Anniversary Day (17 page)

Her stomach churned. Coffee and food wouldn’t make it better, but it would keep her going. And she doubted she’d have a calm stomach for months after this.

The vid from Moscow Dome was in. The
edited
vid. They had asked if she wanted the unedited vid, and she had said no. She wanted to see this attempted murder in action.

Images moved all over the screen. Reporters, talking about Mayor Soseki. One network already had a retrospective that anyone could order, complete with holorecordings of Mayor Soseki’s speeches, a virtual recreation of his acceptance speeches on his election nights, starting with the first mayoral acceptance, and an examination of his home life.

She immediately sent a note of that to Romey. The network might have had a special like that ready for a bunch of celebrities, but it was unusual to have something this fast, no matter what. Maybe they’d had warning.

She made herself sit down to watch the vid. Pacing was driving her nuts. Sitting probably would as well, but at least she would be doing something different.

The tech from Moscow Dome had given her the option of watching everything in holographic mode, but she chose not to. Already this entire thing was much too vivid in her mind. She didn’t need to superficially live through it.

She faded the other images into the background, however, and used the entire screen to watch the images the tech had spliced together from a thousand different images.

DeRicci hadn’t been to Moscow Dome in years. She had no idea where this was taking place. She supposed she could touch part of the screen and get an exact map of the city—and she would if she were the primary investigator, to see if there were other patterns at work here—but she didn’t. She sank into her chair and let the events unfold in front of her.

Everything began on the street outside the venue—whatever the hell it was. It took her a moment to realize that what she thought was a street was really an alley. When she had been there, Moscow Dome had a lot of old streets, alleys that went nowhere, buildings that needed to be torn down. Apparently that hadn’t changed.

The assassin (she didn’t know what else to call him) looked impossibly young here, younger than the one at Soseki’s speech. She did a capture of the image and sent it to Romey, with a note about this shooter’s age. Maybe this clone was created later. Maybe they all weren’t part of a batch.

DeRicci didn’t want to think about how they were created at the moment. She just wanted to observe.

He wore the same clothing, and his hair was cut exactly the same way as the others. He moved a little differently. He was jittery. He kept glancing over his shoulder as if he expected someone to come after him.

The vid itself was a bit jittery, since it seemed to take images off different cameras at random moments. So for five seconds, she watched the assassin from the front, then suddenly she was looking at the top of his head, then at his right side.

But that did give her a perspective of the alley. It had a number of doors and a surprising amount of garbage. Apparently Moscow Dome didn’t have the garbage collection regulations that Armstrong had either.

She made a note of that as well and set it for a future date. If the governor-general lived through this, DeRicci would discuss garbage collection with her, because that could be a health issue for the entire Moon, something that should come under the purview of her office.

She stopped the vid and made herself take a deep breath. She was in some kind of denial, thinking that Celia would live through this. Everything had changed this afternoon, just like everything had changed four years ago, during the bombing.

DeRicci rubbed a hand over her forehead, then started the vid back up again. She thought she saw a shadow at the mouth of the alley but she wasn’t sure. Maybe it was just the camera angle, maybe it was because the assassin kept looking over his shoulder.

She clasped her hands over her stomach. The assassin pulled open a door and slipped through it.

Then the perspective changed. Suddenly, she watched him coming into the building, through a back entrance that should have been guarded but wasn’t. The corridor was dark, which she thought very strange.

He slipped into a side room—a storage room—with the lights off. The cameras in there only caught a bit of him as he hunched underneath some shelving.

That was when she realized that he was waiting. He had arrived so early that the lights inside the building were off. She wished now that she had watched the extended footage; she would know exactly what time this took place.

She made herself take another deep breath. She wasn’t focusing. She wasn’t running that kind of investigation. This was something Romey had to watch, Romey needed to figure out how all of the assassinations or the attempted assassinations went down. DeRicci didn’t have time for it. That was why she had to watch the shortened version, why she had to concentrate, not on the hows, but on the common elements with the other attacks.

And the uncommon elements.

She was pretty sure that the assassin in the Soseki case just walked into the restaurant like the other patrons. And the assassin in the governor-general’s case had a ticket to the event.

So not everything was the same. Some details differed.

Which meant that the clones weren’t acting on some kind of script, but on specific targets in specific locations.

Which meant the clones had some kind of autonomy.

The lighting changed in that room. The assassin slipped out, adjusted his clothes, took some kind of badge from his pocket, and walked down the corridor.

The corridor’s lights were on as well. And there were people inside, people who nodded at him, people who stopped him and checked his badge. More than one security member frowned at it, but he spoke to them—DeRicci didn’t have sound on this, so she didn’t know what was said—and when he spoke to them, things changed. They nodded, although more than one security person looked at him with suspicion.

He was one of the last people inside the room where Keir Julian, the mayor of Moscow Dome, was supposed to give his Anniversary Day address. This wasn’t a standard auditorium or even a politico’s room with a podium and a lot of people.

This was some kind of studio. Apparently Julian’s speech was supposed to be broadcast on Moscow Dome’s various networks. She suspected every Anniversary Day speech of import was on the nets, and probably being anthologized, so that people could buy the various collections—although she never understood why people would buy speeches, just like she never understood why people would voluntarily listen to them.

The studio seemed small, seating maybe a hundred people. The tech who compiled the vid felt it important to show the room without the assassin in it.

Then the image focused on Julian. He was laughing as he sat in a chair on the small stage. The stage held only one other chair, and a table between them, more of an end table than a coffee table, something to set beverages on.

