Vigilantes (30 page)

Then he apologized, and sloshed toward the door, leaving soggy footprints behind. People moved aside as they saw him coming.

Shadows moved outside the windows.

Nyquist looked at them. He would have to make the footage larger when he viewed it at the precinct, which he would do. He couldn’t just let this go, especially with Romey’s involvement. Gumiela—hell, everyone on the force—might think him biased.

Then, to Nyquist’s surprise, Zhu stopped in front of the door. He raised his chin and squared his shoulders, like a man who had found his courage.

He said,
For the record, we’re hiring more than a hundred people. They’ll need someplace to eat. You just screwed yourself out of a lot of business, old man
.

Nyquist winced. He had just told everyone in the building that he worked nearby. And that they would have to put up with hated lawyers and the Peyti clones for a long time.

A couple of the cops whispered to each other as Sevryn let out a bitter laugh.

I don’t need your kinda business
, he said.
Have you looked around?

Zhu pointed a finger at him, clearly not paying attention to anyone else in the place. If he had been, he would have left quickly.

Instead, Zhu said,
You pissed off a lawyer, buddy, who is hiring a bunch of other lawyers from off-Moon. Think it through.

Nyquist’s breath caught. Zhu had been oblivious. He truly had not known the impact of his own behavior on the people around him.

Are you threatening him?
a woman asked on the footage asked just as Nyquist had wondered the same thing.

Zhu grinned at her, and ran a hand over his soggy suit.
Do I look like a man who can make a credible threat?

And then he left.

He was clearly visible through the window, stopping just outside, then proceeding forward—to the deli next door, according to its owner.

Zhu had had balls. Not a lot of people sense, but balls.

Nyquist would normally have admired that, except this time, it had probably gotten Zhu killed.

On the footage, everyone talked about him, gesturing and shaking their heads. Sevryn had gone back to serving people.

But the cops—the cops watched Zhu, long after he disappeared from view, at least on this small hologram.

Nyquist let out a long sigh.

He leaned back in the chair, and saw Sevryn watching him.

“I’m going to need this,” Nyquist said.

“I know.” Sevryn sounded sad.

“Is there anything you want to tell me before I watch the rest of the footage?”

“There’s nothing else that day,” Sevryn said.

“But there was something this morning, wasn’t there?” Nyquist asked.

Sevryn ran his hand on the countertop. His fingers were shaking.

“This is my business,” he said. “My life, my livelihood, everything I am, everything I do.”

Nyquist waited. The man was clearly deeply terrified.

“I don’t want to get in trouble,” Sevryn said softly.

“You won’t get in trouble from me,” Nyquist said.

“It’s not you I’m afraid of,” Sevryn said, and then he sighed and closed his eyes, as if he’d said something wrong. He probably had. He just admitted intimidation.

“You’re afraid that someone will figure out that you said something?” Nyquist asked.

Sevryn kept his head down. He nodded, like a child who was being chastised.

“You’re going to give me the footage from today,” Nyquist said. “I’ll have footage from every business within a five-block radius before the day is over. If whatever happened occurred in public, then no one will know you spoke up at all.”

“Except the idiot next door,” Sevryn said bitterly.

“I spoke to him too,” Nyquist said.

Sevryn raised his head. “What’d he say?”

“He wasn’t a fan of Zhu either. But he would take his money.”

“He’ll take money from anyone. Just like he’ll use Moon flour to save a little, not caring about the taste.” Sevryn shook his head.

“So,” Nyquist said, not willing to let this go. “What are you failing to tell me?”

Sevryn ran a hand over his mouth, then spoke through his fingers—or started to. When he realized what he was doing, he let his hand drop.

“Those three, the ones who threw food on him?”

“Yeah,” Nyquist said, wishing he didn’t have to hear this.

“This morning, they saw him next door.” Sevryn’s gaze met Nyquist’s. “They decided to teach him a lesson.”

Nyquist went cold. “Is that what they said?”

“No,” Sevryn said. “They decided he needed to empathize with victims.”

Nyquist didn’t move.

“They said they’d teach him how it feels to be attacked.” Sevryn’s face had gone pale. “They said they’d make it a lesson no one at S
3
would ever forget.”

THIRTY-NINE

DERICCI’S SOURCE HAD been right. Jhena Andre was involved in this entire mess, somehow.

Goudkins pulled her hands away from her console and stood up again.

If Andre had enough power to order every investigator in the Alliance to ignore the Frémont clones, then she had a lot of power indeed.

Goudkins’ heart was racing. She had to be very, very careful now. Those sideways means of investigating that she had discussed with DeRicci were probably irrelevant.

If Andre could direct an entire investigation from wherever she was, then she would clearly monitor anyone accessing any information associated with the Frémont clones.

Which meant that Ostaka was in trouble, no matter how careful he had been.

Goudkins actually thought of warning him, even though he had been such an ass with her. Then she nodded once to herself. Of course, she would warn him, when she returned to the Security Office—and not before.

She paced for a few moments, weaving in and out of the bolted-down chairs and consoles, thinking. If Andre was powerful enough to control investigations system wide, then she had the ability to monitor investigations as well.

