“Have you ever encountered one previously?” Gaul asked, hoping that he didn’t sound as tired as he felt. “A silver Weir, I mean?”
Mr. North scratched his head and then offered Gaul the faintest ghost of a smile.
“Odd that you should mention it, Director,” he said, looking vaguely interested for the first time since Gaul had met him, “but you are the second person to ask me that question recently. The first, since you are certain to ask, was Mr. Cruces, head of the Terrie Cartel’s operations in Asia. He asked me at the last Hegemony Executive Committee meeting,” North said, squinting with the effort of remembering. “I believe it was as an aside to anecdotes being shared regarding the Weir hill tribes. He felt strongly, as I recall, that the silver breed were not as rare as was generally thought, and that in some regions, particularly Cambodia and Vietnam, that they could still be found if you looked hard enough. I thought it odd, at the time, when he asked me if I had seen one. I got the distinct impression that he had seen one, and recently, from the way he talked about it.”
Gaul tried to digest the information, and then decided that he couldn’t stomach it. He felt like he was being fed something, and he’d never liked handouts. Still, he didn’t think that he would get any more out of North, even if he decided to push him again, so he elected against trying. He changed subjects.
“Mr. North, investigating these incidents would proceed more smoothly and, I might add, impede on your time and liberty less, were the Committee-at-Large to approve the candidates the Board submitted for the vacant Auditor positions over the last two years,” Gaul said carefully, shuffling the papers on his desk into completed and incomplete piles. “I would hope that this experience would color your thinking on the subject.”
Mr. North smiled his faint replica of a smile and folded his hands before he spoke. Gaul knew what he was going to say before he started. Rebecca was right, he thought, exasperated, the man was simply boring.
“I believe that I speak for the Committee-at-Large when I say that we would be happy to expedite approval of the candidates for the vacancies in Audits if you would be willing to review our proposal to expand the selection process for Audits personnel, Director,” North offered mildly.
“You are referring to the proposal in which we add two more Auditors, selected by the Committee-at-Large rather than the Board?”
“The very same. Surely it would be a mutually beneficial arrangement, yes? You said yourself you need more Auditors, Director.”
“An Auditor a piece for the Hegemony and the Black Sun, then?” Gaul said darkly, pausing in his paperwork to fix North with another practiced glare that was wasted on him. “That defeats the purpose of the Auditors in the first place. They are meant to be impartial, Mr. North.”
“I resent the implication that the Committee-at-Large is not capable of making an impartial selection,” Mr. North said, not looking like he resented much of anything. “On the contrary, some might be moved to call the Board less than impartial when it comes to approving your own recommendations. After all,” Mr. North continued blithely, as if he were reading the weather report, ignoring Gaul’s stormy expression, “you have managed to get two of your Auditors onto the Board itself, sir! Certainly, that is a violation of the spirit of the Agreement, if not the letter.”
Gaul held on to the glare a moment longer, and then gave up on it, helpless in the face of total apathy.
“I must say, Mr. North, that you are either an exceptionally dangerous bureaucrat or a surprisingly genteel Operator,” Gaul admitted reluctantly, returning to his paperwork.
Mr. North gave him a short, ambiguous nod, then stood up part way.
“A compliment, surely. I take it, then, that you won’t need anything further from me?”
Gaul glanced up, pen poised above the document laid out in front of him.
“Not at the moment, no,” Gaul said, looking back down at the paperwork. “You may inform the rest of the Committee-at-Large that I will consider their proposal. Please keep yourself available for potential future inquiries in this matter, Mr. North.”
Mr. North nodded again and turned for the door.
“Certainly,” he said, pausing with his hand on the door knob. “But if I may ask, Director — I was wondering about the boy. He is named Alexander Warner, if my sources are correct. I have heard that he shows some promise, and a rather unique protocol. You never told me, sir, if he turned out to be worth all the trouble.”
Gaul didn’t even look up from the document he was annotating.
“No, Mr. North. No, I did not.”
Traffic was light on Market Street for a weekday; the last time Mitsuru had been in San Francisco, there had been talk about banning cars on Market, and until she was passed by a battered white Dodge van turning onto Spear Street, she suspected they might have done it.
The sidewalks were moderately crowded; it was late enough in the afternoon that the luckiest of the office workers had managed to sneak out early, and they plowed eagerly through groups of tourists and teenagers on summer break on their way to the train station. The sun was bright above the Embarcadero, the clock tower of the gleaming white Port Building also considerably changed since the last time Mitsuru had seen it.
Mitsuru moved with the crowd, along Market and then across the wide pavilion that adjoined the Embarcadero, picking her way through crowds of shoppers from the nearby farmer’s market and clusters of shirtless skateboarders. It was warm, and it felt good to her to be out in the sunlight — something she had taken for granted, once. She had new priorities, these days.
At the edge of the municipal railroad tracks she reversed herself, heading back toward Justin Herman Plaza, with the strange, dry fountain at the far end, which Alistair claimed had been built by a donation from Enron. Mitsuru doubted it, but Alistair often knew strange things like that. For a moment, she considered reaching through the uplink for the answer, but then she remembered that she was on mission, and therefore rigged for monitoring. Not a good idea to let her mind drift, then, given how hard a look Central had been giving her operational logs, in light of her application to Audits.
Today felt good, though — working her way through the crowd, elbowed aside by a tiny Chinese woman clutching a bag of what looked to be lemon grass, noticing a brash smile from a handsome Mexican teenager on a skateboard, and after a moment’s consideration, smiling back. The black static that had been eating at her thoughts since the whole thing in the park had lifted some, this morning, and she felt calm and in control.
She couldn’t understand how she’d ended up on the kill team — Alistair wasn’t one to indulge in revenge. In fact, he considered it a vice, and a foolish one. Debts had to be paid, reputations maintained, and that was it, as far as Alistair was concerned. The important thing to him was that someone had attacked a member of the Audit staff, even if she was only a provisional Operator, and that the rest of the world would be watching, and learning from their response. Mitsuru saw where he was coming from, even though she didn’t subscribe to that philosophy personally.
Alistair had no choice, the way Mitsuru saw it. He preferred negotiation to violence, but in this case, he needed to make it very apparent to anyone thinking about trying the same thing that it would be a very, very bad idea. To be effective, the consequences of such an attack had to be so dire that they would outweigh any potential gains. Alistair had avoided requesting many sanctions since he had become Head Auditor, but he had been up late last night, drawing up the paperwork for the sanctioning of the Terrie Cartel.
Mitsuru had not, by her own admission, been a very good girl. But there she was, nonetheless, a sanction order for an entire cartel falling right into her lap. Maybe, she thought brightly, her luck was finally changing.