22 — Refactored

Corruption is never exposed by the people who profit most directly from it. More often it is exposed when a system becomes too greedy and begins to misuse its own instruments. Those who bend procedure once may go unnoticed. Those who bend it everywhere leave a pattern. Excess is the enemy of concealment.

—Naomi Feld, The Tyranny of Want: Causal Factors in Modern Conflict

Dax had watched the entire bloody circus from the terrace of St James’s Café. Protestors seeking nourishment had formed a long queue that snaked around the building and up the path, the Sup unable to keep up with demand. Even the bloody topside protestors were tamed and orderly, he had thought. He’d tucked himself here out of the rain, bored stiff, running his thumb over the serrated edge of his combat knife while the roar and light from the CGS Building plaza washed across the lake.

In the workshop a few hours earlier, Charles had stood over the bench the Fixit Kid had used. Benjamin had sat on the stool, hunched over the jumbled parts of a walker-talker, pretending not to listen.

“He requested a crossbow, rollers, and a glass cutter,” Charles said. “He’s going for the dome. Likely to retrieve some data.”

“So, let him,” Dax sneered. “Let the topsiders eat their own. Or give me the gear. I’ll make some real noise. Bring the whole bloody dome down. Get the job done.”

“You will do nothing of the sort,” Charles countered, his eyes cold. He glanced at his son, then pinned Dax with a look. “You will observe. DCI Ardone is with him. She’s a high-value asset to us in her own right, and Ari is her charge now. I want to know what they find. You will follow them. You will make no noise. You are not to engage. Your job is to leave no trace. Secure any data if it’s dropped. But you do it quietly. Is that clear?”

He’d given a sharp, if somewhat insubordinate, nod. “Babysit a topsider,” Dax muttered, his gaze flicking to Benjamin.

From the café he had spotted the two of them, the Fixit Kid and that ginger copper, slide up the wire to the dome. Stupid, flashy topside work. Then the gunfire, the shouting, the slide back down. The whole thing had the slapdash stink of a shoddy plan.

He had hoofed it over to the construction site and had tracked them as they hid in the holo-booth, then emerged, only to be ambushed. That disappearing act was a proper sick bit of kit he wouldn’t mind getting his mitts on.

The DCI was fast and brutal, dropping two of the black-clad bastards like she was clearing a path to the loo. Not bad for a copper, he’d give her that. She went down, clutching her leg. The Fixit Kid hesitated, yelled something, then did a runner.

“Coward,” Dax spat, the word a puff of mist in the cold air. All that talk in the tunnels, all that hero-worship from Benjamin, and when it counted most, he bottled it like any other topsider.

He clocked two attackers bolt after Fixit. The other two moved in on the copper, closing the net. The lead man flicked his knife into an underhand grip, all professional. They were there for cleanup.

Bloody hell, he thought. Here he was, stuck in the pissing-wet, because of Charles, whose overly cautious plan had gone to shite. The topsider had hared off, the data with him, and the copper was seconds from getting offed.

Dax let out a sharp hiss of breath. This wasn’t his fight. And she was a copper. But Charles had called her a high-value asset, and that asset was bleeding out on the pavement. Securing her was still a win. If that meant doing it his way, so be it.

He unslung his plasma cutter and thumbed it live. The charge spat a thin hiss into the rain. The nearest attacker stood twenty metres off with his back to a power relay junction box. Dax aimed at its main conduit. The white-hot beam lanced into the polymer casing. The relay burst in a shower of sparks and a blue-white arc that killed the nearby streetlights. Darkness lurched across the lane in broken strobes. Ozone and burnt plastic wafted over to him.

The first bully-boy staggered, hands clapped over his eyes, blind with the overload. Dax closed the distance in three silent strides and drove his combat knife deep into the man’s ribs under the arm, twisting up. First a pop as the blade cleared bone, then the hot wet give. He tore the blade free, and shoved the body aside.

