Ragnarok (The Echo Case Files)

  * *

  The injury to Bartholomew Vincente’s leg was mild enough that a couple of hours in hospital was all he needed before the HCPD could haul him into a cell in the Central Precinct. By the time Ramirez had extricated herself from the throng of press and fuss at First Landing, got to the precinct and cleaned herself up, Vincente had been put in an interrogation room.

  He sat cool, calm and collected, even when Ramirez read what meagre rights he had as a Marshals’ prisoner and he declined the offer of a lawyer. When he leaned forwards, cuffs rattling against the metal table, and confessed that he had led Ragnarok’s cell on Thor, he spoke in a voice so level he might as well have been ordering a beer in a bar after a long day of work.

  ‘Which means I ordered the attacks on yourself and Graham Locke, the Second Precinct, the other strikes from the protests. Which means I’ve participated in the smuggling and utilisation of stolen military goods,’ he finished.

  Ramirez tapped her stylus on her pad. ‘Who’s Ragnarok’s leader?’

  ‘You don’t think it’s me?’

  ‘You’re an ex-military mercenary hiring other ex-military mercenaries for a specific purpose. Ragnarok is driven, seeping into politics, crime, the police. There’s a vision here, even if that vision is no more than theatrics to appeal to the masses. You didn’t make that video. You wouldn’t even order that video be made. No, I don’t think you’re the leader.’

  Vincente’s lips twitched. ‘You would be right. But I’m not going to say any more on that subject.’

  ‘Not even to save your own skin? There’s quite an impressive array of charges I have to level against you.’

  ‘You have me red-handed on some. Others, you’ve only got me because I cooperated and confessed.’

  Ramirez didn’t want to admit he was right, though she had enough to send him down for life. ‘Why admit so readily?’

  ‘In part? Because I’ve just told you exactly how betrayed Graham Locke’s been by those closest to him, and the press will love that. They’ll love to see how a man as pure as he can have Ragnarok in his bed without knowing it.’

  ‘I thought you wanted him killed, not with his career marred. Or is this second best?’

  ‘It won’t mar his career.’ Vincente snorted. ‘They’ll love him for the tragedy. But everyone in the Confederacy will know of Ragnarok, won’t they. Everyone will see how far our reach stretches and how close we can get. To crime, which we own on Thor. To the HCPD, so many of who were and are on our payroll. And now, to the politicians. We are everywhere.’

  Ramirez planted her hands on the table. ‘You‘re done. I‘ve taken down your people. I‘ve got your rifles. And now you‘re gone, too. With the HCPD cleaned out, you won’t last weeks.’

  ‘You have no idea who you’re dealing with.’ Vincente shook his head. ‘You think our interests go no further than Thor? Our influence? You think we could have acquired military-grade rifles if we were just of Thor? You think we could have walked in and controlled the entire underworld here in a matter of weeks if we were not already organised, funded, ready? Thor is just the beginning.’

  Ramirez found her eyes locked onto his, dark, intense, and still with exquisite poise. ‘The beginning of what?’

  ‘The Null War has brought out what is rotten in humanity and our government. They use the threat as an excuse for us to destroy ourselves. We will fight for freedom, Commander. And the next step is soon. Very soon.’ Vincente sat back in his chair. ‘What time is it?’

  Ramirez looked at her watch. ‘Almost 1500.’

  ‘Then I think I‘m done talking for now. I‘m sure we’ll have plenty of discussions in the future.’

  ‘Actually,’ she said, standing and picking up her pad. ‘You’ll be shipped off to Odin and with this confession there’s no need I should ever worry myself with you again.’

  It wasn’t strictly the truth. Not if Vincente was honest about the designs and danger of Ragnarok, because if there was ever a job for the Marshals, a terrorist organisation infiltrating all manner of society before enacting its violent ends to topple the government was it. But she didn’t want to show Vincente how much his calm certainty had rattled her.

