CHAPTER 018

DOOR KICKING

Once Wilder was out of the room, I sat back down. The color was slowly returning to Michelle’s face. A server delivered our main courses, canard à la presse in a Madeira sauce, and asked if we needed anything else. We both shook our heads. He bowed slightly and told us to enjoy.

I figured I should put a little time between Wilder’s shock and awe campaign and my follow-up questions. I knew Michelle was a veteran reporter who had probably been through worse, but I had little to gain by harrying her.

“How’s your duck?” I tried.

“I loved him,” she replied absently.

My guess was she wasn’t talking about the duck. “You mean Matteo?”

“Matty wasn’t perfect, but there was something special about him, you know? He always joked that it was the pheromone amplifiers but I knew it was more than that.”

I’d never heard of pheromone amplifiers, though my disdain for modifications in general rendered that point moot. The thought of an implant capable of altering someone’s body chemistry on that level was insane. For that reason, it was the exact type of bleeding-edge tech I could picture Matteo getting to set himself apart from his brothers. He couldn’t outthink Marco or outgrow Luca, but he could certainly outcharm them.

“That’s interesting,” I said blandly, dragging a forkful of meat through its buttery beige sauce. “The chief medic said Matteo didn’t have any cyberware.”

Michelle finished chewing, swallowed, and dabbed her lips with a napkin. A sheen from the marrow-fortified Madeira remained. “Perhaps they did not know where to look. Or he had been kidding. Who is to say?”

I thought back to my interactions with Matteo. Confirmation bias aside, he did have skill for persuasion that bordered on preternatural. I shelved the thought to revisit it later. It was best to focus on facts for now. “How did you two meet?”

“While chasing down the truth about my sister. That much Wilder said was true. I did try to get information from Matty, though only at first. They sent him to get me to back off, after they realized the cease-and-desists did nothing to stop a journalist from pursuing a legitimate story.”

“Did it work?”

Michelle drowned a sad smile with a gulp of her wine. “Do you think I’d be here if it did?”

“Probably not,” I conceded.

“No, Matty was kind. He looked into the prototype case for me, helped me find out all kinds that didn’t make it on the official record.”

“How’d they manage that? I thought there was a public trial.”

“The lawyers argued that many of the details were proprietary, that anything getting out could be harmful to both companies involved. The courts agreed and sealed the records.”

“So what did Matteo tell you?”

“The prototype was a weapon that could turn your body against itself. It was originally designed to help surgeons remove broken or outdated implants from patients without the need for invasive surgery.”

“How’d they manage that?”

“Nanobots. Small enough to be ingested in a capsule, they could be activated remotely to eat away at the bad machinery before dissolving themselves.”

“That sounds almost too good to be true.”

“It was. They never managed to perfect the final part of the process. Once the bots were finished, they would self-destruct.”

“I thought that’s what you said they were supposed to do.”

“I said they were supposed to dissolve themselves. Think of it like a black hole.” She held up her hand, fingers spread, then clenched it into fist. “They are supposed to collapse in upon themselves, right?”

I hoped she’d keep her description brief. It was already getting too scientific for my comfort. “I get the basic concept of an implosion, sure.”

“Of course you do. And you know what comes before a black hole too, yes?”

“A supernova.” I involuntarily pictured a star exploding. My memories predictably shifted the image to a shuttlecraft orbiting Titan. I shook it off before I heard their voices screaming for help. “Wait, you’re telling me this prototype was making nanobots blow up?”

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Michelle fanned all ten fingers to illustrate the blast. “Microexplosions strong enough to send the patient into shock and kill them without breaking skin.”

“And you said this was after the implants were dissolved?” The sinking feeling of uncomfortable awareness began settling in.

“From what Matty told me. He wasn’t exactly a scientist, but I trusted he understood well enough.”

“Your sister. Vance Wilder told me they found her without her cyberware. Is that true?”

“Yes, but—”

“With strange burn marks?”

“They said it was from the thieves’ tools. How could you know that?”

“Matteo was found without any cyberware. He also had strange burn marks.”

“From thieves’ tools? But who on this ship would need to steal? Everyone is already rich. Even the crew members make a handsome wage.”

I was too caught up in my train of thought to address the inadvertent slight. “Someone who isn’t doing it for the money. They’re doing it to make a point.”

I pulled the scrap of Property of Stellar Engines tamper-evident tape from my pocket. “You said that you had Matteo finding everything out about the prototype that you could. Do you think there’s any chance he might have stumbled across the real thing?”

