Waypoint Kangaroo (27 page)

“Son of a bitch,” Jemison says, leaning forward. “I can't believe I didn't see that before.”

“They make the overlays hard to spot on purpose,” I say, examining both eyeballs until I find the telltale grid of a corneal display implant. “Here. In his right eye.”

Santamaria taps my shoulder, and I lean to one side, allowing him a more direct view of Bartelt. I've moved my right hand away from his head. My left hand is still holding his right eye open and keeping him from completing whatever control sequence he was inputting. I hope he wasn't blinking the whole time we were gone, doing who knows what through a wireless interface with his laptop or that device in the closet. We might be completely screwed already.

“Mr. Bartelt,” Santamaria says, “I'm Edward Santamaria, captain of
Dejah Thoris.
I'd like to know why you killed two of our passengers.”

Santamaria's trying to get a reaction. I watch Bartelt's face with my eye scanners enabled, but I don't see anything. He's definitely a professional. A civilian who's been accused of murder is going to react in some way; even if he doesn't twitch, his pulse and skin temperature will vary.

His eyes jump back and forth, looking at each of the people in the room in turn. He gives a single, short, sharp nod.

Santamaria grabs the duct tape and rips it off in one quick motion. The sound makes me cringe, but Bartelt shows no sign of feeling any pain. In fact, he's smiling and looking straight at the captain.

“Nice to meet you, Hades.”

I don't even see Santamaria move. The only thing I'm aware of is a dull
thock
sound, and then Bartelt's head snapping back. I jerk my arm away instinctively. His head hits the wall, bounces forward, and waggles back and forth a few times. A dribble of blood bubbles out of his right nostril.

“What the hell was that?” I ask, in a much higher voice than I intended to use.

Jemison puts two fingers on the side of Bartelt's neck. “He's alive.”

“Good.” Santamaria massages the heel of his left palm with his right hand. “It's been a long time since I did anything like that.”

“Yeah, well, you've still got the touch,” Jemison says. “Danny! Mike! Help me move this guy to the brig.”

“I thought you didn't want him in the brig!” I say. “What about booby-traps?”

Jemison looks over to the bed. “How long was he awake, Mike?”

“He came to about five minutes after you left,” Mike says.

Jemison turns back to me. “He's had enough time to activate anything he set up in here. We need to keep him from doing anything else now.”

“You can't interrogate him if you keep him sedated,” I say.

“He's not going to tell us anything,” Santamaria says.

“Also not the point,” Jemison says. “Sedating him means getting someone close enough to administer the drugs every few hours. We can't risk that much contact.”

“So you're just going to leave him tied up like this?” I ask. “You'll have to post a twenty-four guard anyway. Why not put him on IV sedation—”

“We're going to put him in a Faraday cage!” Jemison yells into my face. Danny and Mike, who have just finished separating Bartelt from the stool, look up in surprise.

“What's a Faraday cage?” asks Mike.

“We have a Faraday cage?” asks Danny.

“Shit,” Jemison says.

Santamaria puts a hand on Jemison's shoulder and pulls her back before she can say anything else—or, maybe, take a swing at me. She sure looks like she wants to hurt me. I'm getting used to it.

“Mr. Egnor, Mr. Brown, we need your help,” Santamaria says. “We're dealing with some very sensitive matters now—matters of planetary security—and we need to know that we can trust you with this information.”

Danny and Mike exchange a look that appears to be half shock and half barely concealed delight. I wonder how long they've both been waiting for a promotion.

“One hundred percent, Captain,” Mike says.

“Hell, yes. Sir,” Danny says.

“Good.” Santamaria nods toward me. “You've probably guessed that Mr. Rogers is not exactly what he appears to be.”

“Yeah, that's pretty obvious,” Mike says.

“Is ‘Rogers' even your real name?” Danny asks.

“Mr. Rogers is on board to oversee the transportation of certain cargo from Earth to Mars,” Santamaria says. “One of the containers is electromagnetically shielded to prevent its contents from being scanned.”

