Read Online Death Sentence by Roger MacBride Allen - Free Book Online Page B

single person, made both sides of that procedure difficult. Hannah was hunched over the one small fold-out table on the lower deck, struggling to keep her notes and materials from spreading out too far and falling to the deckplates or getting wedged in some bit of fold-out gadgetry. Jamie was in the pilot's station, which had the benefit--and distraction--of affording a spectacular view of the stars but also had even less to offer in the way of flat surfaces.
    Jamie squared his data displays and notebooks up as much as he could, stood up, stretched, and made his way down the rope ladder to the lower deck. As he did, he glanced upward at the upside-down view of the Irene Adler 's interior, and felt a brief twinge of completely irrational guilt as he did so. So much effort had been taken, so many risks had been run, so that they could search that ship's interior as soon as possible--and yet neither of them had so much as gone aboard her since their launch from BSI HQ.
    Hannah pretty much had dinner ready by the time he got down the ladder--but she hadn't had to do much. There was barely room enough to store food, let alone provide a real galley. Instead they had self-heating ready-to-eat meals in disposable containers. The BSI worked hard to make the meals palatable, and for the most part they succeeded, but mealtime aboard the Sholto was definitely not high cuisine. Hannah pulled the activation tab on a mealpack and handed it to Jamie.
    "So," he asked. "Made any progress?"
    "Some," said Hannah. "I think I've got a better handle on what Wilcox was supposed to be doing."
    "I still don't get why Commander Kelly couldn't brief us on that."
    "I'd assume it was because Kelly simply didn't know," Hannah said. "You haven't drawn any courier jobs like that yet, but they happen. The BSI Diplomatic Liaison Office will get in a request from the Diplomatic Service, or maybe even from some other agency that needs something moved quietly from here to there. It might be that no one in BSI-DLO would even know what, exactly, the message or item was, but if all they're doing is handing the task to us, they don't need to know--and neither do we. The argument is that it can be safer for the agent on the job not to know--and for it to be generally known that courier runs are double-blind. No one's going to hunt you down and torture you three months after you get back to find out what was in the envelope if everybody--good guys and bad guys--know that you didn't know yourself."
    "I suppose," Jamie said, peeling back the top of his mealpack to reveal a reasonable facsimile of a piping-hot cordon bleu, "but somebody killed Wilcox for some reason, and being ignorant didn't save him. Maybe he could have protected himself if he had known the score."
    "He started out ignorant," Hannah said, opening her own mealpack. She smiled, and Jamie knew why. French onion soup again, one of her favorites. "But we don't know whether or not he stayed that way. He could have been briefed in whole or in part while he was on Metran. And even if he wasn't briefed, he couldn't have helped but learn some things just by following his instructions."
    "How so?" Jamie asked between bites.
    "He was supposed to meet up with a certain Metrannan, Learned Searcher Hallaben, who worked at the City Geriatrics Research Center. Hallaben was supposed to hand him a document--no mention of any decryption key--and Wilcox was to bring it back to BSI-DLO for delivery to the ultimate customer. You spot anything wrong with that picture?" There was a faint smile at the corner of Hannah's mouth.
    He thought for a moment but couldn't see any obvious red lights on the board. "The closest I can come is the bit about only one document. From what Kelly said to us, they recovered the document itself from the Adler 's computers--presumably from the onboard secure file system. But if this was a really secure operation, they would have used two couriers--one for the document and one for the decrypt key.