"Cooperation from the beginning would be in your best interest," Howes said. "We may be able to arrange a deal with Internal Investigations if you decide to be sensible."
"I don't — "
"Consider carefully, Para-investigator," Howes said softly.
Toreth thought of all the prisoners he'd watched sit and think their way through this exact dilemma. Folding now was so fucking tempting, although the mindfucker was probably lying about any deal. The pair of them had been responsible for the death of a Legislator, and Toreth knew that. They'd want him dead, and so would he by the time they'd finished with him.
Toreth looked Howes in the eyes. "I don't have anything to say. I'm sorry, I can't help you. Believe me, I'd love to. But what was in the files is all there is."
The denial would start the long journey through Psychoprogramming and on to an interrogation chair at Internal Investigations. In an odd way, it felt good — knowing that when the crunch came, he'd done it.
Fucking hell. He'd really done it.
Toreth stayed seated, unable to move, as Tillotson called a security guard in. The man had to help him up from the chair before Toreth regained enough self-control to walk out of the room unaided, without a backwards glance.
As the guard escorted him towards the lift, the numbness lifted a little and he began to struggle for a plan. For some chance, however slim.
If fucking a witness was Howes's best card, he couldn't have any hard evidence that they'd faked the confession record, however much he suspected. That would all change with his own inevitable confession, but right now Warrick was still free.
However personal it felt, Howes's real target was SimTech — Toreth was just in the field of fire. So look at it from that angle. Warrick was his only realistic hope, and he'd certainly proved resourceful enough in the past. At the very least, if Warrick ran, if he could get away, that would cut the evidence against Toreth dramatically — without Warrick the original recording might never be retrieved.
All Toreth needed was to get away from his escort for a minute or two.
At least he knew how to make it look good. Measuring the distance to his target along the corridor, he summoned the images. Water, closing over him. Pouring down his throat. Choking and vomiting. Diaphragm spasming, a buzzing in his ears as his lungs struggled against the flood. He was drowning, and he couldn't force his way to the surface. Gagging in his memory, and now in real life too.
"'Scuse me," he gasped, and pushed past the guard into the toilets as they passed them.
It had worked too well, which proved to be lucky. As he collapsed on his knees in one of the cubicles, retching, he heard the door behind him open and then close again. When he looked round, there was no sign of the guard.
Wiping his mouth, he fitted the comm earpiece with shaking hands and called Warrick.
"We're blown." Toreth said as soon as Warrick answered, almost surprised to find that he still had the presence of mind to subvocalize. "Get out if you can. I can't —"
"What's happened?"
"Don't argue, just — "
"Toreth,
shut up
."
The sudden authority silenced him.
"Now, again, slowly," Warrick said. He sounded far too calm, and for a moment, Toreth wondered if he could somehow be involved. Then he dismissed the idea.
Right. Slowly. "Mindfuck — Psychoprogramming — are here, with Tillotson. They don't buy it. And they've found out we're fucking. Were fucking. That gives them enough leverage to interrogate me."
Silence, then Warrick said, "Will you talk to them?"
"Warrick, I won't have any fucking
choice
." The truth of that made his stomach lurch again.
"Well, don't tell them anything yet. Do you think they'll intercept this call?"
"I — " Toreth pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to focus. "No. I don't think so. Tillotson wouldn't draw attention yet with a request to monitor my comm."
"Good." Warrick still sounded as calm as though he were running through a sim protocol. "Do you have a name now?"
Toreth frowned. "A what?"
"A name of someone at Psychoprogramming. Someone involved."
"What are you going to do?"
"Do you have a damned
name
?"
It was almost a relief to hear Warrick's poise fracturing. "Yes. It's —" His mind blanked. "Howes. He said Alan Howes. From Research. He had ID, which doesn't really mean much except . . ." Except it was better than nothing.
"Thank you. I'll do what I can. Try not to panic."
Easy for him to say. Toreth gripped the toilet seat and took a deep breath. "I'm not fucking panicking."
"Then it won't be a problem for you, will it?"
