Waypoint Kangaroo (32 page)

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“He lied to me,” Santamaria says. “That son of a bitch came to my home and sat at my table and lied to my face. And I believed him.”

He's sitting again and staring at the tablet, which Jemison has put down on the desk. I'm standing by the back wall, and Jemison is next to Santamaria's chair.

This isn't just a proverbial bombshell. This revelation is a ground-level nuclear detonation that changes the geography of the battlefield. We thought we were dealing with some national or planetary rival, someone trying to infiltrate and break down our defenses. We were wrong. This danger is in our own house, rooted in the highest levels of what we thought was our most secure stronghold.

These people already know all our secrets. So what are they trying to accomplish here?

I look at Jemison and am shocked by her expression. Her previous anger has evaporated, and she's watching Santamaria now with intense scrutiny—almost desperation. Her arms are folded across her chest, and her deep frown doesn't disguise the fact that tears have welled up in her eyes.

“So let me make sure I understand this correctly,” I say slowly, evenly, not wanting to perturb either Santamaria or Jemison too much. Some days my life depends on me reading a room and playing along with other people's moods, and I am acutely aware of being in that situation right now. “Director Sakraida asked you to sign that transport order, authorizing a sealed piece of cargo onto your ship. No inspection, no questions asked.”

“Not onto my ship,” Santamaria says. “Into the cargo container.”

“Sorry,” I say. “But you knew that container was going to be loaded onto
Dejah Thoris.
”

Santamaria nods. “That was the deal. I would make sure his cargo reached Mars. It would be unloaded and stored in lost and found, and he would send someone else to retrieve it.”

“So you have no idea what was in there.”

He looks at me with weary eyes. “I do not.”

Jemison coughs. “I want to believe you, sir, but this whole thing is—” She shakes her head. “Why would you do something like this?”

He looks up at her. “I'd do the same for you, Andie.”

“I would never ask.”

“I know.”

They stare at each other for a long moment. Then Jemison unfolds her arms and extends her right hand. Santamaria clasps his hand around her wrist, and she does the same to him. They grip each other for a long moment, exchanging some invisible communication through their touch.

“So who the hell is Jerry Bartelt?” I say. We don't have time for gratuitous camaraderie.

Santamaria releases Jemison's hand. She glares at me. He says, “Non-Territorial Intelligence. Bartelt reported directly to Director Sakraida.”

“And why did your old war buddy put him on this ship?” I ask. “He already had a suicide bomber—Alan Wachlin. Why send a second agent when you've already got one on the job?”

“Because Wachlin wasn't a professional,” Jemison says. “Sakraida didn't trust him with the details of our cargo arrangement.”

“So Bartelt's the one who cut into the container?”

“And extracted something to hand off to Wachlin.”

“Great. How do we find out what it was?” I ask.

“Security's already checking camera footage for suspicious activity.” Jemison taps at her wristband. “Nothing yet.”

“Wachlin was able to carry on a very large knife and a nuclear power supply,” Santamaria says. “Bartelt already had his personal electronics. What would they need to smuggle aboard that neither man could hide in his luggage?”

I point at the tablet on his desk. “That manifest doesn't say anything at all about the nature of the cargo?”

Santamaria hands me the tablet. “Maybe you can read between the lines.”

I scroll through the entire authorization document again, twice. There's very little information here, which is just how the agency likes it: the less data we record, the less there is for anybody to compromise. But the people on the ground do need to know certain things, and coded entries are an easy way to hide information in plain sight.

“Here.” I highlight part of the cargo manifest. “‘Approximate mass: 70.23 kilograms.' You don't use two decimal places for an approximation. That's got to be a coded reference number.”

“Doesn't do us any good without knowing the code,” Jemison says.

“And there are dimensions here,” I say, highlighting another set of numbers. “2.1 meters long, 70 centimeters wide, 60 centimeters high. If that's accurate, the box was pretty big.” I try to visualize it. “Big enough to hold a lot of things—”

“No.” Jemison's staring at the wall. “Big enough for one thing.”

