Chapter Fifteen
Mara
“Yes,” Cayzor says.
And something in me stands up and starts working, the way it always does, because that is what I do, I fix things. You put a broken system in front of me and I do not sit down on the floor and weep about it, I open the panel.
“No,” I say. “No, wait. Let’s go back through it, because there are problems with this.”
“Mara…”
“Shell companies.” I’m already up, moving, pulling my tablet off the counter because my hands need to be doing something. “Four shells, you said. Cayzor, that’s what shells arefor.That’s their entire function. You route money through four of them precisely so that nobody at the far end can say who paid whom, and the fact that money went through four of them tells you exactly nothing except that somebody wanted privacy. Half the contractors in the Four Sectors get paid through shells.Wehave been paid through shells.”
He doesn’t argue, just calmly watches me work through my problem.
“What actually connects the fourth one to House Vaszneth? And don’t say Hallie. I like Hallie, but what you’re telling me is that a woman who stole a document off Chronos two years ago recognized a company name. That’s memory, not a true link.”
“It’s in the ledger.”
“Then show me the ledger. Show me the page. Because if that ledger saysthis concern moves House moneythen that’s one thing, and if it’s a name on a list of two hundred names, that’s completely different, and I’d like to know which it is before I convict my brother of murder.”
“It’s not a list of two hundred names.”
“Then I want to see it.”
“You will. Ines will give you all of it, every document.”
“Fine. Next. Money arriving in an account is not evidence of what the money wasfor, Cayzor. I’ll accept that I’m learning that my brother is a gambler with a decade of debt. Money moves in and out of a gambler’s accounts constantly, that’s what the word means. Somebody paying him could be a debt settled, a loan, a win, a friend covering him, literally anything.”
“It was three times within fourteen months, from the same source.”
“That’sworse, actually, that’s more consistent with a payment plan than a bribe. I want to say this carefully because she’s your family and I like her, but Ines is a journalist. Her sources are unnamed and her method is calling in favors from beings who owe her. That’s not an investigation, that’svery good gossip, and I have watched extremely good gossip be wrong about beings my entire career.”
“You’re right about that,” Cayzor agrees. “It wouldn’t stand in front of an arbiter. Ines said so herself. She said we have a caseand not a court case. I’m not going to tell you her sourcing is better than it is.”
I bite at my lip because the fact that he concedes and isn’t defending is somehow so much worse than if he’d argued.
I grab my tablet. “There’s one thing I can check myself is the clearance from four years ago. You said he was removed from a contract on my clearance and I was never told.” My thumb’s already moving. “That’s a personnel action and it’s on my contracting record, not his. If it happened, I can see it right now. So, I’m going to look.”
I pull up my contracting history. Nine years of it, every posting, every clearance, every renewal, all of it filed away in the tidy chronological way I keep everything, because I am organized and thorough and I have never in my life missed a detail that mattered.
There it is. Fen-Arrenth Station. Four years ago, eleven months, structural grid replacement. I remember that job. It was a bad job — freezing, and the client was awful, and it ended early, and Andrew told me the client cut the scope in month nine and we both grumbled about the lost income and went home.
I open the record. And there’s a line in it I have never seen in my life.
Personnel action — contractor removed for cause — reported to contracting authority.
Not to me, to the contracting authority,because I wasn’t the contracting authority, I was the named engineer. I never had the smallest reason in the universe to go looking through the administrative back end of a finished job for something I didn’t know existed.
It’s been sitting there for four years.
I sit down on the arm of the chair with my tablet in my hands. And it all comes down at once, out of order, in pieces, the way I imagine your life does when it stops being the one you thoughtyou had. I got him the Salo contract. Irecommendedhim — I put my name next to his to a client who asked me directly whether he was reliable, and I said yes, and I meant it. Every time a project manager pulled me aside and asked, quietly, whether my brother was all right, and I laughed and said he’d had a rough few years and he’s completely solid now and felt — I feltgoodabout it. I felt good about myself, standing by my brother.
I thought I was saving him.
That’s why I’m on this planet. That’s the entire reason. Not a career decision, not an opportunity, not the biggest Illibrium system in the known universe, because Andrew was excited and I wanted to give him a good thing.
He’d already been paid.