Toreth heard the door open again and he cut the connection, bending over the toilet and coughing while he stuffed the earpiece back into his pocket.
"Sorry, Para," the guard said as he entered. "We've got to go."
He sounded genuinely apologetic, and as they started down the corridor Toreth decided not to have the man disciplined for leaving a prisoner alone. In the unlikely event that he ever had the chance.
This was it.
After the call finished, Warrick sat back in his chair and stared blindly at the screen. Despite his confidence to Toreth, he'd never honestly given the plan more than a sixty percent chance of success. He'd made contingency plans, and he liked those even less than the original.
Run, that was the first option. Wipe the systems as thoroughly as he knew how and run. He had tickets, and a borrowed identity that he hoped would get him outside the Administration. He wasn't confident even of that. This wasn't something he'd ever had to do before.
There were files ready to go to Justice and I&I stating that his fellow directors had no knowledge of what had happened; whether that would do any good, he had no idea. His complete severance from the corporation might help — the founders' clause invoked at last, in circumstances none of them could have envisaged.
Other files to go to Asher and Lew, with everything he dared tell them. Enough to give them the best chance possible to defend SimTech, although the odds of their being able to salvage anything from the mess were small. Perhaps they could at least forgive him.
A message for Dillian, so far away on Mars, explaining as best he could. Saying goodbye, and saying sorry, for what little it was worth, because the Administration weren't kind to the relatives of political criminals. His own crimes should count as corporate, but with Nissim's death to be explained away, anything was possible. Mud would splash and stick, in any case.
He had scant hope of ever seeing Dillian again anyway, or anyone else he knew, whether his flight succeeded or not.
Contingency plans, which had been too hurriedly laid to be reliable.
How long would Toreth be able to hold out? Assuming that he would try in the first place, that the seed of hope he'd tried to plant just now would take, and that was a major assumption. Expecting Toreth to trust him over that — or anything — was optimistic, to put it mildly. He easily could be talking to them right now, spilling everything, in which case sitting here was stupid, bordering on suicidal. Toreth's panicked, mutually incriminating call must have come from I&I, in which case it might have been monitored. Guards could be on their way to SimTech now. Every minute of delay might count.
He closed the files on the screen slowly, watching them disappear one by one. SimTech work — plans for the commercial production of sim units, which he'd only just begun to hope might again be possible. The future of SimTech. His future — everything he loved.
Run. That was the sensible choice.
Toreth found himself thinking about two things, going back and forth from one to the other as restlessly as he paced across the holding cell. Two memories. Fucking Warrick in his office yesterday, so beautifully hot and desperate. Warrick, jerking back against him as he came, as they both came — maybe the last fuck of their lives.
Then Sara's face when he'd come back from killing Marian. She'd guessed something, and that might be enough to doom her along with himself and Warrick. The thought of Sara in an interrogation room hurt more than he would have imagined. Maybe they wouldn't ask him about her. Maybe if they did, he'd be able to hold it back. Questioning interrogators was notoriously difficult. He'd done one himself once, but Internal Investigations took most of them. Soon, they'd have him.
Please, don't let them drag Sara into this.
Warrick had sounded so calm. He had to have a plan, or more probably just a good escape route. No — he'd said that he'd do what he could. It would have to be fast, whatever it was. How long would it be before guards from Mindfuck arrived at I&I to take him? Not long, if Howes moved quickly. Once he was in their hands, he couldn't imagine anything Warrick could do. Hell, he couldn't imagine anything he could do now, either. Back to Warrick again, to the feel of him, the smell of him, the taste of blood on his lips, and Sara bringing them coffee. Oh, Christ. Sara.
When the guard returned, it seemed like ten minutes. Normally he had a good sense of time, but checking his watch showed almost an hour had gone by.
Exactly the opposite of the SMS, he thought vaguely.
The guard escorted him out and down the corridor without a word. No handcuffs yet. The lift took them up again, passing the ground floor, which meant he wasn't being transferred. The overwhelming intensity of the relief shocked him, forcing him to lean against the wall for support.
