The Administration Series (29 page)

The initial interrogation took Parsons an hour and three quarters. Toreth resisted the urge to spectate on the screen in his office — watching other people doing his job, even very talented people like Parsons, always drove him mad.

"Anything?" Toreth asked, when Parsons came up to his office.

"No, Para." Parsons wasn't apologetic, simply matter-of-fact. In the eight years he'd known the man, Toreth couldn't remember hearing him sound anything other than calm and cold. His lined face and deep-set dark eyes were equally expressionless. "The same story as in the file, bar variations for errors in recollection well within standard limits."

Sign of someone telling the truth rather than well-rehearsed lies. "Damn. Well, there'll be a level three waiver coming through, so you can see if she'll loosen up for that."

Parsons nodded. "Yes, Para. However, I should tell you that I'm sure I'll be wasting a room booking. I can do her, no problem there, but she doesn't know anything she isn't already talking about."

Fuck. Exactly what he'd thought himself. "Are you sure?"

Parsons nodded again. "Positive. And for once, Justice is right that she's a fragile witness. She isn't a wreck, but she isn't so stable that I can fill her full of drugs and be sure she'll come out the other end exactly the same as she went in. If she's got good lawyers rather than a Justice rep, I'd prefer a level four, maybe five, before I'd even try the top-end level three drugs. Just thought you'd want to know, before I got started."

Toreth nodded. "Thanks. If that's your opinion — ?"

"Yes, Para, it is."

"Then I'll try something else."

Exactly what that would be, he thought as he watched Parsons leave, was a different question.

While he thought about it, he called up Tara's medical file, scanning through the psych section. Fragile fucking witness indeed. Just the kind of irritation he didn't need on a case that was already looking set to give him ulcers. Particularly annoying that Marian Tanit had pronounced her patient fit enough to return to work and to the sim. Shame she couldn't have glued the girl sufficiently back together for a decent interrogation, too. Not much of a cure, from that point of view.

Poised to page down to a new section, he stopped, attention caught by the diagnosis summary.

Not much of a cure. But how much was not much?

Toreth spent fifteen minutes searching through the I&I system, read a lot of things that stirred uninformatively hazy memories of interrogator training psychology courses, and decided he needed another opinion.

He opened the door to the outer office. "Sara, do you know what a dissociative state is?"

Sara looked round. "Nope. No idea."

"Me neither. Comes from being hung over for most of the nine o'clock seminars, I expect."

She frowned. "Sorry?"

"Nothing. If anyone wants me, I've gone down to Interrogation to find a psychiatric specialist who can explain it to me in words of two syllables or less."

At the time of the merger with Investigation, Toreth had been at the Interrogation Division for a year and he'd enjoyed his work. However, it hadn't taken him long to see where the brighter future lay. He'd worked hard to win a place in the first round of appointments for the newly created post of para-investigator, a job that theoretically combined the skills of both investigator and interrogator.

Interrogation was a profession that had certain basic requirements. Primarily, the ability to hurt people, sometimes kill them, and not care. Plenty of interrogators had applied for the para conversion course, and few had made it. The successful ones were on the more socially adept end of the spectrum — those who could be let near citizens of the Administration without the precaution of a damage waiver. At the time, Toreth had heard the term 'high-functioning' used.

Or, as Sara put it in her less tactful moments, the difference between paras and interrogators was that the former weren't quite so dead behind the eyes.

Parsons was a classic example of an interrogator, but they weren't all so icy. As Toreth explained his question to Psychiatric Specialist Senior Interrogator Warner, he found his mind drifting back to Sara's words. To be fair, the man was working — a prisoner sat slumped in the chair, head forward and hands limp in the restraints. Toreth himself was known to be tetchy when interrupted mid-interrogation. That said, talking to Warner was still hard work.

He had a combative stance, legs apart, heavy shoulders braced, leaning a little forwards. At the same time, his gaze kept flicking away from Toreth's face, searching the interrogation room, before returning to glare for a few seconds. Overall, it left an odd impression of aggressive disinterest.

