“My second-to-last ex. I was married to her when Nataskia had Evette. She doesn’t know about that.”
“Oh.” Yuri’s gaze locked on Poi Li as he tried to remain expressionless.
“So what do you think?” Ainsley asked.
“Okay,” Yuri said, and took a breath. “We have a few scenarios to consider here. Horatio has run off with another girl or boy, and he’s too guilty right now to call Gwendoline and tell her it’s over. Second: He’s had an accident, and the hospital hasn’t identified him—unlikely in this day and age, but possible. Third: He’s dead. We’ll need to check the morgues, but again he should have been identified already. Last option, and the most likely: He’s in trouble with people you really should not be in trouble with.”
“It’s not blackmail?” Ainsley asked; he sounded surprised.
“I’m going to take Gwendoline at her word when she said that she never told him she’s related to you. If this is blackmail, that would mean someone found out.”
“How?” Ainsley snapped.
“Some junior in the legal division got the wrong file by mistake; same thing but with an employee in the finance company handling the trust fund; her mother or grandmother let something slip by accident.” He paused, extrapolating the possibilities. “But if a professional gang did find out, they’d snatch her, not him. Unless…”
“What?”
Yuri glanced at the door Gwendoline had closed behind her. “She’s scamming you.”
“No fucking way!”
“Sir, she has no real bond with you, and she’s excluded from the dynasty with all the wealth, privilege, and prestige that brings.”
“Okay, I’ve only seen her a few times in her life, I admit that, but she knows there’s a place for her in Connexion anytime she wants. She chose to be independent, she worked hard at her exams—and got herself good grades, too. And she’s only seventeen, for Christ’s sake! Girls like that, brought up the way she’s been, they don’t come up with criminal master plans. If she wants money, she can have it. I’m not broke. She just has to ask.”
“All right, acknowledged. So that scenario would be doubtful.”
“We need to find out what’s happened to Horatio,” Poi Li said. “But without any fuss. Which is where you come in. This has to be kept quiet.”
“Poi Li recommended you,” Ainsley said. “She said you were the one we needed for a job like this. I know this is a big ask, but fuck it, this is my family!”
“It’s a logical ask,” Yuri said, trying to make it sound businesslike—although inside he was flying.
“Thanks,” Ainsley said. “I appreciate that, Yuri, I mean it.”
Yuri held up a hand. “This is not a one-person investigation, sir. I understand and appreciate the need for discretion, but I’ll be bringing in some of my team to assist. Not many, but people I trust.”
“Of course.”
“If this is ordinary bad, I need to get started right now.”
“What’s ordinary bad?” Ainsley asked.
“He’s got a dependency problem, or he’s placed some bets offline—neither of which he’ll tell Gwendoline about, for all their lovey-dovey honesty with each other. If he owes money to those kind of people, then right now he’s in some blacked-out room having the shit kicked out of him. The danger there is that once they break him—and they will—he’ll call Gwendoline, begging for money. So first priority, we install a link diversion on her altme. If he calls, that gets routed straight to me.”
“Whatever you need, whatever it costs. Just get it done.”
“Yes, sir.”
—
Yuri called Jessika Mye while he was still in the rickety old lift on his way back down to the entrance hall. She’d joined the Monitoring Office as one of its first recruits, at age thirty-four—a Hong Kong native who’d immigrated to Akitha, where she’d got her exobiology master’s degree. When he asked her why she’d come back to Earth, she’d told him that Akitha was too quiet for her, and she wanted the money to buy full telomere treatments. Yuri could sort of appreciate that; the Utopial principle strove for egalitarianism, but not even their society could afford to provide telomere treatments for the entire population from such an early age. Akitha democratically decided that, for a thirty-four-year-old, it was vanity, not necessity. Jessika was attractive and clearly motivated to remain so. Yuri quite liked that determination, to be able to reject past choices with confidence if they didn’t meet her own demanding standard, so he gave her the job there and then.
“What’s up, chief?” she asked.
“We have a new investigation. I can’t even give you a priority rating, it’s so high.”
“Sounds cool. What is it?”
“Missing person.”
“Seriously?”
Yuri smiled at the doubt in her tone. The lift reached the ground floor, and he tugged the cage door open. “Oh, yes.”
“Why the hell are we doing a missing persons?”