Spin State - Chris Moriarty [98]
“What do you want?” she asked. Her coolness surprised her. She knew people who’d been approached. It was inevitable. If the Syndicates didn’t hit you up, internal security would. Or corporate agents. She’d expected to feel outrage, fear. But all she felt now was a cold, calculating conviction that she had to keep her head and pick a careful path through the minefield that stretched before her.
“I don’t want anything, Major. Other than a chance to introduce myself. You strike me as someone with whom I might have . . . common interests.”
“I doubt that.”
“Ah, but how can you be sure if we don’t discuss them?”
She looked back to the livewall, delaying. Hamdani was tightening up even under his thick turtleneck. He blew on his hands, got called for going to the mouth, stalked off the mound in a fury, came back, stalled. When he finally delivered, the pitch got away from him and drifted invitingly over the heart of the plate.
“Shit,” Li muttered, just as the crack of the bat sounded through the room. She sighed in relief as the ball died over the warning track.
“You’re a curious woman,” Korchow said smoothly. “An enigma, one might almost say. I confess to a powerful interest in you.”
Li kept silent.
“When I learned you’d been posted here, I was, quite frankly, astonished. Your service record shows . . . an impressive ability to get results. It seemed to me that you deserved more. Had a right to expect more.”
“I don’t see it that way,” Li said. “And even if I did, I have plenty to lose. And plenty to be grateful for.”
“Grateful. For what? For the chance to tend the colonial sheep and take orders from inferiors? Or is there some other explanation for the hero’s anticlimactic homecoming? Some people”—Korchow’s voice shifted subtly, got harder, colder—“idealistic people . . . gullible people . . . have surmised that your fall from grace shows the Security Council has repented of some of its . . . harsher attitudes. I am not one of those people.”
“If you have something to say, Korchow, say it.”
“I have nothing to say, Major. I’m merely curious. Call me a student of human nature. Or is human the right word here? By the way, has anyone ever told you how much you look like Hannah Sharifi? Amazing the strength of the XenoGen genesets. Their work was crude, of course. Human, after all. But some of the prebreakaway designers had real genius.”
“I doubt you’ll find many fans of their work around here.” Li shook her head again, not making any progress against Korchow’s jammer.
“No, alas. By the by, was Sharifi really murdered?”
“That’s not established.”
“But I’d been told you have suspects.”
“You were told wrong, then.”
“Indeed. So hard to get accurate information. A thorny problem, that. It makes reliable information particularly valuable.”
Li started to lick her lips, then caught herself, realizing how it would look. Korchow was skirting the edge of deniability. Asking about Sharifi. Asking for information. Unmistakably offering . . . something. But so slyly that Li couldn’t explicitly reject the offer without appearing to have raised the subject herself.
Was this a UN internal affairs sting? A genuine approach by a Syndicate agent? Or just the corporate espionage department of some multiplanetary fishing for tidbits about Sharifi’s work? Whichever it was, they were surely being recorded. The only question was who the wire belonged to. “I can’t give out information about an ongoing investigation,” she said.
“I wouldn’t dream of prying into a Controlled Technology Committee investigation,” Korchow answered. “My interests are more properly described as . . . tangential to yours.”
On-screen, the Cuban was up again. The game was tied, the Yanks one out shy of a win. It was Hamdani’s to lose.
“I don’t know why you’d think TechComm has anything to do with my being here,