The Peyti Crisis: A Retrieval Artist Novel: Book Five of the Anniversary Day Saga (Retrieval Artist series 12) (22 page)

But he didn’t want the resources of the United Domes anywhere near the searches he was about to do. Nor did he want to use his home system for it. Sometimes, he used a non-networked system at the office of the lawyer whose services he used the most, Maxine Van Alen, but he wasn’t sure what kind of trouble this search would get him into.

Better to use the office, where he had back-ups and fail safes and redundancies. Better to use a place and equipment he could destroy if he had to, should he need to cover his tracks.

He touched Talia’s arm and she jumped. She looked frightened when she glanced over at him, just for a moment, before she covered the reaction with that weird implacable expression she’d been trying out since the Peyti Crisis.

He hated the fear. In the past, Talia got frightened—the loss of her mother had scared her—but she had a deep reservoir of courage that Flint loved.

That reservoir seemed to be empty these days.

“We’re going to the office,” he said.

Talia frowned at him, then wiped a hand over her face. She didn’t ask about it. She just nodded, and waited for him to open his door before she opened her own.

The thick air made him cough. He wasn’t used to dust particles any more either, apparently. Two weeks ago, Talia would have laughed at that cough. Today, she didn’t even seem to notice.

She pushed her door closed and joined him. He closed his door as well. He wanted to take her hand, but he knew she would pull away.

So he walked across the lot, his feet scaring up even more dust, and reached the sidewalk ahead of her.

She didn’t even walk like she used to. She kept her head down, her shoulders hunched forward.

He didn’t care how she felt about the show of affection in public. He took her hand as she reached his side, and she didn’t even try to shake him off. Her fingers were cold and just a little clammy.

They walked the two blocks to his office. The neighborhood had changed since he last parked here. Three buildings were completely abandoned, the signs hanging above their doors gone. Three more looked like they were going to topple into each other.

He saw no one on the streets, and none of the buildings had lights on. He tried to convince himself that was because of Dome Daylight, but he knew that many places had lights on around the clock because of how dark this neighborhood was.

Talia didn’t say anything. He wasn’t even sure she noticed that the lawyer’s office next door was closed. It looked almost abandoned—the way that an office constantly in use looked when it was suddenly closed.

Flint felt something like despair. He hadn’t even liked the lawyer, but he had been a decent attorney. Just not a great one. Flint could afford better.

Had the lawyer been one of the collateral damage casualties of the Peyti Crisis?

Flint didn’t have time to investigate that.

He put his hand on the door knob, letting the alarm system identify him through his DNA. The warmth of his hand told the system he was alive; his movements reinforced that; and the fact that he had someone with him alerted the system to making certain that some systems didn’t even activate.

The door swung open, and Talia eased in ahead of him.

She glanced over her shoulder at him, and tried to smile. That look, the pathetic half-smile, the attempt to reassure him that she was okay, made him feel even worse.

“At least it smells good in here,” she said.

It did too. He hadn’t realized that outside smelled faintly of burned rubber. He wondered what was going wrong with the old parts of the dome filtration system now.

He let the door close behind him. The lights came up, not that it would be noticeable from the outside. He hadn’t put out his shingle in years. The entire system was instructed to make sure this place looked like it was not a functioning office any more.

Inside, it had been very functional—at least as recently as a few months ago. He had been rebuilding his computer system on Anniversary Day, as well as redesigning the interior. When he had a moment after the initial madness calmed down, he finished that redesign, with the idea that at some point, he would have to return to work here.

The environmental systems had kept the air clean, the temperature comfortable, and the dust outside of the office.

“What are we doing, Dad?” Talia asked. The question seemed like an effort.

“We’re not doing anything,” he said. “I’ve got some things to look up.”

“I can help,” she said, and she almost sounded interested.

“I know,” he said. “Right now, though, the search is a bit dicey, and I need to do it.”

She winced. She felt he hadn’t trusted her to use the systems in this office since she had nearly exposed her sisters a few years ago. Not that these girls were her actual sisters. They were the other clones from her original, Emmeline.

Those clones were all older than Talia, created at a different time. Flint hadn’t been—and still wasn’t—sure if they even knew they were clones. Talia hadn’t.

And these girls had been adopted by good families throughout the Alliance, so legally, those clones were considered human.

He didn’t know how to reassure Talia without bringing up that incident. She had gotten a lot more cautious in the past few years. He wanted to tell her that, but didn’t dare.

“I should probably be doing this work at the university or something,” Flint said, “but I doubt anyone is in their cafeteria at the moment.”

He often used places with excellent networking and fantastic research capabilities, like the Brownie Bar (which he would never go to with Talia beside him) and Dome University’s Armstrong Campus so that any weird searches he did would be untraceable to him.

“You think someone would notice?” Talia asked.

“I think we go there later in the week if we need to,” he said. “Right now, you and I would get noticed.”

That was the curse of looking different from everyone else. His pale skin and curly blond hair always attracted stares. Talia’s matching hair got the same attention when the two of them were together.

Now that she was older, and her hair combined with her copper skin and stunningly unusual eyes, she was getting other kinds of stares, the kind of stares a father knew were coming for his daughter, but never wanted to see.

“What are you searching for?” she asked.

“A financial trail,” he said.

“I want to help,” she said again.