"Who's feeding you that crap?" the interrogator asked when Toreth had finished.

"Crap?"

"That's corporate lawyer-spawned bullshit, that is." Warner snorted. "'My client wasn't in control of his actions, he didn't know what he was doing'. Tossers."

"Can it actually happen, though? Could Scrivin do things without knowing it? Several times — complicated things, with a long-term plan, and then forget about them afterwards?"

"Now
that
sounds like a DID. Dissociative Identity Disorder. An even bigger pile of steaming lawyer-crap." He spat the words out. "'My client embezzled a million euros and used it to fund a resister cell, but he did it in his sleep'. Pah. Bullshit."

Toreth sighed silently. "But is it possible? I was told you were the expert in this sort of thing."

Warner's eyes narrowed, and for a moment Toreth thought he would start demanding names. Then he shrugged quickly. "Sure, it's
possible
, in theory. Have you got the list of symptoms? Usually they wheel them out like they got them from the manual — that's how you know they're talking shit."

"So? What are they?"

"Presence of multiple distinct identities or personality states that recurrently take control of the individual's behaviour accompanied by an inability to recall important personal information that is too extensive to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness." Warner produced the definition in a monotone, staring past Toreth, before he looked back again. "And very expensive lawyers. That's usually a clue."

"It does happen, then?"

"Sometimes," Warner admitted reluctantly. "Rare as rocking-horse shit. I've seen maybe four in thirty-five years, and I get lumbered with all the real basket cases. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it's someone spinning a line to get out of here."

"How do you tell the difference?"

The man shrugged again. "Send 'em down here on a high-level waiver and I'll tell you in a couple of days."

Visions of SimTech lawyers rose like malevolent ghosts. "If I can't get a high waiver?"

"It'll take us a while longer. We're interrogators, not diagnosticians. Or — " Warner glanced away again. "If you're that keen, send the prisoner to Psychoprogramming and get a deep scan done. DID is only Nature's version of the reeducation crap they pull over there anyway." His gaze slid back. "But with the waiting lists they've got, you're better off here."

The prisoner stirred, and Warner looked over. "Looks like I've got company again."

"Thanks," Toreth said, taking the hint.

"Send her down," Warner repeated. "
If
she's a real DID, I can shove the results through the expert system when we've finished with her. They're so rare we're short of comparison data."

Toreth sat on his hands outside Tillotson's office, trying to keep still, until the section head called him back in. It had taken so long that he'd begun to think Tillotson must be getting somewhere. However, one look at Tillotson changed his mind about that.

"No luck?" Toreth asked.

The section head smiled sourly. "No. Psychoprogramming say that their priority is political, not corporate or ordinary criminal, so the request would have to be put through the system in the usual way."

"This case
is
political. Didn't you tell them that we have a murdered Legislator?"

Tillotson frowned. "Of course I did. Or rather, I told them that we have a dead Legislator. Murdered is a matter of speculation — unless you have some information you haven't shared yet?" Toreth had to shake his head. "I'm sorry, Toreth. I'll do what I can to shift them, but I can't promise anything."

Toreth sighed. "Thanks, anyway."

The man was a waste of good oxygen, Toreth mused on the way back to his office. In fact, you could take every Administration official at Tillotson's level or higher and sink them in the North Sea and it would only improve Europe. Not to mention break a slew of intercontinental treaties regarding toxic waste.

The idea generated a small smile of satisfaction, not least because, if you had the right kind of petty mind, it was treason. If he'd said it out loud in the coffee room, it could be incitement to discontent. It wasn't, of course. He was anti-moron, not anti-Administration. Not his fault if the two often coincided.

Tillotson probably would try his useless best. However, Toreth didn't have weeks to hold Tara Scrivin until Psychoprogramming could get round to formally rejecting his application because it had a spelling mistake in the prisoner's name on page ten. He'd have to see what a little sweet-talking could achieve.

