Extremes Read online

  “How was it obvious?” Swann asked, trying to take control of the interview again.

  DeRicci smiled. “There are some things I’m not allowed to talk about at this stage of the investigation.”

  Swann nodded.

  “As I was saying,” DeRicci said, “when Zweig came up to mile five, her arrival was caught on the nearby camera. But when she passed the camera, that was it, we couldn’t see her any more. However, when you came up, all the cameras in that area seemed to be working.”

  “I am not a technical person,” Swann said. “You can ask my staff back home. I can barely operate my links.”

  “I’m not accusing you.” DeRicci wasn’t sure how this interview had gotten so out of hand. “I was wondering if you saw anyone, maybe even a marathon volunteer, working in the area.”

  Swann turned her head upward, as if the answer were on the ceiling. She blinked a few times, closed her eyes, and frowned. DeRicci’s heart pounded. Swann was actually trying to remember. Maybe the interview wasn’t so wrong after all.

  Then Swann opened her eyes. “You believe that the killer was still there when I went by?”

  “That’s one theory,” DeRicci said.

  “How long between Zweig’s appearance and mine?”

  DeRicci hadn’t asked for that information from van der Ketting, and of course, he hadn’t volunteered it.

  “Not long,” she said, wondering if that was a lie.

  “Then I should have seen something.” Swann frowned. “I don’t remember much, though. You get into a zone.”

  DeRicci nodded even though she doubted she’d ever been in a zone in her entire life.

  “There was a boulder, and the path split. In the past I went to the left, and this time I decided to go right, to see if it would shave some microseconds off my time. Sometimes that’s what this race is about. Not miles, but microseconds.”

  Swann leaned forward, as if finally getting enthusiastic about the conversation. DeRicci nodded, pretending interest, although she really couldn’t care less about the intricacies of marathon running.

  “The Earth was just there, you know. Quite visible. In all the years I’ve run, it’s never been that clear before. It’s always been someplace else in the cycle. This was also the first full-daylight run. I’d never done that before. Even though we have the suits on, it puts a different stress on them.”

  DeRicci wondered if she should be paying attention to this. Maybe it did have a bearing on Zweig’s death—or at least the physical condition of her corpse.

  “So I came around the boulder and nearly tripped. I was moving awkwardly when I came up to the body. Only I didn’t know it was a body then. I just thought it was someone who was injured.” Swann grimaced and shook her head. “I cursed her. Not out loud, but quietly. I didn’t know it was Zweig, although I had a hunch. I thought it was typical of her not to move off the course when she was hurt.”

  DeRicci almost commented on that, but decided to wait. Sometimes letting the narrative flow uninterrupted was better.

  “I had to do a vertical leap to avoid her, and that adds seconds to your time. You wouldn’t think that if you’re used to one-G, but in one-sixth-G, it feels like you’re hanging there forever. And I hung there, and cursed her, and flailed my arms like I was swimming and trying to tread water, which was stupid because there’s no atmosphere to push against. All I was doing was tiring myself, and I figured that was what she wanted.”

  Swann seemed to know Zweig pretty well for a woman she’d hardly spoken to.

  “It took me a good mile or two to regain my gait. I have a hunch everyone’ll tell you that, if you can get them to talk about it. Having her there was disturbing, because it really throws your rhythm off, and even more than regular marathons, the Moon Marathon is all about rhythm.”

  DeRicci made a sympathetic noise, so that Swann would continue.

  “I guess it didn’t matter, though,” Swann said, “because we all had to deal with her just lying there—or at least, those of us up front did.”

  DeRicci wondered if this woman realized she was talking about another human being.

  “It makes sense that someone way behind me stopped. He didn’t have a chance anyway, so a few seconds off his time wouldn’t matter.”

  DeRicci wondered if Swann knew who really stopped or if she was guessing that the person was “way behind” her.

  “How did you know who stopped?” DeRicci asked, making certain none of her people had let information slip.

