Memetic Drift - J.N. Chaney Page 0,7

to hold you to that,” I told her.

3

When Andrea said it might be difficult to get close to Lucien Klein, she wasn’t kidding. Yes, the man was in Italy under the name Thurston Michael, and yes he was the associate director for The 3000 Initiative. Based on those two facts, it would be reasonable to imagine a fairly simple scenario: I show up at his place of work, I ask his secretary to let me speak with him, and twenty minutes later we’re each sipping an espresso while we discuss how nice the weather is on the sunny and beautiful Italian peninsula.

What actually happened was nothing like that. The place was located inside a virtually impregnable corporate sanctuary. The building stood completely alone in an industrial park about ten miles outside of the city, and the cannons on the rooftop had a commanding view of the entire parking lot. Anyone who wanted to get inside had to submit to a retinal scan at the door. I wasn’t going in that way without the whole team backing me.

The first time I arrested this man I was an Arbiter and was able to throw considerable legal weight around, even on Luna where his company was based. The situation now was completely different. As a spy working for an organization that had no official existence, I had no law enforcement authority backing my plays. I sat outside in my rental car for a few long minutes, then noticed a small team of maintenance workers heading in the back door of the building. There was an armed guard there, but no retinal scan.

I pulled out of the parking lot and drove to a small hotel seven minutes away. I rented a room under an assumed name, then called the monitor assigned to Klein. There was no reply—I hadn’t expected one—and I left a message to meet me that night at a nearby bar called Giosue.

I went out for dinner at the kind of place tourists wouldn’t normally go, ordered the risotto alla pescatora because it was the first entrée listed on the menu, and then wandered over to Giosue about a half hour before the monitor would have expected to meet me there. I had never met this person before in my life, but they must have spotted me right away. I was drinking some Neapolitan cocktail when a man approached me on my left and said, “That isn’t really the most popular local choice.”

I turned to look at him. I don’t know what I was expecting, really, but he wasn’t it. Everyone on my own team was more of a paramilitary type than a true spy, but this man was so anonymous I wasn’t sure I would recognize him if I saw him again five minutes later. Middle-aged to elderly, hair mostly white, clothing tasteful but generic for the area. There was nothing about him that stood out at all.

I replied, as I was expected to, by saying, “I wouldn’t know. I’m more of an Ouzo man.”

He nodded in response, then turned and walked out the back door of the bar. I swallowed the last of my cocktail and followed him a minute later. When I approached, he was looking up at the stars in silence.

“How do you even watch the guy?” I asked. “That place is a fortress.”

“I’m with the company contracted to handle maintenance. We go in through the service entrance so—”

“No retinal scan? Yeah. That’s the same strategy I was thinking of using.”

“I can get you a job, and even make sure you’re assigned to his floor. After that, it’s on you. If he decides to pitch a fit the second he sees you, I can’t intervene. All I can do is get a message to our people.”

“Understood,” I said. Then, when my curiosity got the best of me, I added, “Doesn’t it get a little, I don’t know, tiresome?”

“What, maintaining their systems?” He sounded surprised. “No, not at all. It’s just my job. Anything else I do is extra.”

I couldn’t understand it at first; I’d been out of the real world for such a long time. I used to design cars, what seemed like ages ago. Now I can’t even imagine doing anything that doesn’t involve getting shot at. The idea of just going to work every day and tinkering with the systems in this corporate building, knowing all along that you had this secret job as well, didn’t track at first.

But that’s when it made sense to me.