The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2010 Edition, page 40
“I’m afraid so. The deletion is too thorough for reconstruction, and catalogue comparisons have proven to be of no use.”
“They stole something. We don’t know what it is, but Hughes and Jackson definitely stole something. They mirrored the code and deleted the original, did their best to cover up what they’d done, and made off with the copy.”
“That’s certainly one scenario,” Prem said. “Although there is a problem. How did they smuggle the stolen code past the farm’s security?”
It was a good point. Code is stored in specific quantum states of electrons and other fundamental particles, so it can’t be copied and stored as easily as the vast binary strings of ordinary software; to prevent decay into quantum noise, mirrored code has to be kept in cold traps, and these are cooled with liquid helium. Archive traps are as big as trucks; the smallest portable trap is somewhat larger than an ordinary domestic thermos flask. And like all coding farms, Meyer Lansky’s business possessed an insanely paranoid level of security. Coders had step through scanning frames when entering or leaving, and they were subject to continuous scrutiny by CCTV cameras and random searches.
“Perhaps they had bribed a guard, or secreted the cold trap in some other piece of equipment sent out for servicing,” I said. “Or perhaps Lansky himself might have been in on it.”
“Or perhaps they didn’t smuggle anything out,” Prem said. “Perhaps they hacked into the farm’s records and found out where the code came from, then deleted the code and altered the records. Perhaps they did not sell the code, but the location of the original.”
I liked the idea—it would certainly explain why Hughes had left with Sarkka—but there was no way of proving or disproving it unless we caught up with them. Meanwhile, Varneek Sehra’s crew had come up blank on DNA analysis because the two bodies had been thoroughly cooked, but they had identified one as Jason Singleton’s from its English dental work, and the second wasn’t Everett Hughes, but a male in his forties. He had an old, healed bullet wound in his left shoulder, and examination of his burnt skin under uv light had revealed a blood group tattoo on his right ankle, suggesting that he’d been a soldier at some point. Varneek’s crew had also retrieved a partial thumbprint from a stolen SUV in the motel’s parking lot, and that had yielded a hit on the US military database: Abuelo Baez, who’d served as a sergeant in the Special Forces of the US Army until two years ago. The name did not appear on the emigration records, so he must have arrived on First Foot under an alias, either working for one of the corporations, or on the dark side. Varneek was planning to work up a facial reconstruction and use it to track down the dead man’s emigration file; I hoped that once I knew Abuelo Baez’s alias, I would be able to discover what he had been doing in Port of Plenty, perhaps even link him to Meyer Lansky or to the Pak family. Varneek also told me that there was a small discrepancy between the two bodies. Jason Singleton’s had smoke particles in its lungs, consistent with someone who had burned to death; Abuelo Baez’s didn’t. Either the ex-soldier had been killed outright by the blast, or he’d been dead before the room had been set on fire, it wasn’t possible to tell.
All of this was useful, but it was my hunch about the missing motorcycle that yielded the most significant advance in the case. It had been discovered in the parking lot of a mini-mall a kilometre south of the motel; security camera footage showed that it had arrived some thirty minutes before the fire in the motel had been started. Everett Hughes had been riding it, and loitered near a rank of vending machines for some forty minutes until a white Honda Adagio pulled up.
I showed Marc the footage of Hughes getting into the Adagio, pulled down an enhanced freeze-frame of the moment when the courtesy light in the car came on as Hughes opened the door, briefly illuminating a bearded man wearing a baseball cap pulled low enough to obscure half his face. I explained that the driver had not yet been identified, but the car had been traced to the Hertz branch at the spaceport, where it had been rented using a snide credit card, and it had been retrieved for trace analysis.
“After Hughes and the driver returned the Adagio to the rental company, they took the shuttle bus to a ship that departed two hours later. A standard J-class cruiser registered in Libertaria. It dropped through Wormhole #2 six hours ago, and I’ve asked our offices in every port it could reach from that part of the network to look out for it. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the Varneek and the PPPD’s forensic people retrieved fibres and hair from the seats, and fingerprints from the steering wheel and elsewhere. Hughes’s friend is Niles Sarkka.”
