Rath's Gambit (The Janus Group Book 2) Read online

  “That’s compelling,” Beauceron admitted. “Not a certainty, but … likely, I’ll admit.”

  “But it still doesn’t tell us where she is,” Rath said.

  “No. But ….” Beauceron scratched at his bald patch contemplatively.

  “But what?”

  “The Interstellar Police Cyber Division could probably locate her. They have quite sophisticated methods for tracking locations, even of anonymous web users. Most of them used to be hackers,” Beauceron said.

  “Any friends of yours?”

  “No,” Beauceron sighed. “And Rozhkov won’t be able to assist here, either.”

  “I know a hacker,” Rath said.

  16

  “Is that it, Inuye?” Senator Lizelle asked, looking over the staffers at the conference table.

  The Chief of Staff skimmed his notes. “That’s all I had to cover.”

  “Great. Thanks, everyone,” Lizelle told them. Around the table, members of the staff stood and collected their datascrolls and drinks. “Oh, Dasi, would you mind sticking around?” Lizelle asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Dasi said. She shot a glance at Inuye, but the veteran merely gazed back as he held the door open for the rest of the team.

  Note to self: don’t play poker with Inuye.

  Then the door closed, and she felt her pulse quicken.

  “I haven’t seen much of you these past few weeks,” Lizelle noted. “How are you?”

  Dasi sighed. “Wondering if I should hand in my resignation,” she blurted.

  Lizelle smiled sympathetically. “No, of course not,” he replied softly. “I know we never really discussed what happened, or what it meant ….”

  Dasi looked away. When she didn’t answer, Lizelle cleared his throat. “I have another trip coming up,” he said. “I was hoping—”

  “I don’t think so,” Dasi interrupted. “I mean, I don’t think I should. I feel pretty terrible about it.”

  “I see.” For the first time since meeting him, Dasi saw genuine pain on the senator’s face. But he smiled through it. “I’ve hurt you, and I’m sorry,” he told her. “I was hoping that there might be something between us.”

  “There was,” she said. “That’s what I’m afraid of. But I love Khyron,” she said. “And I don’t want to lose that.”

  “I understand,” Lizelle said. “Have you told him?”

  Dasi pursed her lips and shook her head. “I tried. He’s been very busy, too. But I’m going to tell him tonight.”

  “Oh,” Lizelle said. He took a deep breath. “Well, you should know that I care deeply for you. And I want you in my life, in whatever form that might be – just professional, or … whatever. But don’t resign, please.”

  She nodded. “I have to go.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Take some time off if you need to.”

  * * *

  Khyron was already home, sitting at the kitchen counter with a half-finished plate of noodle soup next to him, typing on his datascroll.

  “Hey,” he said, looking up briefly. “How was your day?”

  “Okay,” she said, trying to smile. “You?”

  “Umm … interesting,” he said, distracted.

  She set her purse down on the stand in the front hall, and hung her jacket in the closet. “Khyron, can you set that aside for a minute?” she asked. “I’d like to talk about something.”

  “Funny,” he said, finishing a line of code. He tapped on a final key, and data from the datascroll appeared on the living room viewscreen behind him. “I need to tell you something, too.”

  Dasi frowned. “What?” she asked.

  “Me first? Okay,” Khyron shrugged. “Uh, you’re going to want to sit down, I think.”

  Dasi’s stomach flipped.

  Oh god, did he cheat on me, too? Am I actually relieved to think that?

  She sat on the couch, pressing her skirt around her legs. Khyron walked over to the viewscreen, and tapped on the data – a line chart with several spikes.

  “Okay,” he said, taking a deep breath. “This is going to sound crazy, like tinfoil hat crazy. So bear with me.”

  Dasi nodded. “Okay.”

  “Senator Lizelle asked me to see if FiveSight could predict voting, remember? Not just overall outcome, but votes at the individual level – who’s leaning what way, who might swing, right?”

  “Sure,” Dasi agreed. “Can you do it?”

