Alexios relaxed somewhat. This isn’t going to be difficult at all. He’s ready to clutch at any straw I can offer.
Lara asked, “Can I get you something, Mr. Alexios?”
“Dante,” he said. “Please call me Dante.”
With a nod, she said, “Very well, Dante. A drink, maybe?”
His memory flashed a picture of all the times he and Lara had drunk together. She’d been partial to margaritas in the old days; Mance Bracknell had a taste for wine.
“Just some water, please,” he said.
“Fruit juice?” she suggested.
He almost shuddered with the recollection of the nanomachine-laden juice he had drunk in Koga’s clinic. “Water will be fine, thank you.”
Lara went to the kitchenette built behind a short bar next to the sofa. Alexios pulled up one of the plush chairs and sat across the coffee table from Molina.
“As I said on the phone, Dr. Molina, I’m here to help you in any way I can.”
Molina shook his head. “There isn’t anything you can do,” he said in a hoarse whisper.
“Someone set you up for this,” Alexios said gently. “If we can find out who did it, that would show everyone that you’re not at fault.”
Lara placed a tray of glasses on the coffee table and sat next to her husband. “That’s what I’ve been telling him. We can’t just take this lying down. We’ve got to find out who’s responsible for this.”
“What can you do?” Molina asked morosely.
Alexios tilted his head slightly, as if thinking about the problem. “Well… you said you received an anonymous call about the rocks.”
“Yes. Somebody left a message for me at my office on campus. No name. No return address.”
“And on the strength of that one call you came out here to Mercury?”
Anger flared in Molina’s eyes. “Don’t you start, too! Yes, I came here on the strength of that one call. It sounded too good to be ignored.”
Lara laid a placating hand on his knee. “Victor, he’s trying to help you,” she said soothingly.
Molina visibly choked back his anger. “I figured that if it’s a blind alley I could be back home in a couple of weeks. But if it is was real, it would be a terrific discovery.”
“But it was a deliberate hoax,” Alexios said, as sympathetically as he could manage.
“That’s right. And they all think I did it. They think I’m a fraud, a cheat, a—”
“The thing to do,” Alexios said, cutting through Molina’s rising bitterness, “is to track down who made that call.”
“I don’t see how—”
“Whoever it was had access to Martian rocks,” Alexios went on. “And he probably knew you.”
“What makes you think that?” Lara asked, surprise showing clearly in her amber eyes.
With a small shrug, Alexios replied, “He called you, no one else. He wanted you, specifically you, to come here and be his victim.”
“Who would do such a thing?” Lara wondered. “And why?”
“That’s what we’ve got to find out.”
EVIDENCE
Alexios knew he had to work fast, because Lara and Victor were due to leave Mercury in a few days. Yet he couldn’t be too swift; that might show his hand to them. Besides, now that the IAA’s interdict on his work on the planet’s surface was lifted, he had plenty of tasks to accomplish: resume scooping raw materials from the regolith, hire a nanotech team and bring them to Mercury, lay out plans for building a mass driver and the components for solar power satellites that would be catapulted into orbit and assembled in space.
He waited for two days. Then he rode the shuttle back to Himawari with the evidence in his tunic pocket.
Lara and Victor eagerly greeted him at the airlock. They hurried down the passageway together toward the Molinas’ stateroom, Victor in a sweat to see what Alexios had uncovered, Lara just as eager but more controlled.
As soon as the stateroom door closed Molina demanded, “Well? What did you find?”
“Quite a bit,” said Alexios. “Is McFergusen still here? He should see—”
“He left two days ago,” Molina snapped. “What did you find out?” Alexios pulled two thin sheets of plastic from his tunic and unfolded them on the coffee table as Molina and his wife sat together on the little sofa. He tapped the one on top.
“Is this the anonymous message you received?” he asked Molina.
The astrobiologist scanned it. “Yes, that’s it.”
Alexios knew it was. He had sent it. He turned that sheet over to show the one beneath it.
“What’s this?” Lara asked.
“A copy of a requisition from the International Consortium of Universities, selling eleven Martian rocks to a private research facility on Earth.”
“My rocks!” Molina blurted.
“How did they get from Earth to Mercury?” Lara asked.
Alexios knew perfectly well, but he said, “That part of it we’ll have to deduce from the available evidence.”
“Who sent this message to me?” Molina demanded, tapping the first sheet.
“It wasn’t easy tracking down the sender. He was very careful to cover his tracks.”
“Who was it?”
“And he had a large, well-financed organization behind him, as well,” Alexios added.
“Who was it?” Molina fairly screamed.
Alexios glanced at Lara. She was obviously on tenterhooks, her lips parted slightly, her eyes wide with anticipation.
“Bishop Danvers,” said Alexios.
“Elliott?” Molina gasped.
“I can’t believe it,” said Lara. “He’s a man of god—he wouldn’t stoop to such chicanery.”
“He’s my friend,” Molina said, looking bewildered. “At least, I thought he was.”
Alexios said, “The New Morality hates the discoveries you astrobiologists have made, you know that. What better way to discredit the entire field than by showing a prominent astrobiologist to be a fraud, a liar?”
Molina sank back in the sofa. “Elliott did this? To me?”
“What proof do you have?” Lara asked.
Alexios looked into her gold-flecked eyes. “The people who traced this message used highly irregular methods—”
“Illegal, you mean,” she said flatly.
“Extralegal,” Alexios countered.
“Then this so-called evidence won’t hold up in a court of law.”
“No, but there must be a record of this message in Danvers’s computer files. Even if he erased the message, a scan of his memory core might find a trace of it.”
Lara stared hard at him. “The bishop could claim that someone planted the message in his computer.”
Alexios knew she was perfectly correct. But he said, “And why would anyone do that?”
Impatiently, Molina argued, “We can’t examine Elliott’s computer files without his permission. And if he really did this he won’t give permission. So where are we?”
“You’re forgetting this invoice,” said Alexios. “It can be traced to the New Morality school in Gabon, in west Africa.”
Lara looked at her husband. “Elliott was stationed in Libreville.”
“For almost ten years,” Molina said.
She turned back to Alexios. “You’re certain of all this?”
He nodded and lied, “Absolutely. I paid a good deal of money to obtain this information.”
“Elliott?” Molina was still finding it difficult to accept the idea. “Elliott deliberately tried to destroy me?”
“I’m afraid he has destroyed you,” Alexios said grimly. “Your reputation is permanently tainted.”
Molina nodded ruefully. Then his expression changed, hardened. “Then I’m taking that pompous sonofabitch down with me!”