Sidespace (25 page)

She opted for a less revealing statement.

If we want to prevent whatever Ms. Montegreu has planned for Dr. Canivon.

Yes. I’ll let you know as soon as we have any more information. Delavasi has offered his assistance.

You told him you were passing information to me?

I believe he’d want me to pass this particular information on irrespective of our arrangement, but he’s far from an idiot. We haven’t discussed it, but clearly he knows.

Well. Tell the director thank you, but we can handle any operations ourselves.

Another pause.

How are you?

He laughed faintly.

I’m…adjusting. Don’t worry about me. You have bigger problems right now.

I fear I do. I confess to being a little disappointed the Oversight Committee isn’t behind the kidnapping. It would have made certain things easier—but that’s neither here nor there, and now irrelevant.

Sorry to complicate your life further. Before you go, how is Devon holding up?

He is physically intact—bruises and scrapes. Psychologically, somewhat less intact. But if anything, Dr. Canivon’s kidnapping has given him something to focus his anger on. He wants to focus it by personally dismembering the perpetrators, but it is an improvement on the spasmodic flailing.

That doesn’t sound great, but I’m not surprised. Tell him I’m thinking about him.

I will.

She cut the connection without ceremony, as there was no need for any.

He dropped his head back on the seat. They’d had Olivia Montegreu in their grasp eight months ago—sitting across the table from him and Graham in a locked room—and they let her walk away. It had felt like the right decision at the time, when the stakes were incalculable and she possessed what they so desperately needed. But deep down he’d suspected making the deal with her would come back to bite them in the ass.

And here they were.

He wished like hell he were in Vancouver, because if he were in Vancouver he could be helping Devon. Helping Miriam. Being separated from her was affecting him more than he’d expected; she had been his closest friend for so many years now.

Surely there was some way he could help from here, beyond what he’d just done….

He straightened up and pulsed Will.

Meet me at the office.

I
NTELLIGENCE
D
IVISION
H
EADQUARTERS

By the time Graham walked into the top-floor conference room at Division, Richard had an annotated map and two screens open above the table. Will was transferring notes from one of the screens to the map while Richard did the same from the second one.

Graham leaned on the door frame shaking his head. “Something told me I’d find you here.”

Richard shrugged distractedly. “And something told me I didn’t need to comm you and ask you to come in.”

Graham jerked his head at the displays. “What you got?”

“With any luck, a way to help Miriam stop Olivia Montegreu from becoming a Prevo and possibly even rescue Dr. Canivon.”

“Good news. But I have to ask again…what you got?”

Richard motioned him closer. The annotations overlaid the map to form a multi-hubbed web of interconnections. “Every known member or associate of the Order of the True Sentients, their locations and where they’ve made contact with other members.”

Graham frowned as Will added an additional name to the map above Pandora then streamed a line from it to a name above Seneca. “OTS is still primarily an Alliance problem, which is why it’s interesting that there are fourteen names attached to Seneca.”

“Congratulations, they’re now your problem, too. Faith Quillen, one of the chief lieutenants in the organization, moved to Pandora two months ago to start up a new cell. She recruited Ulric Toscano while he was vacationing there. Toscano returned to Seneca and started his own cell.”

“How did you find this out?”

Richard proffered a small smile. “They’ve been my primary focus for the last three months, because as you noted, they are an Alliance problem and a fairly big one.”

“Consider me interested in this new cell, but how is any of this going to help stop Montegreu?”

“I want to unleash OTS on her. As you can see, they have a large presence on New Babel. At the very least doing so may buy Miriam some breathing room, and if timed correctly the distraction can help increase an infiltration rescue op’s chances of success.”

“It can. How do you propose to do it?”

Richard swiped the two screens toward Will and settled back against the table. “That’s the tricky part. We’ll need to utilize your remote eVi hacking tool.”

Graham’s expression was admirably blank. “What remote eVi hacking tool?”

He chuckled, secretly glad to have a chance to tweak Graham for once. “The one your Strategic Development group has been working on for the last year. I believe it’s currently in the advanced prototype stage?”

Graham rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “And we worked so damn hard to keep that one under wraps. We call it the Reverb. It works, but it requires line of sight to the target for a minimum of three minutes.”

“Makes it harder, but still doable. The clearest way in is through Toscano, but we have to find him. Is that something you can do?”

