Masterminds (20 page)

And she still had no idea what had set him off.

She walked back to the conference room. The meeting had to do with some high alert notice every employee in Alliance government had received because of the Moon bombings.

When the meeting began, the sense of controlled panic in that room had amused her, even though she couldn’t show it. Every employee in the Security Division seemed to believe that more attacks were imminent, and that the entire Alliance was at risk.

They were right.

They just didn’t understand why she had chosen the Moon as the prime target.

And she wasn’t about to explain it to them.

Even now, when the attacks hadn’t quite gone as expected.

Initially, she had hoped for more destruction on the Moon. Then, when the lawyers and the architects and the money people would have felt it was safe enough to show up and repair the Moon, the Peyti clones would initiate another attack. The third attack would come shortly thereafter, destroying what remained of the domes and anyone who responded, and making the Moon a desolate place.

The Alliance would scramble, because there would no longer be an easy way onto Earth.

And everyone would panic, searching for the perpetrators. Or, as they were calling her and her team now, the masterminds.

She loved that word “masterminds.” It made her seem much more powerful than she was.

She took a deep breath and reminded herself that even though the attacks hadn’t quite gone as planned, the Moon was still on edge. And the third attack would come soon.

She had seen nothing to show that the Alliance—or, indeed, the thorns in her side on the Moon itself—had any idea what or when the next attack would be.

They hadn’t yet figured out that she was exploiting the Alliance’s own disaster playbook: Clean up the mess, then rebuild with tighter security.

Remembering what she had done—and what she was about to do—calmed her.

She pushed open the door and stepped back into the conference room.

That sense of controlled panic felt like a buzz along her skin. She liked the way everyone looked at her, as if they were frightened of everything.

Twenty humans, all theoretically in charge of some major part of the Earth Alliance Security Division. They sat around the table like scared children, staring at her with big eyes.

For a moment, she thought the sound of the door opening startled them. Then she realized she had missed something.

Maybe it was the something Stott had mentioned.

“What happened?” she asked.

Jiannan Faizy, the head of the Human Section of the Earth Alliance Security Divisions Prisons Department, placed his hands firmly on the table. It took her a second to realize he had done that because his hands were shaking.

She didn’t know everyone in the room well, but she knew Faizy. She had recommended him for the position when she was promoted out of it.

He was trustworthy—or as trustworthy as someone who believed in the Alliance could be.

“We’ve been hit again,” Faizy said.

She frowned. The next attack wasn’t scheduled for hours. Who had screwed up?

“What happened?” she asked, because she knew better than to offer information in the form of a question. That was how suspects always tripped up. She wasn’t a suspect—not yet, maybe not ever—but she had to be cautious.

“They attacked Hétique City,” said someone in the back of the room.

Andre didn’t look at the speaker.

“What?” She wasn’t sure she had heard correctly.

No one was scheduled to attack Hétique City. The attacks were supposed to be on the Moon.

Were there copycats?

“Massive bombing run,” said Abija Rowe, the second in command in the Political Department of the Security Division. “From orbit, it looks like.”

Hétique City. Andre kept her hand on the door, more for support than anything else. Not the Moon. Hétique City was on Hétique, where the original clone factory was.

The factory she had used years ago. She hadn’t made the Armstrong clones there, but she had used the original clones of PierLuigi Frémont, created in that factory, to help her raise the Armstrong clones.

Well, she hadn’t exactly, but her people had.

She blinked. She wasn’t concentrating on what the group was saying.

“Orbit,” she repeated. “So no clones attacked this time?”

“Clones
were
attacked,” said Bosco Welker of the Legal System in the Security Division. She didn’t favor him with a glance either. His nitpicky nature had annoyed her before this meeting; she didn’t want to deal with him now.

“We have no idea who attacked,” said someone farther down the table. “They used all kinds of different ships.”

Andre was jittery now. Stott was right; someone was on their trail.

But no one in this room knew that. The brightest human minds in the Earth Alliance Security Division—at least at the System level.

She wondered what the actual Division thought of this, then decided she didn’t want to know.

She willed herself to be calm. Everyone here thought the attack on Hétique City was another attack on the Earth Alliance.

She could use that.

Her
group
could use that.

In the short term, anyway.

Long-term, Stott was right. They were going to be discovered, and they needed to plan for that.

If the Alliance held together after the next attack on the Moon.

She felt a surge of gratitude to those mystery bombers in Hétique City. Judging by the panic in this room, those bombers might have made the dissolution of the Alliance a lot easier. Panicked people made bad decisions.

She saw it every single day.

She sat down in the chair she had vacated when Stott screamed across her links.

She was much calmer now, but she didn’t want to show that. She wanted to add to the panic, not quell it.

“Unknown ships,” she said, rubbing her hands together the way that nervous people often did. “Has anyone contacted the Military Division?”

“Do you think we should?” Faizy asked, his voice shaking.

“The sooner we figure out what’s going on, the faster we can stop it,” she said, thinking that the faster they acted, the more likely they were to make a mistake.

The bigger the mistakes made inside the Alliance, the greater her opportunities.

“I think we need to contact the Human Coordination Department in Beijing,” Rowe said.

