4

"RUN IT AGAIN. Gervad," said Justen Devray. "With full enhancement and magnification."

"Yes, sir." Gervad activated the controls, and ran his own downloaded memory sequence one more time.

Devray watched as the imagery bloomed to life one more time. The bald head of Barnsell Ardosa appeared on the screen, the image rendered grainy and jerky by the magnification routine. Justen had run this imagery, and the images from Sapper 323, a dozen times by now. The Sapper's imagery was a trifle sharper, but Gervad had had a very slightly better angle. Once he had downloaded a copy of the Sapper's pertinent surveillance imagery, Devray had left the Sapper on the scene, with the surveillance aircar, and orders to watch for Ardosa's reappearance. Sapper 323 was to follow him wherever he went, as discreetly as possible.

"All right, Gervad. Freeze on the clearest frame, and show me the image you got a match pattern from next to it," Justen said, his voice eager, his expression alert. There was, in every good law officer, at least a bit of the hunter, of the pursuer, of the tracker who would follow the trail and never give up. That part of Justen had been very much awakened by the appearance of Barnsell Ardosa. Or at least by the someone who called himself that at the moment.

The robot obeyed Justen's order, and the two still images-one grainy and slightly distorted, the other a sharp, clear identity scan-appeared on the flat screen.

There were times that robot identity matches failed altogether, when a robot declared an identity match between two images that a human would reject instantly as being of two different people. But not this time. The surveillance image might be of extremely low quality, but it was unquestionably the same man as in the university's identity-scan image.

Justen stared hard at the surveillance image. The enhancement system had cleaned it up at least somewhat, but there were limits to how much one could use that sort of thing. Justen knew he could have ordered the robot to clean it up even more, but they were already at the point where the enhancements were close to guesswork. They would start losing information instead of gaining it if they did any more to the pictures. A more enhanced version might look better, but it would also look less like Ardosa.

Less like Ardosa. That thought resonated with Justen for some reason; but he was not sure why. Not yet. Let it ride. Let it come to him.

Justen Devray allowed himself a small smile. There were few things easier than not looking like Barnsell Ardosa. After all, it was becoming increasingly obvious that Ardosa did not exist. Justen had gotten his first clue to that interesting little fact when he starting trying to find out why Sapper 323's pattern-match lists did not show Ardosa. The Sapper's database should have included everything that Gervad's had.

The explanation had turned out to be remarkably simple. Alarming, but simple. When Justen compared the dates on Gervad's ID database against Sapper 323's, he discovered that Gervad's was only a few days old, while Sapper 323's list had not been updated in a year and a half. That was not surprising, given the fact that the Sappers were not the most popular model in the world. The rental shop where Justen had gotten it had had a dozen Sappers powered down in the back.

Gervad's database had Ardosa, but his database also showed that Ardosa's records had been entered five years before-although Sapper 323's eighteen-month-old database had no record of him at all.

In short, it was painfully clear that someone had managed to manipulate the police data files, and gone to that effort at least in part to insert an operative into the University of Hades faculty. It seemed unlikely that they had gone to all that trouble just for this one man. They were going to have cross-check the entire identity list-and start the long, dreary search for the security breach as well. Tiresome stuff. Justen gave silent thanks that he was not an officer in counterintelligence. They were going to have a mind-numbing job ahead of them.

But where had they-whoever "they" were-decided to put their man? Justen checked the listing a bit more carefully. In what part of the university did Ardosa spend his days?

When he got his answer, the hairs on the back of his head seemed to stand on end. The University's Center for Terraforming Studies. That explained a great deal-a bit too much for Justen's comfort. He had been quite mystified by the notion of someone bothering to insert an agent to watch over the moribund confines of the university. But terraforming was quite another matter.

The struggle to reconstruct the planet's climate was at the core of all the other issues of the day. Whoever controlled the reterraforming project controlled power, and not just the raw, physical power of the terraforming machinery, but every other sort of power as well: financial, political, intellectual, everything. It made all the sense in the world for the Settlers or the Ironheads or anyone else to insert a man into the Terraforming Studies Center.

But something didn't fit. Ardosa-whoever he really was-was not at all the sort of person Devray had been looking for outside the entrance to Settlertown. That stakeout was an ongoing operation, an attempt to establish a pattern of routine comings and goings. Casuals and walk-ins, as they were known in the trade. A deep-cover agent would know better than to use the front entrance, and thus risk blowing his cover. Unless there was something so urgent and important that it was worth risking all.