  Absolute fanaticism like that was something rare in the galaxy these days.

  She left him sat and cuffed in the interrogation room to be handled by the HCPD. Although she didn’t trust them, not fully, the public eye had fallen on Vincente and his arrest and there was far, far too much attention for him to be let go like Jovak had been. And with Navarro’s admissions and Beyer’s eventual action against his list, a multitude of corrupt officers had been identified and isolated. If they didn’t have them all, those left would want to keep their heads down for now.

  Beyer was stood in the bullpen outside, clutching a cup of his evil coffee. It was hard to tell whether the situation or the drink caused his scowl. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He confessed. Folded completely. It’s mad.’ Ramirez sighed. ‘He seems to think Ragnarok have their claws sunk into every corner of the Confederacy and that even if they’ve been gutted on Thor, they’ll strike back somewhere else, harder and faster.’

  ‘Do you think that’s true?’

  ‘I think they had the contacts to get their hands on military-grade munitions. He might be bluffing but it’s evident they have off-world influence. And I still have no idea about the team who produced the more public face, who’ve been pushing these ideals.’

  ‘At least they’re gutted on Thor. He said there’s, what, no more than half a dozen left now? And he was the leader.’

  ‘Except he wasn’t kind enough to say who gave him his marching orders.’ Ramirez exhaled. ‘What did Singh say?’

  ‘In between the floods of tears?’ Beyer wrinkled his nose. ‘They had her fiancé. He was set for a business trip off-world, and they grabbed him on his way back from the spaceport. They’ve been blackmailing her ever since. I reckon he’s dead, but they could lie and she was in close with Locke. She’s been feeding them information all along, she put the beacon in his pocket. Oh, and she admitted she’d told the chauffeur where to drop you off and where the Ragnarok sniper could find you after your date with Locke.’

  ‘It wasn’t a-’ She cut herself off. She didn’t care what Beyer thought. It was hard, though, to not feel sympathy for someone else whose life had been ruined by Ragnarok. Navarro had been foolish, trapped, but there had at least been his own decisions in and amongst the manipulation. Singh had just been a victim. ‘We should be gentle with her. And question Vincente to try to find this fiancé.’

  ‘If he talks. Soon, he’s Odin’s problem.’

  ‘There’s still a huge amount of work to be done here. The HCPD is going to need to open its doors to Internal Affairs, maybe even an inquiry from the governor’s office. The press will have a field day and a lot of hard questions are going to be asked. And that’s even before the HCPD gets to do its work on the streets of Hardveur.’

  ‘And that’s not something you vaunted Marshals can deal with?’

  ‘It is, and I mean no disrespect in this case, too minor for us.’ Not to mention we have all of a dozen investigators, and we’re down one. She looked Beyer in the eye. ‘It’s going to be a hard few weeks upcoming, Commissioner.’

  He folded his arms across his chest. ‘You can speak straight, Commander.’

  ‘There will be questions about how this happened on your watch. There will be questions about the state of the HCPD before Ragnarok. They will find issues to question. If you want to do everyone a favour, including yourself, Mister Beyer, I would resign.’

  ‘I really don’t think -’

  ‘I am doing you a kindness, Beyer. You can resign in the next few days and cooperate fully with the inquiry which is going to happen, or you can be front and centre when any such inquiry looks for a scapegoat. And I know there will be an inquiry, and I know they will look to you, because I am going to write a report making it all happen.’

  Beyer’s ex
pression twisted. ‘I helped you -’

  ‘You did your job,’ said Ramirez coldly. ‘After months of not doing it. And my gratitude for that is having this conversation with you now, so you can retire with dignity and not be dragged through the mud as the man who was on the payroll of Ragnarok’s enemies and didn’t have enough control of the HCPD to stop terrorists from getting their claws in. And – what?’

