Nexus: Ziva Payvan Book 2 (32 page)

-69-

Kat’s Hideout

Chaiavis

There wasn’t much settling to do, given the space available and the amount of equipment they’d brought, or lack thereof. It was decided that the three of them would stay there with Kat rather than return to the flophouse – Ziva was glad, as it was not only safer but they would actually have some supplies at their disposal. Kade had made himself at home at the tiny kitchen table upstairs, engrossed in his computer as he closed in on decrypting the files. The rest of them remained in the garage, with Kat and Aroska exchanging small talk and a bit of harmless flirting while Ziva perused the various shelves and storage boxes.

It appeared there would be adequate tools to properly modify her newly-acquired rifle, one more thing that brought her a bit of relief. There were still materials needed to create the custom ammunition for it, and certainly Kat would know the best places to find them. The weapon itself had already been laid out on the workbench and waited patiently for her to begin her work, surrounded by the other various parts Bosco had found for her. The main concern was the scope. Korberos rifles weren’t known for their range capabilities, but with a little work she would be able to increase it to her liking. Extending the range, however, would leave her with somewhat inadequate sights. It was better than nothing though, and she’d worked with worse.

Ziva removed a tiny blowtorch from the shelf and spent a moment examining it. “So what exactly do you do, Kat?”

“A lot of things,” the young woman replied, still giggling in response to some lame joke Aroska had just told. “I’ve been on my own for about seven years now, and I’ve spent that time doing whatever odd jobs come my way. A little bounty hunting here, some errands for the embassy there. Mostly I work as a fixer, with a slight twist on the popular definition. People say I’m a mercenary, hiring myself out the way I do, but in reality, all my time is spent helping people.”

Ziva set the blowtorch in the pile of other tools she thought she might make use of. “Where’d you get the kytara?”

There was silence for a moment as Kat contemplated a response. “I guess I could ask you the same thing,” she said. “I got it on my very first job after I left the embassy. My client’s brother was a Nosti survivor who got picked up by Federation police; I was paid to infiltrate his apartment and destroy all evidence of Resistance affiliation before the Feds searched the place. Not really sure why I decided to keep it; it was probably a stupid thing to do. I’ve practiced with it over the years and thought I’d gotten pretty good at it, but then you showed up and kicked my ass.”

Ziva couldn’t help but smirk. “I’ll admit you caught me off guard. You ever been exposed to nostium?”

“Hell no,” Kat replied, shaking her head. “The Feds are usually a little more lenient about kytaras. With a city the size of this one, it’s not uncommon to find somebody who took one off a dead Nosti back in the day or even tried to make one of their own. But if they do a brain scan and find evidence of nostium, you’re a goner. I’ve got enough on my plate as it is – don’t want to wind up on the Federation’s shit list.”

Ziva nodded and continued her exploration of the shelves. “So you’re a fixer.”

Kat hummed an affirmative. “A friend of a friend is in trouble with a drug cartel, or maybe they’ve got a debt to pay and someone’s not happy about it. I do my best to bail them out, or at least resolve the situation as peacefully as possible – for a price, of course.” She let out a good-natured scoff. “My last job involved one of the officers from the embassy – the guy got jumped in an alley, got his service weapon stolen. He was scheduled for promotion, but if his superiors found out about the theft, he would have lost his job. He’s got three little kids to support. So I tracked the gun down and got it back for him.”

“Sounds like rewarding work,” Aroska said.

“It is,” Kat replied. “It pays the bills, sure, but there’s nothing better than resolving an issue and seeing a person be able to breathe again.” She smiled gently, but the smile faded after a moment as she stared vacantly ahead. A flicker of some emotion Ziva couldn’t pinpoint flashed across her face, but it was gone just as fast as it had appeared.

Wondering what it meant, Ziva continued her circuit around the room and paused in front of the heating panel. The shelf mounted above it was smaller than the others and contained various items that appeared to be mementos rather than tools. One in particular caught her eye, an older model data pad with a familiar Haphezian style to it. Odd, considering Kat hadn’t set foot on the planet since birth. Ziva picked it up and turned it over in her hand. “What’s this?”

