She pa.s.sed the first corner, which branched into a hallway that turned left, and was looking for signage when a woman appeared seemingly from nowhere.

Romey had seen that trick before. There was a filter built into the hallway, and employees stepped through it, giving no hint of their presence-from sound to smell-until they just appeared.

"Detective Romey." Like most people, the woman was taller than Romey. She was also thinner, but the kind of thin that came from enhancements and not eating enough, not the kind that came from remaining in shape. "I"m to take you to our vice president in charge of operations."

"You"re to take me to a conference room where you"ll a.s.semble the staff," Romey said. "We don"t put our people in the same room," the woman said.

"Well, you do now," Romey said. "Find some place, put them there, and let them know I"ll be coming to talk with them."

The woman stared at Romey, obviously confused by the order.

"Is there a problem?" Romey asked.

"I"m sorry," the woman said. "It"s just that we"re told not to do this under any circ.u.mstance."

"I"m not a circ.u.mstance," Romey said. "I"m the Armstrong Police Department, and I trump any orders given by any boss. If your staff has trouble with that, I can send them all en ma.s.se to jail. Would that please you?"

"Our lawyers-"

"Are irrelevant," Romey said. "I"m not going to detain you people. I"m going to question you about Roshdi Whitford"s death. Now, unless he died from some kind of conspiracy involving every member of this company, most of your staff have nothing to worry about from me-unless you make sure they don"t follow my orders."

The woman"s eyes opened wide. Romey couldn"t tell if she was communicating to someone higher up on a link or if she was just one of those people whose eyes got wider when she was surprised. "I"ll send the order," she said. "Come with me."

She didn"t go through the filter. Instead, she walked to the next corner-this one on the right-and turned down the right-angled hallway.

Romey turned her head slightly and noted that her street cops were following. Good. She might need them.

"How many employees do you have?" she asked as they walked.

"Here or abroad?" the woman asked.

Abroad. That was a term Romey hadn"t heard outside Earth.

"In the building," she said.

"At present . . ." This time the woman"s pause was obvious. ". . . two hundred and fifty-seven." "And how many are employed in Armstrong?"

"We don"t give out that information," the woman said.

"What"s your name?" Romey snapped.

"Um, Sally Juhl," the woman said.

"And your position here?" Romey asked.

"I"m liaison to the senior staff."

"The senior staff," Romey repeated. "I trust that includes Roshdi Whitford."

"No. He has his own a.s.sistants." "Is that what a liaison is?" Romey asked. "An a.s.sistant?"

"No, I actually serve as a communications and business coordinator for the members of the senior staff. They"re not allowed to hire their own a.s.sistants." She bit her lower lip, as if she"d said too much. "Well, Ms. Sally Juhl, Liaison to the Senior Staff, you are now allowed to give out any and all information to me."

"I"m so sorry, ma"am," Juhl said. "I just can"t. Almost everything we do here is proprietary." "We don"t care about your proprietary information. The owner of this company is dead. Doesn"t that matter to you?"

"He warned us that that might happen," she said. "Excuse me." Romey grabbed the woman"s arm, stopping her from continuing down the hall. "What did you just say?"

"He warned us that he might die," Juhl said. "When?" Romey asked.

"When he hired us. He said this is a cutthroat business. If we join it, we have to be willing to give a hundred-thousand percent. And that included our lives. He said that he was always ready to give his life. That"s what made him good at what he did."

"Do you think he died protecting someone?" Romey asked.

"I don"t know," Juhl said. "We"re not allowed to know. That"s what the officer who locked us down said. We know that Mr. Whitford is dead, that he died at home, and that we have lost two other employees although we don"t know who they are yet, either."

At least the officer who closed the place down had done his job. Romey let Juhl"s arm go. "That"s right, isn"t it?" Juhl asked, absently rubbing the place where Romey"s fingers had been. "We"re not supposed to know, right?"

