Anniversary Day (29 page)

Not this angry rant. In all of his interaction with her—which, granted, wasn’t much—she hadn’t been the angry-rant type.

“Have you?” she said, just a bit louder. “Have you looked at what you do in the name of law and justice?”

She wanted him to engage her. Was this the code? He’d do his best to play along—without making the squad too nervous. He hoped they knew that as long as she was talking, she wasn’t going to harm the ship or the port or the city.

But justice and his role in it wasn’t a topic he usually discussed. He didn’t like a lot of the laws he enforced. Which was why he was primarily a detective, not a street cop. He often went in after the crimes had been committed, so that he could find the perpetrator. He didn’t have to make quick judgments at the scene; he could decide how to handle a case at his leisure.

“I look at what I do all the time,” he said.

“And you can accept what you do?” Her hand was shaking.

He didn’t know where the trigger was on that lighter. He also didn’t know what would happen if she set one of the webs of protection on fire.

“I can’t always accept it,” he said truthfully. “But I have good days. I saved you on a good day.”

Her back straightened. She clearly didn’t want him to talk about the bombing or to talk about what had happened between them.

“That bombing was not a good day,” she said.

“You’re right,” he said. “Terrible things happened, all because someone wanted to make a statement. A statement that got lost in the aftermath. No one has ever really understood what happened.”

“Our statement won’t get lost.”

His heart sank. She really was involved. She wasn’t speaking in code. She believed this stuff. Somehow she had gone from eager rookie detective to a bitter violent woman about to set off her own explosion inside the city.

He wasn’t a psychiatrist. He didn’t know how to handle her. He did know if he pushed her wrong, she would try to destroy everything—and the squad would have no choice but to kill her.

Nyquist swallowed hard. “If you go inside this ship, you’ll set off a bomb just like that person did four years ago. You’ll kill and maim and ruin countless innocent people.”

“I don’t care,” she said just a little too fast. So she had thought of it, and she was trying not to.

“Why don’t you care?” he asked. “You know what it feels like to be the innocent victim of someone else’s political statement.”

Her lower lip trembled. She raised that lighter and shook it at him.

“We’re worthless,” she said. “We’re worthless to the city, we’re worthless to the corporations, we’re worthless to the Earth Alliance.”

“You’re not worthless to me,” he said softly.

She gave him a bitter smile. “You’re just saying that so I won’t go into the ship.”

He shook his head ever so slightly. “I didn’t have to go back for you that day. I could have left you to bleed out. I may have treated you badly that morning, but I valued you. I still do.”

She stared at him, and he thought he had her.

Then she whirled and grabbed the next web. Around Nyquist, laser rifles rose.

That’s what she wants,
he sent to the squad.
Don’t do it
.

He didn’t ask her if the group she was working for valued her. He knew how such organizations worked, even if he didn’t know which one she was affiliated with. They took a disaffected person and made her believe she had value. And she did, just not the value she thought she had. Her real value was in her access, of course. Her real value was in her ability to create the most mayhem for the least amount of effort on the organization’s part.

Of course, the organization wouldn’t say that. Instead, they would soothe a bruised ego, making her feel important for the first time in a long time.

Some organization had done that to Palmette. He had no idea who. But he did know—through all of his experience as a detective—that they had already hooked her emotionally.

He couldn’t undo that with a few simple sentences.

She opened the fourth web. There was only one more before she got access to the ship.

“I’m going to let the squad go,” he said to her. “I’m going to stay here with you. I’m not going to live through another bombing.”

“They won’t leave,” she said. “They have orders.”

She was counting on them to kill her.

“They’ll leave,” he said, hoping he was right.

Stand down,
he sent.
If I tell you to leave, please go.

She can’t be allowed to get on that ship
, the leader said.

She won’t be
, Nyquist sent. Or, he privately corrected, she wouldn’t be allowed to ignite the cargo. He would stop her no matter what. He hoped she didn’t realize that.

The laser rifles went down.

She looked at Nyquist in surprise. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Keeping my promise to you,” he said.

“You promised they’d leave.”

Nyquist swallowed hard. He looked at the leader. The leader didn’t move for a long moment. Then the squad turned around and walked away. Nyquist had no idea how far away they went, but he did know that he couldn’t see them any longer—and if he couldn’t, she couldn’t either.

“Don’t go through with this,” he said to Palmette.

“Why not?” she asked. “I’ve already come this far.”

“You have,” he said. “Don’t you think that’s far enough?”

He wasn’t good at this. His heart was pounding. Hard. He was working off instinct, and his instinct with people wasn’t the best.

She didn’t move.

“Logically,” she said after a moment, “it’s better if I die.”

He didn’t ask why. On some level, she was right. She had helped in at least one murder, and would be an accessory in at least two others.

“Are you saying I shouldn’t have saved you?” he asked, deliberately misunderstanding her.

“No,” she said quickly. “It’s just different now.”

“Why?” he asked.

She shook her head. “They took me off detective detail. They put me here.”

“At one of the most important jobs in the city,” he said. “That’s what you’ve been doing, right? Finding the holes in the quarantines? Seeing how terrorists could exploit them? You’ve made your point, Ursula. Now it’s time to tell the city what you’ve found.”

She turned around slowly. He had given her a way out. Hell, he had given her a legal argument. He would wager there was little to disprove it.

Except, of course, Soseki’s death.

But he was gambling that she wasn’t thinking clearly.

“You believe that?” she asked.

“I know how eager you were to solve crimes,” he said. “Sometimes that leads to some risks. I know that. I’ve taken a few bad risks myself.”

She bit her lower lip.

Then she stepped forward.

One step. Two. Past the green webs, to the cable.

