Aneka Jansen 5: The Greatest Heights of Honour (7 page)

‘We’ll see you on the second, Miss Jansen,’ Plug said, and then he turned to leave as fast as decorum would allow.

‘How much of that did you hear?’ Aneka asked when the door was shut behind the agents.

‘Enough,’ Winter replied, letting go of Aneka and starting for the bathroom. ‘I’ll have an avatar prepared to provide you with counsel, and I’d love to stay for the weekend. The others can pick up the slack. Were you going to take a shower? I’ll join you.’

Aneka shook her head, grinned, and started after her.

FSA Headquarters, High Yorkbridge, 2.10.528 FSC.

Aneka sat at a table in what the Federal Security Agency called an interview room. It was blank and featureless, and there were multispectral cameras monitoring every corner. Aneka ignored them, aside from ensuring that Al was monitoring her body temperature, keeping it entirely flat.

Beside Aneka sat a tall, haughty-looking blonde, Winter’s model number six. Aneka had no idea whether this one had known a thing about Federal law that morning, but she did now. She also, apparently, knew how to play on having a good body. Her dress was short, low cut, and scarlet, and it showed off a moderate cleavage which had been pushed up into something more extreme. She was wearing a serene but very confident expression. A faint smile played over her lips as they waited for someone to talk to them. The fact that she was being so calm about it was helping Aneka maintain her temper.

The door opened and a man walked in, tall, slim, not heavily muscled or particularly unfit. He looked like he worked behind a desk a lot. His suit was immaculate, his hair cut by someone who had made a profession of conservative, business-like hairstyles. Aneka decided she did not like him almost immediately; like no other agent she had ever seen, this guy smelled of spook.

‘Good Morning, Miss Jansen and Miss…?’

‘Kilbride,’ Winter responded, ‘Jean Kilbride. I am Miss Jansen’s legal advisor in this matter.’

‘Agent Wilcox,’ the man said, sitting down. ‘Miss Jansen needs a legal advisor?’

‘Given that the Federal Security Agency has made a habit recently of victimising anyone with prior association to its assassinated head, we can infer that this is another example of the same. Miss Jansen has nothing to hide.’

‘I’m sure she hasn’t.’ Wilcox leaned back, raising the tablet he had brought with him and looking at it. He was trying to put them at their ease. More specifically he was trying to put Aneka at her ease and hoping she would slip. ‘Except that you did fire on the Herosian vessel without provocation, Miss Jansen.’

Aneka waited a second to see whether Winter would interrupt, and then spoke. ‘We got a message from the Garnet Hyde stating that they were being approached by a military vessel. Then their communications were jammed. When they could get through to us via tight-beam communicator, they told us that the gunship was searching for us. I considered that a threat situation.’

‘You didn’t consider the possibility that they might be there on a rescue mission?’

Aneka looked at him, but he genuinely seemed to want an answer. ‘Rescue missions typically involve heavy gunships and jamming communications across an entire planetary hemisphere?’

‘No,’ Wilcox admitted, ‘they generally don’t. Do you know why this team came after you?’

‘No.’ Of course she could make guesses, but even the orders had not given a reason for the mission. ‘The orders our AI extracted gave no reason. I actually regret having to kill the crew. The order looked genuine, though I’m not an expert in Herosian military protocols. They were ordered to go there and grab me, and leave no witnesses.’ She frowned. ‘Actually, someone pretty intelligent once told me that “I was just following orders” isn’t a valid excuse. These guys took a mission into Jenlay territory, without question, to kidnap one citizen and murder several others. I don’t regret a thing.’

‘Not an attitude we see in many Jenlay, Miss Jansen.’

‘I’m not a Jenlay, Agent Wilcox. I’m just classified as one for administrative purposes.’

‘Is there anything else you wanted to discuss, Agent?’ Winter asked.

Wilcox glanced at his tablet. ‘Agent Wilcox is receiving direction from an external source via the tablet,’ Al said.

‘Tell me you aren’t hacking their communications,’ Aneka replied.

‘All right, I am not hacking their communications. I am, however, quite capable of decrypting the relatively low-grade encryption used on their internal messaging protocols, and radio is a broadcast medium.’

‘So who’s he getting his direction from?’

‘One guess.’

Wilcox’s eyes twitched as he looked at the screen in his hand. He was not pleased with what he was reading. ‘You seem to have something of a prejudice against Herosians?’ he said anyway.

