Final Inquiries (19 page)

"But why not?"

"Because you two haven't interrogated any of them yet," he said.

There was a moment's silence before Mendez spoke again. "Excuse me?"

"Interrogate them. They're all waiting for you to interrogate them. That's the whole point of their still being confined." He glanced at his watch. "In fact," he said, "given how long they've been waiting, I suggest you get started right away."

TEN

IN THE DARK

Ambassador Stabmacher frowned, and looked from Wolfson to Mendez. There was a dead silence that lasted for a long time. The two agents were expressionless. They looked at Ambassador Stabmacher, then at each other, without speaking. Something in the room changed in that moment. Suddenly the two BSI agents weren't the ambassador's colleagues. They had become something else--his opponents, his adversaries, the cops that were on his tail. He had the general impression that these two agents thought he had done something idiotic and were straining to keep their tempers.

"Ambassador Stabmacher," Wolfson said at last, in a very slow, artificially calm voice, "we started the day in another star system, and we've gone through a period of relativistic time dilation, and changed not only time zones, but shifted to a different planet with a different rotation period and day-night cycle. Part of what that means is that we're exhausted--but it also means that Special Agent Mendez and I are more than a little disoriented as to time. How long ago, exactly, did Special Agent Milkowski contact you and tell you that he had found the body?"

Not when the murder was, or when Milkowski found the body, because you didn't witness those things,
the ambassador told himself. It was a very carefully phrased question. "I can't give it to you to within the exact second without checking the time-date stamps on my commlink log, but it was roughly twenty-one hours ago."

"And how long did it take to get everyone organized, get them into voluntary confinement?"

"I was the last one sealed in by the chief engineer, then of course he went below and locked himself in. That was about three hours after Milkowski called me."

"How long between his call and the
first
person being confined?"

"I would say about two hours."

"Was there any real degree of control over everyone during those two hours?" Mendez asked. "Were they kept in one place where someone could keep an eye on them?"

"N-n-nooo. Not especially."

"How did you do surveillance over the compound once everyone was locked down? I would assume there were watch cameras on and recording?"

The ambassador grimaced and shook his head. "No, I'm afraid not. The entire surveillance camera recording system was inoperative. The BSI agents managed it. The system is designed to do forty-eight hours of recording of all cameras. Then the recording media has to be switched out. There are security requirements that require us to change out the recording media manually. The procedure requires two people--again, for security purposes. A watch-me, watch-you protocol. If the media fills up, then the system stops recording and just presents live views to the security-pod monitors. And with the agents locked up--well, they couldn't do that job."

"And the recording media filled up when?"

"About an hour after Milkowski contacted me. Everyone just forgot about it until about four hours until the lockdown was complete."

"Who remembered about it, and what was done?"

"Special Agent Singh contacted me and told me that he had been assigned to do the change-out and had forgotten about it."

"And what did you do?"

Another long silence. "Nothing," the ambassador admitted. "I concluded that the damage had been done. In order to restart the system, we'd have to have one of the BSI agents come out of confinement, and I'd have to come out to observe him, and we'd probably have to get the chief engineer out in order to witness the work and to lock us both back up again. The odds of creating more and worse problems in the process, adding more variables, seemed very high. The decision at that point was mine, and I take full responsibility for it."

"Unfortunately, taking full responsibility doesn't get us usable surveillance recordings," said Mendez, allowing a bit of temper to show. "From where we're sitting, Ambassador, you've handed us twenty or so witnesses, all of whom were given two to three hours to confer together, then eighteen or so hours to cool their heels, rest up, and think things over without being disturbed. And the number of ways a comm system or a computer system can be diddled to allow unrecorded conversation is almost unlimited. Furthermore, unless they were designed as holding cells, which they weren't, I'd be willing to bet that half of the cabins in the embassy ship have some other way out, via access panels or servicing hatches or escape chutes or whatever. And I'd make another bet that there are ways to communicate between cabins even if the intercom isn't used. Just whisper into an air duct, or shout loud enough, or tap on the wall to do Morse code, or one tap for yes and two for no."

Mendez rubbed his face, let out a weary sigh, and went on. "You've given us an entire compound that has no visual record of people coming and going. Because you had the joint operations center sealed from
this
side before anyone else could view the body or photograph it, the only description we're going to get of the state of the body as it was when it was found is going to have to come from Milkowski, who has to be considered one of the prime suspects.

"And, since you mentioned the enemy right next door, let me remind you that we only have
their
word for it that they sealed the ops center from their side when they said they did, that they kept the seals on, instead of peeling them off, going in, doing whatever they wanted, then leaving and installing fresh seals. I've got several more points on my list. Do you see what I'm driving at? Do I need to go on?"

"Um, ah, ah, no. I see. I believe I do see." The ambassador discovered he was sweating.

"The further problem," said Special Agent Wolfson, "is that neither Special Agent Mendez nor I is in any shape to do one interrogation--let alone twenty interrogations. We need some sleep, we need some food, and we need some sort of chance to evaluate the information we have so far--or we won't know what to ask questions about."

"And there's another problem," said Agent Mendez. "The three BSI agents. We can't use them on the investigation, obviously. Not unless we're able to clear one or more of them absolutely, and I don't quite see a way to do that."

"I agree," said Agent Wolfson.

Mendez turned and looked the ambassador straight in the eye. "But let's go further. They can't do
any
work, can they?" he asked. "They're in charge of security--but at the same time, they have to be regarded as a major security threat. Last to see the deceased, and the persons with best access to her. I speak no ill of the agents themselves here, but it's just simple investigative doctrine. If there's prima facie evidence, even if it's just circumstantial, that a cop, any cop, committed a crime, you pull them off any sort of duty that involves criminal investigation work or security responsibility. You put them to work in the personnel office or something. But there's no way to do that here, is there? No job they could do here that isn't being done, that needs doing, that doesn't have a security element?"

