Death Sentence (15 page)

Those inside the pro-paper camp were almost obsessive about the
type
of paper notebook to be used--what size and weight of paper, whether or not the pages could be easily torn out, what sort of cover. Some agents even had their notebooks custom-made, at ruinous expense. Hannah and Jamie, at least, stayed out of that trap--though Hannah had to admit she was tempted at times.

Both of them normally worked with the sort of standard-issue BSI investigator's notebook Jamie had just handed to Hannah. It was a flip-top spiral-bound notebook, about thirteen centimeters wide and twenty-four centimeters tall. Inside were three sections, with stiff cardboard dividers between the sections. The front section was horizontally ruled paper for general note-taking. The middle was graph paper, with vertical and horizontal lines breaking up the page into one-centimeter boxes for making rough scale drawings in the field. The third section was unlined paper for freehand drawing. The front cover was emblazoned with the BSI badge-star design, and under it

FOR OFFICIAL BSI USE ONLY

60 sheets 20 lined/20 graph/20 blank

Form 401920/2482

Under that were blanks for the user to fill in.

AGENT NAME:___________

CASE NUMBER REFERENCE:__________

DATE USE STARTED:____________

DATE USE ENDED:____________

and a series of other boxes that no one ever bothered to fill in. The inside front cover, and the fronts and backs of the section dividers and the back cover displayed a series of supposedly helpful look-up charts. One set converted metric measures to the various Galactic systems, and, for the real throwbacks, even to feet, miles, ounces, and pounds. Another was a list of "Useful Phrases" in Lesser Trade Speech, the language of commerce and diplomacy used by many xeno species. The guides and charts were all well-intentioned, but Hannah had never heard of anyone using any of them.

There was something oddly comforting about seeing the familiar, old-fashioned charts. She had used a notebook exactly identical to the one in her hand on her first case--and she had kept it as a memento, even if that violated five or six security regulations. No doubt because she herself had such a sentimental attachment to them, examining Wilcox's notebooks seemed a particularly personal, almost intimate, thing to do.

Except, suddenly, it dawned on her that they hadn't been personal, or special, or intimate to him. "Wait a second," she said. "Wilcox isn't a paper guy."

"Right," said Jamie. "At least we don't have any proof that he is. Everything we've seen suggests he's a digital guy."

"Have we seen a single example of his handwriting?" Hannah asked. "Or
anything
on paper? Printouts? Sketches?"

"Not that I've spotted."

"Does that mean he never used paper, or just that he scooped up every scrap of paper in his general clear-out?"

"Well, if he cleared everything else out, he missed the notebooks," said Jamie.

"But they're blank. Empty."

"Not the one you're holding," Jamie replied. "Not all the way. Flip to the back of the graph-paper section."

Hannah did so--and frowned in puzzlement at what she saw there.

In the center of the page was an elaborately drawn and decorated design, a sort of logo, of the initials BSI. The
B
and the
S
were fully drawn and filled in with flourishes and backgrounds and curlicues, but the
I
was merely sketched in, as if the artist hadn't quite gotten around to finishing it. Centered directly under it was a two-line slogan, written in very careful script.

Where we protect our treasures

unless we must destroy them

Hannah laughed. "This is from a little before your time," she said. "It's an old in-joke. Ask anyone in the Bureau's Internal Investigations Unit, and they'll tell you that
BSI
stands for
BURN STASH IMMEDIATELY
. According to them, every time they ask for an agent's work notes, wouldn't you know it, bad luck has struck again and he's tossed the papers they want into the destruct oven, just five minutes before. The regs say that everyone's supposed to 'destroy unneeded insecure notes on a regular basis,' but most agents tend to hold on to their old notes, just in case. But as soon anyone hears a rumor that IIU might come looking around, everyone starts following the regs to the letter."

"Well, Wilcox seems to have followed
that
rule."

Hannah tapped the design with her finger. "We don't even know that this is Wilcox's doing," she said. "We can't even be sure he was the one who drew the logo or wrote the words. This could have been left behind by the last agent to fly the
Adler
prior to Wilcox's mission, or the one before that, or the one before that."

"But only if Trevor missed this notebook while he was doing the clear-out. We haven't caught him making too many mistakes so far."

"The mistake being that he left these notebooks behind when he was clearing the place out to make our search easier?"

"Right."

"I'm not sure I can count it as a mistake not to check carefully every single page of every single notebook to make sure they're all blank when you're clearing out an entire spacecraft."

"No. But think about it. Trevor is sitting where you are right now whenever he pilots the ship. The notebooks were held to the bulkhead with that elastic restraint loop there, like this." Jamie took the other notebooks, pulled back the loop, slipped them into it, and let the loop go. It made a loud snapping noise as it slapped into the notebooks. "Right in his line of sight whenever he turns his head."

"And if he's not a paper guy, why does he put a stack of spare notebooks right there?" Hannah asked. "Unless they were put there by the agent before or the agent before that, and were just left there."

"Even so--he's cleaning out everything else on board the ship. It would take him five seconds to grab the notebooks and toss them into whatever trash bag he was using."

"So you're saying if he left them behind, he did it on purpose."

"Right."

"And if so, he did it for a reason."

"Right."

"And, unless we go over the books with a scanning electron microscope looking for DNA-encoded microstrands and such like, the only thing in any of the notebooks is this design and the words underneath, so what we have on this page has to
be
the reason."

"Right. Unless I'm wrong."

