Sarda went on, “With the deal just about to close, we can’t afford word getting out that there might be any kind of problem. We want to keep the regular authorities and agencies out of it. So my question is, is this the kind of `mysterious thing’ that you investigate?” He drank from his glass and sat back, giving Kieran as long as he needed to think about it.
Kieran looked down at Guinness, stretched out by the table in an attitude of having decided there was nothing of immediate interest going on in the world—but with an eye left open just to be sure. Kieran flipped him a pretzel. Guinness snapped it out of the air, moving just his head, then settled down again with a few contented thumps of his tail against the floor.
“Some dog you have there,” Sarda commented.
“Oh yes. He can be a good friend to have around.” Clearly, someone had known a lot about Sarda’s affairs. Someone he had confided in too much, possibly? Finally, Kieran said, “I can imagine a lot of stress, a lot of fear, to put it bluntly, in facing the thought of going through something like that.”
“Well, yeah . . . Like I just said. They didn’t offer that kind of compensation for nothing.”
“Was there anyone you can think of that you talked to about it?” Kieran asked. That would have been a fairly common reaction. “Someone that you confided in about how you felt?”
Sarda seemed about to answer, and then looked puzzled, as if suddenly finding he had nothing to say. In the end he just answered vaguely. “I don’t know. You’d think there would have been. . . . But no, I really can’t think of anyone.”
“You just bottled up the fears and doubts? Kept them to yourself?”
Sarda shrugged. “Uh-huh. I guess I must have.”
“It seems a little odd. I could see that of an introvert. You don’t strike me as that type.”
“What else can I tell you?”
Kieran drank slowly, all the time looking across at Sarda, inviting him to see the obvious. When no response seemed forthcoming, he said, to help things along a little, “Only one person could have known those codes and passwords, passed all the ID checks, Leo.”
Sarda shook his head, refusing to consider it. “It’s too crazy,” he insisted.
“Is it? The original was . . . what, at midnight last night? How is it deactivated?”
“Plasma decomposition. It’s virtually instantaneous.”
Kieran asked the question that he had been wondering. “Who presses the button or whatever?”
“It’s automatic—the final phase of a timed sequence that I initialized myself when we commenced the process four days ago,” Sarda answered.
So that was how they had gotten around the problem. Kieran noted that Sarda referred unhesitatingly to “myself.”
“So there’s nothing left now, right? No way of knowing what got vaporized,” Kieran said.
“Uh . . . right.”
“How convenient.”
Kieran let the implication speak for itself. Sarda might have had an erratic component, but he was no fool. He had probably arrived at the inevitable conclusion himself already but needed to hear it from somebody else before he could accept it. The original was still alive and well, loose in the city somewhere. And it had a grudge.
“But it doesn’t make any sense,” Sarda protested. “All the tests show I’m indistinguishable by any measure anyone can come up with. So if the original had worked out some kind of plan like this before he went in, I ought to know about it. But I don’t. So how could it be him?”
“That’s what we have to find out,” Kieran replied.
Sarda looked at him uncertainly. “Does that mean you’ll help?” he asked.
Kieran was too curious to walk away now. The Sarda he was talking to came across as personable enough, even if just at the moment probably not exactly at his most composed ever; the Sarda who had fleeced him had to be a very different person. Yet they were supposed to be indistinguishable. “I suppose I’d like to know the answers too,” he said.
“Don’t you usually expect to get paid for something like this?” Sarda asked.