Aneka was about to speak when Winter put a hand on her arm. ‘You have Miss Jansen’s psychological profile, Agent Wilcox,’ Winter said. ‘The only thing she is prejudiced against is the Xinti who kidnapped her. She saved the life of the Herosian ambassador. You should use your own judgement when questioning someone and not take direction from a politician.’

Wilcox thumbed over the tablet and put it down on the table. ‘I think I’ve heard enough. Thank you for your time, Miss Jansen.’

‘Thank you, Agent Wilcox,’ Aneka said, getting to her feet.

The agent did not look particularly happy as they left. Aneka did not really care about that; ‘just following orders’ was not a valid defence.

~~~

‘Why did you terminate that interview?’ Dowler was glowering as he met Wilcox outside the interview room. ‘I was…’

‘You were trying,’ Wilcox said, ‘to set up a woman with a super-computer for a brain and a damn good lawyer. And the lawyer was right, wasn’t she? You have got some sort of vendetta against Jansen?’ Dowler opened his mouth to respond, but Wilcox was having nothing of it. ‘The next time you pull a stunt like this,
sir,
I’ll go straight to the Administration about your lack of professionalism.’

Dowler was still glaring as Wilcox stalked away.

Yorkbridge Mid-town, 10.10.528 FSC.

‘I heard about Dowler’s stunt,’ Truelove said. ‘I hope you realise I had nothing to do with that?’ Dinner was over and Winter’s former assistant was sitting in the lounge to chat.

‘Yeah,’ Aneka said, grinning as she brought over a tray of drinks. ‘We had figured out that you would have probably stopped him. How did you find out? The way you’re talking it sounds like Dowler was trying to keep you out of the loop.’

‘Wilcox told me. Yesterday, admittedly. He took his time, but he told me. He maybe thought I’d be unreceptive, considering that he was in charge of the interrogations after Winter’s assassination.’

‘Huh, yeah. He wasn’t on your favourite people list.’

‘No,’ Truelove replied, ‘though I heard he was pretty unhappy about the mass arrest. I’ve also heard a rumour that he’s looking closely at Dowler. Wilcox is Internal Affairs, so…’

‘So he shouldn’t have been interrogating Aneka the other day,’ Ella pointed out.

‘No, he shouldn’t have.’

‘And he needs to stop looking at Dowler,’ Aneka said.

Truelove frowned. ‘I’d have thought you’d be pleased about someone else looking into Dowler’s activities.’

‘I’m just not keen on having to show off that armour you didn’t see while rescuing Wilcox from a hit.’ Her lips twitched. ‘I don’t like him that much.’

‘You think they’d try to kill him over this?’

‘They tried to kill you didn’t they?’ Ella said.

Truelove nodded slowly and looked over at the fourth person in the room, Justine Nivalis, her bodyguard. Aneka and Ella knew that Justine was a slightly special one of Winter’s avatars, but Truelove did not.

‘They have a point,’ Justine said. ‘Wilcox may not be the best agent we have, but it would be a shame to lose him. Our mysterious assailants…’

‘Do we really have to use euphemisms for them?’ Ella asked. ‘We all know who
they
are.
They
sent a gunship to try to get Aneka on Farrington’s World.’

Justine smiled at her. ‘If we get into the habit of saying who
they
are at home, we might slip at work. We have no evidence anyone is acknowledging that identified them. Farrington’s World is being blamed on a rogue naval officer.’

‘Of course, nothing’s gone past me to indicate that the Agency is looking for him,’ Truelove said. ‘If the Herosians are actually looking for him… Well, I’m an analyst and I think it’s pretty unlikely.’

‘Anyway,’ Justine went on, ‘we know that these unnamed bad guys have a habit of eliminating threats. If Wilcox becomes one then their course of action is obvious.’

‘It won’t be though,’ Aneka said. ‘They can’t risk a direct assassination or a simulated mugging. This would really have to look like an accident.’ She paused. ‘That can’t be easy to engineer these days. Everything’s so safe. Everything is monitored by computers, and if they messed with the computers someone would be able to figure that out.’

‘That’s true. I’ll mention it to Sharissa. It’s her job to come up with threat assessments.’

‘This,’ Ella said, ‘is a morbid topic of conversation.’

‘Yeah, that’s true,’ Truelove replied, ‘but what do we have to talk about besides work?’

Ella giggled. ‘I don’t know. How about… have you managed to entrap Justine into bed yet?’

Truelove blushed, but Justine said, ‘I entrapped her. I like to work closely with those I’m guarding.’

Aneka smirked. ‘Someone could attack her while she’s in bed.’