  “Yes,” Khyron said. “It’s taken me longer than I anticipated to set up the model with the new data and objectives, but I let FiveSight loose a few days ago. Usually, FiveSight starts by just exploring correlations between anything and everything. And usually, it finds normal stuff – the sponsors of a bill nearly always vote for it, for instance. Those two variables would have a perfect linear relationship. But it found a few other very high correlations that made no sense at all when I looked closer at them.”

  “So, what does that mean?” Dasi asked, confused.

  “Ummm. So correlation doesn’t mean causation, right? Things can be related, but one thing doesn’t necessarily cause the other. But in this case, I’m starting to think it probably does.” He pointed to the graph. “One of the datasets I have access to contains individual senator schedules – who meets with who, when, and where. And FiveSight still has access to the stock market data I started off with, which is what you’re looking at, here – the stock market’s performance over time. What FiveSight found is that when three specific senators meet, the market is extremely likely to have volatility about a week later – actually, a single planetary market is likely to get volatile, on a big enough scale that it registers on the galactic exchange.”

  “They’re manipulating the markets?” Dasi asked.

  “Not directly, no. FiveSight found that correlation, but it’s always trying to improve on predictive ability, so it started digging deeper – what are the precise conditions that led to that volatility. These three senators meet quarterly, but they also have ad hoc meetings. Those regular meetings rarely have an impact on the market, but the unscheduled ones – the last-minute ones – in the vast majority of cases they result in a pronounced market swing, generally localized to a single planet. Sometimes the planet’s market goes up, sometimes it goes down, but it always reacts.”

  “So the three senators are making a decision that impacts that planet?”

  “That’s what I figured, yes.” Khyron shook his head. “But FiveSight went deeper. One of the first sources I added back in the day was news feeds and web search trends, so FiveSight looked there, and found … something concerning.” Khyron switched to a different chart. “Here, I plotted it out, because I think it makes more sense when you see it visually. This is a timeline for the last five years. This group of senators had eight last-minute meetings in that period – the red pins on the timeline. Following so far?”

  “Yes. Each pin represents an emergency meeting.”

  “Right. Now I’m going to overlay the galactic stock exchange chart. Six to nine days after each meeting, we see a two to three percent market gain or loss. That’s a big deal. With me so far?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Now I’m going to add the significant events variable that FiveSight created. These are the events that happened right before the planet’s market activity, which likely caused that activity, or played a large part in it. Point number one is the disappearance of the CEO at a multi-billion dollar company on Beta Praxis. He actually disappeared a few days prior, but it went public on this date, and then the market reacted, negatively in this case. He’s still gone, by the way – police investigated for a while, but found no evidence of his whereabouts. No one knows where he is.”

  Dasi opened her mouth with a question, but Khyron held up his hand. “Event number two: a city supervisor is killed in a motor vehicle accident on a different planet. The market actually goes up at that news, but again, her death came within two weeks of a meeting of these three senators. And the story stays the same for all
of their meetings.” Khyron strode over, and tapped each of the red pins on the screen in turn. “Disappeared without a trace, died of unexpected heart complications, suicide, another accidental death, another disappearance, and a murder, where the investigation turned up no suspects. They met nine times in five years, and someone important died or disappeared less than two weeks later eight of those times. After this meeting, nothing happened, or at least, FiveSight didn’t find any significant events and the market didn’t shift.” He stopped, checking himself. “You’re quiet. Did I lose you?”

  “No, I’m just … trying to process this. It’s shocking, and disturbing, and I’m having trouble believing it. Senators are having people killed? How would that even work?”

  “I don’t know,” Khyron shrugged. “A secret Interstellar Police unit, or mercenaries out of the Territories, maybe? But it can’t be a coincidence.”

  “How sure are you about this?” Dasi asked.

  Khyron sat on the couch next to her. “I checked the data. I ran the correlations myself, manually. FiveSight’s right.”

  “Oh my god.” Dasi looked at Khyron. “I’m scared.”