Julian looked pleased with himself. He wore an expensive black suit, made of a material so fine that it shined with silver highlights in the bright studio lighting. He had rings on all of his fingers and some kind of studded buckle on his shoes.

He seemed to be talking and joking with everyone in the room, and like most people around a politician, the others smiled and joked in return, although their smiles didn’t seem as genuine. DeRicci wondered just how lame his jokes were, how biting his humor seemed to the people around him.

The imagery changed to an area behind the stage. The assassin walked past it, grabbed something—a bit of make-up? a drink of water? DeRicci couldn’t quite tell—and walked out on stage.

One of the security guards who had frowned at the assassin’s badge hurried after him. The assassin clearly said Julian’s name. Julian looked up, extended his hand, and the security guard got close enough to block the touch. But, as he turned around, the assassin brushed against Julian.

Two other security guards had already rushed the stage, and someone was shouting. Julian looked surprised. More and more people flooded forward, some looking both determined and competent.

DeRicci could no longer see Julian, and she figured that was no accident. His staff was blocking all of the cameras. The studio itself had devolved into chaos. The doors had clearly been locked—no one could get out—and judging by the way half the audience put their hands to their ears, the links had been severed as well. Maybe even the emergency links, since DeRicci hadn’t seen much news coverage from Moscow Dome either. Just that Mayor Julian’s speech had been canceled.

The guards rushed Julian out of the studio, but DeRicci couldn’t see more than his hands, dangling. And she wasn’t sure if they were grayish or if she was imagining that. He was alive at that point—he was still alive, or so she had been told.

He looked like he was in as serious condition as the governor-general.

The vid wasn’t over yet. The chaos caused by people rushing the stage, by the security guards taking care of Julian, by the links getting shut down and the doors being slammed, gave the assassin an opportunity to slip into that corridor again.

DeRicci couldn’t quite tell, but it looked like he had rigged the backstage door to let him into that corridor even though someone had locked the studio down. He ran through the corridor, unimpeded, and went back into the alley. He turned left on the outside street and then the cameras lost him.

He had effectively disappeared.

She cursed. The one man they had needed to hang on to and they had lost him.

How hard could it be to find four men who looked exactly alike?

She pushed herself out of her chair, and started pacing again.

Food, Popova
, she sent.
Now
. Because otherwise, DeRicci would leave this office herself and dive into one of the investigations. She wanted to be back on the street for this, getting messy, looking for suspects, taking information.

She wanted to be in charge—not in charge of the entire Moon’s security—but in charge of the case.

For the first time in years, she wanted to be a detective again.

Maybe because this was a case she could believe in.

She wanted to catch these bastards, and she wanted to do it fast.

Twenty-nine

Lillian Miyaki stood at the entrance to the Bohemian Theater and clasped her hands behind her back. She had always thought the theater the most stunning building in Glenn Station.

The theater stood in the very center of town. The building itself had five theaters, but everyone only discussed the biggest. It seated about five hundred people—small, as city theaters went—and the seats ran at an incline toward the stage. At first glance, nothing about the stage seemed unusual. The theater’s style dated back to old Earth. The proscenium arch allowed the local theater company to perform ancient works by Sophocles and Shakespeare, as well as modern works from all over the Earth Alliance. The theater was also a great place for the annual pre-election debates.

Miyaki preferred attending concerts here because the best thing about the theater wasn’t its proscenium arch or its comfortable seats, but its ceiling, which actually opened onto the Dome. Sometimes it felt like the entire universe watched as the Glenn Station Symphony Orchestra played works by Litaafaa and Tarming.

But that wasn’t what was supposed to happen here today. Today, Mayor Dmitri Tsepen was supposed to give his annual Anniversary Day talk, combined with his State of the City report. And he was half an hour late, which wasn’t that unusual.

In fact, if Miyaki hadn’t just received a message from Adriana Clief with a coded warning from Security Chief Noelle DeRicci, Miyaki would have thought that Mayor Tsepen had finally blown off a speech because he was too drunk to talk.

Instead, there was some kind of weird threat tied to the sudden and somewhat mysterious death of Armstrong’s Mayor Arek Soseki.

Miyaki had already ordered the theater to be locked down. She had briefed her staff and sent them an image of the man everyone suspected of planning an attempt on Mayor Tsepen’s life. She had guards stationed at every exit, and even more down the streets. She also had mass transit routes from the city blocked, and air traffic routes monitored, just in case this potential perpetrator had seen the unusual activity and bolted.

She sighed, almost inclined not to believe in anything that got Mayor Tsepen off the hook. He had moved to this location last year only because, she had thought uncharitably, no one could smell the stink of alcohol on him on a stage so far removed from his audience.

Adriana Clief had not done him or the city any favors covering his back as long as she had.

If Miyaki were less capable of doing her job, she would have told Tsepen to come anyway, and promised to protect him. He was a popular mayor despite (or because of?) his drinking problem, and she worried that he would get re-elected yet again. If he had come and gotten hurt in the assassination attempt…

She sighed as she contemplated that idea. He would probably have been re-elected anyway.

In a landslide.

She used her security network, set up only for her security team, to signal them to begin the search. First the Glenn Station police were using some kind of state-of-the-art visual software to go over each face in the audience. Then she would get notified of where the suspect sat.

She planned to go to his chair and arrest him with little fanfare, then let the Glenn Station police department handle the exit interviews for everyone else in the theater.

Nothing
, the police sent her less than five minutes after the facial recognition search started.

Do it again
, she sent.