The Administration Series (130 page)

After two hours, Toreth stopped to consider his approach. The prisoner sat in the interrogation chair, only a short step from incoherence, his dark head hanging forwards, and still he wouldn't give up the names. Toreth had a very good instinct for this sort of thing, and he knew it would take an inconveniently long time to break this one. Rungren knew full well the consequences of confessing and like many of the inexperienced prisoners that passed through I&I, he still held on to the delusion that not talking was a serious option.

If Kemp had time to wipe out all his connections to the operation before they could issue an arrest warrant — or worse, had time to run — it would be infuriating. With the rest of the organisation there for the taking, he and Chev would still have a case, and a good one, but for once that wasn't what Toreth wanted.

He wanted the bastard to feel the gun against his back and know there was no way out. To know this was the end.

Dismissing the thought, Toreth decided to move on to a different drug family. He knew he was pushing too hard, because he desperately needed the result, but it was worth the small risk. The needle slipped easily into an already impressively punctured vein.

As Toreth dropped the needle into the clinical recycling, he heard a choking gasp.

A quick glance confirmed his worst fears. "Oh, fuck — he's fitting." Toreth hit the medical comm frequency. "Team to D503. Priority."

Then he automatically went into the emergency procedures, training carrying him past the brief panic. The guards helped him get the convulsing body onto the gurney. The three of them held Rungren down and by the time the medical team arrived to take charge, the fits had nearly stopped.

As the medics began to work, Toreth sat down at the table, feeling more than a little shaky, his wrist aching fiercely from the effort to restrain Rungren.

This wasn't the kind of prisoner whose loss could be chalked up to bad luck and let go with a quick investigation by another senior. Section-head-level Administration employees didn't die without a good reason, and Internal Investigations could come down on him like a tonne of bricks. There would be a full-blown enquiry and the DoP would push it every step of the way. Worse, if Rungren died without confirming his guilt, the link into the DoP would be cut off.

There'd been nothing in the prisoner's medical file to suggest the possibility of an adverse reaction to a perfectly ordinary drug. Damn Central Medical Services and their fucking awful record keeping, but he'd be the one who'd get the blame.

One of the medics approached and Toreth looked up with his best professional face firmly in place. "Well?"

The man shook his head. "Fifty-fifty is the best I can give you, and I doubt he'll be talking if he does pull through."

Damn, damn and double damn.

"Is he conscious?" he asked, hoping desperately.

"For now. Not for very long." The medic's eyes narrowed. "If we don't take him down soon, he'll die for sure."

"I'll take responsibility." Toreth moved over to the table and started selecting more drugs.

The man followed him over. "And he'll die a hell of a lot faster if you put that shit into him."

"I'll take responsibility," Toreth repeated clearly. "That'll be on record. Now get out and let me work."

"All right. It's your funeral." The medics cleared the room, keen to disassociate themselves from the looming failure.

After a minute or two, the mix of stimulants and more exotic drugs did their work, and Rungren focused weakly on his face.

"Listen to me." Toreth spoke quietly. "Can you hear me? You're dying."

His eyes widened. Yes, he could hear.

"You don't want to die, I know. But if you won't help me, there's no point my doing anything for you. Give me the names, and I'll get help for you."

He shook his head, but Toreth could taste the fear coming from the prisoner in waves. If he only had time, he'd give it up.

"We've already got names from someone else in the scam. All I need from you is confirmation of the people you took orders from and who else in the department knew about it. It's much too late for silence to do you any good."

He spared a glance for the monitors around the gurney. Fuck, this was cutting things fine.

"Give me the names." He touched the prisoner's hand lightly, adding the emphasis of physical contact to his words. "Give me the names and you can live."

Finally, confused and alone and so very afraid, Rungren did.

Kemp was the first one.

More prompting persuaded him to go through the list a second time, omitting a few of the names and giving a few more. A third run through was all Toreth got before the monitors flatlined, but that matched well with the first two.

