Masterminds (43 page)

And now, word from a marshal of the Frontier, a woman with a decades-long career who, in theory, had taken a leave of absence.

It was clear that she had not. Odgerel investigated her along one public network while listening to her on a private link.

Marshal Judita Gomez had applied for a job at the clone factory in Hétique City before the bombings. The personnel office had thought she wasn’t serious about the interview and, instead, had been trying to investigate something.

If Gomez’s private ship weren’t already on the Moon when the bombings of Hétique City had occurred, Odgerel would have been suspicious of Gomez’s motives. But until these past few months, Gomez hadn’t been deep inside the Alliance in years.

And a quick search of her records showed some contact with the Frémont clones that anyone would have found disturbing.

Besides, Gomez was the second person to alert Odgerel to possible treason by Jhena Andre, whom Odgerel had met once, and hadn’t liked—not that it mattered. Odgerel often didn’t like subordinates in her department.

Gomez had also sent images of one hundred originals for clones known to be on the Moon. One of them, Lawrence Ostaka, also worked for the Security Department.

Odgerel tried not to let such details disturb her, although they did.

She had sent for Mitchell Brown. Since there were at least two traitors in her division, she wanted someone she could trust.

And even before she sent for Brown, she compared his visage to those of the originals, and she had one of her departments rerun his DNA, searching for hidden clone tags or shortened telomeres.

The department had found nothing.

She heard him approach before she saw him, his shoes making a slight squeak against the path. He had barely been in Beijing for a month, and he still had not absorbed local custom.

Although, as he came up beside her, he handed her a cup filled with her favorite lemon-lime drink. She usually had that mid-afternoon to refresh herself, but mid-afternoon seemed a long way away.

“Did you see the information I sent you on Jhena Andre?” she asked him quietly.

“It’s legitimate,” he said. “Once you look at her, you see a lot of irregularities in her behavior.”

“You seem eager to believe ill of one of our more valued employees,” Odgerel said.

“The office received another warning about Andre about two hours before you contacted me,” Brown said. “I was going to assign someone to investigate, and then we had to deal with Hétique City.”

“Where did the other warning come from?” Odgerel asked.

“One of our investigators, Wilma Goudkins,” he said.

Odgerel’s hands tightened against the cup. The chill of the liquid had leached into the cup’s surface. “She partners with Lawrence Ostaka.”

Odgerel had forwarded the images to Brown as well as other members of her team. She wanted any of those clones inside the Alliance caught and detained.

“Ostaka filed a complaint against her,” Brown said, “claiming she was too sympathetic to the Moon and wasn’t doing her job. In light of who he actually is, that complaint now reads like a recommendation.”

Odgerel sipped the drink, its sweet bitterness somehow refreshing, even as the sun rose above the trees.

“We have to hope that this is not some kind of trick to get us to take her seriously,” Odgerel said.

“I considered that. But I also realize we have time,” he said.

Odgerel turned toward him. He was ever so slightly taller than she was.

“Time?” she asked. “Marshal Gomez said another attack on the Moon is imminent.”

“And we have to trust those on the Moon to handle that problem,” Brown said. “My sources claim that there are only a few hours before the next attack hits, and no matter what we do, we can’t resolve anything in that time.”

Odgerel forced herself to study the pinkish hues along the green leaves. She loved dawn. No fake dawn of a dome ever compared.

She could not let the idea of another Moon attack upset her now. Nor could she think about the implications to the Moon, to Earth, and to the Alliance.

Right now, she had to remain in the moment, and the sunlight, beautifully pink and golden, helped her do that.

“What kind of time do we have?” she asked Brown.

“Time for an apology,” he said.

She had not expected that answer. She looked at him sideways. “Apology? To whom?”

“Jhena Andre, if need be,” he said. “We arrest her now, isolate her, search for known associates. If we are wrong, we apologize and release her. If she sues us, we can argue the heat of the moment. After all, another attack is imminent.”

Odgerel smiled ever so slightly. Brown was devious. She hadn’t expected that of him, and she liked it.

“Order Andre’s arrest. Turn her life upside down. Find everything she has ever done, every person she has ever spoken to, see if we do indeed have a traitor in our midst.”

Brown nodded. He started to move away, but Odgerel caught his arm.

“Make certain that everyone who comes in contact with Andre is not connected to this originals list or to any of the investigations. Make sure they have never had contact with her before. And make certain they keep her from contacting anyone or harming herself.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, in a tone that made her think he had already thought of that.

“If she dies in this arrest,” Odgerel said, “I will hold you personally responsible.”

He nodded, his expression serious. “I would do the same in your position,” he said.

He had meant the words to comfort her, but they did not.

Perhaps she couldn’t be comforted. She had known that there were traitors inside the Alliance, but to learn they had been operating from within her precious division disturbed her more than she ever wanted to admit.

She knew that for weeks, maybe years to come, she would see a lot of dawns from the wrong side of the night. Sleep would become a luxury.

She had housecleaning to do, and decisions to make.

Awful decisions.

Life and death decisions.

She hated making them, but she had done it before.

She knew she could do it again.

SIXTY-NINE

DARKNESS MOVED ACROSS
the top of the dome. DeRicci watched the change through the floor to ceiling windows in her office, as she continued to argue with the leaders of the other domes. They were furious at her for releasing the faces without running the information through them first, without giving them a chance to warn their police or security departments.