Santamaria stands up, watching Jemison intently. “Chief?”

“Three hundred and forty linear centimeters,” Jemison says. Her eyes are glistening. “That's a military casket.”

I open and close my mouth. Jemison's file showed that she oversaw cargo operations for most of her time at Olympus Base. Her last three years there were during and immediately after the Independence War. And corpses count as cargo.

I can't imagine how many of those caskets she had to process for shipment back to Earth.

“I'm just going to sit down here for a minute,” I say.

“They needed somewhere to put that fake power core implant,” Jemison says as I sit, feeling lightheaded. “I'm going to bet that a DNA test will tell us we found Alan Wachlin's corpse in 5028. They cloned him—enough of him to look like a human body—so we would find the right number of corpses at the crime scene.”

“Doesn't it take a lot of time to grow a human clone?” I ask. I seem to recall Jessica ranting at Science Division about this a few years ago.

“They didn't need a working brain,” Santamaria says. “Just a body.”

He flexes his left arm, and another tattoo shimmers into being on the inside of his elbow: a caduceus encircled by pixel patterns. Muscle-activated medical inventory tag. That's not the arm he was born with. I wonder if any of his internal organs are also cloned replacements.

“We had to stop searching for him,” Santamaria continues, pacing in a tight circle. “They knew we'd be watching every single passenger closely during midway, to minimize zero-gee mishaps. Wachlin could only hide if we thought all souls on board were accounted for.”

“But they didn't need to kill his whole family,” I say, rubbing my temples. “Why didn't Alan Wachlin just fake his
own
death? Why would he need to burn the whole goddamn stateroom?”

“‘Need' is a strong word,” Santamaria says.

“You're saying he did it for fun?”

“Not exactly.” Santamaria stops pacing. “But Bartelt was
running
Wachlin. He was giving orders.”

My headache has abated slightly. I stand up. “That device we found in his closet. He was hiding comms inside the ship's existing network.”

Santamaria nods. “And inexperienced operators don't always follow orders to the letter.”

“So you're saying Wachlin went off-script, and Bartelt had to scramble to salvage the mission.”

“It's a common problem within terrorist organizations,” Santamaria says. “Zealots need to be micromanaged.”

“Bartelt did look pretty annoyed when Rogers visited him,” Jemison says. “Angry, even.”

“Okay, but we're saying D.Int is behind this. The
head
of Non-Territorial Intelligence. The man who runs all of the agency's surveillance and recon assets throughout the entire Solar System.” My headache's coming back. “If this
is
his op, he'll have contingency plans up the wazoo. He must have anticipated that either Bartelt or Wachlin would get captured.” I should stop staring at the captain. “He knew
you
were on board. Would he really think he could hide all this from you? And
why
? We crash into Mars and it's war. There's no other possible outcome. Who benefits from that?”

“Well,” Santamaria says, “I know someone we can ask.”

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Dejah Thoris
—Crew elevator

24 hours until we hit Mars and start another war

Jemison gets a call on her radio as our elevator descends to the lower decks. Santamaria and I exit the elevator when it reaches the holding area, but Jemison stays inside.

“I need to go work security,” she says. “Rumors are spreading. Passengers are panicking. Some don't want to get in the lifeboats. We need to break up the crowds before they turn into mobs.”

“Go,” Santamaria says. Jemison nods as the elevator doors close.

Danny and Mike are guarding Jerry Bartelt. Danny is in the corridor, just outside the door to the holding area, leaning against the wall. As soon as he notices Santamaria and me approaching, Danny steps forward and stands up straight.

“Captain,” Danny says. “Mr. Rogers.”

“At ease, Mr. Egnor,” Santamaria says. “Any trouble from the prisoner?”

“No, sir,” Danny says. “Mike's been checking in every five minutes. No problems.”

“Is that standard procedure?” I ask. I can't imagine drunk and disorderly passengers would merit that kind of constant attention.

