The Coward's Option Read online

  Bringen took me to a table in the artificial sun, and placed a small oblong device between us. It was a hiss-screen, ensuring that anybody trying to eavesdrop on us from a distance—unlikely, as that kind of thing takes advance planning—would hear nothing but a wall of white noise.

  He sat. I didn’t.

  He said, “The two of you were not friends.”

  “No. We weren’t. She hated me. I hated her.”

  “Hate’s a strong word.”

  I flashed annoyance. “If you want me to say that I didn’t lie awake at night thinking of ways to kill her, no, I didn’t hate her by that precise definition. But I was still relieved that she was out of my life and that I was out of hers.”

  “You would like a lot of people out of your life, wouldn’t you, Andrea?”

  There was that look of hurt again, possibly pretense and possibly self-delusion; the attitude of a man who believed that his offenses added up to nothing, and that the resentment of those he had hurt added up to salvageable misunderstanding.

  I said, “If you have a point, please make it.”

  “You should know this. One of Tasha’s earliest internal security assignments, an elementary test of her perceptive abilities only tangentially related to this current problem, was writing up her personal character assessments of various Dip Corps personnel who have fallen under one cloud or another. This is one of the closing paragraphs from a two-hundred page report she wrote about you.”

  He tapped the hytex port at his collarline and Tasha’s cool, mellifluous voice filled the air between us.

  Tasha said, “Andrea Cort’s detractors have called her unstable, antisocial, self-hating, angry and paranoid. These are all undeniable elements of her emotional mix, fostered in her by the life she has led, and are so prominent that they discourage others from seeing anything else: among them her incisive intelligence and a sense of personal integrity as absolute as any this observer has ever seen. Despite worries that her profile marks her as prime recruitment material for an enemy power, it remains my personal assessment that the chances of this ever occurring are remote in the extreme. She may never be someone to like. But she will be someone to trust. I would put my life in her hands in a heartbeat.”

  He clicked the report off.

  Tasha’s voice had only warmed the growing knot of tension in my belly, and her opening words had heated it to a slow boil. Her conclusion hadn’t mollified any of that, but had instead robbed me of any place to put it.

  “Damn you,” I said, conversationally.

  “In case you’re wondering, my own professional assessment is on file has always said the same thing.”

  I repeated: “Damn you.”

  He sighed the sigh of the long-persecuted and looked away, regarding the distant curved fields of New London’s farmland with the eyes of one hoping they possessed some landmark he could use to guide him past this dangerous territory.

  After a moment, not facing me, he said, “When she was in the worst trouble of her life, with nobody around to help her, she put everything she had on your shoulders. You want to call that hate, feel free. You want to maybe re-think your premises after you’ve done this for you, feel free to do that, too. You’ll do what you want in any event.”

  “You didn’t wake me up out of a sound sleep just for the sheer joy of lecturing me. Tell me what you can, starting from the beginning, and I’ll see what I can do.”

  He hesitated, but I could tell it had less to do with reluctance to share sensitive material, than the habits of a man accustomed to secrets who needed to consider any he chose to share.

  After a moment, he said, “All right.

  “About two years ago, classified information belonging to the Dip Corps was found on an off-site database belonging to an unaffiliated human entity outside the Confederacy.”

  The various worlds that make up the Confederacy account for some 81% of humanity’s trillions, but there are some remaining players, corporate and governmental, that never joined, and some of them were serious trouble-makers.

  I said, “Of course, you never would have known this if you didn’t have spies in their camp as well.”

  He spread his hands. “That is the way it works.”

  “What was the information?”

  “To fully brief you on that, I’d need days. Suffice it to say that seven operatives working under highly difficult conditions in locations far from home were compromised; two of those never made it back. There was no way of knowing how many others have been endangered, but the potential remaining loss of life and the blow to our interests cannot possibly be overstated.

  “We naturally wasted no time tracking down the leak. From various internal indicators I also don’t need to go into, we knew that the source of the transmitted information came from someplace here on New London, so we sent each of our on-site divisions a test file designed to look important, and tracked exactly how long it took the same information to show up, verbatim, in the data of the government we believed responsible.

  “Of course, we also made sure that each version of the file contained a few unique elements, involving no more than a couple of decimal points in certain vital statistics. In this way, when those elements showed up at the enemy’s location, we knew exactly what office was involved.”

  I nodded. “A little like filling a boat with water to determine the places where the hull leaks.”

  “Right,” said Bringen. He went on:

  “Identifying the specific office narrowed our problem down to one pod of trusted intelligence analysts: three men, two women, one neuter, working in close proximity. Various other factors you don’t need to know about cleared the neuter, two of the men, and one of the women. But isolating the actual culprit out of the two who remained was more difficult, as any open questioning would have simply alerted that party to shut down all of his, or her, illicit activities.

  “That wouldn’t solve the problem. The division would still need to be shut down because of the breach. A number of important operations would have to be curtailed. Both the guilty party and the innocent one would always remain under suspicion, which would mean two important assets lost when we only needed to eliminate one.”

