Retrieval Artist 07 Duplicate Effort by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Author:Kristine Kathryn Rusch [Rusch, Kristine Kathryn]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-03-07T21:21:12.750000+00:00

“Worse,” he said.

She frowned, clearly thinking about that. “More than once?”

“More than once,” he said.

“And you survived.” She said that more to herself than to him.

“I’m tough that way,” he said.

She was silent for a long moment. He could see how hard she was thinking. It was as if her universe had shifted again.

He hated doing that to her.

“So,” she said, “the only difference is me.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean, you can take care of yourself. You’re afraid for me.”

Sometimes he wished he could talk to Rhonda. Sometimes he wished he could ask her how she dealt with such a bright and intuitive child. Sometimes he wanted to ask how he was supposed to deal with her.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m afraid for you.”

“And you can’t trust someone else to take care of me,” Talia said. “Not just because of Ms. Bowles, but because of the people at that day care center, the ones who were supposed to take care of Emmeline, the ones who killed her.”

Out of the mouths of babes. At least he didn’t wince at her crassness. “That’s right,” he said. She was quiet again. He could sense her trying to come up with a solution.

“You should give me a weapon,” she said.

“That just makes things more dangerous,” he said. “I’d rather use your brain.”

“For what?” she asked.

“Most of my job is research,” he said. “and this might require me to synthesize a lot of information.”

“I thought I couldn’t know about the project,” Talia said.

“But you can help me find out about Ki Bowles’s private life,” he said. “Maybe an old boyfriend killed her.”

“We can only hope,” said his daughter, and the sincerity in her voice—and the fact that he agreed with her—made his heart break.

At her age, his daughter shouldn’t be that cynical.

And he was afraid it would only get worse.

23

DeRicci returned to the raw data from the reports she had been studying. She saw the same pattern the deeper she went into the data—information was missing—but she couldn’t discern its significance. Much as she wanted to stay ahead of her underlings on security topics, this one was over her head. She didn’t have the technical expertise to examine the raw data here in a way that yielded an understanding of the potential security crisis.

The first report had highlighted information missing from the public records placed on the public net and from the port itself.

She flipped to the next report. It showed the same kind of lost information. Only this time, it was hotel records and banking statements—things that shouldn’t have been on the public nets, anyway. She understood why those had vanished. Some bank or hotel had probably protested, and she was about to turn away from the report when she realized that this information had originated at the same time as the information about the port.

Little more than fifteen years ago.

She frowned.

The report told her that the banks in question as well as the hotels had lost their records for that period. The

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