[Contributor 02] - Infiltrator (2013) (12 page)

“I am, Mr. Morrow. I’m even more aware than most.” Letizia’s voice was gentle, and consciousness flickered in Joshua’s eyes, but his face didn’t soften.

“It’s okay, Dad. I chose this, remember? I know you want to protect me, but don’t take it out on Letizia. It’s not her fault Andersen asked this of me. At least I have someone to turn to. Imagine what this would have been like if I’d had no one to help me out.”

“You’re right. I’m taking my frustrations out on the wrong people.” Her father sighed and scrubbed his hands over his face.

“We have to deal with this situation. There is no other choice. Agonizing like this will get us nowhere, and doing so makes us run the risk of letting our emotions show. We can’t afford that,” Letizia said, sounding more like the master Dara remembered.

“All right, then. Let’s get to it,” Dara said, taking her seat again.

Focus on the data, and maybe you can get through this.

After a week of digging, it became clear what Shah’s angle was. She had somehow gotten hold of details Dara hadn’t yet seen, and she had run different reports and scenarios until she came to the conclusion that what had been presented was only a small portion of what Andersen had planned. The numbers didn’t add up and were too far off to be the result of a simple miscalculation. Shah had also managed to gain access to some of his personal records, and she seemed to believe that he was double-crossing Magnum. According to her speculations, he had given Magnum enough information to entice them, but not enough to reveal the full scope of his project. She had made a detailed accounting of how many times he had been in contact with other Creators, and had come to the conclusion that he was making the same offer to Fosset Tech, hoping to jump from Magnum to Fosset as a high-ranking Creator.

“It’s absurd,” Letizia scoffed when she first read Dara’s report. They analyzed the information Shah had gathered, ran her numbers themselves, and tried to follow her logic. Still, for as much intel as they’d managed to obtain, there were gaps in their knowledge. No matter how deeply they dug, they were unable to fill them.

“Will the data miners be able to find more?” Dara asked. Shah was way off base, she was sure of it. Andersen was merciless, but was he mercenary? No doubt his own self-interest was first and foremost in his mind, but his own self-interest had always involved doing everything he could to make himself a shining star at Magnum. Could he really be planning to betray his Creator?

“I hope so.” Letizia frowned. “If this is his plan, it can’t be new. He had to have been working on it for years, and I should have seen the signs. What if I missed something? What if I misread him?”

“I guess anything is possible.” Dara didn’t want to compound Letizia’s fears, but there was no sense in lying about it. They had to allow for the possibility that they’d been headed in the wrong direction as far as Andersen was concerned. “But it’s also possible that none of this is true. Maybe it’s all a setup, Shah’s gambit at taking him down.”

“That’s possible too.” Sighing, Letizia set her tablet aside and rubbed her forehead. “There’s nothing more we can do. We don’t have all the information we need. We’ll have to hope the data miners can uncover more, and that they can do it in time. We need to figure out what’s going on before it’s too late.”

Dara tossed and turned that night. It had been on the tip of her tongue to ask Letizia what the Free Thinkers would do with the information, but she knew the answer. They would observe and gather information, but they couldn’t afford to expose themselves. If they suspected Shah and Javier were dirty, the Free Thinkers would let them take the fall. Relocating someone like Javier, someone they suspected might have an agenda, wouldn’t be an option.

Knowing this was what the Free Thinkers had to do didn’t make her feel any better. The deeper she got, the more difficult it became for her to separate the good guys from the bad guys. Implicating Andersen for something he wasn’t doing was reprehensible, but he wasn’t a good man. She supposed it would be justice of a sort if he were taken into custody, even for a crime he hadn’t committed, but how was that any better than what the Creators did? Was this the only sort of justice that was possible in the domes, and what did it say about the Free Thinkers if they sat back and allowed it to happen?

The next morning she had to drag herself from her bed.
I could leave
, she thought.
I could ask to be relocated with my family, live out my life without getting involved in any of this.
It was hard to resist the temptation.

When she got to headquarters she submitted her report to Andersen, poking her head into his office after she’d sent it to let him know it was ready, but he’d obviously already received it. His eyes gleamed as he studied his tablet, his grip on the device telling her he was riveted. He raised a hand in acknowledgment of her but was too engrossed to answer, and she withdrew, closing the door behind her.

Relief and guilt mingled in her stomach, making her feel ill. She and Letizia had worked hard to craft the perfect report, one that gave Andersen just enough meat that he would take his time digesting it, but one that wouldn’t reveal all they had learned. Dara would pass the additional information along to Raj when she met him for her training, and she fervently hoped they would be able to uncover the truth about the whole affair. Her strength had come from believing she was no longer a pawn in Magnum’s game, in Andersen’s game, but she was beginning to lose faith that this was true. Conspiracy seemed to close in on her from all sides, and she felt like she was drowning, no longer certain which direction was up and which was down.

Had Letizia known of her intent, there would have been no end to her berating Dara, which was why Dara kept it to herself. For days she had been searching for Javier, trying to contrive a way of bumping into him so she could question him, but she had been unsuccessful. Tomorrow was her training day, and she was determined to see him before she handed the information over.

She worked without a break all day long, hoping to get everything finished so she could leave right at the end of her shift to look for him. To her relief, Andersen had a late meeting and was unable to hold her up with any last-minute requests. Pushing her way through the throng, she caught sight of Javier and shadowed him out the door and through the thoroughfare. She was afraid he’d head for home, and she had no reason to meet him there. Andersen would never trust her again if he found out that she’d been speaking with Javier.

Fortunately, he headed for the shops, and she was able to follow him, hoping all the while that no one noticed her following him. He finished his errands quickly and set off for his apartment at a brisk pace, Dara maintaining a safe distance between the two of them. Rather than head directly home, he walked into the park with her trailing behind him, weaving his way through the statues. She tried to keep up, but she soon lost sight of him. Cursing under her breath, she sagged against a statue, letting out a strangled cry of surprise when he materialized on the other side of it.