  “And also,” I said, dripping acid contempt, “one actual innocent life ruined, which I’m certain remained key among the considerations you wished to avoid.”

  He flashed that hurt look again. “That should go without saying, Andrea.”

  I sniffed to indicate that I didn’t believe it at all. “Go on.”

  “As it happened, Tasha was rated for the kind of work these people were doing. We transferred her into their office and had her watch both to determine which one was our traitor. It was sedentary office work, here at home, but it was still considered a risky assignment, as both of our suspects had also worked in the field under dangerous conditions and could be expected to defend themselves with deadly force if necessary. If Tasha ever tipped her hand, it would be well within character for the guilty one to lash out. She could be killed. Worse, on a strategic level, she could be captured and tortured for information on what we already knew, let alone on just what compromised intelligence was false. She was provided the teemer implant to limit our losses in case our culprit ever got close to what she carried in her head.”

  “And I gather that happened.”

  “Clearly. She went off-line and was discovered in a niche for maintenance drones in a corridor about five minutes from her home. As near as we could figure it one of the drones started returning to the alcove before her assailant could get to her: that bitch or bastard was forced to flee, and the drones saved Tasha’s life by reporting the discovery of what they assumed to be a critically injured rape victim. Whoever confronted her appears to have scared off before doing her any permanent damage. But she remains non-responsive ever since.”

  I sighed, strode away from him, thought furiously for several seconds, then returned and said, “So let me see if I can use her current condition to ex
trapolate what happened. Tasha found the identity of the guilty party elusive. She laid a trap of some kind, giving him a chance to self-incriminate. Whatever measures she took to protect herself failed; the culprit caught up with her on the street and in some way, likely superior weaponry, possibly just by drawing blood first, demonstrated a tactical advantage Tasha knew she could not beat. Tasha took herself off the board, the guilty party got away undetected, and you found yourself with the same problem you had before, except with your traitor now aware that you’re on the case, and Tasha no longer useful to you.”

  “You’ve got it.”

  “I suppose there’s no forensic evidence, security footage, or ancillary evidence that points to either of your two suspects, over the other.”

  “There’s plenty of evidence, Andrea. But it points in both directions. It’s all ambiguous, right up to the moment where Tasha teemed herself: for both suspects, just as much supporting their respective innocence as their respective guilt. There isn’t enough of it, on either side, to be definitive. There are indications that some of what we have might be faked. But so far we haven’t been able to tell which way the disinformation is targeted.”

  I cupped my right elbow in my left hand, and paced, nibbling on my thumbnail again. “It’s an interesting problem,” I admitted. “Even if you could determine which evidence was faked, there’s no guarantee that your traitor didn’t self-incriminate, hoping that you’d see through the provided evidence and find reason to suspect the other.”

  “We have volumes of the stuff,” Bringen said. “And it’s all useless, for that reason. You can look at it if you have to. But that’s exactly where everybody else before you has gotten lost.”

  I didn’t regard that prospect with anything but dread. The dossier would be exhaustive and it would be meticulous, and because my security clearance wasn’t nearly as high as Tasha’s, it would also be heavily redacted, containing more gaps than hard islands of pure data: all enough to stymie the most anal in what had to be a small army of analysts. Bringen wasn’t a remarkable mind, by my estimation, but he wasn’t an idiot either. If he said the answer was drowning in too much data, I believed him.

  If I was the key to this problem, I was the only key.

  I said, “Two last issues. What’s the fail-safe and why don’t you have it?”

  “It’s supposed to be a specific code word that can be uploaded in a later image, that overrides the first image’s ability to repair itself, and jump-starts the individual’s thinking capacity with direct neural stimulation. If we had that word, we could bring her back up to speed in a matter of minutes.”

  “That would make sense. But you said you don’t have it.”

  “She must have changed it after the last time she checked in.”

  “Why would she do something that stupid?”

  He rubbed his eyes, for what I perceived must have been the hundredth time in the last few days; they were red and worn, glassy with a frustration that I could almost taste. “It’s something she would do only if she had reason to believe her fail-safe was itself compromised. After all, there’s absolutely no advantage in shutting yourself down, if your enemy has the means to just start you back up again. So our people always have the capacity of changing the code, and the image the flash imprints on the mind, to substitutes of their own choosing. It must have been at the very last minute; she’d last checked in with us a couple of hours earlier, and at that point didn’t have any new information to impart…but sometime after that she must have found herself trapped and in trouble and unable to contact us.”

  “The teemer itself doesn’t keep a record of the code?”

  “If it stored the code in any form that could be read, the enemy could obtain that by removing and examining the device. No. The code’s in her head, an inherent weakness in the image that’s overwhelming her.”

  “And I gather you can’t just start sending random words until you pick the right one.”

  “Because that could take hundreds or thousands of tries. The human brain was never built to be teemed at all, let alone that many times. It would inflict permanent psychosis.”

  Curious, I said, “How many could you get away with?”

