Chapter 3
June 16, Year 214 NPrE
Almonzeia, the capital of the MT Corporation's colonies on Almonzis
Teddy was deeply offended that the editor initially thought his young, promising journalist had decided to flee work and run back to daddy's wing. After the editor-in-chief listened to Ross's voice recorder files twice, he asked wearily: "Do you really have the nerve to pursue this?" Teddy confidently replied: "Yes!" and left the office to the muttered accompaniment about rich kids being allowed to amuse themselves however they pleased.
By now, Ross had grown accustomed to this grumbling over the year — it followed him everywhere, no matter what he did. Even back in university, when he learned four languages, many professors simply refused to believe he wrote his papers in those languages himself.
So, ignoring the old man's muttering, Teddy waited until evening when the heat subsided and headed for the fourteenth hospital. He had no idea who the people (or beings) on the recording were. After listening to it several times, Ross decided at least the woman was a being. He also concluded their conversation involved three individuals: the sports car driver who hit the pastry chef Brandt, a passenger, and someone named Hector they were supposed to pick up. That made five people or beings total.
Too bad he'd fled from those two so fast he hadn't even looked back! If only he'd caught a glimpse of what they looked like...
Teddy got out of his car in front of the hospital and shifted uncertainly on his heels. Those two had somehow known what condition the unfortunate pastry chef was in when he arrived. So at least one of them had gone inside? Maybe talked to a nurse? Then surely they'd be on the surveillance cameras...
"Or not," Ross frowned. "They're probably trying to hide their identities."
Well, he had to start somewhere. He crossed the hospital threshold again and was pleased to see the same nurse at the reception desk. She was making eyes at a technician fixing the register, but upon seeing Ross, she snapped sternly:
"Visiting hours are over! Come back tomorrow, from twelve to five."
"That's too bad," Ross sighed. "I wanted to check on Mr. Brandt — you remember him? The one who was smashed flat by a sports car the day before yesterday?"
"He's in the ICU, and your doctor is with him. I can call her," the nurse grumbled unhappily.
"No need to disturb her. Tell me, has anyone else come to see Mr. Brandt besides me and Mr. Fontaine?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well, any visitors besides us, his colleagues? Maybe someone asking about his condition?"
The nurse tore her gaze away from the technician's backside, encased in a uniform jumpsuit, and stared suspiciously at Ross.
"Why are you asking?"
"Remember that huge guy, size of a triple-door wardrobe? The one with different colored eyes? That's my boss, Mr. Fontaine, head of our Security Service. We're very, very interested in whoever did this to our pastry chef and left us without pastries."
"But the police..."
"The police," the technician snorted from deep inside the apparatus. "Someone lifted my wallet last week — not one of those blue-bellies even twitched!"
"Well, I don't really remember," the nurse frowned. "When he was brought in, Mr. Brandt I mean, we weren't exactly focused on visitors. And afterwards..." she thought for a moment. "I remember your boss asking, your chief physician, and you coming. I don't think there were others..."
"Too bad we won't have a warrant to view the footage until tomorrow," Teddy muttered, glancing sideways at the nurse. "But you could look, right? Without my involvement."
"And what would I be looking for?" The nurse's face lit with interest — after all, it wasn't every day she got invited to participate in an investigation.
"For example, someone acting strangely. Someone who came into the hospital but didn't take a number or ask anything, just hung around near Brandt or the medical team treating him. Someone like that would have appeared here," Ross frowned, estimating the time. Probably not immediately after the accident... "sometime between noon and two in the afternoon."
"How's she supposed to get you the recordings?" the technician piped up again; Ross was starting to get annoyed by his eagerness to contribute to the conversation. "You'd need to talk to our security service for that. Once you get the warrant, they'll give you everything."
"True," the nurse agreed. "Want me to send you their contacts?"
"No need," Ross muttered sourly, not wanting to reveal his distinctly non-express address. "We'll wait for the warrant. The boss will scream bloody murder, but... we'll endure."
