A Chronetic Memory (The Chronography Records Book 1) (12 page)

“Things.” What things? The light seemed different somehow. The air smelled funny. “Strange.” How, exactly? She couldn’t explain, and she was glad no one was asking. She wondered if she might be getting sick.

Steadied, she turned to take the tray of items from the observation box. Time to replenish her supply. She was an hour and a half closer to getting those financial details from Anders. Two-and-a-half hours to go.

She got three more batches done by the end of the day, and had only found one instance of unexpected time decay. That was a good ratio. Someone would be pleased. Her steps lengthened as she approached the exit, willing herself forward more quickly. She didn’t even notice that the pale blue walls were strangely and inexplicably a subtle shade of teal now, or that the air held a slightly more tangy scent. Her mind was preoccupied with the meeting ahead.

They both got through security without acknowledging one another. She reveled in the cloak-and-dagger feel to their arrangement. Anders was first, and Dani noted that he walked purposefully around the corner toward the clock tower and the tube station. She followed him, rounding the corner. There he was, waiting on the bench.

“You ready for some interesting reading?” He gestured to a screen full of small numbers on his worktablet and chuckled. “Numbers don’t scare you, do they?”

“Not at all. Which tube are you taking?”

“Blue line. I live on First Hill.”

“Really? So do I? Well, let’s ride together, and you can show me.”

They waited for a chance to get a tube by themselves. It was rush hour, so most of the six-seater tubes were filled rapidly. They barely noticed the delay. After he transferred a copy of the data to her worktablet, they continued their conversation from lunch. He talked about places he had traveled. She talked about places she’d seen through chronography. Finally the station had mostly cleared out, and they found a tube to themselves.

They settled into the seats and let them adjust to their posture. Anders got out his worktablet and started scrolling through the data. He might have been joking when he first showed it to her, but after a few minutes of study, Dani realized it was interesting reading. With their heads together, he pointed out several generous influxes of funds that were attributed only to “investment” or “contribution.”

“A lot of the rest of the funds came in marked like that too,” he said. “But when I traced them back, they all had sources listed; some several, some just one. I plugged the details into the data fields. When I followed these, though, they were dead ends.”

“So, donors who wish to remain anonymous?”

“No, those are listed as anonymous donors and given a number for tax purposes. These are deliberately obscured.”

She tried to estimate the total from the pages of data, then gave up. “Approximately what proportion of the funding comes from these unnamed sources?” she asked him, hoping he might have done the math earlier.

“Approximately? How about exactly? It’s forty-three point six percent.”

She was stunned. “Almost half of the institute’s operating expenses are from unnamed sources? How could anyone not have noticed this?”

“It’s possible someone has,” Anders replied. “I saw signs of people having gained access to some of these files within the last few weeks.”

She frowned at him, worried. “You’re leaving a trail when you look at these?”

“Oh, no, not me.” He dismissed her concerns with a laugh. “I don’t leave trails. I’m like a ninja. I come and go and nobody knows.”

He was so nonchalant, she relaxed immediately, and she laughed with him. Then she sobered. “Anders, I can’t tell this to high schoolers.”

“No, you can’t. Seems like somebody should know, though.”

“That’s a huge amount of money. Somebody might care if others found out.”

“And we don’t have anything specific. It might be all innocent, although I don’t see how it could be.”

“I can’t think of any innocent explanation either.”

They sat in silence for a few moments. “Here’s my stop,” Anders said.

“Mine’s the next one.”

“Let me do a little more digging, okay? Maybe I can get something more concrete, some names or something. Then we can figure out who to go to with it.” He stood up. “Tomorrow at lunch?”

She nodded. “See you tomorrow.”

After Anders got off the subway, Dani called Kat. She wanted to talk to her and Marak, but she had to do some thinking first. Much as she’d like to see Jored, it would probably be better to wait till after his bedtime.

“Hello?”

“Hi Kat!” She tried to make her voice sound natural, in case anyone was tuned in, and shook her head at how she was fitting so comfortably into this spy-novel-turned-to-life. “Hey, I’d like to come see you guys again tonight. Could I come by around 8:45 or 9:00?”

“Sure! We’ll have a glass of wine and some dessert.”

It was Dani’s stop. “I’ll see you then.” She disconnected and stood up.

It wasn’t until she got out of the tube and started home that she remembered back to what Kat had said and realized something was a little unusual. Since when did Kat and Marak have wine at night? Usually, they only brought that out for fancy meals. And as far as she knew, they always waited for her to bring the dessert. Was there some special occasion they were celebrating that she had forgotten? She was usually so good about remembering dates.

Dani was still puzzling about it when she got to her apartment. But she put the thought aside until later. For now, there were things to do.

She fixed a quick stir-fry dinner and ate while she thought things through. She set her worktablet off to the side and set the switch to project windows above it. She moved the panel with the numbers Anders had gathered to the left, and set up a notes panel to scribble her observations. She wanted to have some specific information to give to Kat and Marak, besides that almost unbelievable forty-three point six percent.

The names and numbers would come, she hoped, from Anders’s further research tomorrow morning, but there were patterns she could look for in the data he’d already provided. When did the undesignated funding start? Had it been growing? Had it been consistent all along? Was there any possibility that it could be contributed by the board of directors or someone else in charge? She didn’t know that much about accounting practices. She was glad Anders was so eager to help.

It appeared that the contributions and investments had begun within months after the new technology had been announced and the institute had been established. The first unattributed donation was dated September 2204, with another in October. Then they had stopped, until March of the next year, when the third contribution had come in. The next was not until June, and then they started coming in multiples, two at a time, three at a time, in amounts that varied from mere thousands to hundreds of thousands of credits. In the last few years, the contributions had increased both in number and size, so that now some of them amounted to millions and hundreds of millions.

