The Peyti Crisis: A Retrieval Artist Novel: Book Five of the Anniversary Day Saga (Retrieval Artist series 12) (23 page)

Then he shook his head. He couldn’t think of this case that way. He couldn’t. Because, in reality, this was
for
the Alliance—or at least all those billions of clones inside the Alliance.

Salehi had been right about that.

Zhu braced himself, and then he left the hotel room. Once he went to the Armstrong Police Department, he couldn’t turn back. He was committed.

But he also knew he was fooling himself.

There was no turning back.

He had committed the moment he contacted Salehi.

Zhu represented the Peyti clones, and probably would for the rest of his life.

TWENTY-SIX

THE MEETING DRONED on and through it all, the other detectives listened with a kind of energy that Nyquist had never seen before. Usually in large meetings, his colleagues squirmed. They stared into space, which generally meant they were checking their links or watching the time or maybe even working on an investigation (or playing some kind of game).

If he were Chief of Detectives, he would shut off all but the emergency links in important meetings. But since he had sometimes been one of the detectives who spent his time working rather than listening, he had never suggested that to Andrea Gumiela.

He had eased away from Savita Romey on the pretext of talking with a friend on the force he hadn’t seen for a long time. She should have caught him at that right there; he didn’t have many friends on the force, and most people knew that.

But she was like everyone else in the room—eager to have a piece of those Peyti clones.

Gumiela hadn’t mentioned the property angle. Nyquist wasn’t even certain she thought of it.

She had dealt with a lot of these clones before anyone knew that they were clones. She had known them as high-powered attorneys who came into the offices with an agenda. She had to either agree with that agenda (in the case of the prosecutors) or dismiss it somehow (in the case of the defense attorneys).

She probably hadn’t realized that much of the room had gone from thinking of the Peyti prisoners as lawyers to thinking of them as clones. As property.

And that would lead to something dangerous.

He did his best not to look over his shoulder at Romey as he eased to the front. When Gumiela stopped speaking, he sent her a message and made certain he caught her eye at the same time.

There’s something ugly happening among the detectives
, he sent.
Before you approve the interrogation pairs, please give me five minutes of your time
.

Her gaze flitted off his, and for a moment, he thought maybe his message had gone into some kind of queue inside her communications system.

Then she did something he had never seen before: she scanned the room.

He wasn’t on a platform. He didn’t know what she saw. But whatever it was, it made her lean back almost imperceptivity. If he hadn’t been looking for a reaction, he wouldn’t have seen it at all.

Then she looked back at him.
You’ll have five minutes, Detective,
she sent.
You better make it good
.

TWENTY-SEVEN

THE LAST OF the Peyti clones had disappeared into the security doors at the Reception Facility.

Leckie put her fingers under her chin, then swept it forward, a rude gesture that meant anything from
go fuck yourself
to
fuck off and die
. She meant all of those things and so much more.

“Nice,” Willis said to her. He still wore his riot suit, but he had deactivated the helmet. “Don’t you wish you had magic in those fingertips and you could make them all explode?”

She deactivated her helmet as well. The air on the platform smelled faintly of rubber and some dry dusty thing she’d begun to think of as Peyti sweat.

“I want them to suffer,” she said. “I almost wish I could stay here, so that I could snap an arm, like you did, or accidentally stomp on one of their feet.”

“I think they should die,” Willis said still looking after them.

The other guards were filing back to the train. Eventually, they’d board it, and ride it back to Glenn Station, and for a brief moment, they would sit in silence, with nothing to do.

Nothing made her antsy. She would rather have the stupid clones to focus on than the things she’d seen last week. Or Anniversary Day.

Her hand tightened around the barrel of her laser rifle.

“They should watch each other explode, one by one,” Willis said, “and the last guy, he should be spared, so he could live with that memory forever.”

“Yeah,” she said, but her heart wasn’t in it.

Both she and Willis—and everyone else in corrections—assumed these clones had feelings, they had the ability to understand what they had done, and they felt some sense of self preservation.

And they’d acted on it, after Willis broke an arm. But that was also logic, and she knew how much the Peyti valued logic.

Although there had been nothing logical in their attacks.

She shook her head. “Maybe I’m done with this gig,” she said as she took the steps into the train car.

“Prisoner transport?” Willis asked.

“The Moon,” she said. “It’s not home any more.”

“Ah, c’mon, Maude,” he said. “You’ll feel different when we get back to the Station.”

He meant Glenn Station. Parts of it were just fine, and other parts still hadn’t recovered from Anniversary Day. From her apartment she could see the attempts at the rebuild, and an exploded Growing Pit outside the city’s dome.

She wouldn’t feel different when she got back.

Her city would still be damaged.

Her family would still have holes through its heart.

And she didn’t know how to deal with any of it.

“Yeah, I’ll feel different,” she said, and sank into one of the chairs recently vacated by a Peyti clone.

Willis smiled at her. He thought her little crisis was over. But she meant she would feel different forever, and he meant she would feel better.

She doubted there was any better ahead for her.

So it was time to seek different—whatever that meant.

Maybe if things settled down on the Moon, she might actually have time to figure all that out.

