"First, why did Damik see you after I talked to him?"
"What did you ask him for?"
"I wanted to know who ran the whole baley enterprise. The real managers, not the dockside people."
"Ah." Wenithal grinned again. "That's clever. He never believed he could get caught. Ex-Special Service, you know about that. So he wasn't ready when someone came asking the right questions. Of course, you realize, it got him killed. "
"We were screened. No one overheard our conversation."
"So? It's all connections. People looking for other people. Links get made, conclusions drawn. Brun was killed on spec."
Ariel returned with a cup of steaming coffee and set it down on the table before Wenithal. He stared at it for a long time, then lurched forward to grasp it.
"I don't drink much anymore," he said. "Not used to it."
"Seems a suicidal habit to start up again just now," Ariel said.
"If I'm drunk enough it might not hurt so much." He lifted the cup to his lips and held it there, poised.
"Brun was an orphan," Coren said. "You sponsored him. Why? Did you know his parents?"
Wenithal stared at him.
"The Holmer Foster Gymnas Cooperative," Coren said.
Wenithal focussed on him. "You knew?"
"We did work together once," Coren said evasively.
"Mm. I suppose that counts for something." He took another drink and scowled. "Something about the acids never mix right with the wormwood…" He set the cup down and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. "There was a kidnapping. Oh…when was that?… twenty-something…a long time ago. A district manager for a company that no longer exists. Very high profile. Like an idiot he went to the news nets first, made everything very difficult for us. The thing was, no ransom demand ever came. The child just disappeared and that was it. It wasn't my case initially, I was called in later, but. I. anyway, we had nothing to go on, no thread to follow through the maze. When we started looking through the database for similar cases, a pattern began to emerge. Hundreds of unsolved kidnappings allover the world over the previous decade, none of them with a common denominator other than the complete absence of further contact. " Wenithal grinned crookedly. "The problem with databases-AIs, smart matrices, logic systems-is that if you don't ask just the right question you never get the answer you need. "
"Hundreds," Ariel said. "That many, they had to be going somewhere."
Wenithal raised a finger. "Absolutely. But where? After canvassing and recanvassing witnesses, acquaintances, associates, total strangers who might possibly have seen or heard something-anything-I started expanding the search. I started looking at schools, hospitals, orphanages. "
"You found the link in orphanages."
Wenithal nodded. "Not all of them, though. Special ones, ones that took in and maintained 'problem' children. Infants with defects, genetic problems, congenital and chronic illnesses. Children turned over to the institution and their records sealed or, in some cases, erased. It was difficult to detect, actually, but I found several of them doing a backdoor business in what they delicately termed 'material."'
"Selling the children?" Ariel asked.
"Basically. Oh, they claimed they were selling cadavers, but the numbers were too high and the age groups too coincidental. It took a long time to finally prove what I knew was going on. "
"And Brun?" Coren urged.
"I didn't know his parents very well. They were part of a series of interviews I conducted in relation to the case, but they didn't really have anything to do with it. They'd tried to adopt, that was all. After Brun they'd been told not to try another natural birth, not without a complicated gene therapy they couldn't afford. Shortly afterward, there was an accident. A semiballistic struck an old piece of orbital debris. Ninety or so passengers and crew. Holmer Foster was the local institution. I felt…an interest, I suppose. Brun was bright, nine years old. When I checked on him two years later, he was running a kind of black market in his facility, using smuggled-in recordings, access codes, food allotments. I thought it was a waste of natural talent. So I sponsored him."
"You didn't adopt him?"
"A police officer? Where would I find the time? No, sponsoring was about the best I could do. It was actually Brun who told me about the missing UPDs. "
"UPDs?" Ariel asked.
"Untreatable Physiological Dysfunction. Children with disorders that can only be watched. Often they can't even stop their pain. Those were the ones I found out were going missing the most."
"That doesn't make sense," Ariel said. "What use-? Oh."
Wenithal glanced at her. "Research, spare parts, other things I never cared to think about."
"You 're sure they were being shipped offplanet?" Coren asked.
"That's where the trail went cold. We traced them to four or five labs. They all funneled the 'material' through a single lab that I could never really prove was involved."
"Let me guess," Coren said. "Nova levis?"
"Very good. You must've been a decent cop. "
"I still am. Who was running the operation?"
"Very corporate. But I could never prove it. I know it, but I can't take it to court."
"Imbitek," Ariel said.
Wenithal shrugged.
"How did that tie in with the kidnapping that brought you into it?" Coren asked.
"That was the most perverse component. The boy that was kidnapped was just a normal boy. It didn't make sense in light of what I had found out about these…these… flesh mills. So I took a closer look at my concerned parents and found that they had had two previous children. One had died shortly after birth, the other…the records had been manipulated. The claimed death was not a death. They relegated it to one of these orphanages. There was a connection." Wenithal frowned at Coren. "Do you even want to know? You work for Rega Looms, how much do you know about him?"
"I-"
The door chimed.
Wenithal groped for his pistol.
"Take it easy," Coren said quietly, easing his own weapon out. He looked at Ariel and gestured for her to move to the far side of the room. Coren moved quickly to the wall alongside the door. He nodded to Wenithal, who brought his pistol into his lap.
"Enter."
Coren tensed as the door slid open. Light from the balcony outside spilled across the carpet, outlining a shadow. Wenithal raised the pistol.
Coren stepped away from the wall, aiming at head height.
A sharp hiss and a muffled "Shit!" came from the person standing in Wenithal's entryway.
The light in the room brightened, revealing a woman in dark clothes with a heavy pack slung over her left shoulder. She gaped at Coren, stunned.
"Jeta Fromm," Coren said. "I've been looking allover for you. "
Eighteen
The lab datum has been compromised, Derec, " Thales announced.
Derec looked up from the screen and blinked. "What?"
"The lab datum has been compromised," the RI repeated. "I have detected nine gates placed at various locations within the system that are diverting information to an external source. "
"What about you?"
"I have already detected and blocked an attempt to establish a gate in the immediate array. Judging from the other gates, this will not be a problem; they are sophisticated but limited. However, the longer I block implementation, the more likely other measures will be taken. "
"In other words, they're not just giving up and going away."
"Essentially, yes."
Derec went to the end of the blind and looked across the lab. Only one tech was on duty, this late in the third shift. Derec returned to his chair and rubbed his eyes. He had been at it since arriving, nearly eighteen hours now. The excavation was proceeding more slowly than he had expected due to a series of defensive modifications someone had added to the DW-12. It took Rana several hours to tease through them with Thales' help. Once they understood that bypassing them would not corrupt the matrix any further, everything went smoothly, but making sure ate up a lot of time.