Without missing a beat, Marc said, “I am not sure that I would classify that as good news.”
Niles Sarkka was one of the Fortunate Five Hundred, the self-styled elite who’d ridden the first emigration lottery shuttle to First Foot. Before his downfall, he’d been a leading expert on Elder Cultures with a chair at the University of Port of Plenty, and the star of a TV show popular in Port of Plenty and exported to almost every country back on Earth. In each episode, he led his crew of prospectors to a new site in search of strange and valuable Elder Culture artifacts, surviving dangers and hardships, exploring weird landscapes and worldlets, unearthing wonders. Most of it was faked and exaggerated, of course, but Sarkka was a handsome and charismatic man with an infective enthusiasm for his work. Also, to the disgust of his fellow academics and the delight of his TV audience, he recklessly embraced crackpot ideas about the fates of the Elder Cultures, and conspiracy theories that suggested that the Jackaroo had influenced human history by dropping meteorites or manipulating the climate or starting the world war that, just before they’d turned up as saviours, had almost destroyed us. He was a leading exponent of the belief that the fifteen stars were not a chance to start afresh, but a trap. A cage in which we would be the involuntary participants in some vast and strange experiment, as had the Elder Cultures which had preceeded us. And he had worked up a crazy theory of his very own, which he talked up on every episode of his show. All of this made him rich and famous and notorious, but in the end his hubris was clobbered by nemesis. In the end he took one risk too many, and other people paid for his mistake with their lives.
My boss had been one of the team that had prosecuted Niles Sarkka after most of his crew had become infected with nanotech viroids while excavating the remains of ancient machinery in a remote part of the Great Central Desert. Marc had seen the bodies, all of them horribly transformed, some still partly alive. His boss, who’d later shot himself, had ordered cauterisation of the site with a low-yield nuclear weapon.
The crew had been working on an unlicensed site with inadequate protective measures; Niles Sarkka was convicted of manslaughter and spent five years in jail. As soon as he was released, he promptly fled First Foot and established himself on Libertaria, using what was left of his fortune to pursue the theory that was now an obsession.
Given that there was a wormhole link with the Solar System and Earth, he said, then if followed that there must have been links with the home worlds of each of the Elder Cultures that had once inhabited the worlds and worldlets of the fifteen stars. And those wormholes might still be around, somewhere, collapsed down to diameters smaller than a hydrogen atom, or hidden inside gas giants or in orbits close to stars where they could not be detected by their fingerprint flux of strange quarks and high-energy particles; it might be possible to find the home world of the Ghajar or one of the other Elder cultures, and find out what had happened to them. It was even possible that some remnants of the Elder Cultures might still be alive, either on their home worlds, or elsewhere.
To his fans—and despite his conviction and fall from grace he still had many fans—he was a gadfly genius, a rogue intellect who took great risks to prove radical theories that the establishment tried to suppress. To his fellow academics, he was a highly irresponsible egotist who used his notoriety to promote fantasies as risible as the lost continent of Mu or the Venusian origin of flying saucers, heedless of the damage he caused to serious scholarship. As far as the UN was concerned, he was a criminal willing to take every kind of risk with Elder Culture technology. He was beyond our reach on Liberteria, but he remained on our watch list.
And now he was heading out for parts unknown, either in possession of code mirrored from a navigation program, or of the whereabouts of the code’s original. Given the huge risk he’d taken coming back to Port of Plenty, it seemed likely that he believed the code had something to do with his crazy idea about finding the homeworld or a surviving remnant of an Elder Culture. It was also seemed likely that he had killed Jason Singleton and the mercenary, Abuelo Baez. Even if the code was harmless, Niles Sarkka still had to answer for those deaths.