Back in Tillotson's office again, Tillotson and Howes were waiting for him. Howes had seated himself on the edge of Tillotson's desk, and he gestured for Toreth to sit in the chair before him.
Below him.
Toreth shook his head in silent refusal, standing beside the chair with his hands behind his back.
No one spoke. Why, Toreth wondered, were they doing this here? Why not down in detention? No point lying to himself by pretending that wouldn't have intimidated him. Tillotson would know that, even if Howes didn't.
If they offered the deal again, what would he say? Trust Tillotson, or trust Warrick? Management or corporate — what a fucking choice. At least the men in front of him had the authority to let him go, to try to buy his silence instead of enforce it, which was more than Warrick had.
'I'll do what I can'.
Bizarrely, inexplicably, there was no question who he trusted most.
Toreth watched the bright squares of sunlight creeping infinitesimally across the wall. He paid them more attention than he would have under other circumstances.
If I chose wrong, he thought morbidly, it might be the last time I see the sun.
Finally Howes nodded, apparently to himself, and turned to Tillotson. "The final decision is yours, of course."
Tillotson merely grunted agreement.
"Thank you for your cooperation," Howes said to Toreth, with only the mildest hint of sarcasm. "Good afternoon." With that, and to Toreth's utter astonishment, he simply walked out.
After the door had closed, Toreth said, "Sir?"
"Close the case." Tillotson looked up, his manner suddenly brisk. "Send it on to Justice, just as you said — corporate sabotage. I don't appreciate Psychoprogramming telling me how to run my section. With the level eight waiver and annex, there's no problem with the death."
Relief swept over him again before boiling into anger. They hadn't even said there'd be no enquiry. The bastards hadn't said
anything
. They'd just dropped the whole fucking thing, as if it had never happened. His hands clenched, nails digging into his palms as he fought the urge to punch Tillotson. An hour in that fucking cell, and then nothing. It must have been a bluff all along — trying to scare him into saying something.
Tillotson's nose twitched. "As for the other matter . . . there'll be no official reprimand placed in your file, but if I hear about the slightest hint of — of impropriety in any future cases, you'll be out of your office and demoted to junior before you can blink. Understood?"
"Yes, sir," Toreth ground out, through gritted teeth. "Thank you."
As he turned to go, Tillotson added, "Call Doctor Warrick and tell him the damn case is closed. Do it as soon as you get back to your office."
With that, Toreth knew it hadn't been a bluff after all.
The effort of containing his anger, all the way back to his office, made him feel he might explode. Sara half stood as he crossed the room, then sat down again when she got a better look at him. He slammed his office door with a noise that would set the entire section talking, and then looked for something to throw.
Nothing came immediately to hand, so he kicked his chair into the far wall, scattering the pile of the
JAPI
by the window across the floor. Then he sat on the edge of his desk, fuming.
Why he should be so angry, he didn't know. The idea of Tillotson showing any loyalty to him — or anyone else in his section — was something he'd given up on long ago.
How big a bribe had Psychoprogramming sent Tillotson's way? Toreth couldn't see him fucking with corporates, even small corporates, for free. Cash, and favours to be repaid, no doubt, and plenty of both. Still, it hadn't been big enough that Tillotson had felt the urge to pass any of it on to
him
.
An hour in that foul fucking cell and all because Tillotson was too fucking tight to share the goodies. He'd let Toreth run the investigation without telling him anything. Perhaps he'd assumed that Toreth would dump the case as a career-busting flop, or at worst swallow Tanit's story whole if he caught her. Or perhaps Tillotson simply thought Toreth knew the game well enough not to
need
to be told the desired result.
Maybe he ought to feel flattered, but he didn't. He felt used.
Used, betrayed, lied to, and sick of the whole thing. Sick of the investigation, sick of fucking Tillotson, sick of Int-Sec and its treacherous rivalries and politics. For a moment, he indulged himself in the old fantasy of handing in his notice. Of walking back into the section head's office without waiting for a summons, telling Tillotson exactly what he thought of him and of the rest of Int-Sec, and then leaving the building forever.