Read Online So Vile a Sin by Ben Aaronovitch, Kate Orman - Free Book Online Page B

sold beauty aides. The Qink looked at her and then quickly pulled its braincase halfway into 58
    its chest. ‘Me different Qink, me don’t follow old ways – no favours, no guns.’
    ‘Relax,’ said Roz. ‘I want to buy a wig.’
    The Qink’s braincase emerged cautiously. ‘Just a wig?’
    ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘And while you’re at it, you can tell me where I can get some depilatory cream.’
    She knew as soon as she stepped inside that her room had been turned over. It was a good job, a frighteningly professional job, with everything replaced exactly as it had been found. Too exactly – that’s what gave it away. They didn’t know who she was, then. If they had known she was an Adjudicator they would never have risked searching her room.
    Roz put down her bag and checked the wardrobe door. The single hair she’d stuck across the bottom was intact. A very slick search indeed.
    How had they tracked her? Not through the bearer bonds: they were untraceable. Not through the Qinks: they never squealed and you couldn’t use a mind probe on them. Private Susanti, assuming that Mei Feng had kept her word, would remember nothing more suspicious than a failed date. Besides, she’d given Susanti the wrong name. The last security check point she’d passed through, the last definite visual image of her, would have been the automatic simcord taken when she used the transmat to get down from Aegisthus Station. Two days ago.
    Why had they taken so long to find her? It suggested that they were following an electronic trail. No matter how careful you were, no one moved through the Empire without leaving a trace.
    The Order then? No, they would have just grabbed her at the first opportunity.
    Hell, grabbed nothing – she’d have been shot while trying to escape. To the corrupt hierarchy of the Adjudicators she was a threat because she knew too much, and the honest ones thought she was bent. Either way you sliced it, she’d have been toast by now.
    Roz stripped off her clothes and put the fresher on STEAM BATH
    + OPTIONS. She wrapped herself in a bath towel. The room had 59
    undoubtedly been kinked for full EM spectrum visuals as well as audio. It was what she would have done.
    Imperial Intelligence was too slick and well resourced to leave an operative exposed the way Mr Cheesecloth had been. Standard operating procedure dictated a team of at least six watchers with heavy electronic backup. So it wasn’t double-eye. Cheesecloth had to be a freelance working on his own – all his bugs were monitoring her room and probably the hotel’s own security systems.
    There was a limit to how many devices a single person could operate – which explained why he was taking a risk of being obvious outside. He’d known where Roz was staying, but up until she’d walked in the room, not what she looked like. Now he could track her when she left the hotel.
    Roz stepped into the fresher. She normally hated steam baths, but the steam would mask her visual and IR signature while the reflective tiles would clutter up the short- and long-wave radar.
    Cheesecloth would be relying on UV alone and that, Roz knew from experience, was next to useless.
    Still, she was careful to act natural, washing her hair first before moving on down. Only when she bent down to wash her legs did she retrieve the Doctor’s whatsit and the medical scanner from beneath the drain filter. Feeling terribly undignified bent over in that position she quickly thumbed the scanner to maximum gain and pushed the power output into the red. She hoped Cheesecloth was enjoying the view – it was the last he was going to get.
    She straightened up and listened in satisfaction to the sound of frying bugs.
    It was a slightly too short and remarkably bad-tempered Skagette that walked into the Yellow Oasis later that afternoon. The wig was styled with a swept fringe that almost completely covered her right eye. It was hot, and she kept having to spit out hair, but it did