The problem was that we had lost track of his ship. It could be anywhere in the wormhole network, heading for any one of the other fourteen stars—it might even be heading back to First Foot’s star by a circuitous route. During the early years of exploring the network, the UN had tried to set up a monitoring system of spy satellites around the wormhole throats, but it had been sabotaged by various factions over the years, and in the end it had proven too expensive to maintain.
“Even if Sarkka and Hughes go to ground on Libertaria, we have no jurisdiction there,” Marc said.
“We can try to negotiate with them,” I said.
“Perhaps. It would help if we knew exactly what Hughes and Singleton stole,” Marc said.
“That’s why we need to talk to Myer Lansky again,” I said.
But Lansky had disappeared, and so had his wife and their two young sons. A police detail had been watching the front of the house; it seemed that Lansky and his family had left through the back, escaping across the golf course. Either of their own free will, or because someone had come for them.
A safe sunk in the floor of a walk-in closet in Lansky’s residence had been left open but still contained large amounts of cash and jewellery, and credit cards and phones registered to a variety of names. Traces of blood belonging to Lansky and his family were found on a wall and the carpet in the adjoining master bedroom. I believed that they were dead, their bodies dumped in the sea or in the fern forests beyond the edge of the city, or incorporated into the foundations of a new building or freeway overpass, and their killers had probably taken from the safe copies of the records for the code farm detailing legitimate and black-market transactions.
After a brief conference with Marc and the assistant city attorney, I issued an APB for the Lanskys and made an appointment to visit Meyer Lansky’s boss, Pak Young-Min. Marc thought it a waste of time, but I had a bad feeling that the case was going cold. I wanted to stir things up a little. Besides, I had papers to serve regarding search and seizure of the code farm’s assets, and because Meyer Lansky had disappeared, it was only logical to hand them to his boss.
Pak Young-Min was the youngest son of Pak Jung-Hun, a former head of the American-Korean Family Boyz gang in Seattle who had “retired” to Port of Plenty. Like most gangsters who’d grown rich enough to escape the clutches of law enforcement agencies, Pak Jung-Hin had ambitions to legitimise his family. Three of his sons were involved in real estate and construction, an insurance and loan company, and casinos in First Foot and Mammoth Lakes. But Pak Young-Min was a throwback: an old-school kkangpae with a volatile temper and a taste for baroque violence who had been given control of Meyer Lansky’s code farm by his father in an attempt to wean him away from the street life.
I arranged to meet him in the offices of the development company helmed by his eldest brother, Pak Kwang-Ho. This was on the top floor of a brand-new ziggurat—white concrete, glass tinted the pink of freshly-cut copper, broad terraces dripping with greenery—with a stunning view across the city towards Discovery Bay, the spaceport and the river delta on one side, the power plant and docks on the other, and the great curve of the Maricon and the beaches between. Up there, the city looked as neat and clean as a map, with no sign of the squabbling territories carved out by different nationalities. Up there, it was possible to believe that the future had arrived. You wanted to search the sky for flying cars and dirigibles.
Pak Kwang-Ho met me at the tall double doors of his private office. A slim and intensely polite man dressed in a crisp white shirt and intricately pleated pants, he shook my hand, offered me a choice of ten different teas, and introduced me to two lawyer types who afterwards did their best to fade into the background, and to his brother, Pak Young-Min.
The young gangster was looming over an architectural model of a shopping mall and entertainment complex, a bulky, broad-shouldered bodybuilder stuffed into a sharkskin suit and a yellow silk shirt and snakeskin boots. Tattoos webbed his neck and his hair was shaved at the sides, high above his ears, leaving a glossy black cap on top of his scalp. He didn’t look up when Pak Kwang-Ho introduced me, pretending to be more interested in pushing a model car around a plaza, knocking over model pedestrians one by one.
Pak Kwang-Ho assured me that his family were always happy to help the police with their enquiries, but in this case, since his brother had business ties with Meyer Lansky, he had to ask me to confirm that my enquiries were purely informal. I assured him that I wanted nothing more than background information on Meyer Lansky, although I did have papers to serve with regard to the code farm.