For a moment Kat seemed almost defensive, leaping from her place on the sofa, but she carefully took the device and looked it over herself. “I’m not entirely sure,” she answered. “It’s from home, that’s all I know. It was sent to me care of the embassy about three years ago, with no note and nothing else stored on it. I’ve been tempted to throw it away several times now, but I always figured if it came from home it had to mean
something
.”

She held the data pad out and Ziva found herself viewing what appeared to be a map – of what, she had no idea. The path was long and winding, represented by a thin yellow line against a gray background. Other than some headings indicating north and south, there were no other symbols or written instructions.

“You said you got this three years ago?” Hearing the words from her own mouth struck a chord in Ziva’s mind and she took a moment to process what she’d just said. Dasaro. Argall.
Three years. “It has been three long years – almost to the exact date – since this happened.”

She shook her head when she realized Kat was speaking. “That’s when I first got curious about home,” the young woman said. “Well, I’d always been ‘curious,’ but I’d never taken any action. I figured if they got rid of me, they probably had no interest in hearing from me.”

“And suddenly someone showed interest,” Aroska said.

“Exactly,” Kat replied, “only I never figured out who. With such limited access to databases and records, it was hard enough finding anything out about Argall itself.” She paused, forcing a scoff and adding a sad wag of her head. “I’ve never even been there, and after all these years I’m still calling it home.”

It suddenly struck Ziva how absurd the whole exile rule was. Here was a person who, other than having different colored eyes and hair stripes, had absolutely nothing physically wrong with her. Here was a person who would have made a fine soldier in the Grand Army or a field agent at HSP. Ziva remembered the problems Skeet had had as a boy, what with the abnormal coloring pattern in his hair. The final verdict had been that since the orange was consistent with his eyes he would be allowed to stay, though to this day there were some people who still questioned why he hadn’t been sent away. Those people – the ones who held prejudices against the Defectives – vastly outnumbered those who didn’t, the reason people like Kat and Bosco were still unwelcome on their homeworld.

In a sense, they’d all been banished for various reasons. Kat: because of a genetic flaw that made her appearance unsatisfactory. Ziva: murder, allegedly. Kade and Aroska: in danger of returning home because of knowledge they held – knowledge of her innocence. Perhaps Kat had recognized this pattern and that was why she had opened up to them so quickly. Perhaps, in a way, Ziva understood how Kat felt and that was why she decided then and there to trust her wholeheartedly.

“Well, you must have found something of interest if you were calling on me for help.”

Kat’s eyes brightened a bit, taking on the same mischievous quality Zinni’s often did when she discovered a new clue. She took off up the stairs and returned so quickly that Ziva wasn’t sure how she could have possibly had time to retrieve the second data pad she now carried.

“I was never able to talk to anyone in Argall. I don’t know if it was a problem on my end or theirs, but my transmissions would never go through. I did find these, though.”

Ziva leaned in to examine the data pad and Aroska stood up to get a look for himself. The screen displayed what appeared to be a list of four death records, one of which was from only a few days earlier. Each of the deceased bore the same surname: Reilly.

“Your family?” Aroska asked.

“Apparently. Argall’s not a very big place, and according to some census records I found, there’s only one Reilly clan that has ever lived there. This man here must have been my father. He and the girl, my sister, were killed three years ago. One of my brothers died a few months later. And my mother? She was killed just a few days ago, around the time Tachi was assassinated.”

It was all Ziva could do to formulate a sentence as the words “three years” bounced around inside her head again. “Why do you say ‘killed’?”

“I thought you would never ask,” Kat said, growing more animated by the second. How someone could be excited about the deaths of family members was beyond Ziva… until she remembered she’d never met the people.