"He's a tyrant?" the nurse asked sympathetically.
"Uh-huh..."
"Then why don't you quit?" the technician chimed in again, having completely lost any sense of propriety or interest in the register.
"And go where? This is my first job, I've barely lasted six months, and the boss is an absolute monster! Anyone who hasn't served in the military is just dust under his feet, and so on," Teddy said plaintively.
"He's one of those?" the nurse asked. "You know, mutants?"
"A being, yes. Military designation."
"So's ours! I mean, the head of our security service. A total nutjob, walks around watching everyone, conducting searches — like I'm going to smuggle out a ten-kilo neuro-scanner in my pocket!" the nurse huffed; the offense was clearly recent, and indignation still simmered in her soul.
"Ours doesn't go that far, but the yelling is constant," Ross sighed, shamelessly slandering a perfectly decent being. "You can tell he doesn't like people, especially."
"I don't like mutants either," the nurse snorted. "They're all weird. No wonder — their whole genetic makeup is messed with, who knows how or why. Wait here a minute, I'll think of something," and she disappeared through a door marked "Staff Only — Do Not Enter."
***
Half an hour later, Ross sat in a bar near the hospital, studying a photo the nurse had sent to his phone. This man had spent nearly an hour in the hospital lobby but hadn't asked about anyone. He'd appeared about twenty minutes after Brandt was brought in.
Teddy took a sip of beer. The photo captured a man around fifty, tall, muscular, with large features, gray eyes, and graying light-brown hair. Ross could see salt-and-pepper stubble on his cheeks and chin. The man looked dissatisfied and irritated. Maybe this was the guy who'd been yelling on the phone at the other guy about not picking up the third...
"Who is this third guy named Hector — that's the question," Teddy thought, then sighed. He'd also love to find the man who'd dragged him to his car. Ross remembered him perfectly and deeply regretted they'd probably never meet again.
The bartender placed a shot of tequila in front of Ross and grunted:
"From the lady at the table behind you."
The journalist turned in surprise, and all regrets about the handsome man he'd missed yesterday instantly evaporated. At the table, stretching out long, slender legs, sat a dark-skinned woman with luxuriant dark hair and a chiseled profile — a slightly hooked nose was Teddy's weakness, not only in men.
The woman gave him an appraising look with large green-brown eyes and smiled invitingly. Her lips were full, her breasts high and beautiful; Ross couldn't refuse such a magnificent offer, even though the lady looked over thirty and had probably mistaken him for a local gigolo. Though they could always clear up that misunderstanding, right?
"Hi, blondie," the lady said as Teddy sat down across from her. "Looking for someone to make your evening pleasant?"
"I don't work here," Ross replied. "I'm a journalist, not an escort."
"How sweet of you to warn me," she answered with a soft laugh. "So all services are free, then."
Ross downed the tequila and noticed several young guys and girls watching him with undisguised hostility. They were the ones working here, and he was poaching their clients.
"How'd you end up here, journalist?" the woman asked.
"Working nearby, stopped in for a drink."
"Working? There's only the hospital around here. Some celebrity get admitted? Or did a politician screw an orderly?"
"I was digging into some corruption schemes in hospitals. I'm Eddie, by the way," he added.
"Donna," his companion introduced herself. "So, Eddie, how do you plan to spend the evening?"
"In the company of a beautiful lady," he toasted her with his empty shot glass. "Just sex, no strings attached," he warned, just in case...
"Just sex," Donna repeated with a smile and stood up. She was as tall as Ross. "Let's find a cozy spot with no witnesses."
Teddy never needed such an invitation twice, and soon he was following Donna down the night street. At the bar's exit, he put his arm around her waist, and she smilingly covered his hand with hers. Her palm was dry and warm, her body muscular, like a gymnast's.
"Perfect," Donna suddenly whispered as they passed a narrow, dark alley, and she shoved Teddy into it. Before he could make a sound, the stunning woman, with decidedly unfeminine strength, slammed his back against the wall and pressed a greedy kiss to his lips.
