventually, hating to admit it, wanting to know.
He looked back at her, bored on the surface, tense as strung wire underneath and she knew he was debating whether to explain. She felt a tiny, improbable surge of hope. Why would he be nervous?
"It's nothing that you need to worry about," he said. "You made the wrong confession, that's all. Two of them, in fact. So I fixed that, with a little help, and now you're not going to have a chance to make them again."
"Help?" she asked, forcing herself to think, to try to see how it could be done. The image came back to her of Warrick and Toreth in the sim. So comfortable together.
"Warrick," she said, and as his eyes narrowed she knew she was right.
Then he shrugged. "Yes, Warrick. It doesn't really matter if you know now, does it?"
If he didn't care about that, if he was willing to tell her what he had planned, then there really was no way out. All she could think to say was, stupidly, "You're going to kill me?"
He nodded. "We already did, in the sim. Accidental overdose. It looks very good. Very convincing."
"Warrick wouldn't use the sim like that."
"It was his idea." He looked up at the camera. "Wasn't it?"
For a moment she didn't understand what he meant to show her, perhaps because the idea was too horrible to accept. For all Warrick's faults, for all his overattachment to the sim and his blindness about it, she'd always respected him. She felt bereft at the mere idea that Toreth could have persuaded him to do this. Warrick wouldn't have thought of it himself. Not even to save SimTech and his own neck, and the neck of the sick, twisted excuse for a human being who sat here and watched her and smiled.
But if it was true then Warrick really could be somewhere nearby, looking at a monitor, waiting to see her die.
"Bastard," she whispered, hopelessly, not even sure which one of them she meant.
He laughed. "Don't get all fucking morally superior with me, Dr Psychoprogrammer. Don't tell me you never killed anyone before you took it up as a hobby, because I've read your file. The only difference between us is that you lost your nerve and bottled out into a nice, cushy corporate job."
The contempt, the careless cruelty, gave her back some focus. "Psychoprogramming is a perversion of medicine, like this place is a perversion of justice. You — "
"Save your breath — " brief grin, " — for what it's worth. I've heard it a hundred fucking times from resisters. Your version pays better, though. What did Mindfuck throw your way to bring you back into the family?"
Anger flared. "That wasn't why I did it."
"No?" A tell-me-another tone of voice.
"No. I had to stop the sim being commercialised — Psychoprogramming provided a tool to do it. People are going to get hurt, badly hurt."
Was Warrick watching them now? If he were, this might be the last chance she ever had to try to make him see reason. "The tech isn't safe for everyone. There are vulnerable people out there who will suffer. Lots of them. Addiction, lives destroyed by overdependence, and the Administration doesn't give a damn because it will keep people trapped in fantasy worlds that won't threaten
them
. And more serious effects — Tara won't be an isolated case. There will be illegal copies of the sim, probably even more dangerous. By the time it's recognised, it will be too late to stop it. I didn't want to kill innocents. I didn't want to kill anyone, but sometimes the price of saving lives is — "
"So you decided to hand it over to the kind hearts at Mindfuck instead?"
Yes. That was what she'd decided, although she'd seldom forced herself to look at it so starkly. All she had in defence was the justification she'd used for all these months. "Better a tool for them, than damaging indiscriminately. Once they have control of it, they'll never let it into general use."
He shrugged. "Actually, I don't care."
He didn't, of course. She hoped Warrick would see that, at least.
The para-investigator looked at his watch, came over to the bench. "Time to get started. Or finished."
He pressed the injector against her arm. She felt the brief pain and then the icy heat of the drug flooding through her, making her stomach heave and her vision swim. Someone else might have said, 'it won't take long', or 'it won't hurt'. He simply watched her dispassionately.
The strength drained out of her and her head dropped forward. Toreth lifted her chin, tipped her head back against the chair.
"How's that?" he asked.
A moment before she realised he wasn't speaking to her. He nodded, answering an unheard instruction, and moved her head a fraction to the left. Posing her. She tried to fight it, to ruin their plan, but her muscles weren't responding to her commands and she could manage nothing more than rasping breaths. She tried to focus, eyelids suddenly heavy.
He wasn't even looking at her now. His gaze moved steadily between his watch and the monitor beside her as he counted out seconds under his breath.
"Fifteen."
Slowly suffocating, every breath a desperate struggle. "Please, no . . . please, God . . . don't . . . I don't . . . Warrick . . . Warrick, please."
"Twelve."
"Warrick, please — you have to . . ." Warrick, listening and watching somewhere. What could he do for her now, even if he finally heard her?
"Ten."