Spin State - Chris Moriarty [112]
Li laughed. “I think he’s offered me a job in it.”
“Probably. I’m sure you’d be very useful to him. Which is exactly my point. It’s never personal when you talk to him. Don’t let the organic interface lull you into thinking you’re dealing with someone who feels things as we do. You can’t trust him. Except to act in his own best interest. That’s what he’s built to do. Nothing else. There is nothing else for him.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Li asked. “Cohen’s the best freelancer we have. Now he’s suspect?”
“Just because we work with him doesn’t mean we trust him. Some people are too powerful to be challenged. Cohen’s on the Security Council’s watch list, for Heaven’s sake. Don’t forget that. We may not have had enough to take him to court on it, but he deliberately caused the planetary net crash on Kalispell last year. That’s manipulating a network with intent to harm humans. If we’d nailed him on it, he’d have been stripped down to his switches. And Tel Aviv—”
“Tel Aviv was an accident.”
“An accident like Metz?”
Li’s stomach turned over. “What do you mean, Metz?”
“Catherine,” Nguyen said patiently, and Li felt a weird sense of disjuncture at hearing the name that Cohen always called her. “Forget Metz. I’m just asking you to remember he isn’t human.”
“Neither am I,” Li pointed out.
Nguyen gestured impatiently. “That’s not the point. What you are or aren’t . . . that’s semantics. A few divergent chromosomes. A grandmother whose geneset was assembled by design instead of chance. But in every way that counts, you are human. Cohen is something else entirely. Don’t let personal feelings get in the way of remembering that.”
Nguyen sighed, picked up a fiche, scanned and signed it, and moved it to the other side of her desk.
“Well, that’s over with,” she said. “I hope it wasn’t more unpleasant than it had to be. I think you understand my reasons for raising the issue. Anything else?”
Li started to speak, then hesitated, weighing the risks of telling Nguyen about Korchow. “Yes,” she said. “I had a strange talk with someone the other day. I’m not sure how to proceed.”
Something sparked behind Nguyen’s dark eyes as Li told her about Korchow, and she had a sudden uncomfortable conviction that her meeting with Korchow was the real news Nguyen had been waiting to hear. Maybe even the real reason Nguyen had sent her to Compson’s in the first place. But that was crazy, of course. Even Nguyen didn’t control everything and everyone.
“What makes you think Korchow was in contact with Sharifi?” Nguyen asked.
Li downloaded an image of Korchow’s card and flashed it onto a shared substream. “I found this in her datebook.”
“Well,” Nguyen said, looking at it. “Maybe she was just buying antiques from him.”
“Sure she was.”
“How sure are you he’s Syndicate?”
“I’m not. But he had the look. And if he wasn’t Syndicate, he was doing everything he could to make me think he was.”
“So. Sharifi was talking to a Syndicate agent . . . about her work, we have to assume. And now the same agent wants to talk to you.”
“What do I do?” Li asked.
Nguyen’s lips thinned in a chilly smile. “You talk to him.”
Helena: 22:10:48.
Korchow’s address put him square in the center of Helena’s commercial district, a five-minute walk, air quality permitting, from the old colonial administration building. But Li had a first stop to make before she saw Korchow: St. Joseph’s Home for Girls. And unlike Korchow’s shop, St. Joe’s wasn’t in the nicer part of town.
Compson’s capital city predated the Bose-Einstein Rush. The elegantly dilapidated domes of the capitol building and governor’s mansion recalled the old home-rule days before the Bose-Einstein boom. The commercial zone’s masonry colonnades and office blocks reminded visitors that Helena had once been more than just a company town, Compson’s World more than a Trusteeship. Still, there was nothing quaint or old-fashioned about the slums Li’s cab rolled through on