Masterminds (40 page)

She looked up at her team. “We’re going to need to section our dome, just in case. Rudra, that’s first. Then get me the leaders of the other domes. Just send out the order, all right?”

“Are people going to have warning this time?” someone asked.

DeRicci didn’t notice who questioned it. “Give them five minutes. Sirens, blaring lights, all that stuff. Let’s give people time to clear intersections and get to the part of the dome they need to be in. Quickly, though, all right?”

Half the people in her office nodded their heads. Flint didn’t. He was leaning toward Gomez. Nyquist was gesturing. He was clearly still trying to figure out who she was.

DeRicci turned her back on the crowd. She had to trust them to act.

She would tell the other dome leaders that they needed to section immediately as well.

She needed to tell them to examine their domes, that the threat was pretty clear, albeit difficult to thwart. She would also need to send the images of the originals to the dome leaders, but she wished she had a shorthand to help them search for the clones inside their domes. Before, she’d had one image. This time she had a hundred—literally.

She looked over her shoulder at Magalhães and that skinny guy she had arrived with.

“Did you notice any patterns with those originals?” DeRicci asked. “Anything at all?”

“Nothing we can use,” Magalhães said.

DeRicci let out a breath.

“They’re male.” The voice cut through all of the chatter. DeRicci didn’t recognize it. She looked near the main door. A strange-looking, middle-aged woman in clothes that didn’t quite fit her stood near the wall with her arms crossed.

“I told you to stay in the other room, Pippa,” Gomez said to the woman.

“You were gone for a long time,” the woman said. “And you left the door open. I’ve been watching from the hallway. The faces, the originals you pulled, they’re all male.”

DeRicci hadn’t noticed that but Magalhães nodded. So did the skinny guy.

“They are,” the skinny guy said. “All that means, though, is that we might’ve missed the females.”

“Or it might mean they’re all male,” Gomez said.

“Originals?” Flint asked.

“In a minute, Miles,” DeRicci said. She wasn’t going to get sidetracked.

She frowned as she considered what the group had just told her. She’d been thinking about clone patterns for a long time. The serial killers were a pattern. The Peyti clones embedded in society were a pattern. These people were embedded too, but they weren’t based on serial killers. They seemed to be clones of good citizens. But why males?

Then she realized the answer didn’t matter. What mattered was acting with the knowledge they all had, and searching for more knowledge at the same time.

“What we have is this,” she said, “we have one hundred originals, all human, all male, all born on the Moon. We use that. If we miss, we miss, but I’m pretty sure we have what we need.”

Everyone was looking at her. She felt stronger than she had in weeks, maybe months.

She had only a few hours, but a few hours were more than she had had during the Peyti Crisis, and definitely more than she had had during Anniversary Day.

A few hours was a damn luxury.

Or, at least, she had to convince herself of that.

And she had to convince everyone else too.

SIXTY-TWO

IT ONLY TOOK
a few minutes for Marshal Judita Gomez to catch both Flint and Nyquist up on what was going on. It would have taken less time, but Nyquist had decided not to trust her, and was quizzing her about all kinds of things.

Flint finally had to send a message across his links, warning Nyquist to tone down his inquisition. They only had a short time to act, which meant they even had less time to learn what was going on.

They didn’t know Gomez, but DeRicci had been right: they had to trust her. Her identification checked out—not that it mattered. Ostaka’s had as well.

Ostaka still leaned against the desk piled in trash, his head down. Flint suddenly felt a surge of irritation.

“Did someone block that guy’s links?” he asked Gomez, jerking his head toward Ostaka.

She cursed, and turned to one of the security staff. “Put a link blocker on that man.”

“I need to check with—”

“Put the link blocker on,” Flint said. “And right now, no checking. Just do your job. As the chief said, we have a very short window here.”

The man nodded, then went to a nearby desk where Flint knew a stash of individual link blockers hid. He had put some of them there himself.

“I hope we didn’t start something else,” Nyquist said.

“We need to trace his contacts,” Flint said, and then he shook his head. Nyquist was the person best suited to do that, but he had a lot of other things to do as well, maybe more important things.

He did, too. Now that Gomez had told them what was happening, he needed to tweak the program he had used to find all of the clones during the Peyti Crisis. He had already decided he would open a second version of that program and search for more human clones, without the criminal background.

And he probably needed a third program, searching for alien clones, which was ever so much harder.

He sent a message along his links to Kaz Issassi.
I need you in DeRicci’s office
.

He wished he could send for Talia too, but he wanted her away from all the trouble. Right now, he needed to concentrate. He had to believe she would be all right.

He moved to the computer system he usually used in DeRicci’s office and began his work. Immediately, he got thousands of hits on the already-known clones.

“Noelle,” he said, “there’s no way we’re going to be able to arrest all of these clones. No city on the Moon has the manpower for it.”

She waved a hand at him to shut him up. She was talking to the mayors and acting mayors of every domed city on the Moon.

“That’s a problem,” Gomez said from beside him.

“We’re going to have to release the information to the citizenry,” Flint said. “They’re going to have to isolate these people.”’

“Great,” Nyquist said. “Do you realize what we’ll be unleashing? We’re giving people the go-ahead to maim or murder their neighbors. And there’s going to be a lot of misidentification, a lot of panic—”

“You have a better idea?” Flint snapped.

Nyquist’s lips thinned. He clearly didn’t.