  Swann shrugged. “I don’t know who stopped. I just figured it was one of the dilettantes.”

  “You said that you tripped near the boulder.” DeRicci was careful not to comment on any of the conclusions that Swann had just made. “What did you trip on?”

  Swann was watching DeRicci as if she could read DeRicci’s reaction. DeRicci hoped she couldn’t; DeRicci found that after this part of the conversation, she disliked Swann even more than she had earlier.

  “Who knows,” Swann said. “Perhaps a small crater, or a deep footprint. You can never tell. So much pockmarks this course.”

  “Try to remember anyway,” DeRicci said.

  Swann took a deep breath. “I don’t know,” she said again. “I wasn’t looking down.”

  “This could be important,” DeRicci said. “You might have tripped on something the killer left.”

  Swann looked at her with alarm. “I would have noticed that.”

  “You said you weren’t looking down.”

  “Anything unusual on the course, you see that as you’re approaching. That’s why I noticed Zweig. You don’t see the pockmarks so much because they’re the same color as the dirt itself, but you see man-made things. Especially in that sunlight. Although—”

  She stopped herself and shook her head.

  “Although what?” DeRicci asked.

  Swann kept shaking her head. “It’s not important.”

  “I’ll judge that,” DeRicci said.

  “I came around that boulder, and thought I saw a movement. I think that’s why I tripped. I shied, you know, like you would if you thought someone was sneaking up on you.”

  “Was someone sneaking up on?” DeRicci asked.

  “No. It was the boulder’s shadow. It was pretty deep there.”

  DeRicci remembered that from the vids she’d watched with van der Ketting.

  “The shadow must have fallen across the path. I’m sure that’s what spooked me.” But Swann didn’t sound sure. In fact, now she sounded uneasy. “The killer couldn’t still have been there, right? Watching me go by?”

  DeRicci didn’t answer. She didn’t want to state the obvious.

  “So it could’ve been me as easily as Jane?” Swann hadn’t called Zweig by her first name before this.

  “I doubt it,” DeRicci said, although she didn’t. She wouldn’t know anything until she found out why Zweig had been killed.

  “What would they have been watching for?” Swann said. “There would’ve been no reason to hang around.”

  Except to finish smashing that faceplate. But it would stand to reason that if Swann set off the camera sensors, the killer would have too.

  Unless the killer knew how to turn those sensors on and off.

  “How close behind you was your nearest competitor?” DeRicci asked.

  “Not too close,” Swann said, belying what she had said earlier.

  “What does that mean?”

  Swann shrugged, her all-purpose gesture for this part of the interview. “A few minutes, perhaps.”

  The time frame wasn’t working out.

  “Was Jane Zweig moving when you passed her?”

  “Not that I noticed.” Swann looked down. DeRicci had no way to know if she was telling the truth this time.

  “What did she look like?”

  “I barely saw her.”

  “You nearly tripped over her.”

  “And I was looking forward. That’s the only way you can run out here. You have to pla
n ahead, and if you don’t, you’re done. Why do you think so many people get hurt?”

  DeRicci didn’t answer that. She just waited.

  Swann sighed. “She was on her side, her knees up near her chest, almost like she was sleeping. I noticed because I had room to get around her. If she’d been sprawled lengthwise, I would have fallen on her for sure.”

  So Zweig was already in the position she’d been in when they found her.

  “Are you sure you were right behind her?” DeRicci asked.

  “I told you, I don’t pay attention to those things.”

  “But you knew about the person behind you.”

  Swann sighed. “I knew they were far enough back that I couldn’t see them. I couldn’t see Jane either. She was too far ahead of me. But whether that was thirty seconds or five minutes, I have no idea.”

  “What is the most she could have been ahead of you at that point,” DeRicci said.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Yes, you do,” DeRicci said.

  “Wasn’t your camera time-coding stuff?”

  DeRicci felt a chill down her back. The time-coding had been missing. Wiped off? Or never set? No wonder they had missed the timing. The normal clues weren’t there.