The second man spun, weapon raised, trying to find a target in the flicker from the junction box. Dax moved in fast, his taser’s prongs hitting the thug squarely in the chest. He arched in the strobing light, his gun firing one useless shot into the pavement before he collapsed in a smoking heap.

Two down in under ten seconds, and the lane was his.

He pivoted, the light from his own cybernetic tracings pulsing at his temple. The copper was on the ground, trying to reach her sidearm with one bad leg under her. Dax stalked over and kicked the gun away, the metal skittering across the wet stones.

“Don’t be daft,” he said.

A dark stain was spreading down her thigh. “Bollocks. You’re making a right mess.”

He knelt beside her and pulled a canister of grey military-grade medi-foam from his vest. He ripped her trouser leg open, exposing the bleeding gunshot wound. Without a word, he jammed the nozzle against it and sprayed. The foam hissed as it expanded, sealing the hole against the blood and grit.

“You’ll be fine. Just a flesh wound.”

She gasped, her breath catching, but her focus stayed sharp. She took him in like he was a piece of new kit.

“I remember you,” she rasped. “You’re one of Charles’s men. From the tunnel.”

Dax finished patching her up and stood. Charles’s man? His lip curled. “Yeah, well. Try not to bleed out.”

She pushed herself up onto her elbows, her gaze moving from the two new bodies to the sparking junction box, then back to him. A grim smile touched her mouth. “You fancy a good scrap, don’t you?”

Dax showed his teeth. “It gets the job done.”

“You’re good at aggressive disruption,” she said, her voice still rough with pain. “I might have another situation that’s begging for it. Interested?”

Dax held her gaze while the ruined relay flashed behind her. Aggressive disruption. He liked the sound of that. Better than Charles’s babysitting, and a damn sight closer to the truth.

“I’m in,” he said.

“Good, now go find my gun.”

---

Alene stood in the small adjoining bathroom of her office at New Scotland Yard, a bruised map of the last four days staring back at her from the mirror. The imprint of Jack’s fingers was still visible on her throat, a purple mottling across the skin. She swiped a damp cloth across her face, wincing as it passed a fresh abrasion on her cheek.

The hospital’s accelerated nano-treatments had knitted her ribs. Dax’s medi-foam had sealed her thigh. It would have to do for now. She would go to hospital tomorrow. Besides, the pain was a good counterpoint to a deeper ache.

Ari. His face as he passed her the data card, a man who believed in the mission more than his own survival. I’ll never forget you, Fixit Kid. The boy’s voice on the walker-talker. I love you for seeing me as I am. His shout as he’d left her to fend off Jack’s men alone.

Her first act upon arrival at her office had been to look for Ari. She had called up the street feeds around the holo-booth ambush and watched him hesitate, heard her own hoarse shout on the audio, then watched him run. The cameras had tracked him as far as the Mono port. After that, nothing. LOGS UNAVAILABLE. NETWORK STRAIN. Whomever she was up against had made the sector records vanish under a routine system notice.

She unzipped the filthy bloodstained gilet and let it fall to the bathroom floor. She unstrapped the shoulder holster, her movements stiff. She then peeled back the sodden black bodysuit, wincing as she pushed it past her thigh. The fabric made a sick ripping sound as it unstuck itself from the tacky grey surface of Dax’s medi-foam. After cleaning herself as best she could, she pulled on the crisp formal fabric of her police uniform. The stiff collar chafing the bruised skin of her neck was a welcome irritation that focused her.

Alene returned to her desk, the city’s lights a smear of data through the window behind her. She pulled out the data card she had risked so much to obtain and inserted it into her terminal. She leaned forward, thumb and forefinger stroking her chin, and scanned the screen. She brought up the evidence—the tap recording with Francis discussing half a billion dead, the committee meeting about the overpopulation problem, and the newest file, the requisition to dispose of the excess vaccine. She also opened the diagnostic she’d run on Francis’s private server logs while Ari was being sick in the bathroom. It showed no record of any transmissions at the time of the tap, nor any trace of tampering with comm logs. Her fingers drummed a sharp rhythm on the desk. The transmission hadn’t come from Francis’s office, or been routed through it. It had been injected directly into the Councillor-level secure line from somewhere else.

