Anniversary Day (33 page)

She ran over those rules in her mind. He had tried to do everything except the last. He hadn’t had the strength to take out others while he committed suicide. Which meant that there was something in him, some spark, that didn’t completely believe in the job.

For all she knew, he had screwed up the assassination on purpose.

“Who follows these rules?” she asked, figuring she already knew the answer. He did. The clones did.

“Everyone,” he said. “The rules are for everyone.”

“Even the boss?” she asked, not knowing who the boss was.

He shrugged, then winced. His eyes lined with tears again, and she realized what she had taken for emotion might simply have been a reaction to pain.

“What about the facilitator?” she asked.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “No one was to get caught. No one was to remain.”

She felt chilled. That meant there was still someone else out there. “This facilitator,” she said. “He looks like you?”

“No,” he said. “She joined us later.”

She
. He knew her.

“What did your facilitator do?” Keptra asked, trying not to seem too eager. She didn’t want to scare him off.

“She got me into the Top of the Dome, into the speech,” he said.

“So she’s important,” Keptra said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know anything about Tycho Crater.”

And he had tried to harm people inside of it. She felt that urge to slam her fist onto his broken arm again. But she didn’t.

Instead, she asked softly, “Who is your facilitator?”

“I don’t know her name,” he said. “We don’t do names.”

“How did you meet her?” Keptra heard an edge in her voice.

He didn’t answer that. He looked like he was starting to pass out.

She leaned closer. She would hit that damn arm if she had to. “How did you find her?”

“Oh,” he said, as if he hadn’t realized Keptra had been talking to him. “She has an office in the Top of the Dome. Eleventh floor, suite 8C.”

“You’re sure it’s hers?” Keptra asked.

“Pictures of her,” he said, his voice weaker. “And other people. Floating near the desk.”

“Was she there this afternoon?” Keptra asked.

“She let me in,” he said.

“Into the speech?” Keptra asked.

“The back of the restaurant,” he said. “She let me into the maitre d’s station.”

After he had already escaped the authorities. Before Keptra arrived.

She looked at him. He had passed out again.

“I’m not done,” she said to the attendant. “Wake him up again.”

“I can’t,” he said. “The law prevents me from doing anything that might harm him, and continually pumping him with drugs might do that.”

In other words, she had gotten all she could. A facilitator. An address at the Top of the Dome.

And rules.

The last chilled her:

Do not die alone.

If the facilitator had to follow that rule as well, then the crisis wasn’t over.

It had just begun.

Fifty-seven

Nyquist paced for a few minutes, got himself some coffee, and forced himself to calm down. He was no good to this investigation if he made the interrogation of Palmette about him. As angry as he was at her, at himself, he couldn’t let that taint the interrogation.

Not because of some future court case. He doubted there would be one. He had a hunch Palmette would plead, or be convinced to plead, and that would be the end of it all.

No. He had to protect the interrogation so he could get as much information from Palmette as possible.

Before he went back into that cold, stark room, he checked his links again to see if the psych reports had downloaded while he was dealing with the weapon Palmette had worn around her torso.

The reports still hadn’t arrived. He sent a ping to the psych office, telling them this was of the utmost importance, and then he went back into the interrogation room.

Palmette watched him walk to his chair, her face drawn. She looked tired and defeated. She had hours to rethink her decision in Terminal 81, and it looked like she regretted it.

He wanted to scream at her about the weapon on her torso, about giving zoodeh to the assassins. But he couldn’t. He needed to move the questioning away from that area until he calmed down.

“So, does Gumiela want someone else to conduct this investigation?” Palmette asked, her voice threaded with bitterness.

He shook his head. “I haven’t spoken to her. That wasn’t what had come in through my links.”

He nearly mentioned the weapon. He was angrier than he thought. Maybe he should recuse himself from this. Maybe he should just walk away.

“So what did?” she asked. At the moment, she had control of this investigation. She had control of him—his emotions, and his thought processes.

But he was going to take it back. “I’m waiting on your psych evals from Armstrong P.D.,” he said. “I was hoping to gain some insight. But they’ll be delayed.”

Her cheeks had grown red as he spoke. She was angry now. He almost smiled.

He could use that.

“Besides,” he said, “I have a hunch they’re not accurate. Remember, I had to go through the same thing when I came back from an attack that almost killed me. Those psychiatrists don’t know a damn thing about the way the mind works.”

“They cleared you.” She nearly spat the words.

He smiled tiredly. He felt like two different people: the angry man inside and the weary, friendly investigator outside.

He said, “I have influential friends.”

“I wanted you to use them for me,” she said, so fast he knew she had anticipated his response.

He nodded. “I tried. That’s how you got your job.”

“I wanted to be on the force,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “But you’d have to sleep with the boss to do that.”

He winced at the words. DeRicci would hate hearing that. Others would love to use that sentence against him. But it worked on Palmette.

Her eyes narrowed. “I knew it,” she said. “They don’t care about the work anyone does. It’s just who you know and what you’re willing to do to move forward.”

