The Second Sphere (The Three Spheres Trilogy Book 1) Page 3

  The movement swelled quickly, their ideology quite appealing, particularly to those who’d drawn the short end. They seemed a peaceful and vocal opposition, even reasonable at the time, a movement based on democracy and freedom of expression.

  But rather abruptly, about 150 years ago, they became violent. No one was quite sure what made them turn, though there was speculation, which eventually became dogma, that it was their failure to make real gains peacefully that caused their actions, that the insurrectionist wing of the movement essentially took over.

  Just around that time, Pierre and Tatum died in separate accidents, Pierre in a house fire and Tatum in a transport accident, which led to speculation that the TSG now had the Green Revolution in its cross hairs. Prematurely, pundits announced the end of the GR.

  But, as bombings on the moon and Mars began to happen every few weeks, disrupting the lives of the very people they claimed to want to help, and creating an urgent push for more and more security, those same pundits realized that they were mistaken. The damage was generally minimal, a person here, twenty people there; a few hundred to a thousand at most. But still, they scared the hell out of nearly everyone. Any other GR leadership recognized by the TSG faded. The well-structured organization became totally de-centralized.

  The Intelligence community, after connecting the dots for TSG leadership, won access to records at the Source, searching the minds of those who were suspected of this terrorism. Unfortunately, what we found was almost as disturbing as the violence the GR perpetrated--nothing. No bombing, meeting, or assassination left a trace after the fact. It was as though the GR didn’t exist. The common explanation was that the GR discovered a way to manipulate the Source. And that’s what scared decision-makers the most. Unfortunately, we had to rely on traditional investigative methods to fight them.

  Tens of years ago, Laslow Intelligence and most everyone else in the field realized that to stop the GR, we needed to stop their money, which seemed ample. If we stopped the funding, then the bombs would stop. Most of us fancied ourselves smarter than the average terrorist. Of course, the whole effort was simpler to speak about than it was to execute.

  Most of our analysts suspected that the largest source of funds for the Green Revolution came from illicit activity. This illegal activity included selling banned enhancements, particularly Love.

  They were also thought to control the illegal sale of transfers. When the wealthy tired of their body and wanted a new one, they dumped their relatively new, attractive transfer, or, more accurately, threw them away. Some resourceful people—the GR, the intelligence community speculated, and which I knew to be fact--harvested these dumped transfers and rented them as prostitutes.

  Transfers of course, weren't quite human if they didn't have a real person’s being encoded on their chip and had no connection to the Source. They were lifeless dummies that could be programmed to do whatever their programmer wanted them to do. It wasn't long before they became the sex trade.

  It was this connection between the illegal trades and the Green Revolution that led me to Cody. He was one of my best informants, delivering great intel on more takedowns then I could count. I had other sources, people whom I felt comfortable going to occasionally. But they were often less forthcoming with information, and more suspicious of handshake agreements.

  And I didn’t have the same kind of arrangement with them as I had with Cody. He and I had a high level of comfort, a tremendous belief in the other. Only in the last six months had his information been less than perfect. There was the wrong date of a targeted assassination of a senator on Mars and incorrect coordinates of a cell’s safe house. I wanted to explain the percentages to Bryant to show him that there was no crisis. Everyone made mistakes. But observing his sallow, less-than-pleased-face, I knew that wouldn’t play.

  “I need to talk to him, boss.”

  “Orion--”

  “I’ve got to talk to him before I can think about telling you his name, much less bringing him in here, see if he’s willing to let us trace him. You know I’ve kept this one off the books.”

  “And I told you for years that I don’t like it,” Bryant said with bluster.

  “I’ll go see him tonight,” I said. “Just give me until tomorrow morning. If he won’t give me any reasonable explanation, or whoever is giving him the intel, then I’ll bring him in.”

  Bryant’s fist dropped with a thwack. “You realize how this makes us look?”

  “I know,” I said.

  “We’re going to take heat for this.”

  “I know, boss, but just give me some time to make it right.”

  “Fine.” Bryant’s shoulders slumped for a moment and he pressed an index finger to his temple. “We’re on a call to Lance Heittmann whenever Rosie gets in here, assuming she gets here.”

  “Got it, boss,” I said as I stood.

  “You’ve got until tomorrow, Orion.”

  I left Bryant’s office and stumbled down the hallway wondering whether I was as dumb as he made me out to be. Maybe I didn’t care anymore. Whatever the case, the insinuation that the entire New Mumbai fiasco was my fault irked me. The end of the day seemed distant. I wasn’t sure I could wait that long to talk to Cody.

  Chapter 7

  I sat in the cramped office that I shared with Rosie, staring out at the tops of the skyscrapers, which rolled as far as the eye could see, pondering the snafu I’d gotten myself into. Cody was reliable. He’d given me at least a dozen bombing plots, and a lot more intel about GR plants in the government and at Laslow. This mistake wasn’t from him.

  Cody was a small fry. The information he dropped in my lap was from somewhere up the GR hierarchy, probably sanctioned by someone with clout, who thought strategically about how to keep the Laslow Corporation, and any other Intelligence organization for that matter, certain that they had the bad guys when they were really swinging wildly.