  He’d wasn’t looking at her, was focusing on something over her shoulder, and she turned to see officers gathering around the screen on the wall. The feed that had been piping constant, repeating news of the attack and Locke’s entry into the senatorial race had stopped and the view had changed to footage of a space station surrounded by wreckage.

  She blinked. ‘Is that...?’

  Someone turned up the volume and her thoughts were lost with the blaring of the news reader’s voice. ‘This, just in - an explosion has rocked the Odin Shipyards, the central Confederate Fleet base in the system. We‘re still getting information but it looks like this is no accident, even though sabotage doesn’t match past Null tactics. Already estimates of casualties are counted in the dozens...’

  Movement caught the corner of Ramirez’s eye, and she looked around to see the interrogation room door open as two HCPD officers led Vincente, hands now cuffed behind her back, out and towards the cells. He limped, his leg still wrapped in the regenerative cast to work its way through the vicious injury, but he was still perfectly poised, perfectly controlled, and only glanced around the room. First his gaze landed on the screen with the newsreader still babbling about half-baked first impressions of the attack on Odin.

  Then he looked at Ramirez. And smiled.

  17

  ‘They did this, Tych.’ Ramirez scowled as she shoved clothes into her duffel bag.

  ‘I believe you, Chief.’ Tycho’s face, filling the pad Ramirez had propped against the windowsill so they could talk while she packed the apartment, was pale but sincere. ‘It sounds like them.’

  ‘It sounds crazy. To go from small-time local thugs to planting a bomb on a military shipyard?’

  ‘Small-time local thugs who were running this planet. Who got their hands on shipments of serious military hardware. Who had serious ex-military personnel on their payroll. When you peel off the layers, it doesn’t sound so crazy. But I have one important question.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Are Delta Team dead?’

  Ramirez wrinkled her nose. ‘No. I saw Durand on a short interview. She and Ibrahim are fine.’

  ‘I’ll settle for “disgraced”, then.’

  ‘Disgraced?’

  ‘Odin Shipyards blew up while they were on it. That’s a pretty big failure to maintain law and order.’

  Ramirez sighed. ‘It is.’

  ‘So Locke wasn’t evil after all, huh?’

  ‘It’d seem not.’

  ‘This does raise one more question.’ Tycho smirked. ‘If he wasn’t trying to get friendly to throw you off his trail or set you up to be murdered, why did he take you to a super-fancy restaurant?’

  Ramirez stared at her partner’s face and decided she wasn’t going to answer that. She drew a deep breath. ‘How‘re you feeling?’

  ‘Less like I‘m going to be murdered in my bed.’

  ‘I’ll have you shipped to Glitnir, Tych, as soon as I can.’

  Tycho waved a hand. ‘I‘m not going to be running around in uniform any time soon, Chief. Don’t you worry about me, the service will take care of me. Maybe I can recuperate on a hot beach - some place they serve drinks out of half-coconuts with little umbrellas in them. How‘re you getting back to Forseti?’

  ‘Flying coach, of course.’

  ‘And Harrigan?’

  ‘Already gone on the same transport taking Singh, Navarro, and Vincente to Odin. But speaking of departure, I have a car picking me up in about ten minutes.’ Ramirez straightened, swinging her bag over her shoulder. ‘So I should wrap up. I‘m sorry I couldn’t stop by.’

  ‘You need to get back to work,’ Tycho said, voice firm. ‘The Boss is going to need you there if there’s going to be fallout from Odin and from here.’

  ‘I’ll call you as soon as I can,’ Ramirez said. She killed the pad’s vid-call and tucked it in the inside pocket of her uniform jacket, which she knew was going to get her odd looks the whole trip back home.

  Well, the trip to Glitnir. It was the closest thing to home, these days.

  The apartment was gloomy and empty as she left the bedroom. Tycho’s screens had been packed up and sent to be shipped off. Harrigan’s meagre belongings had been sent with him. He’d been all smirks and smiles when the MPs had cuffed him, and before they’d carted him off out of the Central Precinct, he’d turned to her and winked. ‘Don’t worry, Commander Darlin’, I’ll write,’ he’d said. And then he was gone.