"She has a weird idea of cozy," Ross thought, returning the kiss. He ran one hand through her thick, soft hair and, in anticipation, squeezed her small rear with the other. The beautiful lady licked into his mouth and suddenly squeezed Ross's balls in an iron grip so tight he howled aloud. Everything went dark with pain.
"Spying on us, you little shit?" Donna whispered tenderly, grabbing Teddy by the hair. A red-hot needle stabbed into his brain; everything went black except the pain and the burning, agonizing sensation of someone invading his mind, brutally scattering his thoughts and memories.
"P-please..." Teddy whimpered, afraid even to move. "I d-don't know anything..."
"I'll figure out what you know and what you don't," the memory of the overheard conversation flashed before him. Donna unceremoniously pulled it from Ross's memory and examined it. The memory looped around and around like a crazy dream. The journalist grew dizzy, and his skull felt like it was splitting.
After a few seconds, Teddy began to lose consciousness when suddenly Donna let out a strangled cry and released Ross from both physical and telepathic grip.
The journalist collapsed to his knees and curled into a ball, trembling violently. A body flew over him, crashed into a dumpster, and knocked it over with a clatter. Ross, terrified, tucked his head into his shoulders and covered it with his hands.
"Don't touch him," a vaguely familiar voice sounded from above. Ross peered out from under his elbow and stared in amazement at the man who had dragged him to his car yesterday. He stood between the journalist and Donna, who was rising from the pile of garbage like a viper. But for some reason, she didn't attack her unexpected defender — she just fixed her piercing gaze on his face. He winced, blinked, and shook his head. Donna let out a weak cry and clutched her temples.
"What, not working?" the man said.
"But why... why isn't it working..." Donna whispered. "Ah, to hell with it!" She drew a vibro-blade and, with a long, almost cat-like leap, attacked the man. He swayed slightly to the side, dodging the knife, grabbed Donna's throat with one hand, seized her wrist with the other, and yanked with such force that he dislocated her arm from its socket. Donna wheezed; the knife fell from her fingers and stuck into the asphalt right in front of Teddy's nose.
The man dragged Donna away from the journalist, slammed her temple against the edge of the dumpster, and threw her inside. Then he closed the lid, snapped the latches shut, tipped it over, and flipped it upside down.
Having dealt with Donna, the man approached Ross, who was frozen in a fetal position, and asked solicitously:
"Can you walk on your own?"
Teddy's first impulse was to crawl as far away as possible. The man leaned over him with a worried expression and gave him a strange, almost scanning look from head to toe.
"Do you remember your name? Today's date? Your birth date?"
"Who are you?" Ross stammered. "Where did you come from? Why did you...?"
"Well, some consciousness is present," the rescuer concluded. "No fatal damage either. Can you stand?"
Teddy somehow got to his hands and knees and whimpered faintly from the pain. The man clicked his tongue in that now-familiar manner, wrapped a powerful arm around his waist, lifted him, and started dragging him somewhere. Ross didn't immediately realize where, because every step sent a flash of pain through his groin.
"My car is the other way," he gasped when they reached the end of the street.
"Your car? Maybe you want to go home too?"
"Well, yeah. What's wrong with that?" the journalist asked timidly.
"You'd be better off buying a train ticket and leaving."
"I already bought one. My train leaves in two weeks."
"Change your ticket to tomorrow. First thing in the morning, if possible."
"Why?!" Ross howled. This was scarier than the sudden attack by that crazy woman.
"Because they'll find you and kill you," the man said calmly and seriously.
"Who?"
"The ones you were running from at the hospital."
"How do you know?!"
"I ran into them at the entrance. They were in a hurry, and you'd already left. Still, they found you. What the hell," the rescuer asked with a hint of irritation, "were you doing back at that hospital?"
"I'm a journalist, I'm investigating! I can't just drop everything and leave!"
