O God. But then there was the agreement that let him get to Grant. There was the agreement that promised Grant would be free. She could mindwipe Grant. She could do anything. She had threatened Jordan. Everything was on him, and he could not tell Grant, not in the state Grant was in. He took in his breath and slogged on down the path that led around the corner toward the main doora jet was coming in. He heard it. It was ordinary. RESEUNEAIR flew at need, as well as on a weekly schedule. He saw it touch down, walking along by the gravel bed and the adapted shrubbery that led to the front doors. The bus started up from in front of the doors and passed him on its way around the drive and down toward the main road. On its way to pick up someone on the jet, he reckoned, and wondered who in the House had been downriver in all this chaos.
He walked in through the automatic doors, using his keycard in the brass slot, clipped the keycard back to his shut and headed immediately for the lift that would take him up to his apartment.
Phone Jordan first thing he got in and tell him Grant was better. He wished he had had time to call while he was in the hospital, but Grant had not wanted him out of his sight, and he had not wanted to upset him.
"Justin Warrick."
He turned and looked at the Security guards, putting their presence together with the plane and the bus and instantly thought that some visitor must be coming in.
"Come with us, please."
He indicated the lift buttons. "I'm just going up to my room. I'll be out of here."
"Come with us, please."
"Oh, damn, just use the com, ask your Supervisor You don't touch me!" As one of them reached for him. But they took him by the arms and leaned him up against the wall. "My God," he said, unnerved and exasperated, as they proceeded to search him thoroughly. It was a mistake. They were azi. They got their instructions upside down and they went damned well too far.
They wrenched his arms back and he felt the chill of metal at his wrists.
"Hey!"
The cuffs clicked shut. They faced him about again and walked him down the hall. He balked, and they jerked him into motion, down the hall toward the Security office.
God. Ari had filed charges. On him, on Jordan, Kruger, everyone involved with Grant. That was what had happened. Somewhere she had gotten the leverage she wanted, something to silence them and bring everything down on them; and he had done it, he, thinking he could deal with her.
He walked where they wanted him to go, down the hall and into the office with the glass doors, where the Supervisor sat. "In there," the Supervisor said with a wave of her hand toward the back of the office.
"What in hell's going on?" he demanded, trying bluff in the absence of everything else. "Dammit, call Ari Emory!"
But they took him past steel doors, past the security lock, put him in a bare, concrete room, and shut the door.
"Dammit, you have to read me the charges!"
There was no answer.
v
The body was quite, quite frozen, fallen right at the vault door, mostly prone, twisted a little. Surfaces in the vault still were frost-coated and painful to the touch. "Patch of ice," the investigator said, and recorded the scene with his camera, posthumous indignity. Ari would have resented that like hell, Giraud thought, and stared at the corpse, still unable to think that Ari was not going to move, that stiff limbs and glazed eyes and half-open mouth were not going to suddenly find life. She was wearing a sweater. Researchers would, who worked in the antiquated cold-lab: nothing heavier. But no cold-suit would have saved her.
"There wouldn't have been any damn patch of ice then," Petros muttered. "No way."
"She work with the door shut?" The investigator from Moreyville, smalltown and all the law there was for a thousand miles in all directions, laid his hand on the vault door. It started swinging to at that mere touch. "Damn." He stopped it with a shove, balanced it carefully and gingerly let go of it.
"There's an intercom," Petros said. "That door's swung to on most of us, sooner or later, we all know about it. It's something in the way the building's settled. You get locked in, you just call Security, you call Strassen's office, and somebody comes down and gets you out, it's no big thing."
"It was this time." The investigatorStern, his name wasreached up and punched the button on the intercom. The casing broke like wax. "Cold. I'll want this piece," he said to his assistant, who was following him with a Scriber. "Does anyone hear?"
There was no sound out of the unit.
"Not working."
"Maybe it's the cold," Giraud said. "There wasn't any call."
"Pressure drop was the first you knew something was wrong."
"Pressure in the liquid nitrogen tank. The techs knew. I got a call a minute or so later."
"Wasn't there an on-site alarm?"
"It sounded," Giraud said, indicating the unit on the wall, "down here. No one works back here. The way the acoustics are, no one could figure out where it was coming from. We didn't know till we got the call from the techs that it was a nitrogen line. Then we knew it was the cold-lab. We came running down here and got the door open."
"Ummn. And the azi weren't here. Just Jordan Warrick. Who was back upstairs when the alarm went off. I want a report on that intercom unit."
"We can do that," Giraud said.
"Better if my office does."
"You're here for official reasons. For the record. This is not your jurisdiction, captain."
Stern looked at hima heavy-set, dour man with the light of intelligence in his eyes. Intelligence enough to know Reseune swallowed its secrets.
And that, since Reseune had friends high in Internal Affairs, promotion or real trouble could follow a decision.
"I think," Stern said, "I'd better talk to Warrick." It was a cue to retire to private interviews. Giraud's first impulse was to follow him and cover what had to be covered. His second was a genuine panic, a sudden realization of the calamity that had overtaken Reseune, overtaken all their plans, the fact that the brain that had been so active, held so much secretwas no more than a lump of ice. The body was impossible, frozen as it was, to transport with any dignity. Even that simple necessity was a grotesque mess.
And Corain This is going to hit the news-services before morning.
What in hell do we do? What do we do now?
Ari, dammit, what do we do?
Florian waited, sitting on a bench in the waiting room, in the west wing of the hospital. He leaned his elbows against his knees, head against his hands, and wept, because there was nothing left to do, the police had Jordan Warrick in custody, they would not let him near Ari, except that one terrible sight that had made him understand that it was true. She was dead. And the world was different than it had ever been. The orders came from Giraud Nye: report for tape.
He understood that. Report to the Supervisor, the rule had been from the time he was small; there was tape to heal distress, tape to heal doubtstape to explain the world and the laws and the rules of it.
But in the morning Ari would still be dead and he did not know whether they could tell him anything to make him understand.
He would have killed Warrick. He still would, if he had that choice; but he had only the piece of paper, the tape order, that sent him here for an azi's comfort; and he had never been so alone or so helpless, every instruction voided, every obligation justgone.
Someone came down the hall and came in, quietly. He looked up as Catlin came in, so much calmer than healways calm, no matter what the crisis, and even now
He got up and put his arms around her, held her the way they had slept together for so many years he had lost count, the good times and the terrible ones.