"Yeah, but
you
don't make many mistakes, either," said Hannah. She stared thoughtfully at the design and the words underneath it. "'
Where we protect our treasures unless we must destroy them.'
The way that's placed under the BSI design, it looks like it's supposed to be a joke, that it's the Bureau's motto. But there's more than one way to read it. Instead of referring to the organization, it could also refer to a physical place. A place that's on this ship--and every BSI ship."

"The destruct oven if you rig it for Mode Two!" Jamie said. "The search team didn't look there, did they?"

"Not that we have any record of," said Hannah.

"And
we
haven't looked there either," said Jamie. "How could we all miss that?"

"Rush and panic and trying to do everything at once," said Hannah. "And no one would think of it because no one ever uses the oven in Mode Two. You don't use them that way until things are in very bad shape."

"Well, things got pretty bad for Trevor," said Jamie. "Plenty bad enough if he had a boarding party to deal with. That sounds like a Mode Two situation if I've ever heard of one."

There was a concealed and camouflaged destruct oven aboard every BSI ship. It consisted of a sealable chamber that could be heated to extreme temperatures, combined with an oxygen feed system and a sophisticated venting system, all of it designed to promote rapid and thorough burning. Every piece of portable BSI data-storage equipment from the paper notebooks to the highest-end datapads and computers was designed to fit into a destruct oven, and was specifically made so it could not survive a destruct oven burn cycle.

In Mode One, an agent simply shoved whatever needed destroying into the oven, sealed it, and turned it on. It was intended for the routine and precautionary destruction of potentially sensitive material.

Mode Two was for when things got much hairier. If an agent thought he or she might be caught or killed, or his ship captured, and if the agent was carrying high-value materials, data important enough to protect that was also data that couldn't be allowed to fall into the wrong hands, the standard operating procedure was to store all sensitive documents in the destruct oven and leave them there. The usual protocol was to rig it so that it would start a destructive burn cycle if anyone tried to open it without entering the proper pass codes. The oven could also be triggered by more or less any sort of remote control or panic button or timer or deadman switch the agent might choose.

"So let's look now."

"Forty-five minutes until transit-jump," Hannah said. "We need to make sure we've got time to get ready for it. We'll have to move fast."

"I don't even know where the oven is hidden on this class of ship," Jamie admitted.

"I do," Hannah said grimly. "It's concealed in the bathroom, the head. It's under the deck--right in front of the chemical toilet."

"Take the powerdriver and hand me that prybar, will you?" Hannah asked as the last of the screws holding in the deckplate came loose. She swapped tools with Jamie and wedged the prybar under the lip of the deckplate.

It lifted up easily, and Jamie grabbed the edge of the plate and lifted it clear. A sprinkling of smoky-smelling dust swirled in the cramped compartment as he swung the plate out of the way and leaned it against the wall. They looked into the space it had covered and saw what resembled a small but highly complex safe, complete with combination lock and reinforced door and armored hinges. "So," he said, "what are we going to find here?"

"Well, with any luck at all, the decrypt key, of course," said Hannah, reaching for her datapad to pull up the codes to unlock and disarm the system.

"But if it's stashed here,
when
did he stash it?" Jamie asked. "It couldn't have been
before
the boarding party arrived, because he did the gear-jettison
after
that, and we haven't come up with any explanation for the gear-jettison, unless it was to help us search the ship and not be distracted by searching through his personal effects. Why go through all
that
if he already had the key hidden in the destruct oven and the boarding party had missed it? And if he hid it in there
after
the boarding party--again, why do the gear-jettison? He'd have to know that sooner or later someone would think of looking in the oven--and probably assume that they'd think of it sooner than anyone actually did."

"He could have stashed the destruct key in the oven the second he was back on board after leaving Metran," said Hannah, "before he knew anything at all about the chances of his being boarded. He might figure the oven was the safest place on board. It functions as a hidden wall safe. It would just be a sensible precaution."

"Let me ask you this," said Jamie. "I didn't know where the destruct oven was, since I've never flown one of these tubs--but I knew there was one. What do you want to bet that every Kendari Inquiries Service agent in the field knows all about BSI destruct ovens?"

"No one's talked about the Kendari being part of all this," Hannah objected.

"No, but information can be bought and sold," said Jamie. "Besides, the data wouldn't need to come from the Kendari. The logs show that Trevor docked--or more like landed--his ship at the Metran's Grand Elevator and then rode down to the surface. I'm sure he left the ship locked and sealed and so on--but that wouldn't stop the locals from scanning it fifteen different ways. The Metrannans are a well-connected Elder race. They must have a lot of tech we can't even dream of. Trevor would have to have assumed that whoever boarded him would know where the oven was, and maybe even how to get past the ship's security and the oven's."

"Okay, so maybe he didn't stash it there then," Hannah said. "Or else your argument is very logical and convincing--but it's just plain wrong--and he
did
stash it there, before or after the boarding party, and what does it matter if he did it before or after?"

Jamie scowled. "I'm not sure. But I think we owe it to Trevor to try and understand everything he did as best we can."

Hannah looked at him hard. "Listen up, Special Agent Mendez, and get it straight. Trevor Wilcox III was
my
colleague, too--but this case got War-Starter slapped on it, and investigating his death is a secondary mission--something close to a cover story. Your trying to be his posthumous best friend doesn't do him any good, and I'm starting to worry it's going to get in the way of us doing our job. We're supposed to find the decrypt key, first and foremost. We're
not
supposed to be building a monument to Trevor Wilcox. Got it?"