Dax shook his head. “Most of the personnel evacked before the attack.”
Lena glanced from Dax to Nigel questioningly.
Nigel shrugged. “I went in to retrieve the data, but I knew the minute I set eyes on Dax’s clone that something wasn’t right. After a while, I realized I’d walked into a trap, but they weren’t after me and they weren’t after the data. They wanted me to lead them back to the base. That’s what they really wanted. As soon as I realized that, I used the code I’d been given to warn them.”
“What data?”
“The memo that everyone’s been dying over,” Dax responded, tossing a roll of film onto the table.
Grabbing it up, Lena looked the e-paper over thoroughly and finally read the message. “My god! This is an order to replace the Prez!”
Nigel and Dax exchanged a look. “We should’ve just gotten Lena to figure it out for us before.”
Lena looked at both of them with a touch of indignation. “All right. What do you think it means?”
Nigel gave her a sour look. “Exactly what you think it means.”
Mollified, she went back to studying the memo. “You think this is authentic? I mean, why would they let us get the real thing?”
“Because it isn’t the big boss behind this operation,” Dax said. “It’s one of his recruits.”
Lena frowned. “Morris?”
Dax’s lips thinned. “The informant worked for Quasar Corp. I don’t know how he managed to find his way to Morris, but he’d run across something that scared the hell out of him. Fortunately, as scared as he was, his conscience just wouldn’t allow him to destroy it and forget it, so he started asking some really dangerous questions. When he learned about Morris’ ties to the rebel army, he went to see him. He didn’t particularly trust Morris either, though, and he didn’t take the memo with him when he went, wouldn’t even tell Morris what it was all about--only that it was something that was tied to the rumors about clones.
“That’s why Morris was so upset when he found out you’d been to Quasar Corp, because the minute the guy contacted him, Morris contacted me to nose around and see what I could find out about the informant. And it didn’t take long to find out where he worked.”
Lena frowned. “You mean the guy was in on it?”
Nigel shook his head. “I don’t think so. He was just a bookkeeper. I think the memo got mixed in with some of the work he was sent to pick up. An accident that ended up costing him his life--but it probably would’ve when they discovered the memo was missing and tracked it back to him whether he’d done anything or not.”
“Why didn’t they just retrieve it then?”
“Because the guy had led them to Morris, and it didn’t take them long to connect the dots between Morris and the leader of the rebels--Dax.”
Lena sent Dax a startled glance.
“Claxton, the head of Quasar Corp, probably decided that it would look a lot better to go to the big boss with the information that he’d tracked down the headquarters of the rebels and destroyed it instead of having to tell him that he’d gotten sloppy and let dangerous information out.”
“That still doesn’t mean that this memo is the one the guy found.”
“No. There is a way to be sure though,” Dax said.
Lena and Nigel both turned to stare at him. “How?”
“We have a pretty good idea of which gov officials have been replaced. If we can connect any of the known clones with Quasar Corp and the big boss, then we can be pretty damned sure we’re on the right track. You said yourself that Cameron Mitchell was probably our guy. And he sure as hell fits the profile. He doesn’t owe his office to elections. His branch of the gov is more secretive than the CIA, and as heavily protected as the national treasury. From where I’m sitting it seems to me that he has more power and more money at his disposal than anyone else in the gov … probably in the world.”
“Yes, but … I was just guessing. I don’t know anything for sure. We couldn’t just kill the man because we think he might be the one. And he doesn’t control the money. He has nothing to do with where it goes after it’s collected.”
“Unless he’s replaced everybody that might call him to account. And the memo certainly seems to indicate that.”
Nigel stroked his chin thoughtfully. “We’ll have to move fast. The big boss is bound to hear about all of this before much longer.”
“As far as Claxton knows, he wiped out the rebel base--and the leak. He knows by now that the ships he sent to attack the base were destroyed, but he doesn’t know, yet, that the base had been evacuated beforehand. That’ll buy us some time to hack into the security system at base beta and see what we can see about the head of the IRS.”
* * * *
Lena glanced at her watch as she settled in the chair across from the receptionist. There were two applicants in front of her and she couldn’t help but worry that he’d decide on one of them and terminate the interviews, or decide to wait until after lunch to finish up with interviews. After sitting for a few minutes, she got up and asked the receptionist where the ladies room was.