Toreth sat down in the chair again, feeling almost as shaky as before. Then he smiled. Oh, yes. Success. Fucking success. The prisoner's death meant less now — unfortunate, and there'd be an enquiry, but the DoP would bury it now the corruption there was confirmed. They'd be eager to help and get it all over with as quickly as possible.

Without a glance at the motionless body he had to thank for this happy prospect, Toreth went off, whistling, to submit a warrant for Kemp's arrest.

Fifteen minutes later, he was still in Tillotson's office, and no longer feeling like whistling.

"I should have been kept informed." Tillotson was twitching with anger, intensifying his already startling resemblance to a ferret.

"I'm sorry. There wasn't time."

"Don't give me that. You have a duty to inform me of a new investigation in progress."

"The report was submitted." Toreth tried for innocent surprise. "On Tuesday, I think."

Tillotson looked down at his screen for a moment. "Yes . . . well. For a suspect as important and politically sensitive as Gil Kemp, I should have been informed in person."

'Memo me', as Sara would say. "I'm very sorry, sir — I've been busy. And now I need that warrant."

"No."

"I've got three independent interrogations giving Kemp's name. That's enough."

"One of which is from a senior and now extremely dead DoP official." Tillotson's nose twitched again.

"All inside the waiver. The drug reaction wasn't my fault. The interrogations are signed off and ready to submit to Justice."

"It's not good enough. Sudden accusations out of thin air. You're trying to tell me that Gil Kemp has been at the centre of this conspiracy for years — decades — and no one has noticed before now?"

Toreth struggled for patience. "We have the names of a network of people, medical and DoP. It all ties in."

"Then pull them in and question them. Show me some more evidence."

"If we do that, Kemp will have time to cut loose. By tomorrow morning, he'll have found out about the arrests we've made so far, if he hasn't already. He could even try to run for it. If he gets out of the Administration, we'll never bring him back, not with the kind of protection he'll be able to buy."

Tillotson leaned back in his chair. "Well, from the perspective of enforcing the law, does that really matter?"

When was the last time you gave a fuck about that? "Sir?"

"If Kemp does evade prosecution, it won't make that much difference to the outcome for us. The operation will be destroyed, we'll have the rest of those involved."

All without running the risk of arresting someone with powerful friends. "Except that you can bet there'll be no money to be found when Corporate Fraud finally start digging. The section won't get its cut of confiscated funds."

For a moment, he thought he'd got Tillotson. The visible struggle between fear and budgetary greed made an interesting spectacle. Eventually, though, the section head said, "No. You're reading too much into what you have. Show me something to back up the size of the operation, or the timescale you're suggesting, and I'll consider it."

Someone knocked on the door, loudly enough to make the point that the matter was urgent.

"Yes?" Tillotson called irritably.

Sara entered immediately, clutching a hand screen. Toreth tried to read her expression and failed. She had her admin mask firmly in place, which meant the news was either very good, or very bad indeed.

"What do you want?" Tillotson asked.

"I'm terribly sorry to interrupt, sir." She turned to Toreth. "Para, I have the file you asked me to find and I thought you'd want to see it now."

Toreth stared at her blankly. Taking a step sideways, so that he blocked Tillotson's view of her, Sara mouthed, "Kemp's file. From Warrick."

Thank fuck. He took the screen and scanned it quickly — she'd left it set to the relevant page. Despite the urgency, he read it three times, to make quite sure, then passed it to Tillotson.

"There you are — there's the history you wanted. Kemp was questioned six times over suspected illegal births at the hospitals he ran, but never with enough evidence to interrogate."

"I see . . . " Tillotson read the entries, clearly hoping for a reason to disregard them. "The most recent was thirty years ago."

"History's in the past. That's one of its defining features."

Tillotson looked up sharply. "Why is there nothing since?"