‘I had never thought of it like that,’ Ella mused. ‘I mean, if they did you would lose valuable seconds getting from one room to the next.’

‘Aneka’s obviously been training you in tactics,’ Justine suggested. ‘That is exactly how I explained it to Elaine.’

Truelove shrugged. ‘I didn’t buy it for a second, but I’m not going to pass up the sex, I’m a Jenlay.’

Downtown Yorkbridge, 11.10.528 FSC.

Darren Wilcox watched the black-haired woman sitting beside him sip her wine and tried to work out how he had managed to get so lucky. She grinned at him and said, ‘What?’

‘Uh… nothing,’ he replied, sipping from his own glass. ‘I was just… admiring the view.’

She had a pretty blush. She had a pretty face. No, a beautiful face. She was slim, petite, with the kind of narrow, angular facial set he had always found attractive. Her legs were long; her black hair fell over moderately large breasts, which were barely concealed by her dress that was made up of many thin strips of metallic, silver bioplastic. She looked like a woman who had gone out at the end of the weekend to find a sleeping partner, and somehow she had picked him.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘I’m not really that fond of bars.’

‘You’re not?’

‘They’re noisy. No privacy.’

‘You’d prefer to go somewhere else?’

She looked down, timidly, almost submissively. ‘There’s a hotel about two blocks south of here…’

Wilcox sank the rest of his drink. He was feeling impulsive tonight. Why should he stop himself having a little fun for once?

12.10.528 FSC.

Sharissa’s eyes scanned over the scene critically. It was not a pleasant view. The body lay on the bed where it had fallen, just as the service girl had found it. She was currently in the local hospital being treated for shock. There was less blood than one might have expected, but then a laser drilling through a Jenlay skull tended to cauterise the wound.

Looking up she could see the scorch mark on the ceiling. The beam had been less focussed after burning through Wilcox’s throat, then his skull and brain. He had been sitting up, obviously. The pistol was a service issue, polychromatic, light pistol. A Crawford-Patrick model. Sharissa had no doubt it would be registered to Wilcox.

It looked like a suicide, clean and simple. The problem was that Sharissa could see no reason why Wilcox would have killed himself, or why he had come to the hotel room to do it.

‘Did the scans come up with anything?’ she asked.

The forensics tech was looking at his tablet. He looked bored. ‘Nothing. No one else was here with him. That’s preliminary, obviously. We need to run the data through a full analysis, but we can’t find any genetic material from another party here. The place is clean.’

‘What’s with the reddening of the skin?’

The tech looked down at the body. Wilcox’s face and neck did look red, flushed. ‘Uh… That’s probably blood pressure changes from the beam. That kind of heat causes a lot of fluid expansion in soft tissue like the brain. Brains have a lot of blood vessels and the beam would boil the fluid.’

Sharissa nodded. It made sense, to some extent anyway.

‘I’d like this room cleared. Now.’ The voice came from a man who had just entered the small suite. Tall, well-built, with blonde hair and cold blue eyes, and hard features which Sharissa recognised.

‘Edgerton, what are you doing here?’

‘A senior agent has died under unusual circumstances,’ Edgerton replied. ‘This is an IA matter, Torrence.’

‘Wilcox was a lead investigator in Internal Affairs. Agency policy dictates that investigations into the death of an agent are
not
investigated by their own department. And policy also says that the death of an agent is a security issue…’

‘Not anymore. This comes right from the top. IA is taking this.’

Sharissa’s eyes narrowed, but she said, ‘Okay. I’ll be personally monitoring the case until I get it back.’

‘Sure, Torrence,’ Edgerton replied as Sharissa walked past him to the door. ‘Good luck with that.’

Yorkbridge Mid-town, 15.10.528 FSC.

‘I know you were talking to Elaine about Wilcox getting murdered,’ Sharissa said, ‘but there’s really no evidence that it wasn’t a suicide.’

The reason they were discussing the recently deceased agent was that Sharissa and Janna were over for dinner; Janna and Ella were in the kitchen, and Sharissa had mentioned the case. Aneka had looked distinctly dubious.

‘He was found dead in a hotel bedroom by the room service staff,’ Sharissa went on. ‘He was definitely killed by his own pistol. The weapon log indicates that no one else used it, and besides, there was no one else in the room with him.’