The fact that some of those faces showed up in their police departments seemed beyond the leaders. And as she argued with them, wishing she had more time, she watched the programs shut off in Armstrong’s dome. First, Dome Daylight vanished, and the dome became clear.

This part of the Moon was tilted away from the sun, but hadn’t entirely gone dark yet. Some rays of light hit the dome, just not enough to compensate for Dome Daylight.

Then a shadow darkened the outside of the dome, and even though DeRicci knew that the shadow was part of the emergency surface sweep, it still startled her.

All surface sweeps were done during Dome Night. Although they were visible to the naked eye, most people didn’t notice because the dome was in darkness anyway. She had watched one from this very office when she first became chief of security.

That seemed like a hundred years ago.

Around her, half of the people in her office stopped working and looked at the shadow spreading across the top of the dome. She wanted to tell them to get back to work, but she was too hooked into her conversation with the dome leaders.

She made herself turn away from the windows, moving the images of the leaders with her as she did, because she didn’t want to focus on the dome. Still, she could see the shadow through the windows of the other side of the large room.

And the lights in her own office had gone up because of the darkness outside.

She glanced over at Flint, whose head was down. He and the technical officer from the Armstrong Police Department, a woman he had introduced as Kaz Issassi, were consulting with each other, and then they’d do something on a screen in front of them, and then they’d consult some more.

After that initial moment of alarm as the shadows crept along the surface of the dome, everyone had returned to work. Even Berhane Magalhães seemed busy. She was talking to the skinny man she had brought with her, and the strange-looking middle-aged woman was standing just outside their conversation, head down, seemingly listening intently.

DeRicci made herself focus on the conversations she was having. And then two of the mayors looked startled, almost frightened. And behind DeRicci, someone cursed.

“What?” she asked, but she wasn’t sure she knew who she was asking.

Popova opened a large screen in the center of the room. Apparently, she had made the noise.

On the screen, images appeared. DeRicci recognized the damaged spires of Sverdrup Crater in the distance. The image she was watching seemed to be from some kind of security camera. To one side, she saw the massive Shackleton crater, where energy companies thrived but no city existed, and prominently, near the front of the image, the bubble of the small dome of Crater de Gerlache.

Sverdrup had been one of the twenty cities targeted by the Frémont clones, but Crater de Gerlache had been too small. DeRicci had declined the opportunity to visit there. Sverdrup had freaked her out enough. She didn’t like that part of the Moon; it was in perpetual darkness, and even with everything the cities had done to combat that, she had been unable to forget it.

“What is this, Rudra?” she asked. Two of the mayors had disappeared from her line of vision. Another cursed.

And then the image from the security camera changed. As she watched, the dome over Crater de Gerlache exploded outward and upward, illuminating the rocks and Moon’s surface all around it, the explosion reflecting in the clear spires of Sverdrup’s remaining towers.

DeRicci’s knees buckled, and she caught herself on her desk. “Did that just happen? Or was that a propaganda video?”

“It happened,” someone said softly.

“But,” DeRicci said stupidly, “it wasn’t one of the twenty domes.”

She had sent a message to all the leaders on the Moon, but she hadn’t spoken to everyone. She thought the same domes would be targeted, not
all
the domes.

The debris fell around Crater de Gerlache, but where the city had been, there was only darkness. The top of the dome had disappeared. Correct that: the
dome
had disappeared.

“How many people live in that city?” she asked. She mentally corrected herself on that too.
Lived
. How many people
had lived
in that city?

“Forty-five thousand,” Popova said quietly.

Someone swore, but the rest of the room was quiet. Then the strangely dressed woman, the one who had been talking to Gomez said plaintively, “I thought we had hours, still.”

“Me, too,” DeRicci said, feeling cold.

“Mr. Ostaka over there sent messages all over the Moon before we shut off his links,” said Issassi. “He sent several to Crater de Gerlache.”

DeRicci turned toward him. Despite the evidence of the battering she had given him still swelling his face, Ostaka was smiling.

“Son of a bitch,” she said. “Find out who else he contacted—which other domes—and warn them. Rudra, warn
all
the domes, say an attack could be imminent. And…”

She took one menacing step toward Ostaka. He cringed. The movement seemed involuntary, not theatrical. He wasn’t doing it for show. He was terrified of her.

“Get this asshole out of my office. Put him in custody, and make sure his link blocker still works.”

No one moved.

“
Now
,” DeRicci said, “before I kill him with my bare hands.”

Nyquist stepped forward, even though he didn’t work for DeRicci, grabbed Ostaka by the arm, and said, “You’re going to wish you hadn’t survived this day,” as he led Ostaka out of the room.

DeRicci looked up at the image, which someone was replaying. Her stomach was churning.

They had run out of time. They had just lost forty-five thousand people, in an instant.

She didn’t want this third attack to succeed, and it looked like it was going to, no matter what she did.

SEVENTY

FLINT COULDN’T THINK
about the dead, the people who had just died in front of his very eyes. He didn’t have the time or the luxury. Everyone in this room—everyone on the Moon—had just learned that the domes could blow at any moment.

He hoped to hell the other dome leaders had at least sectioned their domes. That would decrease the deaths, make certain that not everyone in the domes died.