bed. “Mellanie. We could get married.”
Oh, save me! “No, Dudley.” She said it fast and firm, before he had any chance to work on the idea. “Nobody should even be considering things like that, not with everything that’s going on. Life’s too uncertain right now.”
“Then how about afterward?”
“Dudley! Stop it.”
He bowed his head petulantly.
“Come on,” she said in a more considerate tone. “Let’s get packed. There are some great hotels in LA. We’ll stay in one of them.”
***
It was raining again, a persistent, miserable cold drizzle that smeared windows and turned pavements to slippery ribbons awash with a dismaying amount of litter. Hoshe Finn never ceased to be surprised and depressed by how wet it was in the ancient English capital city. He’d always assumed the old jokes were simple exaggeration. Walking to the office from Charing Cross station as he did every morning, he’d learned better. The UFN environmental commissioners who shared the vast stone government building with Senate Security must have been more successful than they admitted in reversing the global warming trend.
He shook his raincoat out in the elevator, and held it at arm’s length as he walked down the corridor to his office. Unsurprisingly, Paula was already in, and poring over screens on her desk.
“Morning,” he called out.
She gave a cursory smile, not looking up.
Hoshe hung his coat on the back of his dark wooden door and settled behind his desk. The number of files awaiting his attention was dispiriting. He’d only left at half past ten last night, and now it was barely eight. The RI had spent the night pulling out anything relevant to the queries he’d made yesterday. He started on the old Directorate report of the Cox Educational charity.
At eleven o’clock he gave the door to Paula’s office a perfunctory knock and walked in. “You might have been right about the educational charity,” he told her.
“What have you got?”
“There are some anomalies between the files I requested.” He sat in front of her desk, and told his e-butler to display the data on the big holographic portal that took up one wall. “First off I started with the report that the Directorate’s Paris office put together after the attempted hack against the charity’s account in the Denman Manhattan bank. Your old colleagues were reasonably thorough; they investigated the charity for any evidence that they were a front. The report’s conclusion is that they’re not.” He waved a hand against the rows of names and figures that were scrolling down the portal.
“This is the list of all the outgoing donations. It’s pretty comprehensive. The Cox supported over a hundred academic projects at one time or another. Recently they’ve declined considerably, although they’re still going. The Gralmond University astronomy department was just one of them. So far, so ordinary; according to the report there is nothing here to be suspicious about.”
“So it looks,” Paula said.
“Okay. That was my starting point, then I began checking references. There are a couple of things that are unusual to start with. Not illegal or suspicious, just odd. The charity’s funds come from a single private donation deposited thirty years ago in the Denman account. The sum was two million Earth dollars, which was transferred to the Denman bank from a onetime account. Secondly, there is no named founder. The firm of Bromley, Waterford, and Granku registered the Cox with the New York charity board, and opened an account with one dollar. The two million was transferred in a month later. It has only ever had three commissioners: Mr. Seaton, Ms. Daltra, and Mr. Pomanskie, all of whom are associates of Bromley, Waterford, and Granku. Your original Directorate investigation team never pursued that, which is something of a lapse if you ask me.”
“There are a lot of rich eccentrics out there giving their money away to strange causes.”
Hoshe raised an eyebrow. “I’m sure there are. But according to its own records, the Cox doesn’t support strange causes. So why keep the benefactor concealed? It’s not for tax purposes. By staying anonymous they don’t qualify for any tax credit at all.”
“Go on, what’s your answer?”
“There isn’t an answer. But it made me curious enough to start digging a little deeper. You see all these names? The ones who received money?”
“Yes.”
“The Directorate report doesn’t say how much was given. Also unusual. We know that Dudley Bose received just over one point three million dollars’ worth of funding; that doesn’t leave much for the rest of them. In total seventy-one and a half thousand dollars were distributed; that’s to over a hundred academic projects covering a period of twenty-one years. That financial data was made available to the Directorate investigators. The raw data was still sitting in the Paris array when I requested it. Someone obviously excluded it from the report.”
“Damn,” Paula said. “Who were they?”
“It was a team research effort. Renne Kampasa, Tarlo, and Jim Nwan all have their names attached. The Cox’s original finance file doesn’t have a named access log, just the team code. One or more of them did look at it.”
“It can’t be all of them,” she said. “It simply can’t.”