  Leaving her to wait here on her own, and all of a sudden it wasn’t just the room that loomed before Ramirez, huge and empty and lonely, but a long transport journey, and a long career.

  She made herself one last cup of coffee. Turned on the screen on the wall and tried to find an ultranet feed that wasn’t the same repeating news but could distract her for five minutes. It was a relief when there was a knock at the door, so she shouldered her bag before she headed over, expecting it to be the taxi driver.

  It was Graham Locke, his sunny, polished politician’s smile back with a vengeance. ‘Commander. I’m so glad I caught you - is that coffee I smell?’

  Ramirez swallowed. ‘Mister Locke. I’ll take that as a subtle hint for me to invite you in.’

  ‘I would like to talk to you, and I find it terribly awkward to hold a conversation across a doorway. I don’t think we had a chance to properly discuss matters at the Central Precinct, and I do find myself talking more freely if I can relax with a comfy chair and a decent cup of coffee. And that smells like proper coffee; you have good taste.’

  Curiosity overcame dissatisfaction. She gestured him inside and went to pour a couple of mugs from the boiling coffee machine. ‘Actually, Lieutenant Tycho has fine taste. I’ve spent too long drinking processed coffee on starships to really appreciate the good stuff.’

  Locke had the good grace to look awkward as he followed her. ‘How is the Lieutenant? I thought it imprudent to return to the hospital after the press decided to stalk me there.’

  ‘Recovering,’ said Ramirez, keeping her back to him.

  ‘Back in uniform in no time?’

  A muscle twitched in the corner of her jaw. She poured the second mug. ‘She’ll probably never walk again.’

  When she turned, she almost walked into him. He’d crossed the room as she’d clattered with the coffee machine, and only now did she realise how tall he was. For once his perfect poise was gone, and he wrung his hands together, handsome features twisting with awkward tension. ‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’

  Ramirez looked up to meet his gaze. ‘Here’s your coffee.’

  ‘You saved my life.’ This was blurted out, and he took the mug from her as if it would distract from his sudden lack of composure. ‘Not just from the sniper, but in the museum, you went out there when you knew they were going to kill you.’

  ‘It was my job -’

  ‘Five minutes before you were trying to arrest me. You thought I was corrupt. I didn’t even trust you; perhaps it was wrong of me to paint you all with the same brush as Beyer, but he’s been a corrupt fool for years, and the moment Ragnarok started working under my umbrella, the police seemed more interested in pinning the blame on me than trying to root out this murderous weed. I should have trusted you.’

  ‘If you thought I was out to get you, why the dinner?’

  ‘I wanted to trust you. And I wanted to warn you about Beyer. I wanted to hope, Commander, that you were different from the others. But I couldn’t assume. Some people in your line of work would have thought it a feather in their caps to bring down a man protesting against the Confederacy, associated with terrorist
s or otherwise. I had to be sure.’

  ‘I would apologise for not trusting you. But I’m not sorry. You were too close to Ragnarok.’

  ‘More than I thought.’ Locke scowled. ‘Anita. I still can’t believe it. She was with me since I first ran for Mayor, but they got to her? And she couldn’t tell me, I couldn’t do anything about it?’ He shook his head. ‘You asked me about Stephen Wainwright, when we met at the hospital.’

  ‘You lied and said you didn’t know him.’

  ‘I was rattled,’ Locke confessed. ‘Anita had taken on a whole new array of staff in the last couple of months, former military men she said couldn’t find work. It would do them some good, she said, and make a statement about the Confederacy not looking after our veterans. They were manual labour, good for setup before an event. Wainwright was one, then he didn’t show up for work and suddenly you cared who he was.’ He sighed. ‘I’m sorry I lied, Commander. I wanted to find out more before I took it to law enforcement.’

