Lois Bujold - Memory

"Yes, and mine too. Call my mother and give her my apologies, but I won't be home tonight. Then sit down here at this desk." He pointed to the sergeant's station chair; the sergeant scrambled out of it. "I declare this evidence room sealed. Let no one in, Ivan, no one at all, without my Auditor's authorization. You two"—his arm swung to point at the two ImpSec men, who flinched—"are my witnesses that I, personally, did not enter the storage areas today." He added to the lieutenant, "Tell me about your inventory procedures."

The lieutenant swallowed. "The comconsole records are continually updated, of course, my Lord Auditor. We do physical inventory once a month. It takes a week."

"And the last one was done when?"

"Two weeks ago."

"Anything turn up missing?"

"No, my lord."

"Anything missing in the last three months?"

"No."

"The last year?"

"No!"

"Do the same fellows always do the inventory?"

"It rotates. It's . . . not a popular chore."

"I'll bet not." Miles glanced at Ivan. "Ivan, while you're sitting here, call Ops and requisition yourself four men with top security clearances, who have never worked for or with ImpSec. They're going to be your team."

Ivan's face screwed up in dismay. "Oh, God," he groaned. "You're not going to make me inventory the whole damned thing, are you?"

"Yes. For obvious reasons, I can't do it myself. Somebody's planted a red flag here, with my name on it. If they wanted my attention, they've certainly got it."

"Biologicals too? The cold room too?" Ivan shuddered.

"All of it."

"What will I be looking for?"

"If I knew that, we wouldn't have to do an inventory, now, would we?"

"What if, instead of something taken out, something was added? What if it's not a lead you've got hold of, but a fuse?" Ivan asked. His hand flexed in nervous pantomime.

"Then I trust you will stamp it out." He gestured the two ImpSec men into his wake. "Come with me, gentlemen. We're going to go see General Haroche."

Haroche too came on the alert the minute he saw Miles's face, as Miles and his little train marched into his office. Haroche sealed his doors behind them, shut down his comconsole, and said, "What have you found, my lord?"

"Approximately twenty-five minutes of revised history. Your comconsoles have been buggered."

Haroche's face grew unhappy indeed as Miles explained his discovery of the added time, with corroboration from the evidence room supervisor. It darkened further with the news about the missing vid record.

"Can you show where you were?" he asked when Miles had finished. "Prove you walked home?"

Miles shrugged. "Possibly. I passed plenty of people in the street, and I am, ah, a bit more memorable than the average man. Scrounging for witnesses ages after the fact is the sort of thing the municipal guard has to do all the time, investigating their civil crimes. I may put them on it, if it seems necessary. But as an Imperial Auditor, my word is not on trial."

Yet.

"Er. Right."

Miles glanced at the evidence room men. "Gentlemen, will you wait for me in the outer office, please. Go nowhere and speak to no one."

He and Haroche waited until they'd cleared the room, then Miles continued, "What is certain, at this point, is that you have a mole in your internal security systems. Now, I can play this one of two ways. I can shut ImpSec down entirely while I bring in outside experts to check them. There are certain obvious disadvantages to this method."

Haroche groaned. "A slight understatement, my lord."

"Yes. Taking all of ImpSec off-line for a week—or more—while people unfamiliar with your system attempt to learn and then check it seems to me an invitation to disaster. But running an internal check using internal personnel also has, um, obvious drawbacks. Any ideas?"

Haroche rubbed his forehead. "I see your point. Suppose . . . suppose we set up a team of men to do the checking. At least three, who must work together at all times. They watch each other that way. One mole I must grant, but three, chosen at random . . . they can freeze the system in sections, with the minimum disruption to ImpSec's ongoing duties. If you like, I can give you the list of qualified personnel, and you can select the men."

"Yes . . ." said Miles slowly. "That works. Good. Do it."

Haroche breathed obvious relief. "I'm . . . grateful you are reasonable about this, my lord."

"I'm always reasonable."

Haroche's lip twitched, but he didn't argue. He sighed. "This thing is growing uglier all the time. I despise internal investigations. Even if you win, you lose. But what … I confess, I don't understand this business with the evidence room. What do you make of it?"

Miles shook his head. "It looks like it's meant to be a frame. But most frames come with pictures in them. This one's empty. It's all … very backwards. I mean, usually, you start with the crime and deduce the suspects. I'm having to start with the suspect and deduce the crime."

"Yes, but . . . who would be fool enough to try to frame an Imperial Auditor? It seems just short of insane."

Miles frowned, and paced the room, back and forth in front of Haroche's desk. How many times had he paced like this in front of Illyan, as they'd hammered out his mission plans? "That depends … I want your systems analysts to look particularly for this. That depends on how long this thing has been sitting down there in the evidence room comconsole. It was a buried mine, set to go off only when touched. When were the changes made in the records? I mean, it could have been any time between the day I arrived downside, and this morning. But if they were done more than a few weeks back—somebody maybe didn't think they were framing an Imperial Auditor. I don't see how they could have foreseen my getting that appointment, when I didn't myself. They were framing, bluntly, a cashiered junior officer who had departed ImpSec under a cloud. The obscure son of a famous father, and some kind of demi-mutant to boot. I might have been tailor-made to be an easy target."

Then.

"I don't like being a target. I'm downright allergic to it, anymore."

Haroche shook his head in wonder. "You confound me, Lord Vorkosigan. I believe I'm finally beginning to understand why Illyan always …"

"Why Illyan what?" Miles prodded after a long moment.

A lopsided smile lightened Haroche's heavy face. "Came out of your debriefings swearing under his breath. And then promptly turned around and sent you out again on the stickiest assignments he had."

Miles essayed a short, ironic salaam in Haroche's direction. "Thank you, General."

Ivan found it two hours before dawn, not quite by chance.

It was in the fifth aisle of the second room he'd tackled, Weapons IV. He'd placed Biologicals, Poisons, and the Cold Room last on his list for this very contingency, in the hope that he might not have to do them at all. Miles would have chosen to knock off the worst rooms first; sometimes, he had to admit, Ivan was not such an idiot as he feigned.

Ivan trod out to the reception area. Miles had been cross-checking the inventory lists on the comconsole there for the last several hours, ever since he'd overseen Haroche's three-man security systems analysis team selected and put to work upstairs.

"I'm in a Weapons Room, right?" Ivan demanded, waving his inventory sheaf of plastic flimsies.

Miles tore his attention away from the chemical description of the nine-hundred-and-ninth item in alphabetical order in the Poisons Room: Ophidian Scrapings, Polian, Three Grams. "If you say so."

"Right. So what's a little box labeled 'Komarran virus' doing on Aisle Five, Shelf Nine, Bin Twenty-Seven? What the hell is it, and shouldn't it be in Biologicals? Did somebody misclassify it? I'm not unsealing the damned thing till you find out what it is. It might make me break out in green fungus, or bloat up like those poor suckers with the Sergyaran worm plague. Or worse."