Psychoprogramming had been created at the time of the reorganisation, stealing experts away from many divisions. Int-Sec made a natural home for them, but they were one of the more clandestine divisions. Unlike I&I, they had no public contact numbers, nor access for private legal representatives to bother them over the fate of the majority of the unlucky citizens who crossed their threshold.

Toreth scanned his ID at the unmanned minor entrance and was let through the heavy security door. The solid sound of the door closing behind him gave Toreth no more than a momentary twinge of unease — Mindfuck might be departmental rivals, but they were Administration colleagues.

Colleagues who were doing very nicely, or so it looked to him. None of the buildings in the Int-Sec complex was more than a dozen years old, so there was no reason that the place should seem so much sprucer than I&I. Toreth suspected that one reason Mindfuck were so secretive about their techniques was to hide the fact that most of the time they did fuck all.

If they were really so fucking busy, where did they find the spare budget for fresh paint and new carpets?

Certainly it was quieter than I&I. Still, like I&I, the detention levels were underground, and they were probably noisier than the admin areas. He passed a door marked Research, where a serious and heavily armed guard watched him pass. Toreth's lip curled. Pretentious wankers — who the hell were they expecting, here in the middle of the Int-Sec complex? Packs of armed resisters come to find their friends?

Finally he reached his goal and stuck his head round the office door. "Ange, my darling, can I have a word?"

The senior administrative assistant to the head of the Psychoprogramming Division was putting her coat on.

"What do
you
want? Make it quick, whatever it is — I've got an appointment."

Not a promising opener. Toreth made it a policy to keep on the good side of all the senior admins and he'd been hoping for a better reception. Ange was a favourite because, as well as making a useful contact, she was married but not
very
married. That gave him an easy way to keep her friendly, as well as to fill the occasional lunch hour.

Had he remembered to call her after the last time?

He sat on the edge of her desk, to get his eyes lower than hers, and gave her his patented admin-melting smile. She looked resolutely unimpressed.

"I wanted to talk about booking an m-f . . . about booking a psychoprogramming session with one of your esteemed and preferably discreet colleagues," Toreth said.

"Did you fill in a request form?"

"Ange, sweetheart . . ."

"No form, no session. Anyway, we're booked up two months ahead for externals."

By which time the SimTech funding would be history and the case effectively over. He inched closer and cranked the charm up a notch. "I'll make it worth your while, I promise. Dinner? Somewhere nice?"

"Well . . . there might be a couple of cancellations, I suppose. "A smile indicated a slight thaw as she sat down at her screen and switched it back on. "All right. I could reschedule a few people. There's an afternoon slot in three weeks' time — that's absolutely the best I can do."

Still too late. "I need it now — first thing tomorrow I'm going to have corporate lawyers crawling all over me."

Absently, she reached out and rested her hand on his thigh. "Lucky lawyers. But I can't do any better."

"Okay." If that was the best he could get, he'd have to take it. He hoped Tillotson could come up with something better, and that SimTech's lawyers wouldn't be too tedious. Neither of those sounded like good bets.

"What's the prisoner ID code?" Ange said.

"She's not a prisoner, she's a witness."

She smiled archly. "And you mean to say your silver tongue's not silvery enough to get her to talk?"

He grinned briefly and touched the centre of his top lip with his tongue. "What do you think? Anyway, that's not the reason. She's talking, all right, but I think she's not remembering what happened."

Ange's eyes narrowed. "Illegal memory blocks?"

Not quite what he'd meant, but he liked the reaction. "Just a suspicion. If it's not a memory block, I don't want to waste weeks chasing it up. All I need is a scan to look for a block or other evidence of tampering — no deep poking around or reprogramming."

She gave an exaggerated sigh. "And I suppose you don't have a damage waiver?"

"Indeed I do — level three witness."

"Is that an I&I witness waiver or anything good for over here?"

"Ah."

She sighed again. "All right.
If
you can get her to consent — signed forms, mind, and no drugs before she signs them — then I can squeeze in an extra session later today. I'll book it in as a recalibration, so no one will ask any questions about queue jumping, and I'll ask Seiden to stay and do it. But you might want to consider taking
him
out for a meal as well."