“According to these reports, they all died in a series of mine explosions that each claimed multiple other lives. Since Argall is a mining town, everyone works in the mines. Accidents happen. That sounds reasonable, right?”

Ziva and Aroska exchanged a glance, knowing better than to agree.

“If there had really been explosions in the mines, it would have stymied the flow of niobi crystals to the military and the research centers,” Kat rattled on. “At no point during the past three years has that happened.”

“Three years,” Ziva echoed, doing her best to stay focused on the current conversation and save her own thoughts for when she actually had time to think them. “So you think we’re dealing with some kind of cover-up?”

“I think they weren’t really killed in mining accidents, if that answers your question,” Kat replied. “And if they lied about the cause of death, there must be something happening that they don’t want anyone to know about. If all my family members are dead, that leads me to believe they were specifically targeted. According to those census records, there should be one Reilly left in Argall: my oldest brother. If they’ve killed the rest of them, I believe he’s in danger.”

“And that’s where I would have come in,” Ziva said.

Kat nodded. “It’s taken me months to gather this information. With such limited communication abilities, I just can’t work fast enough, let alone actually
go
there. I had hoped you’d be willing to go out to Argall and look into it – you would have been compensated, of course. But now here you are with problems of your own.”

Three years, three years, a hunch I’ve had for over three years now.
They had each stumbled across Argall as well as Dasaro’s name. By now it was clear that the captain was somehow responsible for the turmoil they were currently facing; had he somehow been behind the events that had occurred three years prior? “I’m beginning to wonder if these problems are really ‘my own’,” Ziva replied.

“What do you mean?” Aroska asked. “You think this is all connected?”

Ziva stopped rubbing her hand over her mouth long enough to answer. “I think it’s safe to say it’s more than a coincidence that Dasaro’s name has come up for both of us. We found information on Argall three years ago, and we’re finding it again today. Now’s not the time to be jumping to conclusions, though. We need facts.”

As if on cue, Kade appeared on the stairs, toting the data pad Aroska had been using to review Ziva’s case files. His sagging shoulders told her he had yet to conquer Zona’s encrypted files, but the faint glimmer in his eyes said he’d at least found something of some consequence.

“I have some news about the accident that killed the medical examiner,” he announced, holding up the data pad which now displayed the contents of one of the RG files.

When he had their attention he continued down the steps, starting out with a few background details to familiarize Kat with the situation. “I managed to get into one of the smaller files,” he said. “It looks like the HSP office in Haphor recovered what was left of the faulty bot pilot and had the results sent to the RG office.”

“
What was left
of the bot?” Ziva repeated.

“That’s right,” Kade said. “According to witnesses and footage retrieved from the traffic cams, that crash wouldn’t have actually been enough to destroy the bot the way it did. The damage was more consistent with an engine fire or an electrical malfunction, neither of which happened. The lab discovered traces of explosive material around what used to be the bot’s memory core, explosives that would have to have been triggered by an outside source.”

“Sounds to me like someone is trying to cover their tracks,” Kat suggested. “I’ve dealt with my fair share of people trying to erase evidence.”

“But what evidence would they be trying to erase?” Aroska said. “That they programmed the bot to target Eason Fromm’s vehicle?”

Kade shrugged. “Possibly. With the memory core destroyed, it’s impossible to tell. And I’m sure that’s exactly what they wanted.”

“And they’d want him dead because he knew the truth about the man who died?” Kat confirmed. “Agent Spence?”

“Right,” Aroska answered. “And they killed Spence because he was starting to believe Ziva was innocent, which is why they’re hunting Kade now.”

As she stood there listening to them putting the pieces together, Ziva couldn’t help but recognize the chain reaction she had set off. Ever since her arrest, it seemed as though anyone who had gone to the trouble of defending her was either dead or running for their lives. She hadn’t meant for that to happen, and she hated to think of how they had all been dragged into this struggle against their will. It almost would have been easier if nobody believed her, enabling her to work on her own and clean up her mess without spreading the poison to everyone she came in contact with.