"Because after that he got rich enough to stop the skeletons rattling. If there were any suspicions, I expect that people were too gutless to follow them up." That earned him another blistering glare, which he ignored. "Will you authorise the warrant, sir?"

Tillotson looked down at the file again, then nodded. "You'd better be right about it, that's all. If it's a setup, if it's corporate dirty tricks and we've been pushed into carrying out someone's private vendetta for them, we're going to end up with a lot of explaining to do. No —
I'll
be doing the explaining.
You'll
be unemployed, if you're lucky."

Before Toreth set off for Kemp's house, he went outside the I&I building and called Warrick on his personal comm.

"Thanks for the file. You saved my fucking neck."

"My pleasure. I was filling in time while I did the other searches. It's harder to lose a file than people think. Archives are wonderful things."

"Do you have anything for the other thing?"

"A little. Starting from the accounts you gave me, the trail
looks
to stop with . . . the man in question personally, not his corporation. Something else that you'll like — there may well be other streams of euros flowing into the same system, from elsewhere in the Administration. All apparently originating in places where the corporation has interests in medical centres."

All his New Years and birthdays come at once. "Are you sure?"

"Some of it's guesswork. I have beginnings and an end, but I can't yet confirm some of the steps in middle. Give me a little more time, and I will."

"No, that's good enough." Perfect, in fact. "Send it all to Sara. It'll be logged as anonymous information and passed on to Corporate Fraud. They'll do all the confirming necessary. And — "

"Yes?"

How to make sure Warrick knew this was serious? "Stop looking right now. I mean it. However clever you think you can be, I don't want to risk you . . . it could blow the whole case if you get caught. Stop looking, and make damn sure Corporate Fraud aren't going to find any trace of you in there."

"Of course. I understand."

Toreth hoped that he did.

For once in his life, Toreth lost a bet with himself over Justice bureaucracy. They called Tillotson back three times to confirm that he really wanted to arrest Gil Kemp —
that
Gil Kemp, as in Kemp Incorporated? — but after that they processed the warrant and sent it back without another murmur. Tillotson brought it along to him in person, coming into his office and glancing round as though he'd always been vaguely curious as to how the peasents lived. The last time Toreth could remember him being there was during the Selman case.

"Here you are." Tillotson transferred the warrant to Toreth's hand screen, then stood looking at the screen for a moment before he shook his head. "I'm trusting you over this, Toreth, so don't disappoint me. I pulled a lot of strings to get it done quickly. If you go down over it, I go with you."

Then he left, before Toreth could think of anything to say.

Following Tillotson out of the office, Toreth found Sara staring after the section head.

"What the hell was he doing here?" she asked.

"Wishing me luck."

She looked round. "You mean . . . ?"

"Yes. It's on. Call Chev and tell him to get moving."

Chevril took most of their temporarily joint investigation teams to start making arrests of names from the hospital and the DoP. Toreth didn't care about them — tomorrow he would, but just now only Kemp mattered.

By the time Toreth was ready to go, there were fifteen people in the group. Most were systems techs, there to confiscate computer equipment in the house and start the search for evidence. He also took along a couple of investigators and four I&I security guards, more for the look of the thing than because he seriously expected any trouble.

He included a rep from Justice, because he wanted to make very sure that things went smoothly and there were no loopholes in the arrest for Kemp to squirm through later. The rep who arrived in response to his request was so young that Toreth wondered if she had in fact finished her training. She introduced herself as Marielle Chin. A sacrificial lamb, he decided, in case the arrest went wrong — once Justice realised the case was good, she'd be replaced by someone more senior, to take the kudos.

Toreth didn't bother to tell her that — let her have her moment. At least she was keen to help, and sufficiently overawed by the prospect of the big-name arrest that she wouldn't be a nuisance.

The guards at the gate of Kemp's mansion actually argued with them on the way in. They'd probably never had I&I there before, or even thought it would be possible. Once they had been convinced, Toreth took one along with him, to point the way to Kemp's room.