“Everything in the Earth Alliance is like that,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “It’s all rigged. That’s why the Earth Alliance needs to be destroyed.”

Such a dramatic statement, and yet she said it as if everyone believed it, as if it were an everyday thing to claim the governing body of half the known universe should disappear.

If he was conducting a standard investigation, he would jump on that phrase. But nothing about this was standard.

“I wish,” he said with that tired tone. “But you can’t go up against something that big, not by yourself. I mean, even the stuff you did on the Moon today isn’t enough. It got people’s attention, here, but you think the Disty care about it? The Rev? You’d have to hit them too, and that’s almost impossible.”

Her eyes lit up. She was leaning toward him. “What happened on the Moon today is just the beginning. It’s the first volley in a long, long war. We’re bringing down the Earth Alliance.”

He noted the “we,” but didn’t focus on it. She was talking. He wanted that to continue, and if he suddenly switched into interrogation mode, it wouldn’t.

“But your plan,” he said, “you wouldn’t have lived to see it.”

She straightened. “When I nearly died,” she said, “it was for nothing. I was in that house for a stupid reason. Really, who cares who murdered that guy? And the woman was insane. So put her away. It doesn’t matter. Nothing mattered, not then. If you’re going to die, you should die in the service of something. When you nearly died, didn’t you feel that way? I mean, you were trying to save the life of a criminal.”

“He was already dead,” Nyquist said. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Exactly!” She pounded her fist for emphasis. “That’s the wrong reason to die. Better to control it, to plan it, to go out for something good.”

“But you decided not to do that,” he said sounding as regretful as he could. “Was that because of me?”

She made a face. “I can’t kill you, Bartholomew.”

He started. That was the first time she had ever used his given name. She did it with such casual intimacy that it meant she thought of him by his first name. She cared for him. Because of that bond that people often had with their rescuers? Or did she imagine more in her twisted little brain?

He didn’t want to contemplate it. But he had to. He had to think about her so that he could learn as much as possible.

“I owe you,” she was saying. “I’ll always owe you. And I can’t repay that by causing your death.”

“You might have done so anyway,” he said. “You had no idea where I was.”

She looked at him, seemingly calm. He couldn’t quite read her anymore. “It wouldn’t have been deliberate then,” she said. “Killing you in front of that ship, letting you die with me, that would have been deliberate, and that would have been wrong.”

Killing innocents wouldn’t have been wrong. Killing him would have been. He almost shook his head, but caught himself in time.

“I’m confused,” he said, amazed that the anger threatening to overwhelm him wasn’t evident in his voice. “I thought you said you were going to die in service of something. Wouldn’t my death have been in service of that same thing?”

She frowned. Maybe he was making her brain hurt just like she was hurting his. “I didn’t know what you believed,” she said. “I couldn’t ask you, not with all that squad nearby. They would have killed me.”

“And then we all would have died as well.”

She raised her head in surprise.

“We found the weapon you wore around your torso,” he said. “It would have made the laser shots so much worse. Did you know that?”

His tone was accusatory. He could tell because she recoiled. He rested his palm on his thigh, willing himself to breathe. He couldn’t antagonize her now.

“Of course you knew that,” he said, gently this time. “That’s why you stepped away. Because you knew that even one shot could have killed us all. And you didn’t want to do that because of me.”

She nodded. “That’s right.”

He was regaining control of himself, and of this interview.

“So do you regret it? It was your mission, right? You should have died.”

“I’ll get another chance,” she said.

Not if you’re in prison
. He barely bit back the words. “Today?”

She shook her head.

“But I thought today was special,” he said.

“It is,” she said. “But what I do doesn’t matter. I was just a cog. We’re all cogs. Even without me, even though I failed, others won’t. They’ll succeed. And that’s all that matters.”

“Others,” Nyquist said, trying to figure out a way to ask the question without turning into a true interrogator. “The assassins going after the mayors.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “Those attacks should be done by now. The others. The destruction. That should have started. I was supposed to start it, but I clearly didn’t. So someone else will.”

“Someone else? In Armstrong?”

She watched him, and her gaze had turned cold. He had finally turned into the interrogator he had been trying to avoid.

“I don’t know exactly,” she said. She was matter of fact, no longer a co-conspirator, but a criminal, who knew she was in grave trouble.

“Other people like you,” he said.

“Facilitators,” she said with pride. “We distract, and then we destroy.”

He didn’t quite understand that, and was about to ask for a clarification, when it became clear. The assassinations and the assassination attempts, they were the distractions. Had Palmette pulled off her attack, she would have hurt the city and killed hundreds, maybe thousands, of innocents.
That
was the real attack. That was the destruction she was talking about.

“And you gave all of that up for me,” he said, unable to withhold the sarcasm any longer.

“I didn’t give it up, Bartholomew.” And from her tone, he could tell she hadn’t heard the sarcasm at all. “I just elected not to participate. I’m sure that as we’re sitting in here, others are getting the job done.”

And then she smiled.

The smile chilled him more than her words ever could.

“Let me check,” he said and fled the room.