The last thing they needed was a cool head like Odgerel’s involved in all of this.

“I’m sure they know,” Andre said.

“I’m sure the military does as well,” Rowe said, a slight frown creasing her forehead.

“Let’s see if we can track those ships,” Andre said, ignoring Rowe. “Technically, it’s not my job to plan this. I’m not even sure whose job it is.”

Earth Alliance Security at this level was too scattered to address this kind of attack. That was one of the reasons she had planned actual attacks to shatter the Alliance.

For years, she had studied where the holes were.

Now, she was exploiting them.

And, apparently, she had help.

“We have to know the type of ship first before we figure out jurisdiction,” Welker said, bless his anal little heart. “If those ships came from outside the Alliance, then the pursuit does belong to the military. But if they came from inside, then the security police need to take this one.”

“Why didn’t Hétique City go after them?” Andre asked.

“I think their port was destroyed,” said a woman whose name Andre always forgot.

“I guess we better find out what actually happened,” Andre said, and leaned forward, her mind racing, preparing to slow the people in this room down while she scared them half to death.

She hadn’t expected this day to be fun. She had thought that kind of fun would happen on the morrow.

She settled in, ready to stir up some chaos, while she considered what else she needed to do.

TWENTY-SIX

FLINT WORKED AS
fast as he could. He had to get up every now and then to answer the pings his other searches sent him. Most of those pings were questions about refining the searches.

The other searches were going through reams of information, finding hundreds of shipments to the hundreds of Peyti clones on the Moon. The searches had found the first unique spot where the shipments came from, but that had been a false address.

Flint had set those searches to find the actual address, or figure out a way to track where the masks had come from. He hated that he didn’t have several assistants at the moment; he really was doing a half-assed job. He could never figure out how to set those searches to figure out which subtle piece of information was important and which wasn’t.

The other searches, for the corporation with the Peyti name that could be interpreted as
Legal Fiction,
were finding a lot of false positives.

“False positive” wasn’t the most exact phrase he could come up with, but that was how he felt when he looked at them. Apparently, a lot of Peyti corporations had the words “legal fiction” in their names—another sign of how upright almost all Peyti were.

Corporations
were
legal fictions, no matter what anyone said. The fact that the Peyti admitted it in so many corporate documents would have amused Flint under different circumstances.

At the moment, it merely annoyed him—and it distracted him from the investigation into Ike Jarvis.

Still, Flint had managed to find out a lot in a short period of time, things that looked suspicious once Zagrando had pointed a light on them. Flint had a hunch, though, that when Jarvis was alive, he had figured out a way to explain most of those things away—or he had the time to cover his tracks.

His death had prevented the last of the track-covering.

Someone in the Alliance had flagged Jarvis’s operational accounts within the last hour. Millions were missing, most of them moved from other operations. If Jarvis had been stealing money, it wasn’t showing up in his personal accounts.

But Zagrando had arrived in an expensive bullet ship that was part of a larger space yacht design. Had he taken the money? Was that why Jarvis was after him?

Zagrando had said their relationship was complicated. Who had stolen from whom? Had they both stolen from the Earth Alliance?

Flint’s shoulders tightened. He had sent his daughter to watch over Zagrando because, despite it all, he trusted the man. Had his trust been misplaced?

Then Flint took a deep breath. Even if Zagrando were malicious, he would have no reason to harm Talia. Zagrando had come to talk with Flint, and Talia would let Flint know when Zagrando was awake.

Besides, Zagrando was hurt too badly to harm anyone.

No one in the port’s medical unit would let him near weaponry, even if he were getting better.

Flint had made the right decision.

It was amazing to him, though, how quickly he could question his own actions, based on so very little.

He delved back into the information on Jarvis.

Jarvis’s time on the Moon was sketchy. It took a lot of digging to find a mention of Jarvis at all, and then it had been a surprising place—real estate records. In the name of the Alliance, Jarvis had rented or purchased a lot of property on the Moon over a decade ago.

Flint used those addresses to track Jarvis. Flint couldn’t find evidence that the man actually lived on the Moon, but he did stay in hotels near those properties.

And one of those properties showed up in police records.

A man had gone missing from one of the buildings eight years before. Digging around showed that the man was a suspect in several property crimes. But he had been flagged as dangerous.

Flint couldn’t quite figure out how someone went from petty vandalism and theft—property crimes—to being flagged as dangerous.

Then he dug into the allegations.

The flagger—who was anonymous—had stated that the missing man, Cade Faulke, was a suspect in the murder of dozens of clones. Clones were considered property, and their deaths weren’t considered murder. But the flagger had called Faulke a murderer and issued a warning:

Anyone who kills that many clones is probably a serial killer in the making
.

Flint disagreed. Anyone who killed that many clones
was
a serial killer. He had just found a way to make certain his behavior was ignored.

He tried to find a connection between Cade Faulke and Ike Jarvis, but aside from the building and the fact that the one-man office where Faulke worked looked like some kind of cover for intelligence behavior, Flint couldn’t find anything quickly.

He worried that he was slipping into a side investigation that would take precious time from the important investigation.