“There’s something else. Remember what you told me about our old friend Mellanie discovering this?”
“She said Alessandra Baron had tampered with the charity’s records.”
“She might be right. I requested a current financial report from the New York charity board. Legally, each registered charity has to file accounts with them every year. According to the filed accounts, the Cox stopped funding the Gralmond University astronomy department right after Bose made his discovery; however, they did continue to make their usual small donations to other academic projects. I started checking with the named recipients. None of them had ever heard of the Cox, let alone received their money. That is until two days after the Prime invasion; then the money transfers became real again. Those accounts are false, they’re there to satisfy any casual investigation.”
Paula sat back in her chair, and rubbed a finger against her chin. The faintest smile touched her lips. “Mellanie was right. Well, how about that.”
“Looks like it. Paula…the Starflyer funded the whole Bose observation. That means it knew what Bose would find.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Logically, it must have been there; or its species was aware of the Primes and their imprisonment within the force field.”
“Did it let them out?”
“That’s the obvious conclusion.”
“So the war was started deliberately. The Guardians were right.”
“Yes.” She grimaced, and gave him a sad smile.
“So what do we do now?”
“Firstly, I inform my political allies. Secondly, we arrest the Cox commissioners on fraud charges. They’re obviously Starflyer agents. If we can read their memories, we might gain a better understanding of its network inside the Commonwealth.”
“What about Alessandra Baron? She was the one Mellanie tipped us off about. She has to be a Starflyer agent.”
“It will be difficult to arrest such a public figure without having a good reason, and we can’t afford to go public with the knowledge of the Starflyer. Senate Security will make a formal request to navy intelligence to put her under covert observation.”
“What? But we know they’re compromised.”
“Yes. But it’s an excellent opportunity to see what the request kicks loose.”
***
The green and orange priority icon popped into Nigel’s virtual vision as he was reading The House at Pooh Corner to his youngest children before they went to sleep. He tried to read them a story each night, to be a proper father as he classified the ideal. His children would be dressed for bed by mothers and nannies, then they’d be herded into their playroom for the story. He always read from the classics, using a proper printed book, one you could open to find the place, and shut with finality when the evening’s chapter came to an end.
Right now he was halfway through The House at Pooh Corner. The seven children at the mansion who were over three years old sat or lay around on cushions and soft mushroom couches, listening contentedly as their daddy read out loud with amateurish intonations and big arm gestures. They smiled, and giggled, and whispered among themselves.
It was his expanded mentality that was calling his attention to the item from the Dynasty’s security division. The observation team Nelson had assigned to Mellanie reported her arriving at a bungalow in Darklake City owned by one Paul Cramley. Security simply filed the name. In Nigel’s expanded mentality it was immediately cross-referenced with his personal files. That produced the priority notification.
Nigel’s primary awareness shifted out of the playroom to focus on the information flowing into his artificial neural network. He accessed the reports on the burglary, and saw what a mess the nostats had made of the would-be burglars. Typical Paul, never quite guilty himself.
Cramley had been one of the programming team who’d written the algorithms for the first AIs that CST had used to control their early wormhole gateways. After the AIs evolved themselves into the SI, Paul had chosen to live out of the limelight, involving himself in various activities of dubious legality, a minor league player but with masterclass hacking skills. A list of references rolled down Nigel’s virtual vision. He stopped at one of the most recent. Paul had been caught running an illegal search through the City of Paris restricted listings.
Two things were badly wrong with that. Firstly, Paul had searched out Paula Myo’s address. Secondly, Paul wouldn’t get caught doing something that basic. Yet Myo had produced documented evidence sufficient to have him convicted, fined, and his equipment confiscated. She must have a mega webhead shielding her data. More likely it was the SI.
Nigel wondered who Paul had run the search for. Mellanie? Why would she want to know where Myo lived?
The more he delved into Mellanie, the more curious he became. According to her file, she’d visited Far Away for the Michelangelo show. Was she in contact with the Guardians? Or was she the SI’s contact with them? That surely was paranoid speculation. There were so many data points available, but he couldn’t connect them. He didn’t often delve into security matters, but this was turning into the mother of all exceptions. His fascination was further goaded by her sassy looks.
He retracted his primary awareness from the artificial neural network, and continued reading until he’d finished the section. The children pleaded and wheedled,
