Spin State - Chris Moriarty [153]
“Friends in Helena. It’s my day off, remember?”
“Oh.” She did remember now. “Yeah.”
“You?”
“Just going down for the day.” She hoped.
“Want to join us?” he asked, folding his long frame into the seat next to her. “We can show you around.”
“I have an appointment,” she said evasively, hoping she could get rid of McCuen before Korchow’s man showed up. This was one wrinkle she didn’t need.
“Oh, by the way,” McCuen said. “I figured out where that storage chit in Sharifi’s journal came from.”
Sharifi and the investigation had been so far from Li’s mind for the last thirty-six hours that it took her a moment to remember what McCuen was talking about. “Oh?” she asked. “Where?”
“Remember how all her researchers got so conveniently shipped out on that survey mission? Well, one of them didn’t. He shipped out the day after Sharifi died. On the Medusa, bound for Freetown. And it looks like he checked a package through for her.”
“Let me guess when the Medusa makes Freetown.”
McCuen nodded. “Thirteen days, sixteen hours, and fourteen minutes from now. Or, to answer your real question, about twenty minutes after Gould’s ship is supposed to drop into orbit.”
Li frowned, thinking. “Remember what Sharifi wrote on that page, McCuen? Next to Gould’s address? Life insurance. I looked at it and thought it had to be some kind of protective measure, something to save her life. But what if it wasn’t like that at all? What if it was really like an actual life insurance policy, something that would go into effect only if she died?”
“Well, that’s when it did go into effect, right? I mean the student shipped out the day after Sharifi died. And, whatever she may have suspected, Gould didn’t actually leave for Freetown until your call gave her solid confirmation that Sharifi was dead.”
If McCuen was right, then Nguyen had thirteen days to go fishing for Korchow with Li as bait. And Li had thirteen days to get that chop-shop receipt back from Korchow—while he still needed her enough to keep his promise. Because once Gould and the mysterious package reached Freetown all bets were off.
She looked up at McCuen and found him frowning at her.
“What?” she said.
“Call logs.” He looked worried, hesitant. “Remember you told me to check for calls to Freetown?”
How the hell had she forgotten about that?
“Well, someone called a Freetown-based Consortium front company the night before Sharifi died. From Haas’s private terminal. With Haas’s password.”
A chill spread through the pit of Li’s stomach at the thought that Nguyen had been right all along, that ALEF and the Consortium lay at the bottom of Sharifi’s betrayal, and not the Syndicates.
McCuen’s eyes flicked to the aisle. Li followed his gaze and saw Bella standing a few rows up, waiting for a seat. Bella glanced at her and immediately glanced away, her lips set in a pale furious line. She passed by without speaking and found a seat four or five rows back from them.
“Oops,” McCuen said, and the look he shot at Li was full of questions she didn’t want to answer.
She tapped into the in-flight computer and watched the inevitable safety disclaimers scroll up her seat-back screen. “If you feel unable to sit in an exit row,” she told McCuen brightly, “please ask the crew for a change of seating assignment.”
“I have to piss,” Li said, as they stepped out of the boarding gate. Weak, but the ladies’ room was the one place in the airport she could think of that McCuen couldn’t follow her.
“Sure you don’t want to hit the town with us?” he asked, hovering.
“No. I need to check up on a few things. Talk to that nun again, maybe. You go on.”
They were cleaning the bathroom when she stepped in, two skinny, undergrown girls swabbing listlessly at the floor with mops so filthy that Li figured the net exchange of disinfectant and bacteria had reversed itself years ago. As she skirted the wet floor the flash of a gemstone at the older girl’s neck caught her eye.
It was a necklace. A stupid, tacky little charm that you could buy anywhere. But that wasn’t synthetic diamond glittering