It didn’t matter how Goudkins approached her investigation: Andre would know about it.

So Goudkins needed to make her investigation about Andre, not about the clones—any clones—and then weave whatever information she got together, not using some system, but using some deductive reasoning.

She would have to hope that would be enough to get her to one of the lower-level Alliance courts that would give her secret access to internal files.

If she needed that.

First, she needed to see if Andre was the one pulling strings, or if she was acting in someone else’s stead.

And that would be harder to determine than Goudkins wanted.

But she could do it.

She returned to her chair, and brought up a third screen. All she wanted here was Andre’s work history.

Normally, Goudkins would have searched through bank records, but that would probably notify Andre that someone was interested in her.

Goudkins was just going to do a “who is?” search, the kind that a reporter, a job interviewer—as DeRicci mentioned—or someone looking to promote might do.

She had to be very, very careful.

Her hands were trembling as she brought up Andre’s complete work history.

Andre started in the prison system over fifty-five years ago. She had an entry-level job in the maximum security prison that housed PierLuigi Frémont in the last days of his life. Frémont managed to kill himself rather than face the punishments ahead of him, which meant that everyone in that prison was investigated for collusion with Frémont.

Eventually, a lower-level guard was charged with negligence in taking care of Frémont, and removed from the system with a serious reprimand; but oddly, no one who had been on duty when Frémont actually died was found guilty of anything, including stealing Frémont’s DNA.

Goudkins did not linger over the investigation. She didn’t even download it for later use, worried that it was being monitored. She would look at it if she needed to, but not on this day.

On this day, she was pretending to be interested in Andre, the person.

Andre worked her way from an entry-level position at a difficult prison to administration at one of the prisons that housed rich humans. More of a resort than a place that punished prisoners, the prison also gave perks to those who worked there—from high-end housing to fantastic food to all sorts of exercise and entertainment options.

That prison—and others like it—were considered rewards for employees who did fantastic work elsewhere.

Nothing in Andre’s easily accessed files showed her to be anything but a model employee. She married, had two children, and then divorced. Her husband raised the children on Earth, insisting that she use her short vacation every year to visit them somewhere inside Earth’s solar system, and far away from any prison.

She did not dispute that.

Goudkins found it odd that such a detail would be in Andre’s job record, and then, as she dug deeper, she realized why.

That file had been attached when the children were young, and it showed simply that Andre was willing to work anywhere in the Alliance because she had no “regular” ties to hold her in one place.

As long as she got enough vacation time to see her children once a year, she was willing to work anywhere—which wasn’t a common attitude for any employee.

The children grew, Andre’s trips inside the center of the Alliance stopped, and if she visited her adult children, there was no record of it in her work history.

Not that there needed to be. By the time the children were grown, they would no longer be considered a factor in her employment anywhere.

Goudkins saw no record of grandchildren, and nothing that would tie Andre anywhere.

Her jobs reflected that.

She was promoted higher and higher in prison administration, working her way from the ritzy prison to the assistant in charge of the Human Division of the Earth Alliance Prison System. Eventually, she took over the Human Division, and was offered a position in the Joint Division, where she could work her way farther up the food chain.

That was the only job she turned down.

No explanation was given.

But Goudkins knew that operating a Joint Division, where humans and aliens had to work together, was one of the hardest jobs in the Earth Alliance. Some humans weren’t suited for it, and usually found out when they were fired.

Andre probably knew she wasn’t the kind of employee who could handle that stress.

Or maybe she had a different career path in mind.

She remained head of the Human Division of the Earth Alliance Prison System for almost a decade when she was promoted to a position in Earth Alliance Security.

And that was where her jobs started to become classified.

She had apparently taken classes in security and undercover work. She became one of those employees who investigated other employees, making certain whether complaints against them were justified or not.

She spent five years in that division.

Goudkins couldn’t see what Andre had worked on without the proper clearance, and Goudkins saw no reason to get that clearance.

The more she dug, the more confused she got.

Why would a woman who investigated other Earth Alliance employees try to destroy the Alliance?

If, indeed, she did want to destroy the Alliance.

Right now, Goudkins was operating on speculation.

Eventually, Andre rose to the head of the division that investigated other members of the Security Team. She focused on humans-only, and generally operated in Investigations and Prisons. Occasionally, she would cross into the Business side of the Security Division, but not that often. And once she’d been asked to help out in the Political Section, and again, she turned the job down, claiming she wasn’t qualified.

In the past three years, she had risen to a deputy of an important deputy of another deputy inside the main office of Earth Alliance Security Division—the entire division that went over all of the various security departments.

She was handling thousands of human employees and not batting an eye. The Division handled hundreds of thousands of employees of all Earth Alliance species, and Goudkins had no idea how anyone kept everything straight.

Just thinking about it made her head hurt.

But it did answer one question: How one woman could manage to shut down an entire investigation into the clones of PierLuigi Frémont. She had the ability to do so—at least in the human division.

Goudkins wondered if the non-human investigators could look into the clones. She wasn’t even certain how she would get an answer to that question. If Andre’s office was monitoring all traffic concerning the Frémont clones, then even posing that question to Huỳnh would be nearly impossible. She couldn’t think how to do it.