“Repro’ed and already returned to him. Dense. Scientific.” Those had flashed to one screen, at least the initial page, which was overwritten with Jordan’s hand notes. There was computer storage. That was huge, encompassing Paul’s personal manual, specifically, with all its files internal to the computer…nothing reliant on Library. Jordan hadn’t had Library access to other manuals. Just that one. Someone must have given him the entire thing, subfolders and all. There were image files. There were more notes, in the peculiar shorthand of design.
“Not beyond sera to decipher. We could ask her if it’s significant. Or if there’s anything embedded in it. I’m sure Hicks has had to refer the notes to experts. I’m sure Paul’s manual would be significant–if sera could find time to look at it.”
“Jordan and Paul’s computers were returned within the week. His notes came with it. His books. He was complaining two months ago about access to his own past publications. We know the files he’s gotten at since he got clearance. Sera might recognize something in that list that we couldn’t.”
“Interesting thought,” Florian said. “Just a second.” He called up that list and ran a filter. It took a moment.
“Well,” Catlin said.
“Every one of those publications has Ari Senior’s articles, as well as some they co‑wrote. Not too surprising, since they worked together.”
“Interesting, though.”
“Topics…” More keys. “Integrations. Nothing at all to do with Patil.”
“Nothing to do with Patil at all.”
“Integrations was the subject of his quarrel with Justin. And integrations isn’t in his field.”
“Justin’s working in that field. He had a quarrel with that, and with the first Ari’s style.”
“Could he have picked the fight as part of a diversion?” Florian asked. “Possibly preparing Justin or Grant for some intervention?”
Catlin frowned. “That would be somewhat beyond us. Certainly outside the question of the card.”
“Except that Justin became the target of it, after they had a fight about the first Ari’s procedures. I don’t see a connection, unless he’s aiming at something and wants to divert Justin into some scheme of his own. Maybe he really does hate Thieu. Or wants to sabotage Patil, just for spite.”
“Or for profit. Profit would be a reason,” Catlin said. “A re‑contact with old networks. Former alliances. Thathas politics in it. That’smore like what the records say of Jordan Warrick.”
An action, not a gesture, something designed to do exactly what it was doing…getting Patil delayed in her move to Fargone. Possible.
And someone, probably Base Two, in Yanni’s hands, was hiding Jordan’s records from Hicks…or Hicks was hiding them from sera.
“Well,” Florian said, and flicked up the general ReseuneSec Planys office reports on Jordan Warrick. One statistic leapt out. “Jordan received two thousand eight hundred and fourteen security cautions during his tenure at Planys. Persistent note on his file: Immune. Do Not Interrogate.”
“That’s been the problem all along with him.”
“Yanni doesn’t want him in the public eye again. Reseune doesn’t want the first Ari’s murder opened up again. That was what was going on when Denys went down. We’ve got the content of the card chip–nothing overt there, if it’s not a verbal code; and still no absolute assurance where the card itself was made. They can go after where it’s been–testing to destruction if they do. But I think it was made for exactly what it was used for: an introduction, dropped right in front of us.”
“From whom?” Catlin asked. “To whom?”
“Let’s see what ReseuneSec admits it knows about Patil.”
ReseuneSec’s top‑level surveillance of Patil came up easily, creditably meticulous, and ongoing, in Novgorod, within the University where she taught. Her contacts, back inside ReseuneSec files, were all neatly mapped–including letters, some sixty‑three in number, to her old mentor Thieu, and one hundred eighteen from Thieu to Patil, fifty‑two of them in the last half year.
“None to Jordan,” Catlin said. “None from Jordan. As should be. Several from Yanni to Patil.”
“Patil’s house sale is pending. Reseune’s buying it. This week. Yanni’s order. He had some reason. Thatcould hurry up her trip to Fargone.”
Meanwhile the list of Patil’s other possible primary and secondary contacts stretched on and on, listed and identified by ReseuneSec agents in the ReseuneSec files, every class of person from senators and councillors to teaching assistants, radicals, vid personalities, her real estate agent, and the home repair technician who’d recently fixed her refrigerator. She’d made numerous net calls on the local Fargone site, investigating housing, amenities, facilities, reasonable in someone contemplating a move there. She’d made a few tries at getting into the restricted Fargone ReseuneSpace site, on a long lag to Cyteen Station, which held that site and others available in its months‑ago state: data arrived at the speed of ships that picked up that electronic load at Cyteen Station via their black boxes, and delivered that load to somewhere else, and on to Fargone–in a sense, if you sent a message that entered Cyteen Station, it eventually reached every civilized star, and was everywhere at once, until deleted as absolutely irrelevant to the locale where it had ended up. There was no such thing as complete privacy on interstation mail, by the nature of black boxes; and that also went for net data, restricted or not: it got everywhere unless it had a gate restriction that didn’t let it flow to any ships but, say, military, or to no ships at all.
A lot of CITs weren’t aware of that fact of life, or, being aware, so profoundly took it for granted that they didn’t worry about it. Patil’s request for information was certainly widespread by now, so if she’d intended any secrecy, that was blown.
Meticulous, vexatious police work filled other pages, agents patiently tracing out the threads of contact and delving into Patil’s household garbage, a list of items intended to be recycled, and diverted, some of it interesting, in the list items, including unopened physical mail. ReseuneSec’s investigation seemed thorough. It was a fat correspondence folder. The woman didn’t open mail that arrived from unknowns: her system routed it to delete, which deleted a lot of files–or appeared to delete them. ReseuneSec had gotten at the mail source, and been into that, with a resultant long list of would‑be contacts, some of which were red‑flagged.
“Lot of Paxer contact. Lot of complete unknowns,” Florian observed.
“She’d be a fool to send messages of any interesting sort to anyone,” Catlin said. “She deletes their messages–evidently knows who to delete. Some of them are on the watch list.”
Her mailings out to PlanysLabs were all electronic. One mailing was, by title, “Rethinking the Theory of Long‑Period Nanistic Self‑direction,” –the censored Scientiaarticle–sent, with indignation, to Thieu, who had been her teacher. Thieu had replied that it was brilliant. She had written back, decrying entrenched War‑years thinking and Luddism…the commenting agent had flagged that word and supplied a definition. It meant people who were against progress, based on a political movement of 1811 and some years after, against the introduction of weaving machines in pre‑space England.
“Patil has a large vocabulary,” Florian said wryly, “clearly.”
“Why weaving machines?” Catlin wanted to know. But the remark in context seemed metaphorical, not literal.
“I have no idea,” Florian muttered. He was already tracing other things, successfully pulling up ReseuneSec files on the ongoing investigation of Jordan’s Planys apartment, and the people ReseuneSec had sent into Planys were clearly better than the airport security team haste had trusted with the outbound search. Jordan hadn’t gotten to go back to his apartment once he’d been notified he was returning to Reseune: agents had packed for him.
While Jordan and Paul, caught in their office, had perversely or purposefully brought papergoods–either to camouflage something; or simply because, being a person for whom hand notes and writing were a habit, Jordan had wanted materials he hadn’t been sure he’d get easily if he returned to house arrest in Reseune. It might have been innocent. It seemed Jordan Warrick rarely had been innocent–not by that Planys ReseuneSec record.