Spin State - Chris Moriarty [127]
Nguyen wanted Sharifi’s dataset. And she wanted to make sure no one else got it. That she knew things she wasn’t telling Li was a given, part of the price of working for her, of trusting her. But what were those things? Did she know what Sharifi had found in the mine? Who she had talked to about it? Did she know about Korchow? Was it just paranoia for Li to think she was following a track Nguyen had foreseen, even laid down for her?
And what about Korchow? He wanted the same information Nguyen wanted. He wanted it desperately enough to take the chance of approaching Li, of risking the sting he must know was a real possibility. And he had suggested—more than suggested—that Sharifi had already betrayed some of her secrets to him.
Bella was the wild card, of course. Did she know about Korchow? Was she working for him? What was there really between her and Haas? What had Voyt done to make her hate him so much? And what was the cold calculation Li had seen in her eyes? Grief over Sharifi, or something deeper, older, darker?
Something moved in the darkness.
Li’s eyes snapped open. Nothing.
Then she heard the faint but unmistakable sound of someone breathing. She slid a hand into her coverall and eased the Beretta out of its holster. She flicked the safety off, inching the lever back with agonizing slowness in order to muffle the dry little click of the catch snapping open.
“You’re not going to shoot me, Katie,” said a familiar voice.
A match flared. Li smelled sulfur, saw a monstrous shadow loom across the vault high above her. The shadow bent, shifted. A rusty pin squeaked, and a Davy lamp flared into life. “Hello,” Cartwright said from where he sat cross-legged on the gleaming floor. “So you heard them too, did you?”
“Heard who?” Li asked breathlessly.
“The saints, Katie. Her children.” He smiled. “Rejoice, for we know the hour and the day of Her Coming. It’s beginning.”
“Save the sermons for your sheep, Cartwright. It has nothing to do with me.”
Something drew her eyes into the inky shadows behind the priest. Some movement, so faint that she felt rather than saw it. But when the voice spoke out of the darkness she felt so little surprise that she realized she’d known Daahl would be here.
“If it has nothing to do with you,” he asked, “then why are you down here?”
“Just doing my job, that’s all.”
“There are a lot of people who are wondering just what that job is. A lot of people who’d like to know which side you’re on.”
She didn’t answer.
Cartwright began scratching at a patch of dry skin on his wrist, and something about the movement—the sound of fingernails on flesh, the dead skin flaking off and glittering in the lamplight—made her feel ill. He’s crazy, she thought. He always was crazy.
“Well, Katie,” Daahl asked, “don’t you have any answer at all for me?”
Li rubbed a clammy hand across her face.
“I’m going to show you something,” Daahl said. “I may regret showing it to you. A lot of people have told me I will, in fact. But I think you have a right to see it. I think you have a right to know what’s on the table here.”
Li saw the UNSC seal on the letter before he’d finished handing it to her. “This is a classified internal memo,” she said. “Where the hell are you getting this stuff?”
“Just read it.”
It took several reads for the sense of the thing to come through to her—and even then she wasn’t sure what the cautious, bureaucratically vague words really meant. Someone else had been sure though. Some other reader had been there before her, had scored through the critical lines with a strong confident hand:
In conclusion, the presence of live Bose-Einstein strata on Compson’s World is both an internal and external security threat. It is vital, both in relation to Syndicate industrial espionage activities and for reasons of political stability (vis-à-vis the IWW and other outside agitators) to transfer the production