  Up to this point, our arrests because of Cody’s information kept Bryant happy, and it helped keep the Laslow Corporation flush with TSG cash. Our war against the Green Revolution was a pleasant game that made a lot of people rich, filled with public relations opportunities. But ultimately we did little to stop the violence.

  I didn’t like the idea of revealing Cody. We had a good thing going. It was a fair exchange. I wanted to keep Cody exactly where he was. If I could leapfrog him to get to the next level, I’d have something to show Bryant and get him out of my business until the next crisis came along.

  As I pondered a life without Love, Rosalinda Flores, my partner in all matters intelligence stumbled in the room. At one time, she was a pretty transfer with long, blonde hair, sparkling green eyes, a thin build, and a nice wide smile. But now she was a fiend, with weathered, droopy skin and hungry eyes. Love had her completely.

  Rosie set a black bag the size of a small house on the table in front of her and took a seat without uttering a greeting. She flicked her hair behind her ears then glanced up. Our eyes met. The whites were tinged with red; the pupils were wide and black. Even that junkie appearance compelled me to imagine a different relationship with her. But as suddenly as those old feelings appeared, they were gone. My chip brought back the memory that her real name was Roscoe Flores. She was an ex-Marine who, two hundred years ago, weighed two hundred and fifty pounds and was brick-shithouse-solid.

  Back on earth, she was one of Laslow’s top people, a shooting star. Company founder Ed Laslow once promised her the Lunar Chief of Intelligence job. Once we came to the moon, however, we got ourselves into the Love scene, and fell into the transition mire, from which we never extracted ourselves. Rosie was worse off than I was, though. She had no restraint, unable to go more than a few hours without a dose.

  “You look like you had a rough one,” I said. She cast her gaze past me, toward the window and the constructed moon.

  “Fifteen minutes at the Source,” she muttered. She twirled around and eyed her reflection in the window. “So, we hear anything yet about wha
t’s going on in New Mumbai?” she asked.

  I told her about Bryant’s suspicions and my intention to get Cody to pass along the person giving him information, as well as our imminent meeting with Lance Heittman.

  “Great,” she finally said. “I’m getting some coffee. I’ll meet you in the conference room,” she said before she left.

  Despite the lingering effects of the Love I dosed outside of Cody’s apartment, I felt a good fidget coming on. The world was off, and I wasn’t sure that any amount of programmed fix could do anything about it. I worried about Rosie, but I knew that I couldn’t say anything to her. For me to give advice about addiction would be completely absurd. Both of us knew it.

  I left our office, went down the hall, and into the conference room. A map of Mars was on the link-up, the sight of the bombing in New Mumbai blown up on the side. The blast radius was about a tenth of a kilometer across, stretching near the arena.

  Rosie came in and flopped down across from me without saying a word. I saw that she still held her Love drive. I cleared my throat and motioned toward her hand. She didn’t say a word, but cast a look to melt granite.

  “Sorry for expressing interest,” I said, just as Bryant came into the room.

  "Orion’s gotten you up to speed?” he asked as he sat. Rosie nodded.

  “Listen,” he said, “this is going to be a tough day. I don’t want to feed any conspiracy theories that Lance Heittman or anyone else in the New Washington office might have. He’s going to wonder why we wasted his staff’s time on this. I want to handle any problems we had with intelligence gathering internally. So just let me do the talking with Lance, okay? We don’t know anything about a distraction. We were just doing our best. If he asks direct questions, feel free to answer them with that slant in mind; otherwise, just shut up.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Fine with me,” Rosie said.

  Suddenly an image appeared before us, interrupting Bryant. A man with dirty blond hair and a set of steel gray eyes blinked at us. Bryant raised his hand in greeting.

  “Bryant, good to see you,” the man said.

  “Lance,” Bryant said, nodding.

  “Rosie, Orion,” Lance Heittmann grumbled. The head of intelligence at the Laslow Corporate office in New Washington, Mars was disheveled, to say the least. His eyes betrayed his lack of rejuvenation; the stain along the collar of his white shirt indicated an accident with coffee enhancement probably occurred in the recent past. He never looked like this.

  Lance ran through the number of initial dead and length of time to decontaminate the area.

  “So, the real question is, how did we let this slip?” he asked. I remained as still as I possibly could.

  “How’d this happen?” He asked again. The question hung in the air, waiting for someone to answer.

  Bryant was placid in his chair, blinking occasionally, but showing no sign that what Lance said moved him. He waited for Lance to continue, since we all knew that there was no satisfying answer at the moment, and to pretend that there was seemed ridiculous.

  “Did you find anything in your investigation that would even hint of something like this happening?” Lance asked for the third time.

  Bryant shook his head.

  “If we’d found anything that predicted what would happen last night or was of any value concerning what happened in New Mumbai at all, we would’ve already shared it. All of our preliminary reports are in your hands.”

  “Is that a no?” Lance asked.

  “I know that you want answers right now. We all do. But we honestly don’t have any. Our analysts are reviewing our investigation from the last few months to see what, if anything, we missed,” Bryant said.

