Gary Gibson - Final Days

‘We prefer ‘Public Standards Unit,’ Donohue corrected.

After four days in the hospital, Saul had begun to hope against the odds that Public Standards had somehow forgotten about him. He should have known better.

‘So,’ he asked with forced levity, ‘exactly how much trouble am I in?’p>

‘That depends,’ Donohue replied, and nodded towards Saul’s hands, folded in his lap. ‘How’re the grafts working out?’

‘Fine.’ Saul glanced down at the thick swathes of bandage covering his hands. ‘Had some cosmetic work, but they should be back to normal in the next couple of days.’

‘And the shoulder wound?’

Saul shrugged, and felt a sympathetic twinge in the upper part of his back. ‘Didn’t hit anything vital.’

‘Nice.’ Donohue nodded. ‘And, in response to your question, you’re in a shitload of trouble, my friend. One colleague of yours dead, a major undercover operation seriously compromised, not to mention a running gun battle in an economic development zone under foreign jurisdiction. That’s not even to mention the pharmaceutical horn of plenty we found in both yours and Jacob Maks’ bloodstreams. The pair of you practically had the contents of a fucking pharmacy chugging through your veins.’ Donohue leaned back against the window and shook his head, as if in sorrow. ‘All in all, one royal humdinger of a fuck-up.’

Saul stared at him with a venomous expression. ‘How about I throw you a stick, you run and fetch it?’

‘Easy,’ said Sanders from over by the door.

‘First up,’ said Saul, ‘the ice-pharm was out in the middle of a fucking ocean , well outside of anybody’s official jurisdiction.’ He realized with a mounting sense of doom that they must have found some way to recover Jacob’s body from the pharm, otherwise how could they possibly have known so much?

Donohue regarded him with an amused expression. ‘The standard rules of jurisdiction cease to apply when enough people start shooting at each other, at which point the corporations and government interests controlling the legal pharms seek to protect their interests. Coalition peacekeepers were called in to help keep the peace.’

‘I’m sure they were,’ Saul muttered.

‘There’s something I want you to take a look at,’ said Donohue, gesturing to the other agent. Sanders stood up and pulled a folder from inside his jacket, before stepping over. He handed it to Saul, who found it contained nothing more than a single sheet of charged paper.

‘What is this?’ Saul took the sheet out of the folder and regarded it with suspicion.

Sanders leaned down and tapped one corner of the sheet. Dense lines of single-spaced text materialized on its crisp white surface, and Saul recognized it as the incident report he had fled the day after waking up in a Copernican hospital ward.

‘Skip to the end,’ Donohue advised, as Sanders stepped back and out of the way. ‘There’s some additional material you might find of interest.’

Saul found a detailed analysis was tagged on to the end of his own report. It described a covert raid on the ice-pharm, following his escape. There were orbital satellite photos showing it as a misshapen white lump standing stark against the black of Kepler’s largest ocean. Video footage, recorded at extreme magnification, replayed his dash to the helicopter.

‘You were tailing me the whole way,’ Saul muttered, dropping the sheet back into his lap.

‘There were questions about Jacob Maks,’ said Sanders, from beside him, ‘and about the nature of his relationship with Lee Hsingyun. We had reckoned for a while that he might be on the take. Kepler’s black pharms are enormously lucrative, after all, and the Tian Di Hui finances a significant portion of their activities from the proceeds of the pharms they control. Maks wouldn’t be the first to decide that working for them was a better bet than holding out for an ASI pension.’

‘So you think he cut a deal with Hsingyun?’ Saul asked.

Donohue shrugged. ‘That’s what we thought at first. He was spending a lot more money than any field agent might be expected to have, so naturally that raised an immediate flag. You know how the ASI can’t afford to take chances when it comes to compromising our investigations.’

‘So you put him under surveillance.’

‘Both him and you, as a matter of fact. It wasn’t the first time you’d worked together.’

Saul glared at him. ‘And that was reason enough to spy on me, too?’

‘The whole thing was a debacle, Saul. It was a five-year investigation with Shih Hsiu-Chuan as the prize, except you let him get away. At the very least, that makes an internal investigation near-as-damn inevitable. And once that investigation shows how you went into the field with a fair proportion of the narcotics coming out of the ice-pharms stuffed back up your nose, it’s going to be the easiest thing in the world to make you a scapegoat for everything that’s gone wrong. If you’re very, very lucky, you’ll only lose your job.’

‘And it’s not like you’ve had an exemplary record before, either,’ Sanders cut in. ‘At least, not after Galileo. You were nearly kicked out.’

‘I had a breakdown. That’s hardly a secret,’ Saul replied through gritted teeth. ‘I pulled myself together.’

‘Except you haven’t been promoted since,’ Donohue pointed out. ‘You’re still stuck doing the same kind of shitty undercover work, ten years on. However, what the peacekeeper task force found when they got to the ice-pharm raises other, more serious questions.’

Saul caught sight of his own reflection superimposed over the lifeless lunar landscape, and realized how scared he looked. ‘Like?’

‘Jacob Maks was killed by a single shot from a pykrete gun,’ said Sanders, his grin bright and feral. ‘We took prints from that pistol, Saul. Your prints. Your DNA.’

Saul licked suddenly dry lips. ‘It’s more complicated than you think it is.’

‘I’ll bet,’ said Donohue. ‘Did you kill him, Saul?’

Saul felt a sudden flush of rage and waited until it passed. He fantasized about slamming Donohue’s head repeatedly against the floor, but he was so full of painkillers that his body felt like a sack of cotton hanging off his skeleton, leaving him far from capable of giving anyone a beating.

‘I had a gun to my head,’ he replied instead, his voice rasping. ‘They told me if I wanted to prove I really was who I said I was, I was going to have to kill him to prove it.’

‘You killed him to save yourself?’ asked Donohue.

‘No!’ Saul slammed the side of his wheelchair with one hand. ‘They were on to us . It was obvious Tanner wasn’t going to let either of us walk out alive. And Hsingyun . . . something about him bothered me from the moment I met him. He and Jacob acted like they were old friends, but I think Hsingyun had been on to him from the start.’

‘Go on,’ said Donohue.

‘The arbitration unit was bait for Hsiu-Chuan, but it was highly lucrative bait. There’s plenty of motivation, right there, for Hsingyun to string Jacob along until I turned up with the goods. That way he doesn’t just get hold of the arbitration unit, he gets himself closer to Hsiu-Chuan and the financiers behind the pharms. Maybe he thought he could get his own pharming operation out of it.’

‘Nice theory,’ said Sanders, ‘but you still haven’t answered the question. Did you kill Jacob?’

Saul let out a groan. ‘I was convinced the gun wasn’t loaded. I took a gamble they were trying to test us, that there weren’t any bullets in the damn thing. But they already knew exactly who we both were.’

Donohue shook his head. ‘The fact remains, all the evidence says you pulled the trigger, and that’s all any internal investigation would care about. In fact,’ he added, barely repressing a smirk, ‘it might actually have been a lot better for your career if you’d refused, and let them shoot you . No dishonourable discharge, and no possibility of a long jail sentence – and a funeral paid for by the ASI.’