Torch of Freedom

'Well, that said,' his father went on, 'I take it you've decided Jack McBryde really was a traitor?'

'Yes,' Colin sighed. 'I have to admit, part of me resisted that conclusion. But I'm afraid it's almost certain that he was.'

'Only 'almost'?' Benjamin asked with a sort of gentle skepticism. Collin looked at him, and Benjamin arched one eyebrow.

'Only almost,' Collin repeated with a rather firmer emphasis. 'Given the complete loss of so many of our records and the fragmentary—and contradictory, sometimes—nature of what survived, almost any conclusion we could possibly reach is going to be tentative, and especially where motivations are concerned. But I take your point, Ben, and I won't pretend it was an easy conclusion for me to accept.'

'But you do accept it now?' his father asked quietly.

'Yes.' Collin rubbed his face briefly with his good hand. 'Despite the scattered records we found that would seem to indicate Jack was making a desperate, last-minute effort to thwart some kind of conspiracy, there's simply not any way to account for those recordings Irvine made at the diner except to assume he was guilty. Certainly not once we confirmed that the waiter he was meeting with was Anton Zilwicki. And then there's this.'

He drew a personal memo pad from his pocket, laid it on the corner of his father's desk so he could manipulate it one-handed, and keyed the power button.

'I'm afraid the visual quality isn't what we'd like, given the limits of the original recording,' he half- apologized. 'The only reason we've got this much is because the owners of the Buenaventura Tower didn't want seccy squatters moving in. But it's enough for our purposes.'

He touched a key, and a small holographic image appeared above the pad. It showed a passageway of some sort. The lighting was quite dim, but after a moment, three people came into view, crossing hurriedly toward a door some distance away.

'We ran this recording through every cross check,' Collins said. 'The man on the left is definitely Anton Zilwicki, within a ninety-nine-point-nine percent probability. Outside the world of statistics, that means 'for damned sure and certain.' There's simply no question about it. That phenotype of his is obviously hard to disguise, and everything else matches. Not the face, of course . . . although it does match the face of the waiter in Irvine's recording.'

'And the other man is . . . ?'

'Yes, Father.' Collin nodded. 'It's Victor Cachat. To be precise, it's Victor Cachat within an eighty-seven- point-five percent probability. We don't have anywhere near as much imagery on him as we had on Zilwicki, thanks to that documentary the Manties did on him a while back. That gave us a lot smaller comparison sample for Cachat, so the analysts' confidence level is considerably lower. I think they're just throwing out sheet anchors, though. For myself, I'm entirely confident its Cachat.'

'The woman?' Benjamin asked, and this time Collin shook his head.

'As far as her specific identity is concerned, we don't know, and it's almost certain that we never will. But her general identity is clear enough—ninety-nine-point-five percent probable, anyway. She's a Scrag, presumably one of that group of female Scrags who defected to Torch.'

'She'd be a minor player, then.'

'Yes. Zilwicki and Cachat were the critical ones.'

'And you're certain they are dead?' Albrecht was frowning at the image, which was rerunning in a continuous loop. 'No chance that recording was faked?'

'We don't see how it could have been, Father. Mind you, in this line of work we never deal in dead—you should pardon the expression—certainties. But at this point, the practical distinction between 'certain' and 'extremely probable' gets thin enough you just have to take it as a given. Nobody would ever get anything done if we insisted on one hundred percent verification of every single fact.'

He settled back in his chair again, easing his regrowing arm once more, and crossed his legs.

'We ran those images through every comparative program we've got. What I can tell you, as a result, is that these are genuine images of genuine people in exactly the place they seem to be. The analyses we've run compare movements to background on an almost microscopic level. That's one reason it took so long. Those people'—he pointed at the still replaying imagery—'actually did exactly what it looks like they're doing against exactly the background we're seeing.'

'So this is definitely a recording of these people going through that passageway?' Benjamin asked.

'Right.'

'But I notice you didn't say anything about when they did it,' Albrecht pointed out.

'No, I didn't. That's where the 'never deal in dead certainties' I mentioned above comes in. There's a possibility—a very tiny possibility—that they could have recorded this ahead of time and then substituted that recording for the live imagery from the tower's owners' security system. But given the security protocols which would have to be circumvented, pulling it off—and especially pulling it off without getting caught at it—would be . . . extremely difficult, shall we say.'

Albrecht rubbed his jaw thoughtfully.

'By all accounts, Zilwicki is very good at that sort of thing,' he pointed out.

'Yes, and the accounts are accurate, too. But pulling off something like your suggesting would have meant meant getting into that bizarre virtual world where hackers have been jousting for over two thousand T-years.' Collin made a 'brushing away' gesture with his working hand. 'Any security protocols can be circumvented, Father . . . and any program to circumvent security protocols can be detected. Then that detection can be circumvented, but the circumvention can be detected, and so on. It goes on literally forever. In the end, it comes down to the simple question of 'Are our cyberneticists as good as their cyberneticists?' '

Collin shrugged.

'I can't rule out the possibility that Zilwicki is—was—better at this than any—or, for that, matter all of—our people are. Frankly, it seems vanishingly unlikely that one man, no matter how good he may be, is going to be better than an entire planet's worth of competing cyberneticists. Still, I'll grant the possibility. But no matter how good he may have been, he was still playing in our front yard. If we'd been playing on his territory, I'd feel a lot less comfortable with our conclusions, but could Anton Zilwicki, using only the equipment and software he was able to smuggle onto Mesa—or obtain on the black market once he got here—get around the best protocols we've ever been able to create, with all the advantages of operating on our own home planet, and do it so seamlessly that we can't find a single trace of it?'

He shook his head.

'Yes, it's theoretically possible, but, in the real world, I really don't think it's likely at all.' He pointed at the tiny, moving figures of the recorded imagery once more. 'I think we're looking at what really happened and when it happened. Anton Zilwicki and Victor Cachat and an unknown female were passing through the parking facilities of what used to be the Benaventura Tower when someone set off a two-point-five kiloton nuclear device. The center of the explosion was about thirty meters from what you're seeing right this minute.'

'Which, of course, explains the absence of any DNA traces.' Benjamin made a face. 'They were simply vaporized.'

'Oh, there were plenty of DNA traces in the area.' Collin chuckled harshly. 'Even in that location, and even at that time on a Saturday morning, there had to be somebody around. Benaventura's been standing empty long enough, and it's far enough out into that industrial belt between the city proper and the spaceport, that traffic was thankfully light. In fact, that's almost certainly the reason Zilwicki and Cachat had chosen that particular route for their escape. Despite that, our best estimate from our pattern analysis of all of the tower's security recordings from the last couple of months or so is that there were probably at least thirty or forty people in the immediate vicinity. We've recovered over twenty complete and partial bodies, some of them pretty well incinerated, but we're positive there are quite a few we'll never know about.

'But the truth is that even if they hadn't been, for all practical purposes, right at the center of the fireball, we still wouldn't have gotten much from DNA analysis. Cachat is—was—a Havenite, born in Nouveau Paris itself, and StateSec did a pretty fanatical job of eliminating any medical records that might ever have existed when Saint-Just tapped him for special duties. No way we could get our hands on a sample we knew was