He sighed. “Okay,” he said after a moment. “I need you to do a systems check—”

“Da-a-ad.” She made that word into three syllables, and then rolled her eyes. He smiled. He had missed the attitude.

“It’s important,” he said. “I haven’t worked here in a long time, and I need to make sure the security—”

“You can do it.” She sat down heavily on the floor near the far wall. She brought her legs in so that she was sitting cross-legged, then she leaned the back of her head against the wall. She closed her eyes.

For a moment, Talia had been back. Then he lost her again.

He wanted to try to bring her out, even though he knew it probably wouldn’t work.

“It’s not make-work,” he said. “It’s important.”

“I know,” she said tiredly. “But I’ll just screw it up.”

Then he realized what he had done wrong. He had said the word ‘security.’ Security was what had failed to protect that boy in her school. Security had failed to protect almost everyone sitting next to a Peyti clone during the Peyti Crisis, and that failed security had been initiated by the United Domes of the Moon Security Department.

He silently cursed himself. If he got caught or someone came after him because his systems hadn’t protected him, Talia would blame herself.

So she protected herself by not even trying.

“I think you’ll do fine,” he said, and knew it sounded inadequate.

She didn’t answer him. She didn’t move. He knew the posture.

She was pretending to be asleep.

He sighed, and pulled back the chair near his newly rebuilt system. He had screens all over the office, and several different networked computers. He had some non-networked ones as well, and floating flat screens when he wanted to activate them.

He didn’t want to at the moment.

He kept the vocal commands shut down, and he tapped his most powerful system to life. Then he stared at it for a long moment.

He wasn’t sure exactly how to start looking for those vast sums of money he and Deshin had talked about.

He wasn’t even certain what year to begin in.

He needed to do some background work first. He needed to try to wrap his brain around the scope of the thing that Deshin had presented him, something that should have been obvious to everyone investigating, but hadn’t been.

Someone had been planning these attacks for decades. They didn’t just buy twenty-some matching clones (in the case of PierLuigi Frémont) or hundreds of them (in the case of the Peyti). They had raised a series of clones with the idea that there would be two attacks, maybe three.

Definitely three.

He leaned his head back, mimicking Talia’s posture.

Before he did any investigation here, he needed to get DeRicci on this. He wasn’t quite sure how. How did they search for more clones?

And of what? What species? What kind?

Could they legally do that kind of search?

He didn’t know.

But he did know that he had to find out.

TWENTY-FIVE

TORKILD ZHU WAS sober. Disgustingly, horribly, sober. He had taken all kinds of clearers. They got rid of the alcohol, the nausea, the headache. They cleared the red out of his eyes, nose, and cheeks (boy, he had been drinking too much), repaired his broken capillaries, and took the puffiness out of his skin.

They would have made him feel good, except that he didn’t feel good.

He doubted he would ever feel good again.

He had looked in the metaphorical mirror and had not liked what he had seen.

Of course, what he had seen hadn’t gotten him to change his behavior. He knew he never would.

He sat in his hotel room, hands in his hair, scanning the injunctions that Salehi had sent him. Zhu had already run them through his AutoLearn program, but that wasn’t the same as reading the documents. Dozens of them, all to be delivered in person. Salehi had already sent them to the various legal arms of the various government agencies.

But all attorneys knew that agencies were great at claiming that legal documents, particularly those sent across great distances, arrived garbled or ruined or not at all.

Zhu had to make sure that the documents got to the right people.

He had wanted to hire some legal assistants to do that, but he couldn’t. Not yet. He needed to rent some office space first.

Through his links, he had approached a few law firms here about partnering with S
3,
but the two lawyers he had spoken to had begged off before he even got to the meat of the case. Not because they were squeamish about representing the Peyti clones—Zhu hadn’t even mentioned that.

Just because anything to do with the Peyti Crisis put the firms in a conflict of interest. They had either lost lawyers to the crisis or they had hired some of the clones who were now under lock and key.

Zhu was finally beginning to understand why the Peyti government had gone to S
3
in the first place. They couldn’t hire anyone on the Moon. Every single law firm here was tainted.

He got up, feeling fifty years older than he was. He had changed into the only real suit he had brought with him. It crinkled as he moved—real water silk, the kind that cost a small fortune. It had been a present from Berhane when he graduated from law school, and he hadn’t wanted to leave it behind.

He hadn’t fit in it after years at S
3,
but apparently, he had lost a lot of weight during his little binge. Which made sense, since he was using the alcohol for calories.

The very idea of alcohol made him slightly queasy, and that wasn’t because of any clearers or any anti-alcohol nanobots. The way he had behaved the last few weeks disgusted him almost as much as this case did.

Then he corrected himself: these cases, not this case.

He had to wrap his brain around the fact that he was now The Guy Who Had No Soul. He needed to think about his clients and shut off the emotions.

He had to use this as an intellectual challenge.

He checked his appearance in the actual mirror near the door, then finger-combed his hair. He looked good. Amazing what science could do. He made himself smile, then realized that was wrong.

He wasn’t going to be the smarmy attorney who smiled his way through a difficult case. He was going to be the
understanding
attorney, who knew how awful his job was, but how necessary it was as well.

The
adult
attorney, the one who regretfully worked against the Alliance’s best interest.