  Bryant went on. “We’re not interested in playing games here. We don’t mind taking the heat for anything we did wrong, but I don’t want the people who work for me to feel any worse than they already do.”

  Lance’s face contorted, and it seemed as though he wanted to reach through the link-up and slap Bryant in the face. “You want me to worry about your feelings? What about the families of the people who were killed?”

  “Lance, that’s not what I’m saying,” Bryant said.

  “We owe those people an explanation about why we were unable to prevent this. I’m not interested in assigning blame for it’s own sake. I want us to find the truth.”

  “Lance, I completely understand. It’s just--”

  “You’ve got a TSG auditor who’s going to see you this afternoon to begin a review of your investigation.” He said it as though he wanted to stab Bryant in the eye.

  “What?” I asked.

  “It’s standard procedure, Orion,” Lance said. “I recommended that they begin immediately.”

  I thought for a moment about what an audit might mean. Any report would likely detail what was already known and make excuses for our failure, which the Three Spheres Government and Laslow would then use to show that they weren’t responsible for what happened. They couldn’t blame me for trusting a well-regarded mole who’d given plenty of good intel over the years, could they? I hoped the answer was no. Still, I didn’t like a hint of being the scapegoat.

  “We’re going up to meet with Quincy right after we get off with you,” Bryant said. “I’m sure he’ll brief us on the visit.”

  “Good,” Lance said.

  “I guess we’ll talk to you later?” Bryant asked.

  “I’m sure we’ll have a briefing sometime this afternoon,” Lance said.

  “Always a pleasure,” Bryant said as he disconnected the signal.

  “This is bad,” Rosie droned.

  “An audit?” I said. “I don’t want TSG coming in here, poking around, getting information on our GR moles.”

  “What do you want to do about it, Orion?” Bryant asked. “You want to tell them that they can’t have information on where we’re getting our intelligence?”

  “I’m just saying that I don’t like it, boss.”

  A beep came from the panel in front of him, and a beautiful woman with long eyelashes and full lips appeared on the link-up.

  “Mr. Valek, I just want to remind you of your meeting with Mr. Laslow,” she said.

  “We’ll be up there in a minute,” Bryant said just before the image disappeared. “Let’s go see how much worse things can get.”

  Chapter 8

  The doors of the elevator opened, and before us was the vast waiting area of Quincy Laslow’s office, a swirling half circular affair with curved walls of windows and comfortable black couches. Sitting at a broad, what I presumed to be faux-wood table, was the well-manicured woman who buzzed us a moment earlier. She had long, straight, black hair pulled back in a ponytail and the proper look of a doting assistant. She smiled stiffly at us.

  “Morning, Shari,” Bryant said as he led us past her desk. She didn’t open her mouth, only watched us move. We walked through a set of doors to her left and down a long corridor. At the end of the corridor, Bryant led us through another set of doors.

  There, sitting on a gray couch, as he sipped a cup of coffee, was Quincy Laslow. His transfer was tall, dark, and gave off an air of mystery, though his life as a playboy was well documented in the tabloids. Most recently photographers caught him with the star of the highest grossing film of all time, a woman who changed transfers more often than I changed my underwear. Our twice-weekly regular meetings with Quincy, supplemented with emergency meetings, gave me a glance into the life of the rich and famous, a life otherwise out of my reach.

  A white suit clung to his lanky body. He wore a black shirt, no tie and a pair of white loafers. He stared at us for a moment, lost in thought.

  Quincy Laslow was the kind of man who believed that he earned everything he had. In fact, though, his father, Ed Laslow, the wealthy founder of the company, gave him all the advantages that allowed him to feel entitled to run the Laslow Corporation’s lunar operations as he’d done for the past two hundred years.

  The connecti
ons that he and his father developed over the years augmented his lack of knowledge about the threats we faced. The man had a way with people, particularly people in a certain elite social network. He knew the back-alleys of power, all the twists and turns that led the Laslow Corporation to new contracts with the Three Spheres Government.

  “Good morning,” he said before he set his cup down on the shining, white coffee table and lifted himself from the couch to greet us. “I apologize. My thoughts are with the families of those killed in this attack.” He shook his head, and with it, the full mane of hair moved as a single organism. “I just can’t believe what’s happened. Just dreadful. And it seems a little worse than normal.”

  “It does,” Bryant said.

  “It’s a pleasure to see you despite the unfortunate circumstances. Please, sit down,” he said, pointing toward the couches. “Would you like some coffee?”

  We nodded.

  Quincy said rather loudly, “Shari, three coffees please!”

  “We spoke to Lance,” Bryant said, eager to get down to business so that we could return to our regular state of manic operations.

  “Oh yes, I’ve spoken to him several times already this morning. I trust that he gave you a hint about the investigation? The auditors who’ll be arriving this afternoon?”

  “He did, sir,” Bryant said.

  “You’ll give them full access to all of our files?”

  “Of course, sir,” Bryant said.

  “Good, I’m glad that I can rely on you to be cooperative. I’m already getting calls from the governors this morning asking about New Mumbai. The governors suggest that perhaps we were fooled by our moles into believing that the target was the Capitol, when in fact, all along, it had been New Mumbai.”