Chương 69: Chapter 68: Plans

The Task Force arrests people who have wronged them. The factions ruin them. We do neither. We simply enable the wrong people to find the right information about them. - Attributed to a regional coordinator of People for Progress, from a training address the organisation denies ever took place Moghli had been awake for thirty hours straight and had never felt better. The room sat above a noodle shop, rented under a name belonging to nobody.

The table took up most of the floor and there was no longer anywhere on it to set down a cup. Monk's end carried the legal filings in three stacks, sorted by which court would take them and how fast. Moghli's end carried the media contacts, sorted by how quickly each would move and how badly each wanted to be first. The middle held their combined notes and the recording.

"Fourth manifest," Monk said, without looking up.

"What's the shipping weight?" Moghli gave him the weight. Then the origin facility, then the receiving facility, then the eight days the crate had spent between two points that were a day apart, because Monk had a habit of asking for one thing and needing three, and it was faster to hand over all of it than to be asked twice. Eleven manifests. Each internally clean.

Each recording a live transfer of a specimen that no legal chain of custody on Earth could account for, because three of the animals moved on those documents were the only individuals of their species anyone had ever registered. Illegal breeding and transfer of animals, especially exotic animals, was a punishable offense, one which was not taken lightly in any court.

"Certifications are the soft point," Monk said. He had his feet up on a stack of his own filings.

"That's where they'll push. Forgery is arguable. A dead practitioner's signature is arguable. Some clerk processed those, and that clerk will disappear inside a week, and there's your work going to waste while everyone waits for a man who isn't coming back."

"So we don't open with this."

"That's right." Monk pulled the top sheet off the nearest stack and turned it round so Moghli could see the highlighted line.

"We need to have him on his back foot by the time this gets pushed to the court." They had not found any of this quickly. Ever since the trial, they'd been searching for anything they could find about Tomas and his family that could be used against them. Monk had randomly come across the first thread months ago, in his first year at the family practice, checking a routine transfer permission for a client who bred hunting hawks.

The registry had listed the same rare specimen at two holding facilities in the same month. He had assumed a clerical error and sent a query, and the query had come back amended within a day, which was the fastest anyone in that office had done anything in living memory. After that it had been six months of deep, dedicated digging. Facility offices that had lost their records conveniently on certain occasions. Practitioners who had retired to other Areas.

A holding site listed on three separate documents that turned out to be just a field with a fence around it, nowhere close to the standard expected of such sites. Moghli had told Monk twice that they were done. Monk had said fine both times and continued digging the following week. Then, sometime around a month back, it had started giving. An archive clerk in Area 9 who took one look at their request and produced a box. A veterinary register in Area 4 that had been sitting in a public reading room they frequented.

A payment trail, which had gone through five entities in four Areas and should have been unrecoverable suddenly becoming clear and accessible through certain sources that had definitely checked before. Moghli had noticed the change. He had raised it with Monk once. Monk had said that you don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

"Recording goes out at nine once Kara sends us the signal," Monk said now.

"Eleven outlets, all at once, nobody gets the exclusive."

"And every one of them runs it inside the hour to stay ahead of the other ten."

"Exactly." Monk laced his fingers behind his head.

"And what does Tomas do?" Moghli had been running that projection for three days, and he had two skills that made him better at it than most people.

"He calls press. Same day, early afternoon at the latest. He can't leave it standing for an evening cycle with the Fayne engagement being announced soon and the principal's seat four months out."

"And what does he tell the press?"

"That it's fabricated." Moghli could hear it already.

"He'll say a voice can be built out of any public recording of a person by anyone with the equipment, which is true, and he'll say his daughter has been targeted because of who her father is, which is also true in a way he'll be able to make sound generous. Then he'll bring up the boy." Monk's mouth twisted.

"The mute one."

"He'll be careful about it. He'll say he was the one who withdrew the charges against him a year ago, when the whole Area wanted him strung up for what happened in that dungeon." Moghli kept his voice level through some effort.

"He'll say he did that as an act of mercy toward a boy who couldn't speak for himself. And every person watching will think, that's a decent man, and half of them will forget the boy was only charged because of what Tomas' daughter told them." Monk let a moment go by.

"Good," he said.

"Because that's the version he has to give, and once he's given it in front of forty recorders he's standing on a marked spot with lights on him and he cannot get off it."

"That's when the second piece strikes." A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"He cannot walk out." Monk sat forward and the lawyer arrived in his voice.

"This is the piece I've been building since the spring and it's the only piece I actually control. The warrant will be live and public by the time he starts speaking. Filed, sealed, on the register, timestamped where anyone can pull it. Which means there is a named Task Force officer whose duty to execute it began that morning, on record, in a document journalists can read on their interfaces, particularly ones we have made privy to the matter and who will be hunting for anything Tomas related to pick on."

"The ones on his premise have taken his money for a decade." Monk tapped the table once.

"Any officer who lets that hour pass has refused or delayed a live warrant which is out in public. That officer is finished, and so is everyone above him who told him to wait. So they come. Reluctantly, badly, resenting all of us. It will look exactly like justice."

"And then the room turns round," Moghli said.

"Then the room turns round." Monk sat back.

"They came to hear a man defend his daughter. They're watching him led out instead, and the only official left standing there is holding a warrant about live specimen trafficking that not one of them has read. They'll ask him what's on it. And he'll tell them, at length, because by then he'll want it very clear that this was always his operation." The noodle shop had started up below them. Moghli could smell the first of the evening stock going on. The two halves did together what one alone could not.