  “Considering how often her current teem image must have been refreshed, by now…two. Three. With her prospects of regaining sanity even with the right word growing more remote, all the time.”

  My relentless nibbling at my thumb had drawn blood. I examined the wound, thinking of how often the terrible habit had caused wounds just like it, and wondering how many other less obvious wounds I dealt myself on a daily basis. After a moment I said, “Final issue. You said she requested me.”

  “Yes.”

  “You can’t just be referring to that analysis you excerpted.”

  He tapped his hytex link again. A holo appeared in the space between us, and I was sorry to say that I knew the image very well. It was the official 360 degree head-shot of me that once appeared in the Dip Corps database, an image that in its intense demeanor and in its clear resentment of the portrait-taking process communicated everything most people find objectionable about my personality. My lips were curled in an attempt to smile that looked more like a grimace, and my eyebrows were knit in what I’d once intended to look like a penetrating look but was instead the most anti-social scowl imaginable.

  Out of rare concern for the impression I made on others I’d appealed to the people who maintained the database and gotten that portrait changed to something no more charming but several shades less psychotic. But the damage was done. Among my enemies, the image is a prized if rather petty weapon, excavated to be attached to any report that might reference me. It had certainly enjoyed a great resurgence over the past few months, since the business with the Zinn: the perfect visual to go along with any argument that I’m too unstable to ever be allowed any more responsibility, ever again.

  My current expression must have been something very close to it. “And this?”

  “We may not be able to get the correct fail-safe from the device, but it was designed to retain the image it imprinted on its target, in case that ever contained important information. This…is the image that’s been crowding out the rest of Tasha’s cognition, the last two weeks. We know it was the last thing she uploaded, before shutting herself down; the one thing she risked having stuck in her head for the rest of her life. This. We took it as her letting us know that we should go to you. But what you know, is something none of us can guess.”

  I thought about it. Then thought about it some more.

  Bringen said, “You’re smiling.”

  So I was. I was sure that it wasn’t a nice smile, either; it would have been half-bitter and half-knowing, all victorious, not at all warm.

  “There’s something we can try.”

  Sometime later

  There’s a rule of thumb among those who hunt and prosecute criminals that you can pretty much tell whether suspects are innocent or guilty by leaving the accused alone in a room and observing their behavior.

  It doesn’t work the way intuition would suggest.

  Innocents have done the right things, obeyed the proper rules, and not trespassed in the manner they have been arrested for; they are therefore victims of caprice and they tend to react with escalating apprehension, nervousness, and fear, as they wrack their brains for some means of bringing the universe back in line with their logical understanding of actions and consequences. The guilty are nervous, too, but they’ve already been living with the knowledge of their actions and have been, on some level, emotionally preparing themselves for their current predicament. Finding themselves in the place where their actions sent them is more of a confirmation that the world around them does, in fact, work exactly in the manner it was always advertised to function. They react with resignation, boredom, and impatience over just how long it was going to take to get past the current bit so they can move on to the next part. The theory goes, an innocent person left in a room starts climbing
the walls. A guilty one goes to sleep.

  It would be nice if the rule of thumb were reliable enough to be used as a tool in convictions. Alas, human variation plays its part. Some, guilty or innocent, just refuse to believe that the universe will ever permit anything bad to ever happen to them. Some have anxiety triggers that can induce near panic even if the only penalty at risk is a nominal fine. And others are sociopaths for whom the normal variables of good and evil are just plain irrelevant; the way their minds process such questions, anything they’ve done is so perfectly justified by need that it’s just plain not worth worrying about.

  And then there are the professionals, like the two before me: the ones who had been trained in exactly what the signifiers were, and who had been subjected to background checks and security screenings so frequently that this was a test no more formidable than those they’d taken a thousand times before. I saw no nervousness, no paranoia, no damning absence of tension: just a cold angry determination to get on with it.

  They were in the same room, at adjacent tables separated by a narrow gutter; both knew what this was about, both were deadly and both had been given the same neural block to render them temporary paraplegics for safety during the interrogation. They had shared the room for two hours and had suffered in silence, waiting for my entrance. They hadn’t even looked at one another, not for a moment.

  The woman was Veronica Cheung, tall, slim, athletic, with a high forehead and hair that was, like mine, cut to helmet-length. The man was Beau D’Offier, thick-jawed with balding, with a gym physique that had started to go soft at the edges. He looked ten years older than Cheung but was from the file five years younger: a conscious decision to accentuate his apparent age in a bid at enhancing the authority he had over his division.

  I disengaged the lock on the door and entered carrying a cup of coffee, not looking at either one of them at all until I had taken my position at the blank wall they’d both been forced to stare at for two hours. This was standard prosecutorial technique, further breaking down the resistance of the suspects by taking my own sweet time to acknowledge them; but though it had worked for me on the small handful of interrogations I’d been able to have a part in so far in a career that was not yet stellar, I found that when I faced them they were both unimpressed, and both facing me with a remarkable lack of intimidation.