“Did Citizen Wilhoit ever, ah, threaten anyone for trying to get Silvers out of their work area?” Lacey asked.
The clerk grimaced, unwilling to answer the question but unable to avoid it even in his own mind. “Nobody tried to. We were afraid. The whole thing was . . . wrong. Citizen Wilhoit was ignoring it all, pretending that nothing was going on. Except that when this person went up to the Citizen’s desk and whispered to him, they would leave together. Again and again. . . .”
Lacey looked over at the slab of oiled mahogany. Most top executives would have placed their desks on whatever part of the outer wall gave them the best view. Because Wilhoit disliked heights, his desk was central. The ceiling lights pooled brightly around the desk and the serpentine rings of foliage about it.
Lacey stepped over to the plants where the Outermost circle of them lapped against the elevator. Festoons of tubing to carry water and nutrients linked the individual pots. He touched a squat plant whose leaves were like narrow fingers streaked with yellow and green. “Really likes plants, hmm? Don’t any of them have flowers?”
“They’re Citizen Wilhoit’s hobby, not mine. If you want to learn about them, you’ll have to ask his gardener.”
“Even a gardener?” Lacey said mildly. There was a flower, after all; a pink geranium in a pot beside the elevator. Part of what snaked from its foliage was not plastic tubing but wire.
“Of course a gardener,” Ashby was saying, but Lacey was no longer listening to him. The agent had unsheathed his hand scanner and was recording every detail of the apparatus connected to the geranium. The room’s three integral scanners covered it in the sense that if it had been empty, at least two lenses’ would have born on every centimeter of surface. In practice, although opaque objects over 80 cm high were strictly controlled, there were blind angles near the floor which only spot checks by human operatives would record. By chance or otherwise, the geranium was in such an angle. Two short loops of wire were clipped to the leaves. At the other end they disappeared into a sealed, fist-sized box tacked to the nearest post of the elevator.
“What’s this?” Lacey called back over his shoulder.
Ashby looked startled. He stood and peered over at where the agent knelt. “No, I told you I don’t know anything about plants.”
“Not the plant, for god’s sake, the box!” Lacey snapped. “You know about electronics, don’t you?”
“Certainly not. I’m an accountant, not a, a technician.”
Lacey’s expression went briefly flat and his scar stood out. Then he began to chuckle. He was laughing fully, open-mouthed, as he walked past the cringing clerk and up the stairs to where his car and driver waited.
* * *
Level 17 was lighted and busy when Lacey got back to the State Building, though it was technically after quitting time and most of the floors below had emptied. Seventeen belonged to the hunters, and the good ones were lonely people. You couldn’t take a companion under a scanner helmet with you. Some investigators worked long hours for the thrill of the chase, some because they tracked criminals by rote and had by now no other way to order their time. Lacey worked like a slave at an oar bench, driven by an overseer no one else could see. No one, at least, besides the Psycomp which had shunted his profile to the attention of Crime Service recruiters at the same time it carved away Lacey’s ability ever to rape another woman.
His Unit Chief was waiting for him, seated on Billings’ chair with her legs crossed at the knees and a glass of something sparkling in her hand. She set the drink down and smiled as the agent approached.
“Hello, Ruby,” Lacey said, sitting on the edge of his own desk. “Slumming or hiding?”
The Crime Service Net was a huge computer complex that directed its agents with more than mechanical skill, but it could not interface them with the world. That job took humans—not hunters themselves, but humans who could understand the terrible loneliness and exhilaration of the hunters, who could cushion them against the realities of housing and economics and sex. Ruby Sutter was one of them, and she was one of the best. Tall for a woman, taller than Lacey’s own meter seventy, she looked slim and fragile until one noted the muscles knotting close beneath the skin; then she looked only slim. Her hair was darker than brunette, and though her normal work did not require her to use the scanners, she wore it in the tight ringlets that would be comfortable beneath a helmet.