He Wasn't There Again Today by Candas Jane Dorsey

Author:Candas Jane Dorsey [Dorsey, Candas Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2023-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

64. Paper that is too smart for its own fucking good

I checked my cell phone when I woke up the next afternoon. A couple of nuisance messages from that one tech guy who just won’t give up, which I deleted as usual. Nothing from Spak yet, but Roger had left a cryptic message asking me to come into the cop shop.

A dishy constable I’d met once ages ago greeted me and led me to one of the rooms Detective Heather hadn’t wanted me to see. It was the secure room where the mayor and council would gather with their advisors to run the city in the event of terrorists or my old pal the Global Electromagnetic Pulse. I guess she thought it was Ultra Sekrit. Sucks to her: I’d been in there ages ago, when we had been concealing a conversation from Chiles’s electronic surveillance abilities, way back before we caught him. In peacetime, it was also what we ancients would call the AV room, because it always had the best equipment.

Roger was there, drumming his fingers on the desk and bouncing slightly, in a senior-officer kind of way of course. The constable, at a gesture from him, went over to the media console, fiddling with it and muttering. Since Dave had been promoted, I guess she was the new gofer.

“You need to look at something,” Roger said abruptly. “For identification purposes only, and you can’t talk about it outside this room. Except maybe to your lawyer, in your Faraday boardroom.” Constable Cute didn’t know what Roger meant, but I got a chill down my spine. A goose, treading lightly. A cat, treading normally. A ghost, treading poltergeist-heavily. Take your pick.

“Sloan. Go,” he said to the minion, and she handed him a remote and left the room. As soon as the door clicked, Roger pressed two buttons, one that dimmed the lights and one that fired up a big flat screen and started a grainy silent movie on it.

I was looking at a room with empty walls, a table and two chairs. It wasn’t the room Dave liked to question me in, but it was a near-twin: bland wall colour, bland furnishings, no sharp edges or potential projectiles. This one had obvious bars, rather than tempered glass, on the window set into the door.

In one of the chairs, facing the camera, sat Lockwood Chiles, wearing his prison garb as if it were boardroom attire. In front of him was a pad of lined paper, and he was taking notes with a long thin Bic™-like pen.

On the other chair, back to the camera, sat a man. Back of head said Caucasian, balding, perhaps (the colour was terrible) a blue suit, but that was all. Could just as easily have been Ulrich Dyck or Johnny Depp. (That’s a joke. Ulrich is, as it has turned out, a lot better a person than Johnny.) Blue-Suit, too, had paper and pen, and a briefcase down beside his chair.

There was no sound.

“It’s illegal to record a conference with a lawyer,” said Roger, “but the camera stays on for safety reasons.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.