The man sighed, muttered something about the mental development of today's youth, and took out his phone. They kept walking — or rather, Teddy hobbled along, leaning on the man's shoulder. Glancing sideways at the phone in his hand, Ross realized he was calling a taxi.
"What are you doing here?" Teddy asked, realizing this man could hardly have just happened to be passing by.
"They followed you, and I followed them."
"But why?!"
"You're too young to die from your own stupidity."
Ross choked with indignation. A taxi pulled up beside them — driverless, on autopilot. The rear door opened, and the man loaded Teddy inside.
"It'll take you to the Eleton hotel. Book a ticket for the earliest flight from there."
"I'm not going to... hey, where are you going?!" The journalist grabbed his rescuer's arm. "Who are you?"
"Don't even think about going home or hanging around the hospital again."
"Sir, please ask your companion to exit or register as an additional passenger," the autopilot interjected, trying to close the door and separate Teddy from his mysterious stranger again.
"Oh, shut up! I want to hire you!" Ross blurted out.
"Hire me?" The stranger raised an eyebrow. "In what capacity?"
"As a bodyguard! You're... you're an ex-soldier, aren't you? You're a being, right?"
"You can't hire me," he replied, shaking Ross off his arm like an annoying damsel in distress.
"Why not?!"
"Because I'm not a soldier. I'm a pastry chef," the man declared imperturbably and slammed the taxi door shut.
Al-Haiyan, the capital of the Sultanate of Er-Rummal's colonies on Tar-Mariat
He was running again through an endless labyrinth in pitch darkness. He could see nothing, only feel the cold stone slabs beneath his bare feet, and when he stumbled, he crashed bodily into more of the same walls. The labyrinth had no windows, no lamps; he didn't know where he was running, but Irfan's piercing screams, reaching him from somewhere ahead, drove him on like lashes from a whip.
He knew he had to run, had to make it in time! Before they did something terrible to Irfan. He desperately tried to remember what, but couldn't—only knew it was something irrevocable and horrifying. He had to find him! Had to stop it!
Irfan screamed and called for him, and Murad's heart clenched with pain, but he couldn't escape the labyrinth. He ran with all his might, but when he fell, the labyrinth would spin around him like a kaleidoscope toy shaken by a child. Murad would get up and run again, lost in the tangle of corridors, but Irfan's screams always came from somewhere ahead.
Another voice joined the screams—a pleading voice—and Murad suddenly realized it was his own. But he knew that where the voice sounded, he himself was not. He had to run faster, find the voice, merge with it, and then... then...
"Murad!"
The Yakzan gasped, sat bolt upright in bed, and woke. Irfan leaned over him: green eyes gleaming in the bedroom's half-darkness, a black nimbus of hair framing his pale face. Murad wrapped both arms around his prince and pulled him close so tightly that Irfan let out a strangled breath.
"What did you dream?"
"The labyrinth... again, the labyrinth..."
Irfan sank back onto the pillows and hugged the Yakzan tightly, stroking his head and shoulders as if he were a child. Murad buried his face in Irfan's pajama shirt, greedily inhaling his scent.
"I'm here, Murad," the Wad-Prince said gently. "It's all right. It was only a dream."
"It wasn't a dream," the Yakzan thought bitterly. "Everything his father did to him—that wasn't a dream."
"Let's run away," he said, and flinched with disgust at the sound of his own mechanical voice from the neuromodulator.
"We can't, my dear, you know that," a warm, dry palm touched his cheek. "Even if we could remove the chip from your modulator, you couldn't take the Stack with the brand out of me."
Murad held him tighter. Damned Sultan! First he made a toy of his own son, and then, when the toy turned out not to be so obedient, he maimed him so badly that Irfan had hidden his face behind scarves and robes for twenty years!
"I'll kill him," Murad said. "Someday I'll kill your father."
Irfan only sighed softly.
