Part 28 (1/2)

Catlin frowned. ”That would be somewhat beyond us. Certainly outside the question of the card.”

”Except that Justin became the target of it, after they had a fight about the first Ari's procedures. I don't see a connection, unless he's aiming at something and wants to divert Justin into some scheme of his own. Maybe he really does hate Thieu. Or wants to sabotage Patil, just for spite.”

”Or for profit. Profit would be a reason,” Catlin said. ”A re-contact with old networks. Former alliances. That has politics in it. That's more like what the records say of Jordan Warrick.”

An action, not a gesture, something designed to do exactly what it was doing & getting Patil delayed in her move to Fargone. Possible.

And someone, probably Base Two, in Yanni's hands, was hiding Jordan's records from Hicks & or Hicks was hiding them from sera.

”Well,” Florian said, and flicked up the general ReseuneSec Planys office reports on Jordan Warrick. One statistic leapt out. ”Jordan received two thousand eight hundred and fourteen security cautions during his tenure at Planys. Persistent note on his file: Immune. Do Not Interrogate. Immune. Do Not Interrogate.”

”That's been the problem all along with him.”

”Yanni doesn't want him in the public eye again. Reseune doesn't want the first Ari's murder opened up again. That was what was going on when Denys went down. We've got the content of the card chipnothing overt there, if it's not a verbal code; and still no absolute a.s.surance where the card itself was made. They can go after where it's beentesting to destruction if they do. But I think it was made for exactly what it was used for: an introduction, dropped right in front of us.”

”From whom?” Catlin asked. ”To whom?”

”Let's see what ReseuneSec admits it knows about Patil.”

ReseuneSec's top-level surveillance of Patil came up easily, creditably meticulous, and ongoing, in Novgorod, within the University where she taught. Her contacts, back inside ReseuneSec files, were all neatly mappedincluding letters, some sixty-three in number, to her old mentor Thieu, and one hundred eighteen from Thieu to Patil, fifty-two of them in the last half year.

”None to Jordan,” Catlin said. ”None from Jordan. As should be. Several from Yanni to Patil.”

”Patil's house sale is pending. Reseune's buying it. This week. Yanni's order. He had some reason. That could hurry up her trip to Fargone.”

Meanwhile the list of Patil's other possible primary and secondary contacts stretched on and on, listed and identified by ReseuneSec agents in the ReseuneSec files, every cla.s.s of person from senators and councillors to teaching a.s.sistants, radicals, vid personalities, her real estate agent, and the home repair technician who'd recently fixed her refrigerator. She'd made numerous net calls on the local Fargone site, investigating housing, amenities, facilities, reasonable in someone contemplating a move there. She'd made a few tries at getting into the restricted Fargone Reseunes.p.a.ce site, on a long lag to Cyteen Station, which held that site and others available in its months-ago state: data arrived at the speed of s.h.i.+ps that picked up that electronic load at Cyteen Station via their black boxes, and delivered that load to somewhere else, and on to Fargonein a sense, if you sent a message that entered Cyteen Station, it eventually reached every civilized star, and was everywhere at once, until deleted as absolutely irrelevant to the locale where it had ended up. There was no such thing as complete privacy on interstation mail, by the nature of black boxes; and that also went for net data, restricted or not: it got everywhere unless it had a gate restriction that didn't let it flow to any s.h.i.+ps but, say, military, or to no s.h.i.+ps at all.

A lot of CITs weren't aware of that fact of life, or, being aware, so profoundly took it for granted that they didn't worry about it. Patil's request for information was certainly widespread by now, so if she'd intended any secrecy, that was blown.

Meticulous, vexatious police work filled other pages, agents patiently tracing out the threads of contact and delving into Patil's household garbage, a list of items intended to be recycled, and diverted, some of it interesting, in the list items, including unopened physical mail. ReseuneSec's investigation seemed thorough. It was a fat correspondence folder. The woman didn't open mail that arrived from unknowns: her system routed it to delete, which deleted a lot of filesor appeared to delete them. ReseuneSec had gotten at the mail source, and been into that, with a resultant long list of would-be contacts, some of which were red-flagged.