"The less you know the better I can interview," Romey said. She turned to Officer Zurik. "Send for some backup. I can"t cover two-hundred-some-odd employees on my own. And get some techs in here, preferably ones who know something about security systems."

"Yes . . . Detective." He nodded, then stepped back, obviously planning to go outside to send the message.

"In here," Romey snapped. "We don"t have a lot of time."

"Yes, sir. Ma"am. Detective. I"m sorry, sir."

Romey narrowed her eyes but didn"t say anything. Instead she turned toward Juhl.

"Lead me to your colleagues," Romey said.

"I don"t have colleagues per se," Juhl said. "I"m the only liaison on staff."

Romey wanted to shake her. But if Romey tried, she"d probably snap her like a brittle bread stick.

"The other employees," Romey said through her teeth. She"d already decided that some junior detective was going to interview this woman. Romey would probably kill her before the interview was done.

"Oh yes, right," Juhl said. "I think they"ve a.s.sembled now. Come with me."

And she finally stepped through one of the filters, holding the edge of it so that Romey could step inside.

Romey had a sense that Juhl could have done this at any point, taken them directly to the entire staff trapped inside the building, but had been stalling in the mazelike corridors, probably on someone"s instruction.

Romey would find out who that someone was. Just like she was going to find out how this creepy place worked. And she was going to find out just why there were so many human staffers on the premises. But most of all, she was going to find out what had initially caused the companywide paranoia, and whether it was related to Roshdi Whitford"s death.

32.

Rudra Popova still made DeRicci nervous. Even though they had worked together for almost a year now, Popova still had a look that could make DeRicci uncomfortable.

Part of it was that Popova was one of those brilliant women who also knew how to look beautiful ninety percent of the time. Add to that the fact that Popova had more formal training in security, a.n.a.lysis, and government than DeRicci, and that had made both of them uncomfortable from the beginning.

DeRicci had to repeatedly remind herself that she she was the Chief of Security for the United Domes of the Moon, not Rudra Popova. Popova was her a.s.sistant, and a d.a.m.ned good one. was the Chief of Security for the United Domes of the Moon, not Rudra Popova. Popova was her a.s.sistant, and a d.a.m.ned good one.

But it still made DeRicci uncomfortable to watch Popova come through the doors to her office, looking well put together in a black dress and black flats that matched her long black hair. She clutched a pile of handhelds-and she looked frazzled.

Popova set the handhelds on DeRicci"s desk.

"They"re nut b.a.l.l.s," Popova said. "All of them."

DeRicci nodded. Popova was referring to a small band of people who backed up the public information network onto private sites. Although to call these people a band was actually wrong. They didn"t a.s.sociate. Sometimes they even fought.

They were individualists. Some of them were very crazy, convinced that the changing information was filling up with lies that would eventually bring down the universe. Others were just paranoid, afraid that the changing information would cause the most valuable information to be deleted.

And a handful were archivists, who believed that information-whether it was accurate or not-needed a secondary backup in case something went wrong.

DeRicci had had Popova and a small team visit all of them, hoping to cajole the information from them.

She wanted the records from that week fifteen years ago. She wanted to compare it all to what was available now.

"One guy wouldn"t open the door because I was from the government. He climbed to the second story of his house and threw water on me, telling me to go away."

"Water?" DeRicci asked.

"I can"t explain it," Popova said. "Then another guy deleted everything he had when he heard where I was from. He just destroyed it while I was standing there."

She sank into the nearest chair. "I hope this information is important."

It was comments like the last one, spoken in that superior tone, that had made DeRicci dislike Popova at first. Now that they knew each other, DeRicci realized Popova used that tone when she was the most uncomfortable.

"I hope it is, too," DeRicci said. "Which one of these comes from the archivists?"

"Those are the only ones I brought you," Popova said. "They don"t save every site and they don"t save every piece of information, so I tried to bring you the broadest range. I hope that"s okay." "It is," DeRicci said. "I might have to send you back out for the other stuff, though."