"Before he kills you, or me, or touches my family," Al-Fayyaz thought. The Sultan thought he had them by the throat, but someday... someday...
The Yakzan rose on his elbow and kissed Irfan. The prince pressed close, trying with caresses to distract him from the nightmare and from thoughts of the Sultan.
"I think I'll work a bit," Murad said, lowering the prince back onto the pillows. "You sleep—still an hour and a half until the alarm."
"Just don't go away," Irfan murmured sleepily. "I can't sleep without you."
"Of course, Effendi."
Murad brought his laptop into bed, along with a cold coffee drink, and opened the folder with Silverberg's dossier. AlNilam rolled under the Yakzan's arm and curled up against his side.
"Much cozier than Shufrir's office," Al-Fayyaz thought, ruffling His Highness's curly hair and clicking on the first file.
Al-Shadiyar had done a pretty thorough job on the terrorist's dossier—or perhaps he'd already been on the security services' radar, given his line of work and biography. Konrad Silverberg was a more experienced regime fighter than Dawud—he'd been at it since he was nineteen, when he dropped out of law school and joined some local protest movement on Mirna-2. Over the next six years, Silverberg had managed to do some odd jobs (since working was for regime slaves, and he was a fighter!), engaged in petty vandalism—i.e., protest actions—and then landed in prison for two years for assaulting a police officer.
That's where someone must have noticed Silverberg, because upon release, the young man went straight to Ayala, to Estanta—the capital of Elameira, one of the states of the Averon Union, and also the biggest drug hub in the Metropolis and colonies. Here, Silverberg could have figured out how the terrorists funded their struggle for a bright future, but either the boy was dim or he just didn't care.
For the next two years, the pup hung around the court of Enrique Salvador Angeles, nicknamed the Lion of Sierra-Romana—the emperor of drug trafficking who had absorbed the largest cartels. Murad skimmed through the dossier for this period. It seemed the boy ran minor errands, handled communication between drug dealers and local terrorist groups, and then simply vanished—only to suddenly reappear in Al-Haiyan and heroically off himself after trying to break into Fialkovskaya's apartment.
Al-Fayyaz opened the page listing discovered documents. Silverberg had been carrying a very high-quality fake passport (much better than Dawud's), a bank card, and a key card for a rental car. Murad had examined all of this yesterday when the body was brought to the center. A fake passport of that quality cost a fortune, and there was a tidy sum in the bank account as well.
"Too bad there was no phone or apartment key card," the Yakzan thought. "He probably tossed them in a recycler—there are dozens on every street."
Still, Al-Shadiyar earned its keep—the dossier contained everything that could be gathered in a day, including the rental car's routes. Murad overlayed them with a map of the neighborhoods around the student campus where Dawud lived, and grunted with satisfaction. The hypothesis about meetings in brothels had been correct. Silverberg went there like clockwork. Though he was more cautious with bank transfers, not paying Dawud directly but funneling money through other accounts.
"We'll check that out. I wonder how he paid for his apartment?"
That would be harder to avoid—most landlords required strict linking of cards to documents, passports, and phone numbers. But if Silverberg rented from his own people, he might not have needed money at all.
Murad had heard mentions of cash—coins and banknotes—in some very old films. He didn't quite understand what that was or how payment worked (did people have to carry it all around?), and was grateful such barbarism was in the past. Terrorists were most often caught through money transfers, though of course there were specialists capable of encrypting money trails so well no one could touch them.
But not in this case. Diligent digging through the long logs of card activity yielded results—Murad plotted the points where Silverberg had made payments on a map, and by density identified the area where the terrorist had probably rented housing. Just to be sure, the Yakzan cross-referenced this with the car routes. The kid was cautious, leaving the car in different garages and parking lots, but he'd still managed to establish a center.
Murad saved the address of the neighborhood where Silverberg most likely lived and pushed the laptop aside with satisfaction. After breakfast, he'd drop AlNilam at the perinatal center and then head to the potential terrorist lair to look for anything useful.