“You're smuggling for the State Department?” Mike asks.

I wait for Santamaria to run interference. He doesn't.

“It's not smuggling,” I say. “Think of it as an unusually large diplomatic pouch.”

“So that's what you were doing outside,” Danny says. “Checking the cargo.”

I put on my best fake smile of contrition. “Can't be too careful.”

“He's going to pack up the Faraday cage and bring it down to the brig,” Jemison says. “We'll install it in one of the holding compartments and secure Bartelt inside. The cage will prevent him from transmitting or receiving anything.”

She releases me, and Santamaria grabs my arm and spins me to face the door.

“Come on, Mr. Rogers,” he says, “I'll help you get suited up.”

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Dejah Thoris
—Exterior, cargo section

I'm probably going to be late for dinner

The agency regularly smuggles things all around the Solar System—I've done more than a few delivery runs myself—but I was never interested enough to inquire about the logistical details of how they concealed and transported all that cargo.

Data is easy to move around. Encrypt something well enough and you don't even have to hide it, because the math guarantees that nobody will be able to crack the code before the heat-death of the universe. Physical objects are a little trickier.

Many things can be broken down into their component parts, which are either innocuous or can be made to appear so; chemicals and certain electronics fall into that category. But some items, like weapons-grade nuclear material or the firing coil of a particle beam cannon, can't be disassembled or disguised. I am currently the agency's preferred method of transporting those items, but I'm a scarce resource.

Santamaria helps me into my spacesuit and gives me a quick rundown of the cargo attached to the niche in
Dejah Thoris
's hull. I download a map of the numbered containers, and then he sends me on my way.

I'm running radio silent because Santamaria is still concerned about some hostile party monitoring our communications, and there's no easy way to encrypt the spacesuit comms. I think he's being paranoid, but I'm not about to disagree with his orders.

The container I'm looking for is in the innermost layer of the cargo mass, with one end pressed up against the hull. All the containers are oriented “gravity-wise,” like a multicolored brick wall stacked against the cut-out side of
Dejah Thoris
's egg-shaped hull.

I pull myself into the interstitial scaffolding between containers carefully, not wanting to tangle my lifeline. Once I've attached my magnetic boots to one of the scaffold rails, I unclip my long tether and secure a shorter line from the waist of my spacesuit to the top of my target container, right above the seam where the double doors meet.

These containers aren't designed to be opened in vacuum, but they're not completely airtight, either. All of them were evacuated of atmosphere before being loaded, and if any of them contain perishable items, those are in their own airtight packaging inside the large metal boxes. I enter the captain's access code into the security panel, then work my gloves around the door handles, brace myself, and turn them downward until the long metal bars holding the container closed creak out of their fittings.

The doors only swing out so far before clanging against the scaffolding. I have to turn my body sideways and slowly wiggle myself through the opening into the container, all the while hoping there aren't any sharp metal parts poking out to tear a hole in my spacesuit.

Once inside the container, I tap my suit's wrist controls and switch on my helmet lamps. The interior is just as Santamaria described it: one stack of cellulose crates forms a wall just inside the doors, obscuring everything but a narrow passage on the far left side of the container. Whatever cargo the agency is smuggling will be hidden behind these innocent-looking crates marked as various dry goods.

I lumber forward, still not used to the way these magnetic boots stick, and make my way around the decoy crates. This opening isn't quite as tight as the outer doors, and I walk through facing forward and see a giant hole in the far end of the container.

It takes me a moment to make sense of this unexpected sight. There's a large metal-mesh cube to my right—the Faraday cage—and farther down the long container are more unlabeled containers; some look like chemicals, and others might be weapons or ammunition. I sweep my helmet lights over everything, and finally come back to the thing that shouldn't be here: the giant hole.