But terraforming was a project for the generations. It moved, of necessity, at a leisurely pace. Any given project was likely to take years to accomplish. What sort of terraforming information could be as urgent as Ardosa's behavior suggested it had to be? Why go in the front door? Why not send word some other way? It was plainly impossible to shut down all forms of communication. There was always some way to pass a message in reasonable safety, provided you were willing to take a little time. You could send a written message carried by a robot. You could use a dead-drop, something as simple as a scribbled message hidden under a rock. You could send a perfectly normal hyperwave message saying something like, "Your shoes are ready to be collected," or "Please order porridge for my breakfast," with each phrase having a prearranged meaning.

Ardosa had to have some such way to contact the Settlers.

So what could be so vitally important that he would throw all that over and dive for the front door?

And who was Ardosa? Devray was certain he had seen that face before. But where? He studied both images again. It was a distinctive face, not the sort that would get lost in the shuffle. In the surveillance imagery, it was wearing a worried look, and the identity scan image had that awkward, glazed, expressionless look of so many identity photos, the subject caught by the camera the moment before deciding what to do with his or her face.

As Justen stared at the images, there was one thing he became more and more sure about. He had never seen whoever it was in the flesh. He had simply seen an image of this man before. A flat-photo, a hologram, something like that.

A case file, then. That was what it had to be. The mug shots from some case he had worked on, or studied. A case big enough that Devray had studied every mug shot hard enough and long enough to have them burned into his skull. But Ardosa had not been a central figure in whatever case it was. Otherwise, Devray would have known him instantly.

A thought that had flitted through his mind a few moments before came back to him. Less like Ardosa. Was that part of his subconscious whispering that Ardosa no longer looked quite the way he had, whenever Devray had seen him? And it would have to be an older case, or else, Justen knew, he would remember the face clearly. He studied the images one more time. "Gervad," he said, "delete the mustache from both images. And give me a range of reverse age regressions. Not in Spacer mode. We age too slowly. Do it in Settler mode. Go back ten chronological years or so. Standard spread."

"Yes, sir." The robot operated the image control system with a smooth skill, and the two images shrank to take up only a small fraction of the screen before the mustaches faded away from each of them, leaving a vague patch of simulation, the computer's best estimate of what sort of upper lip existed under the man's facial hair.

Then the faces multiplied, and began to shift and change, transmogrifying into younger variants. Some versions of the face grew thinner, or sprouted new hair. Wrinkles vanished, the slight double chin melted away. But there were so many ways for a man to age, and so many ways a man could prevent the aging, in whole or in part, if he chose to do so. Spacers, of course, made every effort to stop the aging process completely-but Settlers did not. They let themselves grow old.

Spacers were not used to people aging, not used to seeing their appearance change over time. If a near-ageless Spacer became friends with a youthful Settler, lost track of him, and then encountered the same Settler twenty years later, the Spacer would have a great deal of difficulty recognizing the older version of the Settler as being the same person. But Spacers had not lost this skill altogether. It could still be brought into play with a little encouragement.

The computer graphics system manipulated the images at a rapid clip. Within seconds, Devray was faced with two dozen versions of the same face, shifted and changed and re-formed. He studied each of them in turn. He was tempted to reject most of them at once, but resisted the urge to move too fast. He trusted his instincts, but only so far. Suppose the face he rejected turned out to be the one that spurred his memory? But still and all, he had to trust what his subconscious was telling him. Number One had too much hair. Number Two looked far too young. Three and Four were plainly too thin, while Six and Eight were far too portly.

Justen Devray stared at the images, slowly, carefully, one at a time. Something in the back of his head whispered that he was close, that he was going to get the answer, that he was about to make the connection.

And then he saw it. Face Number Fifteen. That was the one he knew. He was sure of it. And suddenly, in a moment like a piece dropping itself into place in the puzzle, he knew. He knew who it was.

He had seen Ardosa's mug shot before, all right. And the man calling himself Ardosa had been involved, if on the periphery, of a big case. The biggest case Justen Devray had ever been on. The murder, five years before, of Governor Chanto Grieg.

JUSTEN RUBBED HIS face and blinked hard. "I'm sorry I'm a bit punchy, sir. I've been up all night on this one. I came straight from the archives room to here. " He blinked and stretched, trying to bring the room into focus. Apparently Kresh's wife was waiting in the main office, just down the hall, and that was why Kresh had brought him in here, to an assistant's office, for the meeting. Kresh had assured him the assistant would not be in for another hour, but even so...The paintings on the wall, the tastefully chosen furniture and decoration, made it seem a strangely personal space. Justen felt as if he were intruding.

"It's all right, son," Kresh said. "Sit down." Kresh sat on one end of a low couch, and gestured for Devray to sit down on the other end. Justen did so, gratefully. "Donald, bring the Commander something hot and strong with a dose of caffeine in it."

"At once, Governor," Donald replied, and went off to take care of it.

"All right then, Commander. My wife and I have a rather important meeting at ten this morning. That gives us just about an hour. Will that be enough for whatever it is?"