TWENTY-EIGHT

THE PLATFORM LOWERED, and Gumiela’s team marched through the throng of detectives. Nyquist scrambled to follow. He had to push past colleagues who were pairing up, saying, “Excuse me, excuse me,” by rote. The “Excuse me’s got loud when he started shoving, but still no one seemed to notice.

He got to the door that Gumiela went through just before it snicked shut. He put his hand between the frame and the edge of the door, pushing it open, and hurrying inside.

The room off the bull pen was an extension of Gumiela’s office. She had quite the set-up. It included a full office down the corridor, a larger meeting area, and this thing, attached to the bull pen. Her predecessor had called this the media room, but Gumiela generally met the media on the steps of the police department.

She felt that the department backdrop made everything she said all the more official.

Nyquist was always astonished at how Gumiela’s insecurities still played out, despite her high rank in the department.

She stopped near the door to the corridor, her black skirt swinging. Her red hair was piled high on the top of her head, wisps falling on either side of her face. The hairstyle made her look younger, and Nyquist remembered his thought about people who had the time to assemble themselves before this meeting.

Then he realized he had not seen Gumiela without makeup and perfect hair in years. This was the Gumiela equivalent of an unmade bed.

Her assistants had already left, probably going to set up the interrogation partnerships as the requests rolled in.

“Make it quick, Bartholomew,” Gumiela said, and if he hadn’t thought her tired before, he did now. She was exhausted.

“I was talking with some of the other detectives before the meeting,” he said, “and I think we might have a problem.”

“You mentioned that.” She glanced at the door leading to the corridor as if she could escape through it. “What’s the problem?”

“They’re going to treat the clones like property,” Nyquist said.

“So?” Gumiela asked, smoothing her skirt with her right hand. And then her hand stopped moving. Her mouth opened slightly, as she realized what he said. “Tell me exactly what you mean.”

“Clone law,” he said. “If these clones aren’t marked, aren’t registered, and did not come into city as clones, then—”

“I know clone law,” she snapped. “We’ve already decided to ignore it because we don’t have the ability to find their owners, if they do have owners.”

“But the law states that they do have owners,” Nyquist said, knowing he only had a few minutes of her attention. “Or, if they don’t, they’re not individuals, they’re
abandoned
property. As long as they’re logged in and as long as we keep track of them while they’re here, we’re not responsible for the condition they’re found in when their owner is located.
If
their owner is located.”

Gumiela cursed, and walked to the other side of the room. She put a hand on her forehead, as if she had the universe’s worst headache. Maybe she did.

“Tell me this is only a few rogue operatives,” she said, her back to him.

“Maybe it was before you put everyone together in the bull pen,” he said. “But I’ve heard it from a dozen sources so far. Detectives are talking about pairing up according to how they plan to treat their prisoners.”

He didn’t add that the only person he had had that part of the conversation with had been Romey.

“Son of a bitch,” Gumiela said. “I don’t want to delay these interrogations further.”

“I know, sir,” Nyquist said.

“Then you understand what kind of position this puts me in,” she said.

“I also know that we’re dealing with Peyti here,” he said. “They might have thought of this too.”

“They were suicide bombers who failed. They wouldn’t—” Then she stopped herself and looked at him. “Do you think they’ll goad detectives into killing them?”

He hadn’t thought of that, but it made sense. Most detectives didn’t really know how fragile the Peyti were.

“It’s possible,” he said. “They’re smart, sir. They were high-level lawyers. You can bet they know the nuances of the law better than we do. They also know that breaking property carries a fine, but it’s not a felony. No one will get in trouble for doing it.”

Gumiela swore a third time. “I didn’t need this,” she said, but not to him. She was speaking to the air, as if she just needed to vent.

Then her gaze met his. “We’re taking in the prisoners from the other domes.”

He almost said,
I was listening, sir
, but decided against it. Snark probably wasn’t appropriate right now. Besides, she was upset enough already.

“A trainload just arrived from Glenn Station. We’re going to need to do
something
, Bartholomew. These clones know who created them, they know who they’re working for, and as you said, they’re very intelligent. They can’t have been programmed,” then she raised a hand, as if forestalling a thought, “or, at least, I can’t believe they had been programmed. I know several of them. They couldn’t have been good lawyers if they were just working by rote, and from everything I’ve heard so far,
all
of them were good lawyers.”

He blinked, feeling a little surprised. Gumiela had been giving this a lot of thought.

“I suppose we can issue some kind of directive.” She was speaking more to herself now than to him.

“Or make harming them a crime,” he said.

“Oh, that’ll play well in the media,” she said, then put a hand over her face. “What am I going to do?”

He wasn’t sure if she was asking him or just speaking out loud. “You could bind them over for the Alliance to take care of.”

“And lose all the information they can give us,” she said.

“Do you actually expect a group of trained lawyers who willingly became potential suicide bombers to give up information, no matter how nicely we ask?” he said.

She paused, as if she were considering what to say, and then she shook her head.

“I don’t expect it,” she said. “But I don’t do my job based entirely on my feelings. I have to deal with the expectations of others as well.”

And, she was implying, someone higher up in the Armstrong Police Department expected results.

“Then let’s figure out a plan,” Nyquist said. “Your idea of pairing interrogators was good, but it didn’t take into account—”

“The blood-thirstiness of my troops,” she said, then sighed. “Which I completely understand.”