  More things to talk with van der Ketting about.

  “It wasn’t my camera,” DeRicci said, “and no, there were no time-codings.”

  Swann seem to relax with that. “I could tell you on a one-G marathon, but this one, I have no idea. It was only mile five, but Jane liked to go lights-out in the beginning, which was stupid, because then you had nothing left for the end. I always beat her in the last four miles or so.”

  “So give me a guess,” DeRicci said.

  “She could have been as much as ten minutes ahead of me, if she went really fast and knew what she was doing.”

  Ten minutes was enough time, barely, for the murderer to kill her then. Two minutes for capture, another minute or so of struggle, then the time it took to disconnect the suit’s oxygen—DeRicci still didn’t know whether or not that had happened—and four minutes or so for the actual death. Unconsciousness would come first, and the body could get posed.

  But even then, Swann should have seen something more than a movement near the boulder.

  “You don’t believe me, do you?” Swann asked.

  DeRicci looked up at her. Swann’s arrogance was gone. For just a moment, she seemed like an insecure girl.

  “I do believe you,” DeRicci said. “And that’s where the real problem lies.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  “I THOUGHT I TOLD YOU to go inside the dome.”

  Without his environmental suit, medical team leader Mikhail Tokagawa had a formidable presence. His slenderness accented the wide bones of his face, giving him a regal look. His black hair somehow lightened his blue eyes, so that they seemed almost colorless.

  Oliviari leaned against the wall, arms crossed. Several other runners had come down with cold symptoms, and Klein had left to tend to them. Oliviari was still feeling chilled, but she attributed that to Tokagawa’s attitude. He had come storming into the medical tent when he found out that Klein had tried to requisition decon units from other parts of Armstrong.

  Tokagawa had cleared the boxes off the desk with a swipe of his arm. He now sat on top of it, staring at her.

  “Well?” he said. “I thought I told you to leave.”

  “You told me to fix my links,” Oliviari said, amazed that he cared about that conversation. “Look, we’re wasting valuable time here—”

  “No,” he said, “we’re not. You’ve been acting strangely all day. You’re one of the few people I’ve never worked with before on the medical team, and now you claim that one of our runners has died from an obscure variation on the cold virus that hasn’t been seen outside some Disappeared scientist’s lab. Sorry, Ms. Ramos, but I see no reason to believe you.”

  “I don’t suppose you do,” Oliviari said. “But—”

  “No buts.” He slid forward on the desk and dangled his legs off the edge. “You’re part of the plan, aren’t you?”

  “Plan?”

  “To ruin the marathon. First there’s the body, then the enforced isolation, and now this, a fake quarantine. Who was supposed to have planted this virus? Tey herself?”

  “Look,” Oliviari said. “I don’t know about any of this other stuff, but I do know this virus. If we don’t act quickly, a lot of people could die.”

  “I read about it too,” Tokagawa said. “It’s rare, it’s essentially man-made, and it hasn’t been seen in this part of galaxy. Not ever. So unless you give me one good reason to believe you, I’m going to treat this infection the way I treat all viral infections. I’m going to put people in our decon unit just as a precaution, and then we’re going to zap the things away, like we’ve been doing for more than a century.”

  “Zap them, and they’ll get worse.”

  “If they’ve got Tey,” Tokagawa said. “But they can’t have Tey, can they?”

  Oliviari took a deep breath. She had known when she told Klein about this that she had little hope of remaining undercover.

  “There’s a really good chance that’s exactly what they have,” she said. “I—”

  “Really good? What’s that? Point one percent?”

  “Let me finish.” She kept her voice as calm as she could. She was getting angry at all the time he was wasting. “You’re right. I have been acting strangely. I’m a Tracker. I’ve been assigned the Frieda Tey case, and I have good reason to believe she’s been participating in this marathon for years.”

  “Frieda Tey? The woman who butchered hundreds of people for science? She would run in the Moon Marathon?” He shook his head.