The exterior of the cargo container is a thick, lead-lined steel alloy, designed to protect the contents of the vessel from cosmic radiation and dust impacts. There's not a lot of solid matter in interplanetary space, but when you hit anything traveling at several million meters per second, it's going to leave a mark. It takes serious hardware to cut through that material. I study the edges of the roughly circular hole. They definitely look like they were melted with a high-temperature cutter.

And on the other side of the hole, according to these hull markings, is a service airlock leading into the ship.

Man, I could have taken a shortcut.

*   *   *

“What do you mean, a hole in the container?”

Santamaria, Jemison, and I are alone in the briefing room. After I brought the Faraday cage inside, Security set it up in a holding cell in the brig and confined the still-unconscious Jerry Bartelt inside. Now I'm describing the other things I saw in the cargo container.

“Hold on.” I finish transferring the vid from my left eye to the conference table and play it back, freezing the image on a clean view of the breach. “Now that's right up against the ship's hull, and it's way too circular and large to be accidental.”

Jemison pulls her face closer to the tabletop and squints at the image. “Son of a bitch.”

“Is there anything on board that can cut through steel alloy like that?” I ask. “If there's missing equipment, maybe we can track Bartelt through the crew sections and see what else he's been up to.”

“I'll ask Eng,” Jemison says, tapping at her wristband. “But we have limited camera coverage in the crew sections. If this guy knew exactly where to cut through to extract the cargo, he also knows where our blind spots are.”

“What else did you see in there?” Santamaria is looking down, but his eyes seem like they're staring right through the tabletop.

I spin the vid forward. “Everything else was still secured, except for this set of straps.” I point to the ends of four yellow tie-downs, hanging in zero-gee like seaweed, the metal buckles unlocked and open. “The Faraday cage hadn't been touched.”

“We need to determine exactly what's missing from that container,” Santamaria says.

“You don't know?” I say.

“Compartmentalization,” Jemison says. “If we don't know what we're transporting, we can't blow the operation.”

Something else occurs to me. “Did you have any control over the loading procedure? Whoever cut into that container knew exactly where it was, and which section inside the ship would lead there.”

“The agency takes care of the paperwork,” Santamaria says. “Our transport containers are always loaded near the center of the cargo mass. That position gives them better protection from radiation and accidental discovery.”

“Well, are they always up against the ship's hull? And right next to an airlock?”

“Yes. To allow for emergency extraction, if necessary.”

“Even if there are hazardous materials inside?”

Santamaria's dark eyes are hollow, and I see the flicker of something sharp and angry back there. “We don't transport hazardous materials.”

“It's got to be someone inside the agency,” Jemison says. “Someone who knows about this run.”

“A mole,” Santamaria says.

“We need to contact Lasher,” Jemison says.

Santamaria nods. “Yes.”

“What happened to avoiding detection?” I ask.

“Have you not been paying attention?” Jemison snaps. “We're way beyond that. Bartelt and whoever his bosses are, they know more than any civilians should about our operations on this ship. The device that Bartelt hid in his closet was tapped into our internal comms. Bartelt was monitoring crew chatter, probably to make sure he could sneak around the ship without running into anyone.”

“But we still don't know
why
he was sneaking around the ship,” I say. “Have you interviewed Janice Long yet?”

“Yeah, she's clean. Innocent victim of a professional thief. And I'm guessing Bartelt was sneaking around to kill Emily and Alan Wachlin and pin their murders on David, the brother.”

“It still doesn't make sense,” I say. “Even if Bartelt wanted just Alan Wachlin dead, why not kill all three of them? No witnesses—”

“To give us a plausible suspect, and deter further investigation!” Jemison says. “But our speculation will get a lot better after we obtain some more goddamn facts from the office!”

“Okay, okay!” I start blinking my eye into communication mode. “Give me a minute to warm up the Echo Delta.”

Santamaria presses his fingers to the tabletop and taps out a series of letters and numbers. “You're going to use this relay port to get a direct line to Director Tarkington's office.” He scrolls down and taps out a different sequence of gibberish. “Then use this encryption key and route the call to my quarters.”