“Not so,” Renne said. “McFoster knew him. In fact, he was glad to see him. Overjoyed, actually. For my money, our assassin is from Far Away.”
“Who on Far Away is going to send an assassin into the Commonwealth?” John asked.
She shrugged. “Don’t know, but at the very least we should check CST’s records to see if he came through the Boongate station in the last couple of years.”
“All right, I’ll get my people on that,” John said. “Foster Cortese is running visual recognition programs for me. He can add the Boongate database to his analysis.”
“Good,” Alic said. “Now, what about the equipment he was wetwired with? We all saw what he was capable of. That stuff was cutting edge; there has to be some sort of record.”
“Jim Nwan is following that up for me,” Tarlo said. “There are plenty of companies across the Commonwealth who manufacture that kind of armament. I didn’t realize. A lot of it is supplied to Grand Families and Intersolar Dynasties for their security divisions. Tracing the end user through them is difficult; they’re not being very cooperative. Then there’s always Illuminatus. The clinics there are even less friendly.”
“If anyone blocks you, let me know right away,” Alic told him. “The Admiral’s office will apply some pressure directly.”
“Sure.”
“Right, Renne, what did you turn up at the observatory?”
“Quite a lot, though I’m not sure how much of it is relevant.”
“Let’s hear it.”
She sipped at her coffee, wincing at how hot it was. “First, we confirmed what McFoster collected: a whole load of data that they’d been storing. Apparently it all came from Mars.”
“Mars?” Alic frowned. “What the fuck is on Mars?”
“That’s where we start running into problems. We don’t know. The data was transmitted from a remote science station. Officially, it was a project sponsored by the Lambeth Interplanetary Society to investigate the Martian environment. The station has been transmitting the signals for twenty years, supposedly from automated sensors dotted all over the planet.”
“Did you say twenty years?”
“Yeah,” she said sardonically. “However, the Lambeth Interplanetary Society no longer exists. It went virtual eight years ago; today it’s just a named address logged with an equally bogus legal firm. There’s an administration program overseeing a bank account with just enough money deposited to pay for the Mars project to its conclusion. The observatory gets its annual fee, and if anyone calls the society with a query the program has a menu of stock replies. In other words it’s a typical Guardians’ front operation.”
“Was it ever real?” Alic asked.
“When it was set up, yes. There was a physical office in London, along with staff. I’ve got Gwyneth trying to track down anyone who was employed there; we’re hoping to turn up a secretary or some junior staff member. It’s not promising; anyone important would be a Guardian, the rest would be offworlders on a standard employment visa. As there aren’t any records, we’re checking with offworld employment placement agencies.”
“Why did the Guardians abandon the society office if the observatory is still collecting data for them?” John asked.
“The switch coincides with the last set of instruments being sent to Mars,” Renne said. “They paid for a lot of packages to be deployed in their first twelve years. You can’t do that entirely through the cybersphere. There have to be meetings, actual people to talk to the UFN Science Agency staff and take them out to lunch, attend seminars, designers for the sensors packages, that kind of thing.”
“So there are records of what they shipped out to Mars?” Alic didn’t like the implications of how big the Guardians’ operation was; nor that it involved something new, something they couldn’t understand. That was too many negatives to file in any report to the Admiral.
“We have UFN Science Agency manifests for their transport ships,” she said. “As to what was actually placed on board at the time, there is no way of knowing. Those ships travel all over the solar system, and the planetary instruments they deploy are packed in secure containers inside one-shot landers. Nobody at lunarport would ever break open a sealed system as they load it on a ship, there’s no reason.”
“You’re telling me that the Guardians have been running an operation here in the solar system for twenty years right under our noses, and we still don’t know what it is?” Alic stopped. He didn’t want to come over as critical; they had to work together on this. “What about other planets? Are the Guardians running operations on them?”
“It doesn’t look like it,” Renne said. “Matthew Oldfield is running verification on all the solar planetary projects the UFN Science Agency knows about; so far they look legitimate. It was only Mars.”
“But there’s no way of knowing what they placed there?”