“No,” Danny says, “but the chief told us to watch this guy real close. Said he's dangerous.”

“He is,” Santamaria says. “Open it up.”

Danny nods and taps his radio button. “Got two coming in, Mike.”

The door slides open with a pneumatic hiss—I note that it's not a simple hinged affair, which makes it that much harder to force open, and probably has an interlock to keep it closed even in case of power failure. It's almost as if Jemison expected she'd have to keep a dangerous prisoner in here at some point.

Bartelt's cell is at the far end of the compartment, the last of six small berths fitted with clear acrylic panels for doors. Mike is standing in front of that last cell, with his back up against the door and both hands clutching at his neck.

Santamaria mutters a curse and calls back to Danny. I rush forward and blink my eye into scanning mode. The Faraday cage disrupts active scan frequencies, but it doesn't stop the rest of the EM spectrum from showing through and registering on my passive sensors.

The transparent doors on these cells give a clear view of each holding cell, presumably to minimize the chances of prisoners getting up to too much mischief inside. Each clear panel has a series of breathing holes cut into it, making a dotted line across the midsection of each cell door. The holes aren't large enough to fit anything bigger than a writing stylus through—they're designed to be the only ventilation in the cell.

Despite all those safeguards, Jerry Bartelt was able to slip a loop of piezoelectric filament cord through one of the air holes and maneuver it around Mike's neck. I can see the glowing outline of the filament ending at Bartelt's right wrist. It must be a garrote implant, but I can't see the reel that should be under his skin.

That's when I realize: I can't see anything. On its current setting, my eye should be able to pick out most of the equipment that Bartelt must have surgically hidden in his body. There's got to be a computer core, a power source, and at least one comms package implanted somewhere, not to mention the garrote he's got around Mike's neck. But I can't see any of that.

It's not until I get closer that I notice it. There's a slight sensor shimmer all over Bartelt's body—an interference grid built into his skin itself, masking certain EM frequencies. I can see his biological heat map, but his implanted tech is camouflaged. I've heard Jessica and Oliver talk about Science Division working on ways to “cloak” a field agent's implants—it's one research area where their two normally disjoint areas of expertise overlap. There still isn't a way to do it without dangerous chemicals, unstable power sources, or both.

So either Jerry Bartelt's got toxic fibers surgically woven into his epidermis, or he's been given some exotic gene therapy that alters his body chemistry and will probably kill him before he's forty. In either case, my key takeaway from this bit of reconnaissance is that he's crazy, and the people running him are even crazier.

“Quantico?” Bartelt says. He's looking directly at me. Santamaria is just coming up next to me, with Danny close behind, his stunner drawn and aimed at the cell. He's got no hope of accomplishing anything useful with it, but I understand his need to do something.

“Are you talking to me?” I say, hoping to distract and delay him while Santamaria figures out how to deal with this.

“You're in Operations,” Bartelt says. “You've got the eye, a comms unit under your collarbone, and wireless implants in your torso. Where did you train in hand-to-hand?”

“Let me think,” I say. “Yeah. That would have been last week, in a cheap motel near Miami Beach, with your mother. She didn't have great control, but she did some very interesting things with her legs.”

This is not my finest hour.
I really hope you're thinking up a brilliant plan back there, Captain.

The only reaction I get from Bartelt is a slow grin that spreads over his face like an oil slick. “Open this cell or I cut his head off.”

I guess he's decided he isn't going to get anywhere talking to me. He's looking at Santamaria now.

“Then you'd be free,” Santamaria says, “and you'd kill him anyway.”

“Maybe,” Bartelt says. “Maybe not. Can you afford to take that chance?”

I have no idea what Santamaria's thinking, and that's a problem. We didn't come in here expecting to deal with a hostage situation, so we didn't have a plan. Bartelt, on the other hand, has had hours alone in his cell to think up an escape scheme.

Escape.
He wants to escape. That means—