  He took her hands in his. “Me too.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it all day. And I think we have a responsibility to tell someone,” he suggested.

  Dasi nodded. “I think so, too. Who?”

  “Someone in the media, or the police, maybe. But Dasi, this is dangerous – this group has executed people a lot more powerful than us. That last meeting they had? That significant event is Senator Reid, on Alberon.”

  “What? You’re saying that wasn’t an accident?”

  “I don’t think so. Again, it happened right after one of their emergency meetings. They killed a colleague, another sitting senator, and tried to make it look like an accident. And according to their calendars, it only took them thirty minutes of discussion to decide they should do it. Dasi, If we take this to the wrong person, we’re dead, no question.”

  Dasi squeezed his hands, hard. “We should go to Senator Lizelle. He could protect us, he could get a security detail to guard us, or get us into protective custody, or ….”

  “No.”

  “No, we can trust him,” she said. “I know him—”

  Khyron shook his head. “Dasi, no.”

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “Because Charl Lizelle is one of the three senators.”

  She was too far away from the bathroom, but Dasi made it to the kitchen sink, where she threw up her lunch, and then dry-heaved until her stomach was empty. Dasi stood sobbing, leaning over the sink, while Khyron rubbed her back.

  I have to tell him.

  “Who are the other two senators?” she asked, her voice hoarse.

  “I don’t know,” Khyron said. “I mean, I can figure it out, I have all the data … it’s just de-identified right now. I stopped trying to identify them when I figured out one of them was Lizelle.”

  Dasi wiped her mouth on a paper towel and then turned to Khyron. “Are you sure?” she asked, again. “I mean, without a shadow of a doubt, stake-your-life-on-it certain?”

  Khyron nodded slowly. “Dasi, FiveSight correctly predicted how much funding the Emergency Relief Committee was going to allocate toward the tsunami efforts on Delphi Two last week, to the nearest thousand dollars. It wouldn’t miss on something like this, not when the correlations are so apparent.”

  She studied him for a second. “Okay. I believe you.”

  He hugged her, and Dasi felt a pang of guilt and self-loathing. “I’m going to write this all up, put together the evidence,” Khyron said, rubbing her back. “Then I guess I go to the police?”

  Dasi put her head on his shoulder. “I don’t know. I think maybe we should talk to a lawyer first. You don’t know how the police are going to handle this, they might just laugh you away as some crackpot conspiracy theorist.”

  “True,” he allowed. “If we retain one, he’s legally bound to keep everything we tell him confidential, and he can advise us how to proceed from there.”

  “So … let’s go find a lawyer,” Dasi said.

  * * *

  The viewscreen behind the lawyer’s desk showed a panoramic view of the asteroid at the heart of Anchorpoint, criss-crossed with ships’ deep-space tethers. But unlike in Lizelle’s office, Dasi knew the view was purely a simulated one. She watched as the lawyer drummed his fingers on the desk, then leaned back into his deep leather desk chair and sighed. He studied Khyron first, then Dasi, twisting the corners of his mouth.

  “You don’t believe us,” Khyron guessed.

  Yellen bit the inside of his cheek and exhaled. “No, I do; that’s the problem.”

  Khyron sighed in relief, and Dasi realized she had been holding her breath, too.

  “What do we do?” she asked.

  “As a citizen of the Federacy, and an Assistant District Attorney? Shout this from the rooftops. Tell everyone. Get ready to testify before the Senate.”

  “And as our lawyer?” Khyron asked.

  “As your lawyer?” Yellen pointed at Khyron’s datascroll. “Burn this. The AI program, your analysis and write-up, all of it. And then find a deep, dark hole, and disappear down it.”

  “Really?” Khyron asked. “You would destroy it?”

  Yellen sighed. “I’d think about it, yes. You guys are threatening to blow the whistle on one of the most senior senators, in what is undoubtedly the biggest scandal the Federacy has ever seen. Your lives will never be the same. Christ, there’s a chance – a very slight chance, but a chance, nonetheless – that the government falls apart if this gets out. This could be the first crack in the dam.”

