Masterminds (23 page)

Maybe he should go to Andrea Gumiela and ask to be taken off the Zhu case.

But he knew what Gumiela would say.

She would tell him she didn’t trust anyone else.

Because she had told him that before, when he tried to talk his way off the case after she had assigned it to him.

Someone had to investigate Zhu’s death.

And apparently, that someone was Bartholomew Nyquist.

THIRTY

PIPPA DIDN’T RECOGNIZE
the woman she saw in the reflecting doors at the United Domes of the Moon Security Office. That woman had short, reddish hair and a careworn face with a frightened expression. Pippa recognized herself only by the distressed cotton shirt she wore over dark blue pants.

The inside of the building was shadowed so she couldn’t see where she was going, and that alone nearly made her turn around.

But now, the midwestern politeness, drilled into her when she married her husband, kept her going. She had contacted a woman inside this office, a Rudra Popova, who was expecting her. This Popova woman sounded a bit hesitant about meeting Pippa, but this Popova had said that Pippa should come to the building.

So Pippa had.

She stepped inside, her heart beating so hard she thought maybe she was having some kind of attack. She made herself breathe. She was shaking.

She almost felt like crouching and running, then recognized the feeling. She had spent more than a year ready to bolt at the wrong kind of glance, the wrong person standing in a corridor.

That had been when she was Takara Hamasaki. Takara was back, not the courageous woman who had rebuilt her life, but the terrified woman who had run from place to place until she finally felt safe.

Pippa half-cursed herself. She wanted the courageous part to show up, not the scared rabbit-woman.

She made herself focus on the lobby. It was empty—at least as far as she could see, and she knew she wasn’t seeing all of it.

The high ceiling felt fake, the lack of furniture was unnerving because she couldn’t blend in with it.

She was in the middle of the entrance and she knew everyone inside of the building could see her, and she couldn’t see them.

She almost bolted again, but common sense stopped her this time: They had seen her. She was on the security feed.

It wouldn’t take much work to figure out that she had been the woman who contacted this Popova person. And then the security office could track Pippa to her hotel and from her hotel to her shuttle, and from her shuttle to her home on Earth.

She was committed now.

She took one more step forward, and the wall shimmered in front of her. A gender-neutral avatar appeared and Pippa jumped.

She clenched her hands into fists, concentrating on the pressure in her fingers. She couldn’t will herself to be calm, but she could will herself to be calm
er
.

State your business
, the avatar sent to her.

She bit her lower lip, glad she didn’t have to speak out loud. She wasn’t sure her voice would work.

My name is Pippa Landau. Rudra Popova is expecting me
.

The avatar vanished. The wall in front of her disappeared entirely. The lobby extended before her—a
real
lobby, with furniture, and human guards, and corridors off to the side.

That should have calmed her more.

It didn’t.

The female guard approached her. The woman was taller than Pippa and muscled—real muscles, not enhancements (or, at least, it looked that way to her).

“Ms. Landau, Assistant Chief Popova will join us in a moment. In the meantime, please accompany me away from the door.”

A lump lodged in Pippa’s throat. She couldn’t speak if she wanted to, so she nodded instead. She followed the guard to the side of the room, where there was tall piece of furniture too wide to be a podium, but not really an actual desk. Some kind of guard station.

Pippa folded her hands together, because otherwise she would have to grab the guard station for support. She didn’t want to do that. DNA.

Then she closed her eyes for a brief second.

Transferring DNA didn’t matter at all. Here in the Earth Alliance, her DNA identified her as Pippa Landau. Outside of the Alliance, a deep search of the DNA (not a cursory search) would have identified her as Takara Hamasaki.

The caution she felt was deep in her bones. She had to remind herself that it didn’t matter, at least not today.

She was going to tell the people here—the
strangers
here—exactly who she was.

As she stood there, a shadow fell over the door. Apparently the security system had activated again.

“My God, what is this?” the female guard asked the male guard. “No one ever comes here.”

He shrugged, and seemed to be watching some kind of monitor. At that moment, a ding sounded behind Pippa.

The female guard put a hand on Pippa’s shoulder, and she stiffened at the touch, but didn’t move away. Then she silently cursed herself. Her reflexes had deteriorated. If something had startled Takara like that, she would have been halfway across the room in a nanosecond.

“Come with me,” the guard said. “Assistant Chief Popova will see you now.”

Pippa’s heart was pounding. She nodded again. She wasn’t just acting like a scared rabbit; she knew she looked like one.

The guard led her down one of the corridors. She passed a bank of elevators, one of which had doors that were just closing now. So that ding had been an elevator? Or a notification to the guard that Pippa could hear?

The guard opened a door not far from the elevators. A woman not much taller than Pippa stood inside. The woman had long, black hair, and looked so tired that Pippa wondered how she could even stand up.

“Ms. Landau?” the woman asked.

Pippa nodded. She still wasn’t sure she could talk.

“I’m Rudra Popova. I work for the Security Office here at the United Domes of the Moon. I understand that you have some information to share?”

Pippa nodded again. She tried to clear her throat, and found she couldn’t. She glanced at the guard, who was watching them.

“I can take this from here,” Popova said.

“Are you certain?” the guard asked. “Because—”

At that moment, Popova raised a hand, interrupting the guard. Popova’s eyes glazed. She was clearly communicating on her links.

Pippa swallowed hard.

