And then he saw it. Face Number Fifteen. That was the one he knew. He was sure of it. And suddenly, in a moment like a piece dropping itself into place in the puzzle, he knew. He knew who it was.
He had seen Ardosa’s mug shot before, all right. And the man calling himself Ardosa had been involved, if on the periphery, of a big case. The biggest case Justen Devray had ever been on. The murder, five years before, of Governor Chanto Grieg.
JUSTEN RUBBED HIS face and blinked hard. “I’m sorry I’m a bit punchy, sir. I’ve been up all night on this one. I came straight from the archives room to here.” He blinked and stretched, trying to bring the room into focus. Apparently Kresh’s wife was waiting in the main office, just down the hall, and that was why Kresh had brought him in here, to an assistant’s office, for the meeting. Kresh had assured him the assistant would not be in for another hour, but even so… The paintings on the wall, the tastefully chosen furniture and decoration, made it seem a strangely personal space. Justen felt as if he were intruding.
“It’s all right, son,” Kresh said. “Sit down.” Kresh sat on one end of a low couch, and gestured for Devray to sit down on the other end. Justen did so, gratefully. “Donald, bring the Commander something hot and strong with a dose of caffeine in it.”
“At once, Governor,” Donald replied, and went off to take care of it.
“All right then, Commander. My wife and I have a rather important meeting at ten this morning. That gives us just about an hour. Will that be enough for whatever it is?”
“I don’t think it’ll take five minutes, sir.” Justen hesitated a moment, and then decided to plunge ahead. “This appointment at ten, sir—would it by any chance be with a Davlo Lentrall?”
Kresh looked surprised. “It would indeed, Commander. I haven’t told anyone I’m meeting with him again, outside of my wife. Might I ask where you got that particular tidbit of information?”
“Thank you, Donald,” said Justen. Kresh’s personal robot had returned with a cup of what seemed to be remarkably strong tea, and Justen took it from him. Like most Spacers, Justen rarely bothered handing out “pleases” and “thank yous” to robots, but, somehow, Donald 111 was a special case. He took a quick sip of the tea, and found it as reviving as he had hoped. “I got my information from two sources,” he went on. “From our old and dear friends in the Settler Security Service, and from the Ironheads. Neither of them gave me the information on purpose, of course, and neither of them knows what I’ve found out. But I learned it from them, all the same. If they don’t know all about him by now, they will, very soon. And whatever he’s involved in has got both outfits about to go ballistic.”
“Do you know what Lentrall’s been working on?” Kresh asked.
“No, sir. But if the Settlers and the Ironheads don’t know by now, they will by lunchtime. I can tell you they are both digging as hard as they can.”
“Why don’t you start at the beginning, son?” Kresh suggested.
“Yes, sir. I’ve been sitting in on the various ongoing operations, just to see how things are going, to get a feel for what my officers have to deal with, and so on.”
“And it gets you out of the office now and then,” Kresh said with a smile. “I used to do the same thing when I was running the Sheriff’s Department.”
Justen smiled back. It helped a great deal to have a governor who used to run a law enforcement agency. He understood things without needing too much explanation. “Yes, sir. In any event, I sat in on the Settlertown main entrance stakeout. Normally the officer assigned to that duty is expected to provide his or her own vehicle or other watch post, and his or her own robotic assistance, and is later reimbursed. The thinking is that keeps us from using the same three vehicles and the same three robots over and over. It should make us harder to spot. It also encourages the officers to be a bit more creative, show some initiative. In any event, I did the drill myself. I brought my own personal robot, and rented a second robot and an aircar. That stakeout is sort of a grab-bag affair, more than anything. Every once in a while we spot someone going in who shouldn’t be, and we can run some checks.”
“But something a little different happened.”
“Yes, sir. My robots spotted someone not on the watch lists. My robot could ID him, but the rental unit could not, even though it was a security model. I later found out that the ID database in my personal robot had been altered. My robot’s list is a copy of the standard CIP list—and I’ve confirmed that the standard list has been altered as well.”