Michelle’s jaw dropped. She reached out and took the scrap, running it between her fingers to prove to herself that it was real. “You found that in his room.”

“Along with burn marks on the carpet that matched up with his wounds. If he had the prototype with him, someone took it after turning it against him. There are only a few people who know what exactly was in that package, what it was capable of. Do you remember who the engineer was who sent it from Madison Defense?”

Michelle pressed her fingertips to her temple in thought. “It was a Burke. Ted Burke. He disappeared right after it happened. Last I heard he was selling his services on the black market to the highest bidder.”

I needed to figure out the last time Ted Burke spoke with Vance Wilder. My attempt at crafting an approach was cut short by Michelle’s desperate questioning. “Was there anything else in Matty’s room? Any other clues?”

I hesitated, then pulled the single-cut diamond from my pocket and placed it on the table.

Her hand drifted to her throat, her fingertips automatically alighting to the single empty mounting. “I noticed it was missing this morning. You must have suspected the worst.”

“You know I don’t comment on open investigations.” My clever callback to our previous conversation didn’t quite have its intended effect. “Go ahead, take it. It’s not evidence.”

She gently picked the diamond up off the tablecloth. Iridescent refractions danced across our half-eaten mains.

“With everything else that was going on, I didn’t take time to report it. I thought it might have something to do with the things that kept getting stolen throughout the ship, but I did not know how because I never take it off. It was a gift from my sister.”

I considered telling her that I had already put that mystery to bed, but she had enough to process as it was. And I had a date with Vance Wilder. By the time our grapefruit-scented olive oil cakes hit the table, we were already in the wind. Apologies, Chef Vatel.

Michelle returned to her quarters to check the manifest for any connections to Ted Burke and any of his past collaborators. Anything she couldn’t turn up, I suspected Archie Tamsworth could. I made a note to seek him out as I headed for Wilder’s suite.

Suddenly Matteo’s inexplicable business meeting with Wilder made sense. Wilder couldn’t legally get his hands on the prototype, but he could pay someone on the inside to do it for him. I wondered how much it had cost for Matteo to betray his family, not only his brothers but the Denaros as well. I hoped it was an amount he was okay dying over.

Wilder continued ignoring my messages and calls. I was giving him the chance to do this like gentlemen, but he was making it hard.

I tried to put myself in Matteo’s shoes. He’s got middle brother syndrome and is looking to stand out. To impress the fancy reporter he’s smitten with, the one who doesn’t go for his usual tough guy act. He needed money fast. She put him onto the prototype, maybe he thought of that for himself, who knew. It was rare, probably one of a kind, so it wasn’t like he could hock it at the local pawn shop. He needed the right buyer. Vance Wilder.

No, that feels loose. Run it backward.

I checked my comex. The prick still wouldn’t respond. I could see the wing where his suite was from where I stood.

Okay, Vance Wilder was looking for a way to embarrass Frankie Denaro, to send a message that he was in the same league, not to be messed with. What better way to do that than to do that in front of all the elitists who doubted him, using a weapon he thought Frankie stole from him? That prototype was his fair and square. He’d show everyone. He put out feelers, heard Matteo was in the lurch, and convinced him to run a job for him. One job, enough to buy his own personal Russo Air and get out from under Denaro’s thumb and the shadow of his brothers once and for all. Except then Wilder double-crossed him, kept the prototype, and waited for the scandal to hit.

Closer, but not quite there yet. I could believe Matteo swiping the prototype from the warehouse. I could even see him sweet-talking Frankie into giving him the unofficial chief of security slot on the Express. What I didn’t buy was that he’d be capable of getting Vance Wilder onto the guest list without anyone noticing. It also didn’t explain how Emilia Benoit was involved. Someone had gone out of their way to kill her in a very specific manner traceable to a select few people. There had to be a reason.

And since Vance fucking Wilder wouldn’t respond to my comex, I guessed I’d have to beat it out of him. I pounded on his door three times and waited to see how the prick was going to wriggle past me while I was standing on his front step.

“Open the door, Wilder. It’s Miller.”

Silence.

I didn’t make a habit out of kicking down multiple doors in the same week, but I also didn’t have any rule against it. I took three big steps backward and squared up. Right as I was about to take off, a heavy hand clamped down on my shoulder.

“Hold it right there, sir.”