Another question occurred to her, one she would have to ask Anders to check when they met tomorrow. She knew the institute had hundreds of employees, and if she were to judge from her own extremely generous stipend, they were well paid. But with the amounts of money coming in, she wondered where it went. Quick estimations of salaries, equipment, operating expenses, and various government fees and taxes came far short of the total money coming in. Was it being spent? Or was it being stored for some other purpose? How wealthy was the institute, exactly?

Ronny’s exhortation to “follow the money” echoed in her mind and prompted her to consider another aspect. Who benefited from all this wealth? She knew, vaguely, that Drs. Calegari, Brant, and Tasman were technically just three more employees of the institute, and a board of directors sat in oversight. Were the directors the beneficiaries? Or did they even know about the immense fortune that was, presumably, being accumulated for some unknown purpose? She realized, suddenly, that she didn’t even know who sat on the board of directors!

Another question for Anders. Or, perhaps, for Kat and Marak. They knew more than she had expected. Somehow, they were still in contact with Dr. Seebak. She would ask them tonight.

WALLACE HOME, Lower Queen Anne, Seattle. 2045, Wednesday, June 7, 2215.

“Come on in!” Marak greeted her at the door enthusiastically.

Dani smiled. She always felt like she was coming home when she entered this house. She had no illusions about the actual building; it was the people in it that made her feel so welcome.

“Kat’s in the living room. We’ve got the wine out and a chocolate torte waiting to be sliced.”

“Sounds like I’d better get in there, then!”

The living room was neater than she’d ever seen it, and more elegant in some subtle ways that she couldn’t quite place. Was that a new vase on the mantel? A new window treatment? Something seemed different.

Kat jumped up and gave her a hug. “We want to hear all about what you found out, but first, let’s celebrate.”

Dani returned the hug, then pulled away with a laugh. “What are we celebrating?”

“You sound like me!” Marak said. “I can never remember dates.”

Dani pondered. June seventh? Was this a date she was supposed to know? They met on September seventeenth. They were married six months later, in March. Jored was born in May the year after that. June? Nothing came to mind.

Kat must have seen the embarrassed confusion in her expression and came to her rescue. “June seventh was the day we met, in 2208.”

“Met? Met where?” Had they been apart for a time, after Jored was born?

Marak swept into the room with a grand gesture of placing plates and forks on the coffee table beside the chocolate torte. “Oh, now that’s a story that needs to be told! Have a seat and I’ll fill you in. I’m a lot better with story details than I am with dates.” He glanced at Kat, and her nod confirmed it.

“I’m surprised Kat hasn’t told you this story.”

“She probably has, and I’ve just forgotten it,” Dani said, coming to her friend’s defense.

“I have. But she hasn’t heard your version, so go ahead.”

“It was one of those beautiful June days, not all that common in Seattle, as we all know,” he began. “I had an appointment to have lunch with a story source who had become a good friend—you’ll recognize his name, actually—Dr. Mitchum Seebak, and his son, who had just graduated from high school.”

“Dr. Seebak has a son?” Dani realized she knew nothing of Seebak’s personal life.

“Well, a ward, actually. There’s more to that story, too.”

“We can tell her that later,” Kat interrupted. “Go on.”

“Okay, well, Mitch got an invitation to go meet a old friend of his, one of those pillar-of-the-community types, with lots of useful contacts in city government. He thought I’d like the guy, and invited me along.”

“You never turn down a good contact, hon.”

“Well, no, I don’t. Best way to get the facts straight. Good for my reputation. People like being able to trust me, strangely enough.” He winked. “Anyway, this pillar of the community had a boat, and it was a beautiful sunny day, remember, so we headed off for the marina.”

Dani was beginning to see where this was heading. Marak thought he was going to meet some stranger, and it turned out to be his wife’s uncle! Sounded like a great story. She settled back to listen.

“We got to the marina, and found his boat. I was expecting a boat, you know, small cabin and room for a couple people below decks. But we saw a
boat
…” Marak drew out the word and spread his hands out to indicate something enormous. “I was intimidated, I’ll tell you. This guy had Money. With a capital M.”

“Oh hush.” Kat was laughing. “He’s just a regular guy, and you know it very well.”

“To you, maybe.” Marak said, with a conspiratorial glance in Dani’s direction. “Some of us aren’t that privileged.”

Kat slapped his hand affectionately. “This story is so long, I’m getting thirsty. Anyone else want wine?” They nodded, and she poured, with just the perfect roll of the bottle after each glass to catch the drips.
Where did she learn that skill?
Dani wondered. But Marak was talking again.

“So we made our way up this showpiece gangplank—who keeps a gangplank that nice?—and when we got up on deck, there was this gorgeous creature standing there, with flowing auburn hair that sang of seawater and mountain air and bird songs.”

“My hair sang?” Kat turned to Dani. “I’ve never heard this part of the story before, I assure you.”

“Oh yeah! And you were standing in that sexy pose that you do”—he tried to demonstrate, with comical results—“and I just stood there, with my mouth gaping open.”

“Yeah? I saw this hunk of a man with a smile that sent my world rocking. Or maybe it was the boat rocking.” She paused, considering. “Anyway, that’s when I knew…”

“That’s when
I
knew,” he corrected her.

And they finished together: “I was going to marry him/I was going to marry her.”

Dani had been relaxing back into the soft sofa cushions, but now she sat up straight. “What do you mean, marry? You guys were already married!”