"I don't think it'll take five minutes, sir." Justen hesitated a moment, and then decided to plunge ahead. "This appointment at ten, sir-would it by any chance be with a Davlo Lentrall?"

Kresh looked surprised. "It would indeed, Commander. I haven't told anyone I'm meeting with him again, outside of my wife. Might I ask where you got that particular tidbit of information?"

"Thank you, Donald," said Justen. Kresh's personal robot had returned with a cup of what seemed to be remarkably strong tea, and Justen took it from him. Like most Spacers, Justen rarely bothered handing out "pleases" and "thank yous" to robots, but, somehow, Donald 111 was a special case. He took a quick sip of the tea, and found it as reviving as he had hoped. "I got my information from two sources," he went on. "From our old and dear friends in the Settler Security Service, and from the Ironheads. Neither of them gave me the information on purpose, of course, and neither of them knows what I've found out. But I learned it from them, all the same. If they don't know all about him by now, they will, very soon. And whatever he's involved in has got both outfits about to go ballistic."

"Do you know what Lentrall's been working on?" Kresh asked.

"No, sir. But if the Settlers and the Ironheads don't know by now, they will by lunchtime. I can tell you they are both digging as hard as they can."

"Why don't you start at the beginning, son?" Kresh suggested.

"Yes, sir. I've been sitting in on the various ongoing operations, just to see how things are going, to get a feel for what my officers have to deal with, and so on."

"And it gets you out of the office now and then," Kresh said with a smile. "I used to do the same thing when I was running the Sheriff's Department."

Justen smiled back. It helped a great deal to have a governor who used to run a law enforcement agency. He understood things without needing too much explanation. "Yes, sir. In any event, I sat in on the Settlertown main entrance stakeout. Normally the officer assigned to that duty is expected to provide his or her own vehicle or other watch post, and his or her own robotic assistance, and is later reimbursed. The thinking is that keeps us from using the same three vehicles and the same three robots over and over. It should make us harder to spot. It also encourages the officers to be a bit more creative, show some initiative. In any event, I did the drill myself. I brought my own personal robot, and rented a second robot and an aircar. That stakeout is sort of a grab-bag affair, more than anything. Every once in a while we spot someone going in who shouldn't be, and we can run some checks."

"But something a little different happened."

"Yes, sir. My robots spotted someone not on the watch lists. My robot could ID him, but the rental unit could not, even though it was a security model. I later found out that the ID database in my personal robot had been altered. My robot's list is a copy of the standard CIP list-and I've confirmed that the standard list has been altered as well."

"Someone inserted a false ID profile into the CIP database?"

"Yes, sir. And I might add that the real identity of the person in question is not in the file. I'm not sure if that's because he was deleted by the same people who inserted the false idea, or if the real identity's file was culled in a routine file purge."

"I see. And who is someone pretending to be?"

"Dr. Barnsell Ardosa, of the University of Hades Center for Terraforming." Justen pulled hardcopies of the original images out of his carry bag. "This is the university's ID image," he said, handing them over. "And this is the surveillance image."

Kresh took the two images, and let out a low whistle. "Norlan Fiyle. The rustbacking Settler in the Grieg case. The mustache hides some of him, but it's not exactly an impenetrable disguise."

Justen Devray looked at Kresh in impressed surprised. "The face looked familiar to me," he said, "but it took me hours and hours, and every image-manipulating trick in the book, before I was able to place him."

"You've been a working cop since then," Kresh said, still looking thoughtfully at the images of Fiyle/Ardosa. "There have been a lot of other faces for you to deal with, on a lot of other cases. Fiyle-I never met him, of course, but he was part of the last case I ever worked. I can still shut my eyes and see every page of the case file. Did you ever meet him?"

"No, sir. I wasn't in on that interrogation. Maybe I should have been."

"Don't be absurd," Kresh said, his voice gentler than his words. "You were running a big part of a vital case. He was picked up on the far side of the Great Bay from where you were working, and he gave up the one piece of information we needed almost at once. Why in the devil should you have chased after him? Just in case he popped up five years later?"

"I suppose you're right. But even so, right now I wish I had gone to get a look at him."

"Hmmmph. Water under the bridge. Let's get back to the point. You've had a chance to check the files, and maybe my memory isn't as infallible as I'd like it to be. Give me a quick summary on friend Fiyle."

"Norlan Fiyle. A Settler, but not any part of the terraforming team. It seems he took advantage of a few loopholes in the immigration laws to come to Inferno, presumably in hopes of making some quick and easy money. He was working with a gang of rustbackers, helping to smuggle illegal New Law robots off the island of Purgatory. He got caught just about the time Grieg was murdered. He made a deal, all charges dropped and freedom to leave the planet, in exchange for the name of a Governor's Ranger who was on the take. The Ranger in question was Emoch Huthwitz, who was killed the same night as the governor, while on guard duty. It looked a lot like an opportunist revenge murder. It was one of the leads that got us looking at the possible involvement of rustbacking gangs in the case."