And then there were the people hunting them. How would they know to show up again right after she and Ari had secured the data needed to implicate Francis? She jumped to another file, the search she’d requested on Jack. The system had matched the face to a name, FRANKLIN BARNES, MERCENARY. ASSOCIATED WITH VOLGOGRAD FREE ZONE.

Barnes was muscle, a Capo hired to do the wetwork.

Charles’s words in the tunnel, consider who benefits most from chaos.

Framing Francis, one of the most influential CGS figures, while the world is already a tinderbox, could incite a revolt. The people who benefit the most are the ones who want to burn the whole system down and rule the ashes.

Charles? The Walkers had no love for the CGS, but they would suffer just as much from it unravelling.

Capos? The motive fit, but intel suggested they didn’t have the coverage needed to be able to execute on something this complex.

Who had the means to deploy mercenaries, manipulate data, and get it into her hands?

Baron? He had overruled Magistrate Radford to give her the warrant she wanted to search Ari’s flat. He had made a deal with the Walkers to give her Ari, prompted the tapping of the CGS Council secure line, and then insisted she get more evidence on Councillor Herbert. Was he backing her investigation, or was she a supporting player in his plan to frame Francis?

She needed to verify. Information violations are rarely found in the data itself, but in the traces that data leaves behind—routing information, identity signatures, machine fingerprints—traces she had retrieved from the logs on Francis’s private server.

She activated her comms. DC Leo Hatch’s image flickered to life. He was at the Crick Institute, his face pale, his eyes wide. “Ma’am. Dr Feld is, uh, focused. She’s working.”

“Good.” Alene’s voice was a rough rasp. She cleared her throat, the pain a sharp scrape. “I’m sending you a data packet with complete logs and signatures. I need a full diagnostic on a suspicious logistics file, Req-Logistics-774. Cross-reference its signature with the phantom admin logs from Feld’s initial hack.”

“You think they’re connected, ma’am?”

“I think the person who locked the files in Feld’s initial hack is the same one who planted this requisition,” Alene said. “If that’s the case, I suspect we’ll see the same signature on the transmission we intercepted today.”

“Yes, ma’am. Right away.”

Hatch’s image vanished. Alene pivoted, pulling up the case files for the two mercenaries from the King’s College ambush, the ones she’d taken alive.

TRANSFERRED

She opened the transfer order. Signed by Magistrate Radford. The man who’d stonewalled her, and Baron’s obsequious gatekeeper. The order cited security concerns at the police medical wing. Their new location, a public hospital in Southwark. She queried their public health records.

DECEASED. 2214 HOURS. COMPLICATIONS FROM SEDATIVE.

DECEASED. 2219 HOURS. FATAL CARDIAC ARRHYTHMIA.

They were gone. Recycled. Radford cleaning up loose ends.

She had her own loose end to check—Ari’s supervisor, Adebayo. She ran a new query, this time on personnel files, cross-referencing Adebayo’s service record with Radford’s and Baron’s.

A flag. Adebayo’s recent promotion to his sensitive network position.

SPONSORSHIP APPROVED BY MAG. W. RADFORD.

The link was there. It was a direct procedural line from Baron’s power, through Radford’s authority, to Adebayo’s CGS position.

Her comms chimed. Hatch.

“Ma’am,” he said, “it’s a match. The signature on the Req-774 file and the phantom admin logs—they’re identical. And you won’t believe who it is.”

“Adebayo,” she said.

“What? How did you know that?”

“Tell me what you found.” She tried to keep the impatience out of her voice.

“I compared the signatures to Adebayo’s data-skimming case. It’s his digital fingerprint, clear as day.”

