"Consider yourself threatened," he said. "Now talk."
Farris was more than just a few moments calming down. If it was an act, it was a fragging good one. Every move flush, a seamless performance. Right down to the way she pursed her lips, as if forcing herself to at least seem in control of herself, when really she was shaking. Rico wasn't sure if he believed her act or not.
"You said your husband volunteered. Volunteered for what?"
"A special program," Farris said in a voice that seemed weak with emotion. "He didn't have to do it. He did it to get away from me. To spite me."
"Spite you why?"
"Because things didn't work out."
"What things?"
She hesitated and swallowed visibly. "Our relationship," she said. "Our marriage."
Rico figured that much had to be true. If it hadn't been true, it was now. Unless Surikov didn't mind almost getting wasted by his wife. "Tell me about this special program. You said your husband volunteered."
"It's a secret."
"You wanna get hurt?"
She lowered her head, shook it, and said, "It was a program to infiltrate Fuchi competitors. Security services have been doing that… doing it forever. The problem is… your average security operative lacks the qualifications to get at the data you really want. The agent typically ends up on the competition's security staff or else posted in some security function to an executive, with only very limited access to proprietary material. The Fuchi program changed all that. We developed an interdisciplinary scheme for training scientists and researchers to work as security operatives, and to work effectively. That's basically what it was about."
"Keep talking."
Something crossed her face, maybe dismay. "The program was very involved," she said softly, almost moaning. "It was five years in the making. I was part of it from the beginning. Ansell resented the hours I logged. He's very possessive. He wanted me to be with him whenever he was free from his work. My work didn't matter to him. I tried working from our condo and ultimately went on leave, but by then it was too late. He resented me, resented everything about me, and that resentment turned vile. It turned into hatred."
"So he volunteered for your program."
"It was… it was a way to use my own work against me. He felt that I had betrayed him. This was his revenge. Knowing how it would make me feel."
Rico wondered how much of this was true. Farris' file said that she had worked on some special project for going on five years. More than that, he didn't know. A lot of what Marena Farris was telling him wouldn't likely appear in any files. "Surikov's a big deal biotechnician. You're telling me Fuchi put this slag, this asset, into some experimental program and sent him straight to the enemy. I don't buy it."
"Ansell's qualifications made him perfect for the role. That was the point of the program, to get astute people into the competition's camp, people who would know what they were seeing, who could report in specific detail on how competition research was developing." She hesitated a moment, wiped her eyes. "Yes. Ansell Surikov is a highly qualified scientist with an enviable reputation. Fuchi has many highly qualified scientists with good reputations. None of mem are irreplaceable."
"Where'd they send him?"
"Kuze Nihon. A subsidiary, Maas Intertech. That's located in New Jersey."
"How long you been on leave?"
"About… about three years."
Her Fuchi file agreed. "Why do you rate your own personal security team?"
Farris hesitated, "I… I was never told why. In the beginning, I assumed it was because I had always been loyal to the corporation. I'm still an asset, even if I am on leave. I haven't resigned."
"What makes you an asset?"
"I'm a psychologist."
Her Fuchi file verified that. Fuchi had sent Farris to several universities in the U.C.A.S., and she'd earned a degree in psychology. It had seemed odd to Rico that a corp would spend money like that on a corporate hooker, but apparently it wasn't as strange as he thought. Piper said that a lot of the megacorps used their more sophisticated joygirls and joyboys a lot like shrinks. Some even worked as spies for corporate security.
That whole train of thought made Rico wonder if he was sitting next to something as potentially nasty as a trapdoor spider. Farris looked and acted upset, and yet the things she was saying told him that the brain behind her dark brown eyes was alive and working just fine. Did she really believe that her husband had hired help to murder her? That much didn't make much sense.
"Psychologists at Fuchi get personal security teams?"
"I suppose I'm a special case. Certain people hinted that threats had been made against Fuchi, against security personnel in particular. I accepted that. Later, as I put my life back together, I began to wonder if perhaps the threat had something to do with Ansell. Perhaps he had been found out. Perhaps Kuze Nihon was using threats against me to make Ansell work for them."
"Why would he care?"
"You would have to know Ansell to understand that."
"Try me."
She seemed puzzled for a moment. Whether puzzled by the demand or puzzled that it should be made, Rico couldn't tell. She said, "Ansell doesn't respond well to coercion. He's out of his element here, so you've probably found him-easy to deal with. In the corporate environment, where he's at home, he's highly independent of mind and intensely aware of his own personal purview. He believes he should be allowed to pursue his work utterly without supervision or constraint. He views even the slightest intervention by management as a complete usurpation of his rights as a scientist. That same egocentric perspective dominates his personal life as well. A threat against his wife would be no less a threat against him as a man. It wouldn't matter if he cared whether his wife lived or died. What would matter is his power to control what happened."
"If anybody's gonna ice you, it'll be him."
"That would be his view. Highly simplified."
"How does he go from spiting you to wanting to kill you?"
"Presumably, Maas Intertech realized he was an infiltrator and began using him as such, limiting his access, feeding him false data to pass along to Fuchi. They would naturally put restrictions on his research and he would resent this. Probably, he would blame me, for if I had not encouraged his spite, he would not have gotten into a situation like that. It's all my fault, you see."
"So he'd come after you for revenge."
"Isn't it obvious?"
"You make him sound like a psycho."
"Then I haven't been clear." Farris paused, wiped at her eyes some more. "Perhaps I should explain that the desire for personal power is a defining factor in many men, just as the desire to form cooperative relationships is a factor in many women's development and personalities. Ansell is as rational a man as you might ever meet He functions very effectively in the corporate milieu. His personal power is extremely important to him, but he's not inflexible, not compulsive, in the clinical sense. At times, he deliberately exaggerates his need for control, as a ruse he uses merely to achieve a degree of control that he'll be comfortable with, knowing all the while that certain of his demands will be refused."
"Rational men don't dust their wives."
"If you really believe that, you've been misinformed."
"Yeah?"
"Rational people sometimes do irrational things. I'm explaining myself to you at length when I should probably be saying as little as possible."