“Someone inserted a false ID profile into the CIP database?”
“Yes, sir. And I might add that the real identity of the person in question is not in the file. I’m not sure if that’s because he was deleted by the same people who inserted the false idea, or if the real identity’s file was culled in a routine file purge.”
“I see. And who is someone pretending to be?”
“Dr. Barnsell Ardosa, of the University of Hades Center for Terraforming.” Justen pulled hardcopies of the original images out of his carry bag. “This is the university’s ID image,” he said, handing them over. “And this is the surveillance image.”
Kresh took the two images, and let out a low whistle. “Norlan Fiyle. The rustbacking Settler in the Grieg case. The mustache hides some of him, but it’s not exactly an impenetrable disguise.”
Justen Devray looked at Kresh in impressed surprised. “The face looked familiar to me,” he said, “but it took me hours and hours, and every image-manipulating trick in the book, before I was able to place him.”
“You’ve been a working cop since then,” Kresh said, still looking thoughtfully at the images of Fiyle/Ardosa. “There have been a lot of other faces for you to deal with, on a lot of other cases. Fiyle—I never met him, of course, but he was part of the last case I ever worked. I can still shut my eyes and see every page of the case file. Did you ever meet him?”
“No, sir. I wasn’t in on that interrogation. Maybe I should have been.”
“Don’t be absurd,” Kresh said, his voice gentler than his words. “You were running a big part of a vital case. He was picked up on the far side of the Great Bay from where you were working, and he gave up the one piece of information we needed almost at once. Why in the devil should you have chased after him? Just in case he popped up five years later?”
“I suppose you’re right. But even so, right now I wish I had gone to get a look at him.”
“Hmmmph. Water under the bridge. Let’s get back to the point. You’ve had a chance to check the files, and maybe my memory isn’t as infallible as I’d like it to be. Give me a quick summary on friend Fiyle.”
“Norlan Fiyle. A Settler, but not any part of the terraforming team. It seems he took advantage of a few loopholes in the immigration laws to come to Inferno, presumably in hopes of making some quick and easy money. He was working with a gang of rustbackers, helping to smuggle illegal New Law robots off the island of Purgatory. He got caught just about the time Grieg was murdered. He made a deal, all charges dropped and freedom to leave the planet, in exchange for the name of a Governor’s Ranger who was on the take. The Ranger in question was Emoch Huthwitz, who was killed the same night as the governor, while on guard duty. It looked a lot like an opportunist revenge murder. It was one of the leads that got us looking at the possible involvement of rustbacking gangs in the case.”
Kresh shook his head. “I needed the refresher. Sometimes I forget how intricate that case was. But Fiyle was supposed to leave the planet. Why didn’t he?”
“I don’t know, sir. But the fact that he was supposed to leave does offer an innocent explanation why he wasn’t in the current CIP identity files. We don’t maintain current files on people who are off-planet. As to why he didn’t leave, my hunch is that he hadn’t been any more honest on his home planet. Maybe he was on the run from the police there when he got to Inferno. Maybe he thought it over, and figured he wouldn’t stay out of jail for long back home, if he went there. So he offered his services to the SSS here. A freelance informant. They’d set him up and protect him in exchange for information.”
“And maybe Cinta Melloy didn’t make it a voluntary arrangement, if she had the goods on him back home,” Kresh said. “It’s all speculation, but it sounds plausible. But so far all you’ve got is an old smuggler walking into Settlertown and living under an assumed name. There has to be more.”
“Yes, sir, there is,” said Justen. “I left the Sapper to watch for Ardosa and trail him while I went back to CIP headquarters with the other robot and started trying to find out who Ardosa really was. Well, Ardosa came out of Settlertown not long after we left—and led Sapper 323 straight to Ironhead headquarters, and a nice little chat with Jadelo Gildern.”