“Well, we don’t make a habit of surveilling our citizens without cause, but the infrastructure is in place. If I put a priority flag on him, we should know where he is within a few hours, assuming he’s not at home asleep. I’ll send someone by his home address to check.”

“If he is, we’ll have to find another way in, because we can’t wait until morning. So will you flag him?”

“Done. Now we need a plan.”

He had one of those, too. “OTS operates a private comm network. Since it relies on person-to-person connections, we thus far haven’t found a way to access it. I want to use the Reverb to implant information in their network suggesting Olivia Montegreu is preparing to bring one of the new-style Artificials online. We can also imply that after she does so she intends to take out the other cartels on New Babel then make a big play on Pandora.”

Will had finished transferring names to the map and turned his attention to them. “That’s thin. How do we make it believable?”

“I think…spoof a member of the organization, someone positioned to have access to this kind of information. You’re right, it’ll be wafer-thin, but if we create a sense of time pressure it could be enough.”

Graham held up a hand. “Maybe not so thin. Let’s go see Hennessey in Strategic Development.”

Tessa Hennessey spun her chair around to face them, sending thick orange and black braids whipping over her shoulder. Irises altered to match the orange in her hair sparkled with flecks of gold. A network of the most elaborate, intricate glyphs Richard had ever seen pulsed in rainbow colors down her mocha arms. Her tank top was made entirely of interwoven conductive threads.

“Hey, director dude and friends.”

Graham dipped his chin. “Tessa. We need to take a VISH out for a spin.”

“How long of a spin?”

“If it works? Until it doesn’t.”

“Hmm.” She eyed him and Will. “You, I’ve seen around…Willie something? You, though? You’re new.” She thrust out a hand at Richard. “Hi, I’m Tessa. Resident warenut and fashion consultant.”

“Richard. Nice to meet you. We’re on a tight timetable, but perhaps you could explain what a VISH is?”

She checked with Graham; he nodded assent, and she reached behind her and tapped in a few commands. Her screen shifted, but not to anything he recognized. “VISH is what we call a ‘simulated human’—designed from the ground up to mimic human conduct and nothing else. It took an Artificial to develop it, but the finished package is quite compact, particularly if we limit its parameters before deploying it.”

“STAN developed it?”

“Ha. As if the military would let us play with their prize synthetic. No, we have a far smaller but in my opinion more clever Artificial here. I call it Cleo. So how compact do we need the VISH to be?”

“Small enough to be contained in an eVi or transmitted through a comm-based quantum tunnel?”

She made a hedging motion with her hand. “If we narrow its directives and cut a few corners, I can
probably
make it happen.”

Graham leaned forward and planted his hands on the edge of her desk. “Mid-level security officer in Defense. Not a tech job, but overhears things in the halls. Male, single, no SO, no kids. Strong distrust of Artificials.”

“Cleo will get a kick out of that. When do you need it by?”

He and Graham exchanged a look. “Pretty much now.”

Her odd orange eyes widened briefly. “Come back in twenty-five minutes.” Then she spun around to the screens and her fingers began flying over the keys, a soft white luminescence occasionally escaping from the space between her fingertips and the virtual keypad.

“No.”

Will dropped a shoulder on the wall and crossed his arms at his waist. “I won’t be in any danger. All I have to do is talk up a guy for three minutes.”

“Not a guy—a terrorist.”

“Maybe, but I doubt he’s planning to take out the pub.”

They had picked up Toscano’s location five minutes earlier when he paid for a beer at
Fuori Point Grille
, a pub near the river. Agents would be in place in the next several minutes to tail him if he should leave, but the pub represented the perfect opportunity if they could catch up to him in time. “Let Graham use one of his agents trained in undercover work.”

“Richard,
I’m
trained in undercover work. And I can charm anyone. People relax around me.”

He stared at Will, working to push away the twinge of acrimony that had flared. It was so close to being permanently banished…but the admission had allowed it to worm its way up to the surface once again. Judging by the expression on Will’s face, he knew it, too.

“No more lies, remember? It is what it is.”

Richard exhaled. “I know. Sorry.”

“I can’t say if any qualified agents are here right now, but I’m here right now, and ‘here’ is ten minutes from the pub.”

He threw his hands in the air. “Okay. Let’s go. We’ll tell Graham on the way.”