Andrea confirmed. “I came in cloaked and took them by surprise, but by that point there were only three of them left alive. Tycho, bring them up to speed on what happened after we split up.”
“I took Dr. Markov down to Holding, but Katerina attacked us. She had escaped her cell and was trying to leave the building. I held her off for a while, but she injured the doctor. After stabilizing her, I went after Katerina and caught up in the lobby of the hotel. She ran into the city, and I was on her tail until StateSec intervened.”
Andrea nodded. “So, that brings us to now. There are a few conclusions we can draw. One is that the Eleven have managed to compromise the Jovian military, although it’s likely they had no idea who they were really fighting. Conclusion two is David Kote’s affiliation. We’ve considered the possibility that he is one of the Eleven, but his life history is too well-established, and the expectation is that one of the Eleven would have a vague early history.”
Vincenzo spoke up. “So, if he’s not one of the Eleven, who is he to them?”
“My guess is that he’s working on the behalf of one or more of the Eleven. The only problem with that is we can’t do anything with it. So far there’s been no intelligence leading back from Kote toward any of them. None of his known affiliations are strong candidates to be one of the Eleven. It’s possible that not even Kote has direct contact with them.”
“So, what would that mean?” asked Andrew. “They’re communicating with him by proxy?”
“That seems plausible, though it’s still just an educated guess. But yes, he could be taking his orders from a cutout intended to shield the Eleven from potential exposure.”
“What about Katerina?” I suggested. “She was piloting Kote’s ship. She could even be the one who first contacted Kote on their behalf.”
“It’s just as possible that he was the one who originally contacted her,” Thomas pointed out. “The fact is, we just don’t know how the circuitry works on this.”
I could see what he was saying, but only Thomas would have used circuitry as a metaphor for a network of relationships between human beings.
Raven had been staring at her feet for the past few minutes, listening to what everyone else was saying. Now she looked up. “The one thing we do know is that Katerina is at the heart of it.”
“That’s an excellent point,” said Andrea. “She is at the heart of it. She must have been the one who transferred the Warwick node from wherever it previously was to Llyr Station. And even if those special forces troops were there to retrieve the node, they provided an excellent distraction for her to pull off her escape.”
Vincenzo smiled ruefully. “I used to love her escape stories, but being on the other end is not so pleasant.”
“You can say that again.” Andrea stopped pacing and looked around the room. “I owe you all an apology. I underestimated the amount of security that would have been needed to effectively hold her.”
“I don’t think anything short of killing her would have been enough,” Vincenzo replied grimly. “Who can say how many other secret mechanisms and backdoors she had?”
Andrea’s jaw clenched in anger. “That demonstrates how shitty of a person she always was. Loyalty meant nothing to her. Family meant nothing to her.”
I wasn’t so sure. Katerina was an unusual person. Given her personality, she could have installed those systems purely as an intellectual exercise—however useful they eventually turned out to be.
Andrea continued. “The strongest lead we have is still Katerina, and recapturing her is our highest priority. That’s our next mission.”
“That reminds me,” said Veraldi. “Tycho, you’re officially cleared for field duty.”
I chuckled quietly, thinking about how upset I’d been just a few days before when I’d been told the opposite. After everything we’d just been through, I was no longer quite so focused on getting back in the action.
“Katerina knows who Kote is working for,” Andrea went on. “I’m sure of that much. We’re going to capture her again, we’re going to shackle her this time, and we’re going to do everything to make her talk.”
I didn’t want to ask Andrea what she meant by that. In my experience, Section 9 did not use torture as a means of information gathering, but I couldn’t be sure we wouldn’t make an exception. Maybe Katerina’s assault on Andrea’s birth mother had changed the equation. I’d known Andrea for a while now, but I never felt like I had less insight into her inner thoughts than I did when we were dealing with her family.
Andrea turned in my direction. “Tycho, you are cleared for field duty, but you won’t be joining us on the hunt for Katerina.”
I tried to mask my incredulity. “Why’s that?”
“It’s nothing bad,” she went on. “I have another task, but I can’t spare more than one body for it. It’s less urgent, but it could turn out to be more important than we realize. You work well alone, so I’ve picked you for this.”
“We all get these solo missions,” Andrew pointed out. “We’ve all had them. Andrea’s had them. I’ve had them. Raven has had, like, a hundred of them—”
“One hundred forty-six,” she corrected.
He was right, but that didn’t change how I felt about being sent off on my own just then. There was nothing I could do about it, though. An order is an order, and even if Andrea was my friend in some sense of the word, she was also my commanding officer.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to react that way. I’ll do it, of course. What are the details?”
“Good man,” said Andrea. “Thomas, maybe you’d better fill Tycho in on the background for this assignment.”
“Of course. Using the circuitry map of the Warwick node, I have recovered imagery from the device just as I did with Huxley.”
“Imagery?” asked Raven. “You mean you can see people’s memories?”
Thomas nodded. “Yes. That’s one reason this data is so difficult to recover. Human memories are incredibly information-rich. I can capture a seemingly huge amount of data and it turns out to be nothing more than a memory of walking through a park and feeding the ducks.”
“Is that what we have here?” asked Vincenzo, grinning slightly. “An afternoon stroll?”
“Hardly. The data is primarily fragmented sensory experience, but there is indeed an image of a man’s face reflected in water. The face was relatively clear, but as you might imagine, a face reflected in a fluid is not a clear image for identification purposes.”
Unless Thomas could boast about all the obstacles he had overcome, you couldn’t get him to tell you anything at all. Not that it wasn’t impressive, of course.
“Were you able to get the face ID’d anyway?” asked Vincenzo. He was only feeding Thomas the reply he needed, but without that we might have been there all night.
“Of course I was. I ran the image through my own analysis algorithm and then fed the result through a variety of sampling filters to make it as clear as possible. When I fed it into our database to search for a match, the image did return a known individual.”