for permission to leave. Raj was a good-looking kid, dark hair, bright smile, confident air…
“You can go,” I said. “But don't disturb them up front, you got me? This is official police business. You just walk straight out. Got it?”
“Yes, sir. I'll be on my way then.” Raj walked out, closing the door behind him.
I tried to swallow the lump in my throat. Fuck me! I stared at the closed door expecting a raging Yuri Kiper to come storming in any moment. C'mon kid, just leave. Don't stop to chitchat. Just go. With every uneventful second, my heart pounded a little softer and a little slower. Kid must've done what I said. Yuri Kiper was none the wiser-at least for now. I turned back to the drawer and tried to focus on the vid labels, skimming through them until one finally jumped out at me, its title: “Liz-Complete Works.” I pulled it and sweated out the two minutes of copy time before putting it back in the drawer.
I shut the drawers and took one last look at the room to make sure everything was back in place. Looked good to me. I moved out into the hall and from there into the kitchen. I needed another distraction to help me get past the sitting room doorway. I placed a holo-free call to Maggie, then as we agreed, I hung up as soon as she answered. I tiptoed to the doorway and listened to the tail end of Maggie's fake phone conversation. “Yes, Mom,” she said. “I'll be by after work, okay?” Then after a short pause, “'Bye.”
“Sorry about that, Yuri,” she said. “Were you about to say something?”
“No.”
“Listen to me, Yuri.” The tone in Maggie's voice said it was definitely hardball time. “I know you and Ian have something going. I saw you having dinner with him.” Maggie was pacing. I could hear her shoes clacking loudly on the floor with her overemphasized steps. “Ian told you that you were sloppy. Sloppy how?”
Yuri played dumb. “I don't know what you're talking about. That cop beat me up for doing my job. You should be grilling him, not me.”
“Cut the shit, asshole.” Maggie was full into it now. “The Libre didn't send you out to that barge. I talked to your reporter friend. She said she never got a call that night.”
“She's lying.” Yuri was sounding whiny.
“Why would she lie?”
“She never showed up. She's just acting like she didn't get the call so she doesn't get in trouble with management. These reporters don't like getting their hair wet.”
Maggie's pacing stopped. “You expect me to believe that?”
“It's the truth,” he said, quiver-voiced.
“I want to know why you were snooping around that barge. I want to know what kind of shit you and my partner are into. I want to know about the offworlder. You're going to tell me, Yuri, or I'll be back here with a warrant.”
“But I didn't do anything.”
“Liar!” The sound of shattering glass burst from the sitting room. I seized my opportunity and scrammed out the front.
I arrived at Maggie's first and sat on her front stoop, rain sleeting off the slicker. We Lagartans didn't use these things often, rain gear was for tourists. We'd rather tough it out than look like offworlders. Not that it was that tough. Even during the long stretch of winter, when our polar location hid us from the sun and left us in total darkness for twenty-two hours a day, even then, this place stayed balmy.
Maggie came up the walk wearing a conspiratorial grin. “Did you get anything good?”
“Don't know yet.”
Maggie walked up to the door, which swung open for her DNA. I followed her through, my sopping shoes leaving little pools of water on the tile floor. Maggie snatched up a couple towels, tossed one my way. I stripped off the slicker, this time making sure I carefully slipped the sleeve over my splinting so as not to get knotted up again.
Maggie excused herself, and I settled in her living room, an almost cavernous room with monitor hide furniture and spotless white carpeting. I wondered how much she must pay to keep this carpet mold free. Her family was loaded, descendents of plantation owners who made their fortune on the long since defunct brandy trade.
Maggie stepped in, wearing a fresh set of clothes and bearing a couple glasses of what was sure to be a rare family vintage. I took a deep swig, swishing the brandy in my mouth, savoring the flavor before swallowing it down.
“You scared him pretty good,” I said.
“I wish you could've seen him when I smashed my tea glass. He was shaking, he was so scared.”
“Did he say anything useful?”
“No. He held firm to his story, flimsy as it was.”
“Ian's going to be fuming when he hears.”
“Good.”
I nodded, though I thought it likely that Ian had been expecting Maggie to confront the cameraman. He knew that Maggie had seen him with Yuri and the offworlder. I wouldn't have been surprised if Ian had spent time coaching Yuri, preparing him for Maggie's interrogation.
“Shall we see what we got?”
We made quick business of going through the copied vids, frustrated by the results. Nothing but a series of vids shot for his job, interviews with local pols, footage of social events, countless hours' worth of humdrum garbage. The only thing that showed any promise was the last vid I'd copied, the one titled “Liz-Complete Works,” but all five vid files were protected by an encryption scheme.
Maggie logged into the KOP systems and downloaded the latest encryption crackers and then started them up, checking each cracker's time estimates. “Damn,” she said as she tossed a holographic timer my way. I reflexively reached for it, surprised when I succeeded in batting it down. Maggie must've had one seriously top- notch system to be smart enough to alter the hologram's trajectory when my hand blocked its path. A cheaper system would've just passed the holo through my hand. I mimed picking up the timer as if it were real, the timer's image moving along with my hands. I looked at the estimated completion date: December 18, 2790.
In hopes of cutting down the decryption time, Maggie tried offloading some of the processing work from her home system to the KOP databank servers. I held up the holo-timer for her to see, the new date: June 32, 2790. Not a whole lot better.
“This isn't going to work,” Maggie said. “We're going to need some serious processing power.” To the computer, she said, “Stop processing.”
I watched the timer vanish from my hands. “Any other ideas?”
“Yeah. Let me see what services are offered on the Orbital.”
Maggie got busy researching our options. I called Vlad, who assured me that nobody'd been by to visit Niki. He told me he was going to get sleepy soon and asked if it was okay for him to bring in his cousin Victor for the overnight shift.
“Is he trustworthy?” I asked.
“Like a brother,” he said.
“Fine. Do it.”
I decided not to call Niki. Let her fucking stew.
I sucked down the last drops of my brandy, thinking another sounded good, real good. I set off for the kitchen, hunting for that bottle. Maggie made it easy for me by leaving the bottle on the counter. I poured a full glass, took a couple long swigs, then topped my glass back off. I read the bottle's label:
ORZO
OAK AGED
2764
Damn. This was some good hooch. I decided I'd really take my time with this glass, try to enjoy it.
By the time I made it back into the living room, Maggie had it all worked out. There was an offworld company that could crack the vid files in under thirty hours. Maggie explained that they had a satellite network with a couple thousand sats, each one with far more processing power than it needed to do its job. They made a habit of selling off the excess processing time when they could find a buyer. For a job this big, they said they could dedicate a couple processors from each of the sats to cracking the encryption scheme.