  Oliviari wasn’t going to fight his skepticism point by point. There wasn’t time. “I have been on this case for years. I’ve been following a lot of leads, and they all brought me here. There are three women who could be Frieda Tey. I ruled out two this afternoon, while I was in the medical tent.”

  “How?” he asked.

  She made herself remain calm. The last thing she wanted to do was admit to her illegal DNA scans. “Look and voice mostly.”

  “That’s not enough, and you know it. You need fingerprints, retinal scans, maybe even permission for DNA scans. You can’t be sure—”

  “No, I can’t be sure. But I felt like I had enough to rule them out.” Oliviari said. “That only leaves one woman and she was my prime suspect anyway. I’d been trying to get appointments with her for months, but she kept canceling. The marathon was my backup.”

  “You wanted an appointment?” He frowned. “I thought you were a Tracker. Couldn’t you spy or something?”

  “There’s only so much you can do from a distance,” she said, hoping he wouldn’t push her any harder.

  “You think Frieda Tey is here,” he said.

  “I think the virus confirms it.” A shiver ran through Oliviari. This one had nothing to do with the conversation. It had come from inside her. She wondered if the illness was finally manifesting itself.

  “Of course, and I suppose you saw her, and were about to arrest her when this whole problem came up.”

  Oliviari didn’t like the sarcasm in his voice. “I wish it had been that easy. She’s the one woman I didn’t see. Maybe releasing the virus had been her plan all along. Maybe she was scoping this place out in the previous runs, trying to see whether it would work for her.”

  “You think she’s experimenting with us?”

  “I don’t know,” Oliviari said. “The virus’s presence actually makes no sense at all.”

  Something in her voice seemed to have caught him. He frowned. “You actually believe this.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll bite. If Frieda Tey has been around the marathon for a few years, I’d know her. Who would I know her as?”

  “One of your top runners,” Oliviari said. “Jane Zweig.”

  TWENTY-TWO
r />   RABINOWITZ HAD BEEN a good Retrieval Artist. His research seemed to be quite thorough, but his notes were sketchy. He didn’t write down anything that anyone else could trace.

  At least, that was Flint’s first impression as he went through the files Wagner had given him on the handheld. Flint hadn’t merged the handheld’s files with any of his systems, and he wouldn’t until he was certain that no bugs or traps were buried inside.

  But the handheld itself posed no dangers; Flint started looking through it the moment Wagner left his office.

  Before Wagner left, he downloaded funds to one of Flint’s many accounts. Flint gave Wagner a paper business card with the account number embedded in it and an identification number written across it.

  The ID number was mostly for show; each account was tied to a different client. Flint moved money through more than a dozen of them before he put the money in his main account. With the way things were changing, he was beginning to wonder if a dozen accounts were enough. So many bugs and spies in the systems, he suspected that someone could track everything he did, if they wanted to.

  He didn’t want people to track the names of his clients nor did he want his clients to be able to use his accounts to track his own monies. The last thing he needed was for a Tracker pretend to be a client, then trace all of Flint’s movements through his finances.

  Flint sat at his desk, propped his feet on one side, and leaned back, reading the handheld. His first scanning of Rabinowitz’s notes made for interesting reading. Rabinowitz completely ignored the issue of Tey’s guilt or innocence. Like any good Retrieval Artist, he focused on finding the Disappeared first, probably feeling that evidence about her crime would appear at the same time.

  He spent weeks—Flint couldn’t tell how many from the notes—looking at her initial Disappearance, and concluded that she planned it herself, without going through a Disappearance company.

  But she left a lot of false trails, including two co-workers who Disappeared with her, both of whom met her physical description, and both of whom used Disappearance companies to help them escape.

  Rabinowitz, with typical reticence, didn’t comment on the other womens’ Disappearances, but those extra cases made Flint uneasy. Either they thought they had something to hide as well, or they owed Tey.