”Lot of Paxer contact. Lot of complete unknowns,” Florian observed.

”She'd be a fool to send messages of any interesting sort to anyone,” Catlin said. ”She deletes their messagesevidently knows who to delete. Some of them are on the watch list.”

Her mailings out to PlanysLabs were all electronic. One mailing was, by t.i.tle, ”Rethinking the Theory of Long-Period Nanistic Self-direction,” the censored Scientia articlesent, with indignation, to Thieu, who had been her teacher. Thieu had replied that it was brilliant. She had written back, decrying entrenched War-years thinking and Luddism & the commenting agent had flagged that word and supplied a definition. It meant people who were against progress, based on a political movement of 1811 and some years after, against the introduction of weaving machines in pre-s.p.a.ce England.

”Patil has a large vocabulary,” Florian said wryly, ”clearly.”

”Why weaving machines?” Catlin wanted to know. But the remark in context seemed metaphorical, not literal.

”I have no idea,” Florian muttered. He was already tracing other things, successfully pulling up ReseuneSec files on the ongoing investigation of Jordan's Planys apartment, and the people ReseuneSec had sent into Planys were clearly better than the airport security team haste had trusted with the outbound search. Jordan hadn't gotten to go back to his apartment once he'd been notified he was returning to Reseune: agents had packed for him.

While Jordan and Paul, caught in their office, had perversely or purposefully brought paper goodseither to camouflage something; or simply because, being a person for whom hand notes and writing were a habit, Jordan had wanted materials he hadn't been sure he'd get easily if he returned to house arrest in Reseune. It might have been innocent. It seemed Jordan Warrick rarely had been innocentnot by that Planys ReseuneSec record.

One thing he knew: sera's security wouldn't have let Jordan fly without a body scan, let alone turning out his pockets. The staff at Planys' airport had searched him for foodstuffs and biological contraband, their usual worry in flights originating from Planys, but nothing morebecause, for security reasons, they hadn't been in on the investigation ReseuneSec was making of Jordan's apartment and had no idea at all what they were looking for.

That was a major slip; but sera's orders had been unexpected, and speed had mattered. Not even ReseuneSec at Planys Airport had known why Jordan was being put on a plane, but people were about to die in Reseune, and had already died in Novgorod: it had been just a confused few hours.

The agents at Reseune Airport had naturally confiscated and copied his notes when he landed, but let blank paper pa.s.s without, likely, paging through a personal-use handful of blank sheets. Florian made a mental note of his own, that airport security needed more attention to detail, once sera took Reseune.

And it still boiled down to one question: how had Jordan known about the Patil appointment in Novgorod, in security so tight Base One hadn't penetrated it? That took the old fas.h.i.+oned sneaker-net approach. Someone had hand-carried either the card or actual information about the Patil appointment. Either would do.

So. they could certainly politely ask Jordan about the card and see if he'd cooperate, but they weren't to that point yet, and clearly there was no use asking a Special any question to which they didn't already know the answer.

So Patil's condo had found a buyer, in Yanni's office, with a possession date on July 20 & whether or not Patil knew that was how it had sold. She was currently saying goodbye to the University in a round of parties attended mostly by academicsone such was scheduled this evening. She had sold most of her furnis.h.i.+ngs, given other items away to friends and charity; was actively arranging storage for all her non-data possessions that she planned to keep, perhaps to s.h.i.+p later. She had no known s.e.xual attachments, no children, no relatives.

She was a scholarly woman with a lot of electronic files, preparing to make a long, state-sponsored and fairly high-ma.s.s move to a new life, accompanied by those data files and a fair number of household goods plus being a CIT, likely a few items of emotional attachment.

”She's teaching two cla.s.ses currently,” Catlin reported, ”besides lab courses, and she is maintaining her schedule. I checked other professors. They have more cla.s.ses. Patil spends a lot of time writing and some time doing correspondence with the military labs out at Beta, which we can't penetrate. No change of pattern there. She does guest lectures, attends bioethics conferences &”

”The people she's contacting on Cyteen,” Florian murmured, scanning that list, and the commentary ReseuneSec provided, ”old acquaintances, former students, but not many.”