Kresh shook his head. "I needed the refresher. Sometimes I forget how intricate that case was. But Fiyle was supposed to leave the planet. Why didn't he?"

"I don't know, sir. But the fact that he was supposed to leave does offer an innocent explanation why he wasn't in the current CIP identity files. We don't maintain current files on people who are off-planet. As to why he didn't leave, my hunch is that he hadn't been any more honest on his home planet. Maybe he was on the run from the police there when he got to Inferno. Maybe he thought it over, and figured he wouldn't stay out of jail for long back home, if he went there. So he offered his services to the SSS here. A freelance informant. They'd set him up and protect him in exchange for information."

"And maybe Cinta Melloy didn't make it a voluntary arrangement, if she had the goods on him back home," Kresh said. "It's all speculation, but it sounds plausible. But so far all you've got is an old smuggler walking into Settlertown and living under an assumed name. There has to be more."

"Yes, sir, there is," said Justen. "I left the Sapper to watch for Ardosa and trail him while I went back to CIP headquarters with the other robot and started trying to find out who Ardosa really was. Well, Ardosa came out of Settlertown not long after we left-and led Sapper 323 straight to Ironhead headquarters, and a nice little chat with Jadelo Gildern."

Kresh raised his eyebrows. "The head of Ironhead security, no less. But how do you know he talked to Gildern?"

"I was coming to that. The robot on the front door wouldn't let him in until Ardosa told him something, and the robot checked it with someone inside. The Sapper caught it all on long-range imagery and audio. I've watched it a dozen times by now. What Ardosa-or rather, Fiyle-said was 'Listen, you tin box. Tell Gildern it's Ardosa with new info on Lentrall. He'll see me then.' And sure enough, in went Fiyle."

"Not the most discreet of double agents, is he?" said Kresh. "Waltzing up to the front door of two different establishments, talking on the street like that."

"Unless that was deliberate," said Justen. "He's working two sides. Why not three? Maybe he was deliberately trying to attract our attention."

"This does get deep pretty fast," Kresh said. "We could spend the whole morning spinning theories. I wonder if Gildern or Melloy know Fiyle is working two sides of the game."

"It takes a lot of nerve to spy for the Ironheads and the Settlers," Justen said. "It would only take just a bit more to spy for both of them without the left hand knowing what the right was doing. I don't think he's told either side."

"What makes you say that?" Kresh asked.

"Nothing solid. Just what we know of his temperament from the Grieg case, the way he carried himself as he headed toward Settlertown, and going into Ironhead HQ."

"All interesting," Kresh said. "All very, very interesting. You have a watch on Fiyle, I assume?"

"The works. Full team trailing him, taps on his hyperwave, research into his background, everything."

"Good. And one other thing. Lentrall is about to arrive here, any minute. When he leaves, I don't want him to be alone."

"I was about to suggest that, sir. I would advise a full security detail, human and robotic." After the Grieg case, they had learned not to trust a purely robotic security detail, or a purely human one. Far better to use both, rather than be exposed to the weaknesses of either working alone.

"Very good," he said. "If it were remotely practical, I'd tell you to keep them out of Lentrall's sight, but as it is-have them keep out of his way as much as possible. He's not the sort of person who's going to take kindly to a security detail. More than likely, he'll blow his top, sooner or later. Let's try and make it later."

"Yes, sir."

"Thank you for your good work, Justen," Kresh said as he stood up. "You've told me something important. Lentrall has dropped a major situation on me, and I'll need all the information I get in order to make a proper decision about it."

Justen took the hint. He stood himself, took back the images from Kresh, and put them in his carry bag as he made ready to leave. Kresh offered Justen his hand, and Justen shook it as Kresh gave him an encouraging pat on the shoulder. "I'm glad to have been of help, sir."

"You have been. You have been," Kresh said as he led the younger man out into the hallway. "Perhaps more than you know." Kresh's robot activated the door control to Kresh's office, and preceded his master through the entrance. "Thanks once again, Commander," said Kresh.

It was not until Kresh had said the last of his congratulations and farewells, stepped into his main office, and Donald had sealed the door behind them that Justen Devray noticed something. Kresh had not said a single word about what Lentrall was working on.

Tonya Welton knew more about it than he did. Simcor Beddle knew more. Of course, that was not saying much, because Justen Devray, Commander of the Combined Inferno Police, did not know anything at all.

P/S: Copyright -->www_novelfreereadonline_Com

***