stealth suit, or the coincidence that the one building he’d bombed was the one where Chain had stashed the prowler components. It had been his teeth. They’d been even, white, perfect, glowing while bared in a feral snarl in the semi-darkness. No Outie, and precious few Metrozone dwellers, had teeth that good.
He’d bet good money that Daniels was running a gene assay right now, checking for military-grade bio- hacks, and that he thought the CIA were odds-on favorites for killing Harry Chain.
Petrovitch got his clothes on, and rescued his boots and coat. His rat was still in his pocket, along with the other bits and pieces he kept there. Not like last time. His fingers wouldn’t lace his boots, and he ended up tucking the loose ends inside.
Madeleine was sitting in the reception area, counting her beads while having one eye on the television screen. She stopped clicking and tucked them away as he slopped closer.
“I would pull you up,” he said, “except I’m more likely to rip both my arms out of their sockets.”
She chewed at her lip. “I don’t want to lose you, just when I’ve found you.”
“Yeah. It was crazy. I should never have done it. That I got away with it doesn’t excuse anything. Sorry.”
“And it won’t happen again?” She fixed him with a needle-like stare.
He blew out his breath in a thin stream. “Slight problem with that.” He looked around: there were other people present, and what he wanted to say wasn’t for public consumption. He did notice that he’d fallen further down the news cycle: the morning’s bombing had knocked him lower. “Can we go and find something to eat? I need to tell you everything.”
9
There was a coffee maker in one corner, surrounded by the paraphernalia of making: dirty mugs, dirty spoons, two empty foil packets of filter coffee and one closed with a red clip. Filters were scattered like autumn leaves on the floor, spilling from the box on the shelf above.
Flimsy pieces of paper sat in randomly allocated piles on every flat surface, daring the erstwhile occupant to open the window and lose all order. Filing cabinets bulged with files. His desk was crammed, too, along with what brief ephemera he considered important.
There wasn’t much room between the furniture and the walls: being a major in a bankrupt militia held even less prestige than a detective inspector.
“Yeah. Okay,” said Petrovitch, “what am I supposed to do?”
Daniels presented him with a build-it-yourself document box. “Take what effects he left. The next person in will throw away what you leave, so better get them all.”
Petrovitch folded the box together, pushing tab A into slot B until it became rigid. There was a lid, too, and that was constructed in the same fashion before being laid to one side. Daniels leaned against the door frame as Petrovitch edged his way toward the window and Chain’s chair.
“I should watch you while you do this, but I can trust you, right?”
“Of course,” said Petrovitch. “I’d appreciate some time alone.”
“I’ll come back in twenty minutes or so, see how you’re doing.” With one last look, he strode away, almost marching, leaving the door to the corridor open.
Petrovitch looked over the top of his glasses, and picked up a photograph frame, toying with it until Daniels’ heels disappeared.
He was about to put the photo down when he realized what it was, what it showed. Him and Madeleine: him uncomfortable in a jacket, no tie. Her—she’d wanted white, but post-Long-Night Metrozone didn’t do wedding dresses for two-meter-tall brides in a hurry. She wore gray silk instead, looking like gossamer, wound around her straight from the bolt and held together by artfully placed pins and a silver brooch.
Chain had taken the picture himself on the steps of the church, then he’d taken the time and trouble to print it out and mount it, and sent the happy couple a copy. It appeared he’d made one for himself, too.
Petrovitch put it in the box. The corridor was clear, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t being watched. He took out a slim black wand and twisted it on. A line of lights rose up the side of the casing, then dropped back down until just one was illuminated.
He ran the wand over the desk, then spread out, holding it up and around until he’d scanned the whole room. Near the door, the lights tripped all the way into the red, and he peered out. There was a camera positioned just above, on the ceiling, a small black dome of surveillance.
He stepped back in and knocked the door half-closed with his foot.
He went straight to the desk and leafed through each file, scanning its contents with a quick, practiced eye. Nothing seemed immediately relevant in the first few, and he guessed they’d been placed there by a subordinate. Further down the pile was the report on the discovery of the prowler. That went into the box, too, as did the one beneath, which was slim, containing only a couple of sheets of typescript, but was labeled CIA suspects.
He looked at the size of the files, then retrieved two more, roughly the same thickness, from random places in the drawers. While he was there, he poked around in the far recesses of the cabinets, seeing what lay hidden.
He didn’t know what to expect. Bottles, perhaps, but he’d never seen Chain so much as sniff at a wine cork. Porn, but the man seemed almost completely disinterested in women. Or men. And he clearly liked his pies, but his roundness was due to poor diet and lack of exercise, rather than bingeing on packets of biscuits.
Nothing but a few empty boxes of nicotine slap-patches. Chain had missed his vocation. He should have become a monk, instead. He might still be alive if he had.
Back to the desk then, and the tier of three drawers. Petrovitch pushed the empty biros and dried-out fibre- tip pens aside to get at the three cash cards at the bottom. He’d pass them through a reader later and find how much was banked on each.
The next drawer down was stuffed with storage media, all the way from ancient three-and-a-half-inch black squares, through silvered discs and plastic sticks, to the modern solid-state cards overprinted with a variety of designs.
They all went into the box. Even if they all ended up in a bulk eraser, it was worth sifting through them for the chance of one nugget of gold.
He opened the bottom drawer and found Chain’s bugging equipment, devices he’d been the wrong end of on several occasions. There were manuals, software, and the bugs themselves, various sizes and shapes, including the sticky ones Chain liked so much. His detector wand, too.
Petrovitch didn’t know if MEA would allow him to take that sort of property home. It was worth a try.
Now for the hard part. He opened the case that held his overlays and slipped them on his glasses, then from another pocket, clicked open the rat. The environment wasn’t info-rich. Not yet, anyway.
He started patting the underside of the desktop, then the drawers, then got down on his hands and knees when he couldn’t feel any pieces of paper. His face twitched. Chain hadn’t pasted his logon details anywhere obvious.
There was nothing on the desk either: used mugs held only dregs, and the hardwired phone only its own number.
Then he cursed himself, and dived back into the half-full box, sliding out his wedding photo and using his thumbnail to open the back of it. Not there, either.
No matter. The job went from hard to really, very hard, but he was prepared. Using the rat, he navigated his way to the MEA computer—not the public face of the authority, but the bare code that covered the access nodes, and simultaneously fired up his secret weapon.
The script on his screen read:
It was smart enough to know what he wanted. Of course it was. All he had to do was point at the node he
