The Beam: Season Three (51 page)

“I forgot about him! I forgot that I met him years ago, floating on The Beam!”
 

“How do you know the thought that ‘I met him years ago’ isn’t the one that’s bullshit? Why are you so convinced that all you’ve always believed has to be what’s wrong? It’s a faulty memory, not a cover-up.”
 

“I don’t think so, Dom.” Leah was trying to speak reasonably, but he’d made her both angry and defensive.
 

“Okay. Just set that aside. Put a pin in it. What did Shadow have to say, and why do we care?” Dominic realized that might sound dismissive of her story, so he clarified: “I mean, does what he said have anything to do with what’s happening now, with us, with our current problems?”
 

Leah bobbed her head, making an obvious effort to focus. “Maybe. I didn’t think so, but the more I consider it: maybe.”
 

“How?”

“He’s all worked up about some big event that’s just around the corner. He tried to do something with the Primes, as I mentioned — ”

“What did he try to do with the Primes?”
 

Leah cocked her head. “Are you being a cop right now?”
 

“Just curious.”
 

“Nothing. It didn’t work anyway. He wants to understand Shift is all. And to tell you the truth, so do I. So do a lot of people. And this event seems important to figuring that out.”
 

Dominic’s intuition prickled. “What event?” Then, more to the point: “What does this have to do with us?”
   

“Some big shindig tomorrow. Some guy named…Browning?”
 

“Braemon?” Dominic felt his teeth wanting to clench. “Was it Braemon?”

“Yeah. That’s it. Greg Braemon.”
 

“Craig,
Leah.
Craig
Braemon.” And inside, he thought,
Fucking hell.

Leah squinted at Dominic. “What is it?”
 

“Who is this Shadow guy?” Dominic asked. It came out like a demand.
 

“I don’t know. He’s anonymous, like all of Null.”
 

“But he knows who you are. He pinged you.”
 

“He knows me by my alias. The ping came through a secure system, also anonymous.”
 

Dominic stood. “Dammit, Leah. What did you tell this guy?”
 

“Nothing.” Pause. “Nothing about the Organas.”
 

“What about me? Did you mention me to him? Did he ask?”
 

“What? No! Why would he ask about
you?”
 

“I’m in charge of citywide security for the Respero fundraiser Craig Braemon is throwing tomorrow. I have…people going to the party.”
 

“Cops?”
 

“No. Friends.”
 

“What does that have to do with Shadow?”
 

“He could be NPS. He could be anyone, Leah! He’s pumping you for information. Is he the one who started feeding you bullshit about the bad man on The Beam? The one who you
created
?”
 

“No! What the hell, Dom?”
 

Dominic shook his head, suddenly worked up. No wonder this had all seemed so wrong. Never ignore instinct.
Never
.
 

“Good cop/bad cop, Leah. That’s what he’s doing. The bad cop is your boogeyman. The good cop is Shadow. He knows that you know something. He’s working you to get to me.”
 

“He didn’t even mention you!”
 

“Of course he didn’t. I wouldn’t, either. Let you reveal that tidbit on your own so you think it’s your idea. You told him something, though, didn’t you?”

“He told me shit too, Dom,” Leah replied, crossing her arms.
 

“And what did you tell him? You still haven’t said.”
 

“Nothing! Nothing that matters to any of this.”
 

“But
something
, right? What was it? What did you
volunteer
after he
didn’t even ask for it
?”
 

“I…it’s not even relevant.”
 

That simple sentence changed her face. Dominic could see it: Leah knew he was right. She knew she’d been stupid and sent the ship sailing.
 

Dominic breathed heavily, once, then sat. After a long moment, Leah followed.
 

“I found something on The Beam,” she said. “I meant to tell you about it. There just wasn’t time, what with all the breaking dangerous criminals out of jail and all.” She said the last semi-spitefully, maybe reminding Dom that he hadn’t spent his day toeing the line, either.

“Okay. Okay, just tell me. What did you find on The Beam?”
 

Leah spun her story. Dominic sat back, taking it in. Little by little, his skin began to feel cold. The transcript she’d happened upon, chronicling a meeting between three people intent on killing a fourth, squared with much of what he’d discovered over the years, poking at a patch of ground where he’d been forbidden to dig.
 

An old crime scene with two out-of-place victims who’d seemed positioned rather than natural to the location. A crime that a cleric had come to take away from Dominic, intent on the data worm that should never have been there in the first place.
 

He shouldn’t have poked at that old case, but over the years he had. And what he’d found had revealed three names:
 

Colin Hawes,
deceased.
 

Marshall Oates,
deceased.
 

And of course
Rachel Ryan
, head of Ryan Enterprises — whose association to the victims had mysteriously vanished the day they’d died, according to what Dominic had cornered the clerics into telling him.
 

High rollers, all three.

Leah sent the transcript from her buffer memory to Dominic’s handheld, and when he read it, more names surfaced.
 

One of the people mentioned in the transcript was
Clive
. In the company of Hawes, Oates, and Ryan, that might be Clive Spooner — the man who’d built the famous moon base.
 

And
Alexa
. That could be Alexa Mathis, whereabouts unknown.
 

Dominic looked up from the transcript. “Holy West. Do you know what this is that you’ve found, Leah?”
 