“I hope this means I can reopen it,” Pak Young-Min said. “I lose money every day it is closed. Most inconvenient.”
“Here’s another dose of inconvenience—we’re sealing it up until further notice,” I said, and held out the envelope that contained the twenty-page court order.
Pak Young-Min took it and scaled it towards the lawyer types, saying that his people would check it out and get back to me.
“You need to sign it,” I said.
“Why don’t you ask me what you came here to ask me?” Pak Young-Min said. “I’m a busy man. I have a lot of stuff to do. Important stuff.”
I decided to meet him head on and locked gazes with him and said, “When did you last see Meyer Lansky?”
“Days and days ago. I heard he ran away after you questioned him about those two geeks who burned to death,” Pak Young-Min said. “If you catch up with the old rogue, let me know. I have some questions for him myself.”
“You have no idea where he might be,” I said. “Him and his family.”
“I’ve been in Mammoth Lakes for the past week,” Pak Young-Min said, and took out a gold cigarette case and, ignoring his brother’s warning that he couldn’t smoke here, lit a black Sobranie with a match he ignited on his thumbnail.
“One of the bodies in the motel room was that of Jason Singleton. An employee at your code farm.”
“Meyer Lansky’s code farm,” Pak Young-Min said.
“You own it.”
“He runs it. I wouldn’t know who he employs. When can I reopen the place, by the way?”
“When we’ve finished our investigation. Although by then there probably won’t be anything left of your little operation.”
Pak Young-Min looked at me with insolent amusement. “I know about you and your crusade,” he said. “Word is, you lost your husband to bad code, and now you see bad code everywhere. Even when it isn’t there.”
I didn’t rise to his bullshit. If you show any kind of weakness to someone like him you’ll lose authority and never get it back.
“You are certain that you have never met Jason Singleton.”
“I’ve never had anything to do with those freaky little geeks.”
“Have you ever met Everett Hughes?”
“Is he the other one who burned up in that room?”
“He’s the one who got away,” I said. “The other in the motel room was that of Abuelo Baez, a former US soldier who served in the Special Forces.”
“I’ve never heard of any of these people,” Pak Young-Min said.
“Perhaps you know the face,” I said, and showed him the printout of Abuelo Baez’s reconstructed death mask.
Pak Young-Min breathed out a riffle of smoke and said, “He isn’t one of mine.”
“You might know him as Able Martinez,” I said. “That’s the alias he used when he came to Port of Plenty. We identified him from a file in the gaming commission’s records. Every employee of every casino has one. I’m surprised you don’t know him, Mr. Pak. He worked on the security detail of the casino in Mammoth Lakes owned by your family.”
“My brother has nothing to do with the running of the casino,” Pak Kwang-Ho said. “And neither do I.”
“We’re looking into everything Mr. Naez was doing here, and everyone he associated with,” I said. “If you remember anything about him, it would be better if you told me now.”
Pak Young-Min shrugged.
“You should speak to the manager of the casino,” Pak Kwang-Ho said.
I told him that I would, and thanked them for their time and turned my back on both of them and walked towards the big double doors of the office.
Pak Young-Min called after me—he was the kind of man who had to have the last word. “Come find me in Mammoth Lakes. I’ll show you a good time. Loosen you up a little.”
I paused at the doors, turned. The corny old Columbo trick, but it’s sometimes useful. “One other thing. Have you heard of Niles Sarkka?”
The two brothers looked at each other. Pak Young-Min said, “Isn’t he the crazy guy who had that TV show?”
“He and Everett Hughes took off together,” I said, and left them to think about that.
Later, I told my boss that I was certain that Pak Young-Min knew all about Hughes and Singleton. “Lansky was not a stupid man. He probably discovered the deletion in the navigation package and the alteration in his records after they dropped out of sight, and decided to come clean about it to his boss. Pak Young-Min sent his muscle man, Abuelo Baez, a.k.a. Able Martinez, after the two coders.”