  “He’s right,” Dasi agreed. “Approval ratings are at an all-time low, and despite all the fighting going on, people are immigrating to the Territories at record high rates.”

  Khyron rubbed his forehead. “But we can’t just … forget about this. Right? We can’t just let them keep killing their own citizens.”

  Yellen pushed back his chair, and stood up. “Listen, something this big deserves careful forethought. You need to think about what’s best for you – and I can’t tell you what that is. So think about it. Sleep on it. For god’s sake, don’t tell anyone else! Go back to your jobs and pretend everything is normal. Next week, when you’ve had some time to think, come back and we can talk again. And in the meantime, I’ll think about the right way to go public with this, if that’s what you decide you want to do. My gut says Interstellar Police isn’t equipped to handle this. We might want to go through one of the Senate oversight committees.” He tapped on Khyron’s datascroll with a finger. “Is all of the evidence here on this machine?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Khyron said. “That’s got all my code for FiveSight, and the encryption keys for accessing the databases.”

  “And your analysis?” the attorney asked.

  “All of it,” Khyron agreed.

  “Okay. Leave it with me. I’ll lock it up here, and keep it safe.”

  Khyron shifted nervously in his seat. “Are you sure?”

  “If you’re not in possession of it, you have some plausible deniability,” Yellen assured him. “You don’t want this lying around until you’ve decided what to do about it.” He smiled. “Trust me.”

  17

  In his motel room, Rath opened the datascroll and ran C4ble’s encryption key. He drummed his fingers on the desk for a minute, then cursed, and typed his message.

  I need help locating someone else. Could you find someone based on their AnonChat posting history?

  He waited for several seconds, and then the reply appeared.

  Probably. Won’t know until I try. Care to double down on your offer from last time?

  Rath sighed. Yes. Two kills, one for this job, one for the last one. But only on the condition that you find who I’m looking for.

  I found the last one, didn’t I?

  * * *
/>   Beauceron’s car was idling in front of the motel when Rath strode through the entrance doors, carrying his backpack, as usual. He slid into the passenger seat and shut the door.

  “No dice,” he told Beauceron. “The messages passed through a deep-space relay point in the Territories, but after that she covered her tracks too well – she could have been anywhere in the Territories.”

  Beauceron frowned. “I hadn’t really considered the Territories as an option.”

  Rath shrugged. “She probably headed there to stay off the grid. No Interstellar Police there.”

  “That could explain why she didn’t show up in the databases we checked,” Beauceron admitted. “Those databases only include Federacy planets – nothing from the Territories, they’re all on separate systems. And they don’t share data with us.”

  Rath watched in the passenger mirror as a man and a woman, holding hands, took a seat on a bench a few cars behind their parking space.

  Beauceron was lost in thought, staring out the front windshield. “There is MirrorLine, though.”

  “What’s ‘MirrorLine’?” Rath asked.

  Beauceron hesitated, glancing over at Rath. The assassin was playing with a necklace made of different-colored crystal beads, passing the beads through his fingers, as if counting them.

  “What’s that?” Beauceron asked, stalling.

  Rath looked down at the necklace, embarrassed. “It’s … just some jewelry I bought a few months ago. There was this woman that I met. It was for her, but I never got a chance to give it to her.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Beauceron said. “What was her name?”

  “Jaymy,” Rath said. “Her name is Jaymy.” Rath wrapped the necklace around itself, and tucked it back into his pocket. “So, MirrorLine?”

  Beauceron lowered his voice. “Years ago, Interstellar Police developed a secret program intended to increase our arrest rates by more closely monitoring criminal activity in the Territories. Criminals have always hid from us in the Territories, of course, but we reasoned that many would continue their criminal activities there, too … and get arrested and convicted by local law enforcement on Territorial planets. Then when they were released, we could track them, and arrest them if they returned to a Federacy jurisdiction.”