The ambassador saw the point Mendez was making, and he didn't like it. "No," he said, and left it at that.

"Let me go a little further," Mendez went on. "In a post this small, and in this high-risk an assignment, is there
any
desk job at all that doesn't involve exposure to secured material of one sort or another? Sooner or later--probably sooner--something that is classified in one way or another gets to just about everyone, right?"

The ambassador frowned. "I suppose I could find something for them to do, but it would be about on the pick-up-sticks-and-lay-them-straight level."

"But even that level of paper shuffling would have to be set up in, what would you call it, a quarantine area where nothing sensitive could go in or out. Plus which it would probably have to be the BSI agents themselves who would set that up, wouldn't it? And it would have to be done
now,
while the whole embassy is in an uproar already, wouldn't it?"

"I haven't had the opportunity to think that through," said the ambassador. "But I suspect you are correct."

"And who is going to do that work?" Mendez asked. "Who is going to run security at this place, handle travel security, and run this investigation, all at once? Care to make a wild guess?"

Mendez was plainly angry--and he was just as plainly someone that the ambassador didn't want to have angry at him. He found himself wondering whether or not the BSI agents' powers of arrest extended to ambassadors. And perhaps arrest was really the least of his worries.

Senior Special Agent Wolfson spoke hurriedly, as if she wanted to do so before Mendez had a chance to explode. "We'll deal with all that, Jamie. Somehow. Frankly, I don't know how, but we will." She turned back to the ambassador, and he felt nothing but relief that he had her to deal with, and gratitude for the way she had intervened with Mendez.

The ambassador couldn't quite tell if it was all authentic emotion, or just good-cop bad-cop theater, but he didn't care anymore. If it was theater, it had him thoroughly convinced. "Thank you," he said.

"Let's focus on one problem at a time. As regards the interrogations--under normal circumstances, I think we'd be lucky to do a dozen a day. Obviously, we can't keep the staff on hold that long--some might not get out until two or three days from now. It might be tempting to get a start on it this evening, but, as I said, we're just too tired to do the job properly, and we haven't had any chance at all to review the information we have. So as long as all members of the embassy staff are voluntarily confined, I think we might as well let them spend one more night there. We'll have to tackle all of them tomorrow--somehow."

Wolfson smiled sadly. "I seem to be using that word 'somehow' a lot. In any event, we're going to bed down somewhere and get some rest, and I suggest you do the same. But first, I do want to cover a couple of other points. One, the simulants and two, the Kendari and human groups that seem to be on-planet. I suppose I have the same general questions regarding both. Who are they, how many are there, where are they, what are they doing here, and how did they get here? Let's cover the simulants first."

Ambassador Stabmacher nodded eagerly, glad to talk on another subject, any other subject. "They got here because the Vixa insisted on them. It was a flatout condition of their hosting the next phase of the negotiations. We were to accept them and allow them, quote, 'to perform their initial functions' unquote, or else there would be no negotiations, and the Vixa would shut down the human embassy."

"So they haven't been here long?"

"No. The first--mine--arrived about four months ago. There are five of them in the compound at the moment, not counting the one that came with you. You've noted that they seem to imprint on a person--it would appear that your simulant has imprinted on Agent Mendez. The five here imprinted on me, the three BSI agents, and Dr. Zhen Chi. They have arrived one by one, and we are told that more will be arriving as we go along until every member of the embassy staff has one."

"But what are they for? What good do they do?" asked Mendez. "I spoke to the one imprinted on me, and the one imprinted on Brox, but didn't really seem to get much out of them." He turned to Wolfson. "Nothing that made sense, anyway. There were a few details I'll talk over with you later."

"The Vixa really haven't told us what they are for," said the ambassador. "Or at least, when they have, the answer isn't much help."

Mendez flipped through his notes and read from them. "'We observe on behalf of those who sent us. Our assistance will be provided at a later time, and will be of significant help to you.' That sound familiar? Or how about 'We are here to observe and assist.'"

The ambassador nodded. "We've all heard that many times. And the subhouseholders of the Preeminent Director tell us pretty much the same thing."

"They certainly aren't the most efficient observation or monitoring devices," said Wolfson. "It would be a lot easier just to send in a bunch of cameras on floaters, or blanket the embassy with whatever sort of covert spycams or listening devices they might like to use. Are the sims in fact recording or transmitting video or audio signals?"

"We've checked every frequency and transmission system we have the gear to test, and haven't found a thing. They do seem to send and receive encoded messages via a short-range variant of QuickBeam that the Vixa use, but those messages are short and very intermittent. We can't read the content of those messages, but we can measure their characteristics pretty well. The transmissions
might
be highly compressed summings-up of observations, but it seems very unlikely. I'm told that something called the information density of the signal just wasn't high enough for that. Our signals specialist said the structure of the messages looked a lot more like the simulants receiving commands and sending 'yes I got it' confirmation messages. And, just by the way, the Vixa
do
send in spy devices. Finding them and disabling takes up a lot of the time of our signals and comm specialist."

"Those five people who have gotten simulants," said Mendez. "Is there any rhyme or reason to why you five were the first to get them?"

"Yes, actually. We're the people here who have had the most frequent direct face-to-face contact with the Vixa."

"And where are the simulants now? We haven't seen them."

"In a storage shed over by the motor pool," said the ambassador. "They have their feeding stations there. The agreement with the Vixa states that we only have to allow them to be up and about during official duty hours--and I assure you, we keep to that agreement very closely."

"What are they exactly?" Mendez asked. "I haven't been able to decide if they're machines or not. You mentioned a feeding station. That suggests they are living creatures. Are they a subspecies of the Vixa? A sort of domestic animal?"