The trafficking would take a court four years and the public would lose interest by winter, and the recording would burn hot for a season and prove nothing. Run one after the other, in that order, and a man could beat both charges and still never hold a seat again. Nobody walks back into public life from being taken out of his own press conference.

"Your Soothing skill's leaking again," Monk said.

"Sorry."

"It's the only reason I've slept this week, don't apologise." He stretched until his shoulder made a noise he seemed pleased with.

"Where are we?" Moghli looked over the table. Filings, contacts, certifications, manifests, the payment trail, and the recording in the middle of all of it.

"Everything's been ready for three days," he said.

"We're just waiting on the signal."

"And if it doesn't come?"

"It's Ghilim's brother. It'll come." Monk pulled a stack toward himself and started reading it again. Moghli let him. The last of the light came down the western valley, and Shanks walked the ridge path with his hands behind his back to watch it go. Below him the land dropped away into the first of the biomes. The saltmarsh ran from the base of the ridge out to the inlet, and somewhere in the middle of that a pair of long-legged waders were doing their evening patrol.

The territory was larger than what it would have been in their natural habitat. They would never run out of space. He made sure of that with all the creatures in this sanctuary. Eleven biomes. Marsh, cold forest, high scrub, three grades of grassland, the flooded caverns under the north ridge that had cost more than the rest combined. Three hundred and eleven residents. He knew every one of them by sight. Cato came down off the rock face and fell into step beside him, and put a hand on the back of his arm.

She was the only orangutan on the property and had been walking this path with him for thirty-one years, since it was first established.

"They're coming tomorrow," he told her. She made a low sound in her chest and kept walking. He had built the sanctuary the year he stepped down as deputy head, which people had read as a retirement. PfP had read it differently. He held no post and drew nothing from them, and within eighteen months every rescue the organisation pulled anywhere on Earth came here. They sent him confiscations. They sent him the last four individuals of a river species out of Area 3.

They sent him animals recovered from private collections, and they sent them quietly, and no manifest ever recorded where they went. The two rooms at the end of the lower terrace had been prepared since the day before. Dim, lined, as near to soundless as anything above ground ever got. A bond does not come apart gently, and what comes through it needs somewhere the world stops pressing for a day or two after. Cato would take most of that. She had a way of settling a creature in pain. Three coming in.

Two grown, one small. He had known about the trafficking for six years, and PfP had known longer, and for six years the organisation had done nothing about it. It was not their place. The Task Force acted, and could be bought, and was therefore worth buying. PfP acted on nobody and could not be bought and simply held what it knew, and every faction on every planet understood that whatever was known about them was sitting somewhere, indefinitely, in the hands of people with no ambition to use it unless provoked.

Four months ago Tomas had sent an intermediary into a PfP regional office to suggest that certain transfer records might be handled with discretion, and to indicate what discretion was worth. He had done it because the Task Force had always been available at that price. He had never in his life been told no by anyone who mattered less than he did. Shanks had read the report twice and then gone for a long walk, and by the time he came back the decision he trusted PfP would make was made.

Within a month, pieces of six years of accumulated knowledge began appearing where a determined outsider could reach them. An archive clerk in Area 9 stopped being obstructive. A public reading room in Area 4 acquired a register. Two people had been far enough down the trail by then to notice the door opening. He had reviewed both of them once.

A young man in the first year of his family's legal practice, who had found the original anomaly himself, and a third-year student in a dungeon cohort who had his own reasons to dig for the right information. They believed they had built the case out of their own stubbornness, and Shanks intended them to believe it for the rest of their lives. A man who has torn down a faction leader walks differently afterwards.

A man who learns he was handed half the pieces spends the next twenty years wondering which of his other achievements were arranged. Since learning about the trafficking, he had visited one of the settlements where Tomas was at. The shrikewing had been on a perch too small for it, obsidian black with the wingtips bred blood-red, kept where guests entering the hall would see it first. The wife had explained that the glass serpent was kept cold because the translucence showed better that way.

Neither animal had made a sound the entire evening. He had carried that home and had it with him ever since. Four of the twelve exotic partners on Earth, arranged across eight weeks for one first-year student. It had cost him less than people would assume. Isamu had been a friend for fifty years and was held in high enough regard in his own region that the coordinator there was only too happy to approve a University student with an exotic partner and a stated interest in umbrellas.

The other placement had needed a slight push. Not much. PfP staff in the settlements the Tomas family frequented had been treated as furniture for years, and were glad to look the other way about a first-year's assignment. Aldric in particular had assured him he would give the boy his full support without the boy knowing till the end, but only if he proved he was worth it. He had already given him the full account by now.

The boy had gone at the work with admirable efficacy, and had done something with the girl's partner in four weeks that no one else had ever managed. Aldric's report was clear on how he and the rest of the staff viewed him. It also discreetly mentioned what he had been upto outside of his duties. Below him, the light left the marsh.

The transport would be at the north gate sometime tomorrow if all went to plan, with three animals who had spent their whole lives considering their own needs of secondary importance to their partner's. The boy would be here before them. He was on the aircraft somewhere out past the coast at this hour, and Shanks had questions to answer for him. Cato's hand tightened on his arm.