  ‘You told Singh where you were after you dropped me off, the night we had dinner.’ It wasn’t a question.

  ‘Not quite. I had an event the next day and she’d given the chauffeur strict instructions on where to go and when. So my schedule didn’t get pushed back and I got a good night’s sleep. Why?’

  ‘Because she knew where I’d be dropped off, and had Wainwright waiting to shoot me on the way home.’ Ramirez sipped her coffee to hide her expression. ‘He went missing because he failed and I shot him.’

  Locke pulled away, going to the window to stare at the traffic that zoomed along this quiet corner of Hardveur. She was going to miss the view, Ramirez realised – that simple connection to regular, normal life that escaped her so often elsewhere. ‘You would have thought that war from some outside force would bring humanity closer together,’ said Locke eventually. ‘It seems more determined to rip itself apart under the pressure.’

  ‘There will always be people who prey on weakness for their own advantage. Ragnarok are the finest example of the darkest of humanity. Which means those of us who have the will and the means have to fight when we can.’ Ramirez joined him, cupping her hands around the mug of coffee.

  For the first time she could look at him without agonising about what was going on under the surface. He was less poised here, less the consummate politician with his smiles and his control. He’d appeared relaxed at dinner, but she suspected that, too, was its own mask, and she’d not studied him when they were fighting for their lives. Now there was worry creasing the corners of his eyes, and it added a human touch he’d lacked.

  ‘I want to do that,’ he said after another pause. ‘That’s what I think the Senate needs. I meant every word of my speech; I’ve always meant every piece of rhetoric. I think too many people forget the individual in this battle for survival. If we sacrifice people deemed unnecessary, abandon the forgotten, then what in the galaxy are we trying to save? We keep our flesh and blood, but we lose our hearts.’ He looked at her. ‘Do you believe me?’

  Ramirez blinked. ‘What does my belief matter?’

  ‘Because I think that you and I, Commander, are not so different in our cause. And we have spent long enough keeping each other at bay, suspicious. I would rather we were allies.’

  She hesitated, then decided trust began with honesty. ‘Show me, first. With more than just talk.’

  He gave a gentle snort and looked back at the window. ‘I envy you, Commander.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Locke put down the coffee and turned for the door. ‘Thank you for the drink. I have the remains of my security and my new chauffeur waiting downstairs, and they’ll be beside themselves if I’m up here too long.’

  But she was in no mood for evasion now this was all over, and reached to grab the elbow of his well-tailored jacket. ‘I am not my mother, Mister Locke,’ she warned. ‘You can’t feel like you’re getting her acceptance just by getting mine.’

  ‘I want your approval because I respect you, Commander. You risked life and limb for the pursuit of justice. To save my life when you had little reason to.’

  She didn’t answer that point. ‘Why do you envy me?’

  ‘Purpose.’ Locke pulled his sleeve free. ‘Men and women spend their entire lives trying to have purpose and, above all, to make a difference. They question themselves every day, wondering if they matter, wondering if they have any impact on the galaxy around them. I’m not immune to such doubt. I might have opportunities before me, but if I fail, I’m nothing more than some washed up demagogue, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”.’ He shrugged. ‘You’ve changed the fate of a city in a matter of days. And in a matter of seconds you saved my life. One thing you never have to worry about, Sara Ramirez, is making a difference.’

  Then he left, sweeping out of the apartment with his long-legged stride, full of the presence and determination that made him the most important man in any room, giving her nothing more than a smile which, for once, properly reached his eyes and didn’t look practised.

  And, for the second time that hour, the room felt much emptier.

  Ramirez scowled to herself, sipping her coffee and turning to the view through the floor-to-ceiling windows of Hardveur traffic. The city bustled about its business before her, the same as it had yesterday, the same as it would tomorrow.

  She’d made a difference, he’d said. But unless you were up to your neck in trouble, you couldn’t tell anything had happened here at all.