Spin State - Chris Moriarty [41]
She tucked the shipping recept back into the front flap and flipped through the notebook’s pages. There were half a dozen sheets of fiche, divided by tabs: lab notes, logs, addresses, appointments. She tapped the appointments page and got a polite, impersonal access-denied message. She tapped into the book’s operating platform, found the hash log, and stripped Sharifi’s password off it without breaking a computational sweat. She grinned, feeling irrationally better about the whole investigation; brilliant or not, Sharifi had at least been human enough to commit the most laughably elementary security gaffes. Maybe Li really could catch up to her.
She scanned the daily entries, found the usual appointments and reminders, scattered jottings of notes, names, streamspace coordinates. One page held a list of names, none of them familiar. Another held a long, close-written paragraph that appeared to be a transcription of a conversation about data transfer protocols with a person whose name Sharifi had, perhaps carelessly, perhaps on purpose, omitted.
Li tapped up the page that matched the day of Sharifi’s death. Nothing. She flipped back one day and saw the letter B written in the 7 P.M. slot. Too late for a work appointment. Dinner?
Just above it Sharifi had scrawled a set of Ring-side spin coordinates, and beside them the name Gilly and two words that raised Li’s hackles: Life Insurance.
The livewall in Sharifi’s quarters turned out to be in the last place any rational person would consider putting it: on the bathroom door. Hadn’t the station designers ever heard of reading on the john? Or was this some devious, petty-minded plot to prevent time-wasting by station employees?
Li flicked the wall into life, tapped up a streamspace directory, and zoomed in on the blazing quarter arc of the Zona Libre.
The coordinates took her to the NowNet Science Publishing Division, S.A., on the 438th floor of the Pan-American Building, Avenida de las Américas. Must have a nice view, Li thought. And the monthly rent must be enough to pay off the national debts of half the planets on the Periphery.
She cross-checked NowNet’s office directory against Sharifi’s on-station user files and found what she was looking for within seconds: a call on the day before Sharifi’s death to one Gillian Gould, Senior Science Editor. A long call. She read Gould’s address out loud, told the wall to put her through, and stood tapping her foot impatiently while the underpowered station net struggled through the Ring-side server’s handshakes and VR resets.
Finally the NowNet logo blossomed on-screen, followed a half beat later by a 2D view of an attractive young man sitting at a suspiciously neat desk. He wore the inevitable Ring-side business blue suit, and his neck was encased in the stiff bead-and-bone latticework of a tribal collar.
The collar had to be fake; no mere salary puller could afford genuine Earth imports. But even the good fakes were expensive. And this was a good fake. All in all, the living, breathing image of the up-and-coming junior editor.
“Gillian-Gould’s-office-may-I-ask-who’s-calling?” he said in a tone that told Li precious few people talked to Gillian Gould without appointments.
Then he looked into his monitor and nearly jumped out of his ergonomically correct chair. “Dr. Sharifi! Sorry. If you’ll just give me a minute, I’ll get her out of her meeting for you.”
Li blinked in surprise, but he was