”The majority may be on Beta, in Beta Labs. Security block, there.”

”I'm not going to try to crack that,” Florian said. ”Not worth it to go after thoseyet.” He kept reading. ”Mmm. Here's a few names on her home system, people ReseuneSec notes for further investigation.” He ran a who-is on the few, at ReseuneSec level. ”Well. Well. Well. How long have we been at this?”

”Two and a half hours.”

”Well, nothing totally new in this. We have some footnotes here from ReseuneSec. But no mischief attaches directly to Patil, except her lectures attract radicals. Coffee,” Florian said, and got up and poured a cup from the dispenser. A glance at Catlin drew a nod, and he poured another, then looked at the clock himself. Close to time for s.h.i.+ft-change. ”I'm going to message Marco and Wes to lie in for another couple of hours. I think we should look through Science Bureau records. Base One can probably get into those.”

”Suits me.” Catlin said. ”Try it. Shall I have Gianni send us sandwiches?”

”I could use one,” Florian said, and settled back at his console, pulled out the under-counter return that kept coffee off the main desk, and set his cup there. Catlin did whatever she was doing. He worked delicately, probed this, probed that, scanned text without storing it, and didn't get a Base One warning of any unadvertised connections on Yanni's access, no strings attached.

The files had some background of interest. Defense had apparently had a lot to do with Patil's career. Black budget funding had been behind the terraforming labs when they were on Cyteen, specifically at a lab just a little outside Novgorod, a lab later razed in favor of a food production facility. Behind closed Council doors, there'd been an intense battle over removal of the nanistics lab out to Beta during the War. Centrists campaigned to keep it at least as close as Cyteen Station, not relegated to the outer system inside a Defense installation. The first Ari had supported the nanistics move to Beta, however, in agreement with Defense, and Centrists had opposed her and Defense, at that time, in a rare configuration of political alliances.

Patil, at a hundred and five years of age, had gone out to Beta when Thieu moved down to Cyteen, had subsequently distinguished herself in ways deeply cla.s.sified, and then Patil herself had been moved back to Central System and onto Cyteen as a safety measure during the darkest days of the War. Patil, Thieu, and a researcher named Ibsen, Pauline Ibsen, since deceased, age one hundred thirty-six, had all been sent down to Cyteen, three people who had been working on the blackest of black projectsmost likely the production of terraforming nanistics, but theoretically only: any lab work was done out at Beta, as a potential and never-used weapon of war.

After the War, Patil hadn't gotten promoted back out to Beta. ”Articulate, sharp, and gregarious,” so the report said, she had ”fallen into the social milieu of the University,” had found herself a comfortable post and a prosperous side income as a favorite speaker at Centrist and pro-terraforming conferences and meetings.

Clearly her imminent departure into Reseune's employment had stirred up the Centrist community. Some comments had hit the general web, the one that any CIT could access. Some Centrists were pleased at the acceptance of what they called a moderating influence into a Reseune post: others were more concerned about losing Dr. Patil's moderate and respectable voice in Novgorod politics, once she s.h.i.+pped to Fargone, and wondered if it was a means of silencing her voice. None of the reports apparently knew about her relations.h.i.+p to the Eversnow project.

” 'Moderate and reasonable,' they call her,” Florian said, having condensed the flow for Catlin. ” 'A peacekeeper.' Which might argue that Yanni's move to send Patil to Fargone really isn't the best idea, losing her local influence. The Paxers come to her lectures. She doesn't appear to support their activities.”

”Moderation might have been what recommended her to Yanni, however,” Catlin said, and they read a while longer.

Then Catlin said: ”Read the post under Gulag.”

Interesting word. they were down to CIT political gossip on the Novgorod city net. Florian looked that word up, before investigating the site Catlin had tossed him.

The Gulag writer was pa.s.sionately angry, convinced Patil's transfer was a ticket to a Reseune-run oblivion and possible a.s.sa.s.sination. Well, there might be a grain of truth, not likely in the second.