"Another interesting question," the Yakzan thought, lying back down next to Effendi to catch another half-hour of sleep. "What's Enrique Salvador's stake in this, and how deep is he in it?"
Almonzeia, the capital of the MT Corporation's colonies on Almonzis
While Ax gave orders to his deputies and senior officers, Phan made a call somewhere, after which images of the stolen container, its specifications, and serial number magically appeared. It was a long, cylindrical tube of light metal, with a connector for attaching to equipment during corrective procedures. At the top was a substance level indicator. Judging by its readings, the container was packed to the brim.
They started the search with the baggage cars. Fontaine ordered the head of the baggage and freight service to evacuate all her subordinates, then Phan's team and Ax's soldiers got to work. Searching all the baggage and the entire express in one day was out of the question—it would take two weeks of continuous labor without sleep or rest. The poor souls in the IT department were also drowning in work, frantically searching for possible holes in the train's control system security.
Meanwhile, the thieves' accomplice was probably still on the train, among the crew...
"Maybe it's not one of yours," Phan remarked quietly, though Fontaine didn't sense her reading his thoughts. Probably his face showed the full extent of his despair.
"Maybe. Though I don't know which scenario is worse—because I can check the crew, but I can't check the depot personnel."
"Or it could be someone from outside."
"Even worse. That would mean your thieves somehow got their hands on classified documents that only the directorate, train chiefs, and chief engineers have access to."
"What about the rest of the technical staff?" Phan frowned. "How do they work, then?"
"Each specialist has access only to their own section. No one except train chiefs and chief engineers sees the complete security system schematics. And they're not supposed to wave those schematics around in front of just anyone!"
"I very much appreciate this trust from Ana Timirena," the major assured him, clearly stung by his words. "I'll do my utmost to justify it, even though I don't think she likes me."
"She doesn't like anyone who insists on traipsing through her express and rummaging through passengers' luggage. I'm sorry," Ax rubbed his face with his hands. "You're certainly not 'just anyone.' But we guard our classified information as carefully as your superiors guard yours."
"So far, we know that someone obtained information about only one section of the security system. It makes sense to check whoever has access to that part of the schematics."
"I'd already figured that out, but if your thieves got even a piece of a top-secret schematic, we're not talking about petty theft anymore—we're talking about possible preparations for a terrorist attack. And I," Ax hissed, "will not allow a repeat of the 'Dorothea'. I'll take the entire directorate hostage myself, if necessary, to get this voyage cancelled!"
"They can't be that stupid, refusing to cancel a voyage when there's a terrorist threat," Phan said soothingly. "It would be far worse if we hadn't found out at all, and I'd wasted time searching 'Altair'."
"True," Axel sighed. "I'm sorry, but I won't be able to help you find the cars and the cutter. We'll barely have enough of these thirteen days to re-check the crew and search the entire express, from locomotive to tail."
"Don't worry," she touched Fontaine's arm, "I know your main concern is the express. By the way, I got the footage from the cameras on the streets near the accident site."
"And?" Fontaine perked up.
"And nothing. Mr. X isn't on any of them. But I only ran the recognition program on data from the immediate neighboring streets. Tomorrow I'll start on the next ones."
"You're going to run all the footage from every camera in the city through the program?"
"If I have to."
Ax just shook his head. Then again, Phan had always been a determined woman—and very patient. He could easily imagine that if the recognition program froze, Phan would start reviewing the footage herself.
Fontaine pulled out his phone and found the image of Mr. X. Tall—one meter ninety or a bit more—broad-shouldered, dark-skinned from the look of his hands, and dark-haired. Ax stared intently at this man, comparing him with another, similar photo he'd been studying recently—and wondered where the pastry chef Aguilar had been yesterday when Ferenc was hit by a car.
"I'll definitely ask him," Axel thought, seeing a note appear in his work calendar: "Interview. P. L. Aguilar Serrano. June 17, 10:00."