Popova’s eyes focused again, but she was looking at the guard. “We have yet another visitor,” Popova said. “If she makes it through the secondary vetting, take her upstairs.”

“Yes, sir,” the guard said. “But don’t you want—?”

“I’ll be fine,” Popova said in a tone that was so dismissive, Pippa cringed.

The guard glared at Pippa then pulled the door closed.

Popova pivoted, her hair moving around her like a coat in the wind.

“As you can imagine,” she said in a much softer voice, “things have not been the same here for months.”

Pippa nodded, felt stupid, and made herself take a deep breath. She swallowed involuntarily, but her throat didn’t feel as constricted after that.

“I’m…um…sorry to bother you,” she said, then she almost smiled. Raymond would have appreciated that remark. Midwestern to the core. Begin with an apology, partly to break the ice.

Popova didn’t respond to the apology. She just looked expectantly at Pippa.

Pippa took a deep breath to say something she hadn’t said face-to-face in decades.

“Here, in the Earth Alliance, I’m Pippa Landau, but really, I’m a Disappeared. I’m not fleeing alien justice. I haven’t broken any laws. I’m in hiding.”

Popova’s expression remained impassive. Pippa rubbed her damp palms on her pants. She had always expected a more dramatic reaction when she revealed who she was—a gasp, maybe, or a look of suspicion, maybe even a sympathetic comment.

But she wasn’t getting anything, just a person she didn’t know at all, staring at her.

She said, “I worked on a starbase in the Frontier. The local name for the starbase was Starbase Human, because the place deliberately catered to humans. I mean, aliens could land there and all, but they weren’t really
welcome
….”

Pippa let her voice trail off. She was babbling. She’d never expected to babble when she told this. In her imagination, she would speak clearly and forcefully, telling the story of her escape as if it were a grand adventure and something terrifying all at the same time.

“Um, anyway,” she said, stumbling as she switched gears. “The base blew up decades ago. I mean, it
was
blown up by a bunch of PierLuigi Frémont clones.”

Popova’s mouth opened slightly. Finally, a reaction from her.

“I think I’m the only survivor,” Pippa said, “but I don’t know. I believe I was being pursued by some more of those clones, but I’m not sure. Anyway, um, I’m pretty sure that was a practice event for your bombing here. On the Moon. And I thought, maybe, you could use it to track stuff down…?”

Two spots of color had risen on Popova’s cheeks.

“Give me just a minute,” she said, and then she left the room.

Pippa glanced around. She hadn’t looked at her surroundings before. A few chairs, a table with nothing on it, and a wall that clearly had no network built in. This room was designed for exactly what Popova had used it for—a preliminary investigation room.

Popova had closed the door, making Pippa feel like a prisoner. She paced for a moment, her heart still racing. She half expected someone to take her into custody. After all, she had just admitted to being a Disappeared, and inside the Alliance, most Disappeareds had broken actual laws—major laws, not identity laws.

But Popova hadn’t said anything about arrest.

Maybe, though, she had locked Pippa inside the room.

Pippa walked to the door, and pushed it. It opened easily, revealing the corridor outside.

She kept the door open just slightly. It was a psychological thing, so that she knew deep down that she wasn’t a prisoner here.

She had been terrified of being caught, imprisoned, and killed for so very long, especially after she had admitted who she was, that she was trembling.

Only she hadn’t said her real name, not at all.

She smiled just a little. She had always planned to reveal that. The fact that she hadn’t surprised her. The secrecy had become a reflex.

She wondered what Popova was doing. Was she checking the name of Starbase Human? Was she investigating Pippa?

Was she getting the guards?

Pippa didn’t know. But she was on this path now.

She had chosen it. She had chosen to help all of these people on the Moon, even though she didn’t know a one of them.

Her son had told her that the Anniversary Day bombings weren’t her problem. But they felt like her problem. They felt like they had always been her problem.

She had never talked to law enforcement about the base explosion. She had never done anything to get those clones captured or stopped or the clone creators imprisoned.

Maybe if she had…

She shook her head. Raymond used to say that what-ifs didn’t matter at all. What-ifs were a foolish way to self-flagellate.

Usually, she took his advice. But on this one, she couldn’t stop.

Maybe if these people caught her clones, she wouldn’t be so afraid all the time. Maybe the nightmares would go away.

Maybe she could really slide into Pippa Landau, and not be terrified that someone was going to drag her away in the middle of the night, taking her children too.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. As useless as what-if.

Rudra Popova leaned in the doorway. “Ms. Landau,” she said, “let’s go upstairs. Someone up there would like to talk with you.”

Pippa nodded. She was back to being a scared rabbit again. She didn’t ask who wanted to talk to her, because she knew nothing about the way things worked here on the Moon. The name would most likely be meaningless.

She was on the road now, the road created by her latest choice.

She just needed to keep moving forward, and see where this road would take her.

THIRTY-ONE

IN THE PAST
hour, all Flint had done was walk from one part of his office to another. He was deep inside two searches. The search into the Peyti Corporation that might or might not be named Legal Fiction was narrowing. He found numerous references to it on law school sites and in documentation concerning the Peyti lawyers back when they were law students.

But Flint couldn’t find the shipping addresses for the masks that the Peyti lawyers had received earlier in the year. The one-of-a-kind explosive masks had to have come from somewhere.

So far, every address he found turned out to be false.