Rico stood, and said, looking at Bandit, "I'm gonna question our guest. I want you to watch her for lies."
Of course.
Reluctantly, Bandit followed Rico into the bedroom, where he had found the flute. The woman was in there now, the one with the unusual aura. Latent magical ability. Marena Farris.
Rico closed the door.
Marena Farris looked like she'd been crying: red eyes, shiny brow and cheeks. A few wet-looking curls of hair stuck to her cheeks. She looked at him with an expression that seemed to mix grief and fear into something intensely vulnerable.
It would've been easy, too easy, to walk over, crouch down, talk to her soft and low and try to reassure her. Any woman in Farris' position probably deserved no less… Just for being a woman caught in a bad situation. Yet Rico forced himself to plant his feet in front of the door, then crossed his arms and looked at Farris long and hard, like he'd be taking no cirek from anybody. He had more to consider than just this woman's feelings. "Okay," he said, "you got my attention. What'd you know about all this?"
"Did you talk-"
"We talked," Rico said, interrupting. He had heard what Piper had to say about her talk with Farris. "Now I wanna hear it direct."
Farris wiped at her eyes, then looked at him and said, "Where shall I start?"
"How do you know about Prometheus?"
"It was part of my job as a member of Special Administration-"
"Of what?"
Piper had mentioned this, but Rico wanted to hear more. Farris elaborated. She made the Fuchi "Special Administration" sound like a corp within a corp, a special network designed to monitor practically every phase of the corporation's business. Part of Farris' job, apparently, was to covertly stick her nose into different Fuchi departments' business.
"Get back to Prometheus."
Farris nodded. "Fuchi has done extensive psycho-profiling of all its primary competitors. There's an entire department devoted to competition research. I participated peripherally in several studies, including a recent study of Prometheus."
"Convenient."
"It was essential. I served as liaison between the infiltrator program and competition research. We weren't about to choose the target for our infiltrator by random selection. We viewed our first insertion as a sort of beta test-model. We wanted to ensure that whoever we sent would enter an environment where he or she would have a high chance of success."
"You said the meet with Prometheus wouldn't work out Why?"
A wary, almost fearful look entered Farris' eyes. Rico wouldn't be surprised if she was aware that Surikov wasn't the only one who had died at the meet with Prometheus. She had to know that others had been wounded. Rico, for one, had a bandage on his left arm that couldn't be missed.
Farris hesitated, then said, "When was the last time you heard of Prometheus accepting someone from a competing corporation?"
"I'll ask the questions."
Farris flushed. "Excuse me," she said. She spent a few moments regaining her composure, that or figuring out what to say next. Rico wondered how much of the wary, fearful act was real. Bandit offered no clue. Not yet anyway. "Well… my point," Farris said, "is that Prometheus has a very strong intra-corporate program. They develop their personnel resources from within. They've taken a few special individuals who desired to change corporate affiliations, but those were exceptional people, primarily mages with very arcane specialties."
Rico could accept that, as far as it went. Magicians were special. They weren't half as common as most people seemed to think. Ones with Bandit's ability were damn rare.
"Typically," Farris continued, "the corporate mindset views a change of affiliation as a sort of betrayal. Would you trust someone who betrayed their corp? Trust them with proprietary data? Your edge against the competition? Corps guard their secrets very closely. They scrutinize personnel recruited from other corps scrupulously. Prometheus more than most."
Rico nodded. Never trust a traitor. He'd heard that before. "Why'd they kill your husband?"
"Because," Farris said, seeming stung, "they'd rather deprive a competitor of the value of an Ansell Surikov than risk recruiting a potential traitor. Another corp's loss is their gain. That's how Prometheus sees it."
"And that's how you knew the meet wouldn't go right."
"That was my assumption."
"So why didn't you say something?"
"Would you have believed me?"
"Does it matter?"
"Of course it matters. Everything I do influences what you think of me and that matters quite a lot." Abruptly, Farris seemed on the verge of tears. Her eyes got moist and her lower lip quivered. "If I had said they might try to kill you, and they didn't, if your meet had gone as planned, you'd see me as a schemer. You'd think I had some hidden agenda, that I had tried to deceive you." Her breath caught. "It may not seem very brave, but I want to get out of this alive. I'm horrified over what's happened, over Ansell's death, but nothing scares me more than the power you have over me. I'll do anything I have to do… to get through this."
Some slags would take a statement like that and run and never stop, especially with it coming from someone who looked like Farris. Some slags would use any situation to take advantage of a woman. Not Rico's style. Not even on his worst day. "One of my people might still be alive if I'd known what you know about Prometheus."
Farris' expression grew anguished. "I'm sorry," she said. "It's hard to know what to do. If I, had it to do over, I would take my chances and tell you. I was afraid. I'm still afraid."
"You got reason."
Farris seemed to shudder. "Yes, I know," she said quietly, almost in a whisper. "I know I have reason to fear you. That's why we must talk. I have something that you might want."
"Like what?"
"Ansell Surikov."
30
"Surikov is dead."
"No. He's not."
Farris looked scared, but she spoke in the dead-calm tone that people used when they know exactly what they're saying, and know that they're right.
Rico looked at the stress analyzer on his wrist. If Farris was lying, she was damn good at it.
A long silence followed. Farris' eyes never wavered, despite her fearful expression. Mentally, Rico ran down the short list of possible explanations. Farris could be lying. She could be nuts. Desperate enough to say anything or too far gone to notice. Even if Surikov had been revived, magically resuscitated, or his apparent death only some magician's illusion, Farris would have no way of knowing that.
Rico could think of only one other explanation and it wasn't a good one. Possibly, just possibly, he and his team had been not only double-crossed, but reamed right from the start. Tricked somehow. He didn't see how. "Surikov's not dead?"
"No." Farris shook her head.
"Then who was the slag we busted out of Maas Intertech?"
"Michael Travis. One of Ansell's research assistants." It didn't seem likely. "No way," Rico growled. "No fragging way. We had retina scans. We had fragging DNA scans,"
"Yes, but how did you confirm those scans?" Farris asked softly. "Based on data obtained from Fuchi?"
"I'll ask the questions."
Farris just watched him a moment. The fear in her expression seemed to mix with sadness, maybe regret "Not even Fuchi datafiles are immutable," she said. "The infiltrator program anticipated the possibility that certain relevant datafiles such as personnel files might be surreptitiously accessed. These files were altered. Datasets were exchanged. Michael Travis' retinal and DNA patterns were inserted into Ansell's files. The real Ansell Surikov, his codes and patterns, are now part of the datafiles that originally belonged to Michael Travis."
Rico said nothing. He guessed that what Farris was saying was possible, but she made it sound too easy. There was more to changing identities than just a swap of data in computer files. "Surikov's face is all over the datanets. He's been at conferences. He's been on trideo. People know what he looks like."