“I can release names and identification for most of these clones,” Flint said. “I’ve been comparing citizen records. We know who these people are, we just don’t have the ability to arrest them.”

“No android police in Armstrong?” Gomez asked.

Nyquist looked at her, clearly horrified. Flint wondered how long she had been away from the heart of the Earth Alliance.

“In most cities, androids are only allowed as guards in prisons,” he said.

Gomez nodded. “All right, then. I say release the names. If we get false arrests, and lose a few lives, it’s better than losing millions of lives.”

“Or a dome,” Flint said.

“Do we give everyone who commits murder today a pardon as well?” Nyquist asked.

His words echoed around the room. For some reason, most of the chatter had ended just before he spoke.

Flint shuddered. He was approving something he didn’t believe in. He hoped to hell no one pointed out that the murder of clones wasn’t considered murder in a single city on the Moon—not unless those clones had had a status change, like Talia.

“No,” Flint said. “We tell people to isolate these folks, but we don’t tell them that we’re having them search for clones. That’ll cut down on some of the violence.”

“You have a lot more faith in humanity than I do,” Nyquist said. “Particularly panicked humanity.”

Flint knew Nyquist had a point, but they couldn’t control everything. “We’re going to have to tell them that if they kill these people, they’ll harm the investigation into whatever’s going to happen in the domes. Tell them they’ll be destroying information.”

Nyquist shook his head. “Who is going to make this lovely announcement?”

“Me.” DeRicci had turned toward them. “You folks didn’t make it easy to talk to the heads of the domed cities. You were awfully loud. Anyone hear of link communications?”

“Sorry,” Flint said.

“Don’t be,” DeRicci said. “The heads of the domes are all panicked, and it’s all they can do to check the dome equipment and get their sections down. I’d already decided that I would send the information about the clones, and you two have just helped me with the wording. We’re going to tell everyone on the Moon that we know who the next attackers are, and they’ve been living among us, just like the Peyti clones did. Smart people will realize they’re dealing with clones. Everyone else will simply act.”

“Do you want to do this by dome?” Flint asked.

“Meaning what?” DeRicci asked.

“I’ve got names and images. It would take nothing to isolate where they live, and when Officer Kaz Issassi gets here, we should be able to find where these people actually are.”

“You can do that quickly?” DeRicci asked.

“I can do part of it quickly,” Flint said.

“Then do it,” she said. “We need to move
now
.”

SIXTY-THREE

THE ENTIRE BUILDING
shook, and dozens of lawyers looked at each other, clearly startled. Salehi grabbed a nearby desk, only to feel it scoot away from him.

He had forgotten: he was on the Moon, and nothing here was bolted down.

“What the hell was that?” he asked Melcia Seng. She had run S
3
in the days since Zhu’s murder.

She shook her head. Her dark eyes were wide, her back stiff. “I have no idea.”

“It’s the dome sectioning,” said one of the private security guards who stood near the door. He was a beefy man with a jowly face. Salehi had taken one look at the guards he had hired after Zhu’s death and had decided to find a different firm. Half of these guards were out of shape, and the others seemed too small to be effective.

“Dome sectioning,” Salehi repeated.

“The domes section when there’s a potential threat,” said Uzvuyiten. “Haven’t you lived in a domed community, Rafael?”

When Uzvuyiten used his most sarcastic tone, he seemed even more condescending than usual.

“No,” Salehi said. “I haven’t.”

He had lived a lot of places, mostly on space stations or starbases. He’d also lived on Earth for several glorious years. But never in a domed community.

“The dome sectioned on Anniversary Day,” said one of the lawyers that Seng had brought with her or that Zhu had hired. One of the lawyers who was already in the S
3
offices when Salehi had arrived half an hour ago.

After he and his staff had their initial dust-up in the Port of Armstrong, they made their way through the city with little incident. Cars Seng had hired for them brought them directly to S
3
’s offices, as Salehi had instructed.

Once they arrived, he wondered if they should have gone to the apartments that Seng had rented for them first, giving everyone a chance to freshen up. He had noticed a thread of tension running through the entire group, probably from the port encounter, and he wanted to ease it.

He had been about to announce a break until the next day when the building had shaken.

“Shouldn’t we get some kind of announcement when the dome sections?” he asked.

The security guard shrugged. “There’s warning bells and stuff for people near the sections, sometimes, if there’s time.”

“Anyone monitoring the media?” Salehi asked. “Do we know why the domes have sectioned?”

“There’s just been an announcement about some kind of dome check,” one of the staffers said.

The guard glanced at another guard, seemingly uneasy.

“What does
that
mean?” Salehi asked.

But before the guard answered, images flooded Salehi’s eyes. The images came through his emergency links.

If you are near these people,
blared an androgynous voice,
detain them. They plan to attack the Moon in the next few hours. Make sure they have no weapons or explosives and no access to their links. Notify authorities once the prisoners are secure. Time is of the essence here.

Then the message repeated itself, and strangely, it did not warn the people who received it to take care of themselves.

The images continued scrolling, and one of them lit up as his links registered a match.

The guard who had told him about the sectioning.

The guard looked alarmed. He glanced at everyone, then bolted out the door. Half a dozen associates followed, along with Salehi, who was closest.

He sprinted, reached the guard, and tackled him, sprawling across the tile floor, feeling the skin scrape off his elbow.