Popova shook her head. "Fortunately, I had enough foresight to collect the information from the true crazies when I saw them. I marked their handhelds and I"ll give them to you when you want." "Not yet." DeRicci slid the top handheld toward her. She flicked on the handheld and watched information scroll along the tiny screen.

"In my absence," Popova said, "we got some more reports."

DeRicci looked up. Another crisis? Or was it just this one? Not that DeRicci was entirely convinced lost information from fifteen years ago could be called a crisis. To her, it seemed more like a curiosity.

One that might blossom into something more important.

"What?" DeRicci asked.

"You know those power grid flickers that we noted in the old reports?" Popova asked. DeRicci nodded.

"We"ve had several in the past two days."

"What?" DeRicci asked. "How come no one brought this to me before?"

"Because they"re not gridwide. They"re isolated. Only certain parts of the infrastructure were effected."

DeRicci set the handheld aside. It continued to scroll. She should probably have shut the d.a.m.n thing off, but she wasn"t ready to just yet.

"We separated out the grid a few years ago," DeRicci said. "After the dome explosion, when we realized that it would be better to have parts of the dome with power."

"Then I should find out where these isolated grid problems were," Popova said. "That might tell us something."

"Do that," DeRicci said. "Look to see if any of the affected businesses from fifteen years ago were in these grid areas."

"All right." Popova headed for the door. "And one more thing," DeRicci said. "What?" Popova asked. "Check the power glitches against police incident reports for the past week."

Popova raised her eyebrows. "Interesting," she said, and walked out the door, closing it softly behind her.

DeRicci looked at the handhelds, feeling more disturbed than she had all day. Something was wrong, but her information was incomplete.

And the incomplete information was preventing her from knowing how great the threat was-at least intellectually. On a gut level, she had a feeling she was discovering something very important, something she should have been paying attention to for a long time.

But she didn"t yet know what that something was.

33.

Flint had always known that Ki Bowles skirted an edge. He was just surprised at how close she had come to falling off it.

Even though he had been personally satisfied when InterDome fired Bowles for her story on Noelle DeRicci, he had had the pa.s.sing thought-never expressed-that InterDome had overreacted. After all, Bowles was a well-known investigative reporter, with more awards than any other reporter on InterDome"s staff.

But those awards had cost the company millions in legal fees and damage awards. It seemed that every case Bowles had investigated had resulted in at least one police report, and sometimes dozens. More than one subject of a Bowles story had filed hara.s.sment and stalking suits. Even more subjects had filed libel and slander suits. And one had filed a suit alleging restraint of trade.

Flint felt his stomach twist. Shouldn"t Van Alen have investigated all of this before agreeing with Flint that Bowles would be perfect to hire to do the story against WSX? Or had Van Alen thought that Flint had done this work?

Of course, he didn"t know how many other investigative reporters had similar records. Maybe it was just a liability of the profession. Maybe the aggression that Bowles and her colleagues brought to bear against the subjects of their investigations provoked these kinds of reactions.

More often than not, the libel and slander cases got dismissed. The restraint-of-trade case went further than he thought it would, but it, too, got tossed for lack of evidence.

But the lower-level cases-stalking, hara.s.sment-a number of those got settled, not in criminal court, but in civil, with a rather large judgment to the plaintiff.

Flint had handled these cases because they were so technical, letting Talia investigate the stalking cases that Bowles herself had brought.

She had used InterDome"s attorneys for those as well, going after people who sent her letters, followed her around the city, and in two scary instances, let themselves into her apartment.

That was when Bowles had upgraded her security systems, but she hadn"t-oddly, Flint thought-hired a security team. Maybe InterDome provided one.

The stalking cases went on for years, with depositions and witnesses. The injunctions were violated on a regular basis, and each time, Bowles went back to court seeking higher and higher orders of protection.