“Why are you following me?” he hissed, the words slipping from between his teeth.

“Andersen is asking questions. You need to watch your back,” she said, glaring at him.

“You think I don’t know that? Creators, Dara, I expected you to have learned a thing or two by now. Do you think I’d be stupid enough to think I’d escaped him?”

“Then what
are
you playing at, Javier? You don’t think you can beat him at his own game, do you?”

“I think what I’ve always thought, that you should mind your own business.” His face hardened.

“Listen to me, I know about your sister, so if you’re trying—” He got in her face and she took a step back, gasping in surprise.

“You don’t know anything.” His eyes blazed and his jaw muscles strained as he spoke. “Stay out of this. I won’t warn you again.”

With that, he turned on his heel and stalked from the park, leaving her more confused than ever.

“This is good work,” Raj said when he finished reading the report Dara had prepared.

“Thanks,” she said tiredly.

He set the tablet aside and fixed his gaze on her, but she averted her eyes. “Are you okay?”

“I don’t know what to think anymore. I have no idea what the truth is.”

“I know, but we’ll get the data miners on it, see if we can figure out—”

“That’s not the only thing I’m talking about,” she said, snapping her gaze back to his.

Closing his eyes, he sighed and pushed a hand through his hair. “What does truth mean anyway?”

“Seriously? You’re going to play that game with me?”

“It’s not a game.” He opened his eyes and looked at her. “And, yes, I am serious. The truth is a subjective thing. We all create our own truths, all the time. Think about your years of schooling. You were convinced that was the truth. Now you’re here, training with me, and you’re convinced this is the truth.”

It frustrated her that he was right. Balling her hands into fists, she turned away. “I don’t know who to trust anymore.”

“You can trust me.”

“Can I?” She met his gaze again, searching his steady, dark eyes for a sign.

“Yes, you can, and I hope you’ll come to believe that. My goal here is to help you. I want to give you the information and let you drawn your own conclusions about it, whatever they are.”

“You know, that’s what everyone tells me. Everyone says they’re just presenting the facts, but those facts vary from person to person.”

“It’s what people do. That’s what I meant about the truth. Think about it, Dara. It’s easy to get caught up in the group mentality. When everyone around you believes in something, you start believing too. The domes are structured the way they are for a reason. The Creators have made an art of bringing social pressure to bear. You fall in line, do what they ask of you, because it’s what all your neighbors are doing. It has to be the right thing to do if everyone else is doing it, doesn’t it?”

“How does that make the Free Thinkers any different?”

“It doesn’t, not always,” he said, shocking her. Her expression provoked a grim smile from him. “What, you thought I was going to try to convince you that all the Free Thinkers are different, as if we’re special or something? We’re as subject to stupid human whims as anyone else. I’m not going to deny that I’ve seen the crowd mentality at work here more than once.”

“Then why do you stay?”

“Because I believe that the Free Thinkers do want to give us choices. Sure, everyone here has their own agendas. Some are working toward the greater good, but others have less pure motives; revenge or a grab for power or whatever. I will never, ever tell you that everything we do here is the right thing, because I object to the Free Thinkers’ methods at times.”

“And they let you stay?”

“Yes. It’s part of the overall philosophy.” Picking up his tablet, he paged through a few screens, then handed it to her. “See this? This was the Constitution, the document on which the former system of government was based in the country once known as the United States. Where we are, it was part of the U.S. once, before the Great Famine, before corporations began to replace government. Read the first part.”

Dara took the tablet and read the portion Raj indicated. The language was archaic, the concepts so foreign that she had trouble making any sense of it, and she frowned. “‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances’,” she read aloud. “What does all that mean?”

“It means that, in the past, the right to say what you thought was protected. As long as what you said wasn’t a direct threat to another person or institution, you were free to criticize at will. You could complain about the government, corporations, anything and everything. There were limits, of course, but the bottom line was that you could question. In its purest form, an inherit wariness was built into the old system of government to encourage that questioning. The government was meant to protect the people, but the people who helped establish that government believed it was dangerous to become too sanguine.

“What makes me believe the Free Thinkers are different is that questioning is at the heart of what we do. The Creators don’t want us to question because it leads to Contributors thinking about their position in society and wondering why things are the way they are. Who benefits? How well does it work? The Creators want to run things like factories, plug the parts in where they’re supposed to go.”

“So the questioning helps keep you aware of what’s going on around you,” she said slowly, still trying to put the pieces together in her mind.

“Exactly. When you don’t question, when you just accept, you don’t stop to think about what you’re doing. You follow the crowd, do what they’re doing. The consequences of that can be disastrous. I’ve done things, Dara, things that, when I think of them now, make me sick. But at the time I didn’t question, I just did what I was told. I didn’t know any other way, and the thought of even questioning terrified me because of the attention it would bring. I believed that my role was to trust in what my Creator said and to be a good example, the perfect Contributor.” Bitterness peppered his tone.

“What you’re saying is, because I can ask questions about what the Free Thinkers are doing, it means they’re better?”

“Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. What I’m saying is that the fact that you can even ask questions is a good sign. Can you ask questions of Magnum? Could you challenge them when they told you taking your mother away was the best solution?”

“No.” She hated that he brought her mother into the argument, even if what had happened to her mother had been her impetus for joining the Free Thinkers. Her face must have given him an indication of her feelings, because he was suddenly contrite.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to bring your mother into this. What I’m trying to say is, I’m glad you’re questioning, glad you’re not jumping into this trusting that every Free Thinker has altruistic reasons for doing what they do. I want you to keep questioning.”