“I told you. It’s some sort of ultra-privileged group. A splinter within it, actually. Plotting to kill…” Leah’s eyes widened.

Because that was the last name in the transcript:
York
. As in
Stephen
York, aka Crumb.

“Did you even tell him?” Dominic demanded.

Her eyes were still wide, shocked, and vulnerable. “No. I never had a chance. Too much happened right as I found it. I tried to call Leo, but of course he was offline. You weren’t answering. I tried running back to the village, but NPS beat me there.”

“Where is he? Where is York?”
 

“I…I don’t know.” Then, covering: “Dom, that transcript is from forever ago. It can’t possibly matter now.”
 

Dominic began to pace. “I don’t like it. At all.”
 

“It’s from the ’60s! Before I was even born!”
 

“I was a detective in ’63, freshly recruited, called in on a double homicide that was snatched from my partner and me by Quark PD clerics. The victims were two very wealthy,
very
powerful figures, Colin Hawes and Marshall Oates. The kind of people who float in the same high-level cloud you just told me about.”
 

“So?”
 

“That case bugged me for years. I couldn’t stop picking at it. I got the impression that they were two people who’d pissed off someone they shouldn’t — not in a Mob sense, more like a double-cross. So what if Hawes and Oates are two of the people in this transcript?”
 

“How could you possibly conclude that — ”
 

Dominic held up his handheld displaying the transcript. “The dates line up. And these two weren’t from the neighborhood. A data worm had shown up to erase them, but we got it in time. Someone was trying to cover it up, and it attracted all the highest kinds of attention.”
 

“But that was 2063. Why would it matter
right now?
To…to
Shadow
, of all people?”
 

Dominic sighed. “Just a few days ago, there was an incursion at DZPD station.”
 

“I had nothing to do with that.”
 

“I’m not saying you did. But it happened. Someone was targeting a specific bit of information, which I was able to conclude had been accessed during the outage. It was about Crumb. The record of the first time I met him.” Again, he held up the handheld. “Not long after this, I was brought in on a vagrant case. Which was ridiculous at the time because the city has tons of vagrants, and I’d just been promoted. I was annoyed, but my mind turned to it after that break-in, after the information was stolen. Because do you know who that vagrant was?”

“Crumb,” Leah said.

“Crumb.”
 

“So what does it mean, Dom?”
 

“What if I was
sent
to pick up Crumb? Specifically
me?”
 

“Why?”
 

“Maybe someone knew I was a softie. You know about Chrissy. I took
her
to Leo to get her away from Respero, so it seems a decent bet that I’d do the same for the next person I was ordered to take. Take them up into the hills, where The Beam couldn’t find them.”
 

Leah looked overwhelmed, but it didn’t matter. Dominic didn’t know how all of these puzzle pieces went together, but he’d been a cop for long enough to believe they did. The connections were there. He just had to find them.

“I’m sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have answered Shadow’s ping. It seemed…”
 

“You told him what you told him.” Dominic waved a dismissive hand. “What did
he
tell you?”
 

“But you don’t trust him. Why does it matter what he told me?”
 

“Someone could be watching. Using him like they may be using you. What did he say?”
 

“He just talked about the event tomorrow. The Braemon thing. I don’t know why.”
 

“Craig Braemon was accused of Shift tampering in 2091. Maybe that’s what your guy is after, if he wants to
understand Shift
. He’ll never get in to find out about that fundraiser, though. Unless he’s secretly a bigwig of some sort, he’ll just have to watch what’s shown on The Beam.”
 

“He’s not going in. He sent someone.”
 

“Who?”
 

“A guy he’s been following. Nicholas…no,
Nicolai
somebody.”
 

Dominic’s eyes closed. His head sagged. Finally.
Finally
, things were slotting into place.
 

“Costa. Nicolai Costa.”
 

“That’s the guy,” Leah said. “Do you know him?”
 

Dominic knew Nicolai because Kate had mentioned him. And if Kate had thought to mention Costa, that probably meant Omar had put the idea in her head…while, of course, making Kate think the idea to mention Costa to Dominic had been her own.
 

The plan. Omar’s stupid plan. He’d downloaded a ghost then given it to Kate. The idea that Kate could use the disembodied Beam shell of one of Omar’s cronies had seemed ridiculous from the start, but Omar had continued to say,
Just trust me, Dom. Just trust the plan
.
 

Either Shadow or this Integer7 must be Omar in disguise, now milking information from Leah. Biding his time, setting pieces in place to do some Shift-tampering of his own. And now Leah had handed Omar what he needed on a silver platter.

Omar was connected to Thomas Stahl.

Thomas Stahl was connected to Nicolai Costa.
 

And although the official story called for Kate to use some random man’s shell to breach Craig Braemon’s system, Dominic didn’t believe that was the actual plan. If
anyone
had left a shell behind on The Beam by vanishing a long time ago, it would have to be Stephen York. And although Thomas Stahl wouldn’t give Kate access to Braemon’s system, Stephen York — uncredited second father of The Beam and probable target of frustrated assassins — just might.

“What, Dominic?” Leah looked confused, nervous, ashamed, guilty. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that if someone could create a decoy version of Stephen York on The Beam, it would solve a lot of a certain bad guy’s unsolvable problems.”
 

Dominic drew a deep breath, letting the final pieces slot into logical places.