“Thank you, Constable. Carry on.” Alene ended the holo.

Justice Baron had manoeuvred her like she was his personal investigator. He had aimed her. Cracking a case usually lit her up. This one drove a shard of ice under her ribs instead.

But why? He had the means, but what was his motive?

She took a slow, painful breath and activated a secure line to Number 10. Councillor Francis Herbert’s face appeared. She looked a decade older, her eyes hollowed out.

“DCI Ardone? What is it? Where’s Ari?”

“Councillor, you’re being framed as the originator of the pandemic. The allegation is overpopulation control.”

“I know,” Francis said. “Sharon told me about the fake second transmission. I suspect Baron is behind it.”

For a second the heat rose under the bruises at Alene’s throat. Sharon went behind her back while they were still in motion. Then the flare was gone. Francis had said Baron.

“Why do you suspect Baron?”

“He’s consolidating power and I’m an obstacle.”

“Any evidence?” Alene said.

“Yes, but not of the framing. You?”

“Not quite enough, but I see the connection now. I need you at Dr Feld’s lab. The Crick Institute. 0100 hours.”

“And Ari?” Francis’s voice broke. “I got a report from CGS security that you and he—”

Alene’s gaze was steady. “Yes, sorry about that. It was necessary. I’ll give you all the details at the lab. 0100, Councillor.” Alene cut the connection.

She took another breath, forcing the pain down. She activated the direct line Baron had given her.

His image coalesced. “DCI Ardone. It’s rather late. Is everything all right?”

Alene let the silence stretch. “Justice Baron, our concerns about Councillor Herbert are justified.”

“That’s grave news,” Baron said.

“I have evidence from Herbert’s private server,” Alene said. “It details how she distributed the pathogen. It’s the proof you said you needed.”

“I understand. Send it over and I will—”

“There’s more.” She leaned back, as if settling into a confidence newly chosen. “I’ve made a decision. Regarding what you said about serving a concept versus serving the people who get things done.”

He went still. A smile touched his mouth. “Oh? And what have you decided?”

“Dr Sharon Feld,” Alene said, letting a hint of excitement enter her voice. “She has a cure. A viable treatment to end the pandemic.”

Baron’s smile remained steady. “That’s wonderful news, isn’t it?”

“No, it isn’t. She’s going to give it to the CGS. It’ll make Herbert a hero. She’ll use it to convince everyone that our evidence is a lie. Why would she have given Dr Feld all the resources to find the cure if she caused the pandemic?”

“Yes, that would be unfortunate, considering the evidence.”

“Worse than unfortunate, it would be a wasted opportunity. However…” She leaned back and spread her hands.

“Go on, DCI.” The way he said her title sounded like a warning.

“I control the evidence and you need me to legitimise it.” She consciously relaxed the muscles in her shoulders. “I propose a partnership. You and me.”

He looked at her without blinking. Partnership might have been overreach.

She continued. “I can also give you the cure. And with your resources, we will control the market.” This was the biggest gamble. A test of his ideology.

Baron’s smile returned. “An astute proposal.”

“Then hear the rest. We take Dr Feld before she delivers anything to the CGS. Crick Institute, 0200. The research is there, and I have a man on site who’s making sure she stays put.” Her voice gained a husky edge. “I’ll hand you the Herbert evidence in person and we can acquire the cure together.”

“Bold,” Baron said. “And Ari Feld? I still want him.”

“Justice Baron,” she said, “don’t insult me. We both know what happened to him.” She held his gaze. “If we’re doing this, we’re done pretending. 0200.”

Baron nodded once. “I’ll be there.” He terminated the call.

Alene stood, the pain in her body a steady burn. She picked up the tarnished nickel whistle on her desk. Her fingers closed around it, the worn metal tangible in her palm before she slipped it into her pocket.

She checked her service weapon. It was scratched up from getting kicked across the pavement, but serviceable. The click of the magazine seating into the grip carried through the office.