He was shaking, but he still managed to meet her. He took the lighter from her.

“I have to cuff you,” he said. “It’ll keep the squad from attacking you.”

She nodded. She knew that was a lie, and she didn’t care. She was smart; she probably knew everything he said was a lie, and she didn’t care about that either. She just hadn’t seen a way out, and he had given her a tiny one.

Not that her life would be any better. It would be worse.

Her bitterness from the bombing, from the loss of her dreams, had brought her here, blaming the city instead of blaming the terrorist who bombed the Dome.

He gently took her hands and cuffed them behind her back. Then he sent a message to the squad as well as Murray Atherton.

Got her
.

Fifty-two

She knew she shouldn’t have been so relieved, but she was. Noelle DeRicci led Miles Flint into her office. His daughter, Talia, followed him uncertainly, and DeRicci realized she hadn’t given Talia explicit permission to join them.

DeRicci gave the girl a tentative smile, and Talia smiled back, then lowered her head, as if that big a display of emotion was too much for her.

They hadn’t had a great deal of interaction—Talia and DeRicci. Usually when DeRicci needed to talk to Flint, Talia excused herself and left the room, or was at school. DeRicci did know that Talia was as gifted at computers as her father—maybe more gifted—and she was scary brilliant.

She was also beautiful in an exotic way, that blond hair on top of copper skin. Most women had to use enhancements to achieve the same effect, and they often forgot to change the color of their eyebrows. But Talia’s looks were completely natural. Smart, beautiful, and athletic—or so Flint said. Talia had never applied herself to sports before, but she was now. She had been too gangly before to be very coordinated.

That wasn’t a problem now.

Talia moved with the smooth grace of a dancer.

In short, she was growing into the kind of woman who made DeRicci both nervous and self-conscious.

Both Flint and Talia stood next to the big screen in the center of the room. DeRicci had frozen all of the images when she realized that Flint had arrived. She didn’t want him to watch the crisis unfold. She wanted to tell him about it herself.

“You saw the mess out there in my office, right?” DeRicci asked Flint.

He nodded. “Popova and Soseki were involved?”

Flint sounded both skeptical and appalled—probably because he had never really liked Popova.

“It was news to me too,” DeRicci said, “but she’s devastated, and she begged me to let her stay. She can’t work, and the assistant we brought in—well, it’ll take him weeks to get up to snuff. I need someone who can coordinate information for me, and help with a Moonwide investigation.”

“What’s Nyquist doing?” Flint asked. He clearly knew how things worked. He knew that DeRicci wouldn’t have brought him in if she had other alternatives.

“He’s following a very important lead, or so he says. He couldn’t be here as quickly as I wanted.”

Of course, Flint hadn’t arrived in record time either. It had taken nearly thirty minutes for him to make it to the office. Had DeRicci known it was going to take that long, she would have stressed the urgency even more.

“Do you want me to wait out front?” Talia asked, her voice so soft DeRicci almost didn’t hear her.

“No,” DeRicci said. “I need people with excellent computer skills. However, you have to swear to me that you won’t say anything about this investigation. It’s confidential, and if you tell one unauthorized person, you’ll put the entire Moon in danger.”

Talia’s back straightened just enough to make DeRicci realize how tall she was—taller than DeRicci, certainly.

“It seems to me,” Talia said stiffly, “that the Moon is already in danger.”

“Talia,” Flint said.

“I mean it,” she said. “There’s all kinds of rumors everywhere. Kids were being pulled out of classes because they’re killing all the important people. I heard people died as far away as Moscow Dome.”

DeRicci looked at her in surprise. Not so much at the mishmash of information, but that she had put together the nature of the threat from all the leaks.

DeRicci was going to have to make some kind of statement, and do it soon.

“Talia.” Flint put his hand on his daughter’s arm. “This isn’t the place—”

“Actually, it is the place,” DeRicci said. “Talia’s right. We’re in trouble here, and it might extend throughout the entire Earth Alliance. Something is going very wrong. I don’t have the resources to investigate it properly. Governments not used to handling this kind of thing are scrambling to respond. My people are spread throughout Armstrong. The police department is working on two separate cases—”

“Two cases?” Flint asked.

She had forgotten. No one knew about the governor-general.

“I don’t think Celia’s going to make it,” she said softly.

He cursed.

Talia looked at him in concern. “That’s the governor-general, right? Someone tried to kill the governor-general?”

DeRicci looked directly at the girl. She needed Talia to remain calm, but she probably couldn’t in the face of this information. Better to give it at once.

“You never answered me. Can you keep everything we discuss in this room confidential?”

“Of course I can,” Talia snapped.

“Talia,” Flint said, but it sounded like a reflex. Then he looked at DeRicci, as if he knew he had to step into this. Poor man, he was out of his depth. With no wife to steer him through the difficulties of raising a teenage girl.

DeRicci would have smiled in a different circumstance. She remembered being the same kind of girl Talia was—smart, defensive, shy, and insecure. It made for a volatile combination, particularly with all the hormones added in.

“Talia’s great at keeping secrets. She knows how important some of them can be.” Flint gave his daughter a sideways look, almost a cautionary look, and for the first time, DeRicci wondered what kind of secrets Flint was keeping.

Then she shook off the thought. She didn’t have time to mistrust him. Besides, he had proven himself trustworthy repeatedly over the years. She needed to believe in that.

“All right then,” DeRicci said. “Let me tell you what’s going on and exactly what kind of help I need.”

Fifty-three

Nyquist’s helmet sat beside him on the bench. He had his hazmat suit half off, and soon he would have to go through decontamination. He was in the exit room—a place no one got to unless they had been inside Terminal 81.