<Stay calm.> Totoki messaged her. <Steve is focusing on figuring out where the alphabet avatars are logged in from. You just need to stall for time.>
Echika clenched her hands on her lap under the table.
Just focus on staying logged in.
The holo-models continued their reports. From the sound of things, the holo-models present here were lower-ranked members of the Alliance, comrades who backed the secret society. How had they been ushered into the fold? The thought manipulation system’s influence instantly came to mind, but that hadn’t been widely implemented yet…
“As for Banfield’s wife, she’s asking that the Ministry of Health look into the illness that killed her husband,” said #78, a middle-aged woman who looked like an average housewife. “The bureau informed her about the sample’s analysis result, and she’s trying to get the media involved to get an investigation started into his unexplained infection…”
“The bureau is keeping the media silent. It was thanks to your negligence that Banfield escaped to a restricted zone and the infection was exposed.”
C castigated the woman. He had a man’s voice, one that was oddly…familiar? Yes, while the alphabet avatars had their appearances hidden, their voices weren’t perfectly modified.
“So you’re only scolding her?” asked B, with the voice of a woman who sounded like she was the type to wear perfume. She spoke in fluent American English. “You share the blame, for failing to stop the sample from being delivered.”
“We had no comrades along the drone’s route, and there wasn’t anyone who could shoot it down without drawing suspicion,” C replied. “I bribed some local hunters to shoot it, but they proved useless.”
“Just because you managed to kill the other investors didn’t mean you could cut corners when it came to keeping an eye on Totoki,” A said.
“Now, listen, if you’re going to blame me for this, then #80 is also at fault here.”
C spat the words out bitterly, and silence settled over the roundtable. The four cocoons didn’t budge. A second later, Echika realized that the other holo-models had fixed their eyes on her.
#80. That must have been Greg’s number.
“Maybe you didn’t hear me. Then you don’t mind me calling you by your name, Greg?” C said with chagrin. “I got a report saying Totoki kidnapped you, but here you are. Where are you right now?”
The thing she feared most had happened right away. Echika came up with an excuse on the spot. “I’m in the suburbs of Birmingham. Totoki and her people released me and disappeared somewhere…”
“We sent our comrade investigators and had security drones out to track you down. It appears the bureau was wise enough to use isolation units.” Thankfully, it seemed like the Alliance hadn’t yet realized that Echika and company had taken off their isolation units. But what C had just said confirmed that the Alliance was involved with the Electrocrime Investigations Bureau. Who was he? “What did Totoki ask you? Investigator Hieda went missing, too. Is she with her?”
“She suspected me of being involved in the Alliance, but I insisted I didn’t know anything, so she gave up. As for Investigator Hieda, I don’t know who that is…”
“I told you about her before. She’s a Japanese electronic investigator.”
“Oh, yes, I think I might have seen her, then.” It was getting harder and harder to keep up the facade. If only she could dig through more of Greg’s Mnemosynes for more details about his connection with the Alliance. “They didn’t Brain Dive me, though.”
“Of course they didn’t,” C said, his voice cold and harsh. But at least it didn’t look like he’d seen through her ruse yet. “Either way, you carry a lot of responsibility here. It was your son that arranged for the drone that carried the sample while you were snoring in bed.”
“I’m sorry.”
“This little private sermon of yours looks like it’s going to take a while, so we’ll narrow down your connection.”
The moment A said this, looking quite fed up with the both of them, all the holo-models around them vanished. Only Echika in Greg’s guise and the four alphabet avatars remained in the Salar de Uyuni.
You’re joking, right?
Echika’s mouth was dry, and her palms were covered in cold sweat.
<Not yet. Keep them busy for five more minutes> A message from Totoki popped up.
But if they asked her any more personal questions, Echika would almost certainly expose herself. She didn’t have the first idea as to how she would wriggle out of this, but she had to keep going.
“Why didn’t you dispose of the blueprints for the hornet in the first place?” C asked, his anger flaring now that there were fewer eyes on them. “Was it payback for us using your son as collateral? Don’t forget that I’m the one who gave Jacob his position.”
“No, I’d never dream of getting back at you…,” Echika answered, recalling this one point from Greg’s Mnemosynes.
He’d been terrified of needing to provide the Alliance with drones for their biological weaponry and of being complicit in the murders they committed. But he had no choice but to play along to protect his son, Investigator Gardener, who the Alliance was surveilling. Did that mean Greg was unlike the other comrades and hadn’t joined of his own free will? Was he a recent addition, brought in to facilitate the injection of the chimeric virus via drone as a method of assassinating the investors?
What if, in the process of taking him into the fold, they’d used his son as collateral to ensure he didn’t resist?
Echika could only think of one person who could demand gratitude from Gardener for granting him his current position.
“That’s not the only problem, is it?” B’s way of talking really did strike Echika as familiar. “None of this would have happened if the fact that Banfield died from a disease wasn’t discovered. The sudden death angle would have thrown Totoki’s investigation off our trail, and they’d have given up on finding evidence about the thought manipulations system.”
“Maybe making a virus so as to not leave any evidence of a homicide was a mistake, after all,” A muttered. “Our miscalculation was the sample being transported. Although they exposed the chimeric virus’s existence, attempting to pass off a state secret as a weapon manufactured by the TFC may have been too excessive. We didn’t have to set up such an elaborate performance just to get Totoki to pick up that USB…”
“What’s the point of questioning that now, A? That act was absolutely necessary to convince the bureau’s people.”
“There’s also the chance Kai leaked something to Hieda, too. I took him on thinking he’d be loyal so long as he got paid, but with how Totoki zeroed in on Greg, it’s possible he’d broken his contract with us.”
Dumbfounded, Echika could only blankly listen to their exchange. The bureau had completely and utterly misread the situation. That much was clear now. As far as the alphabet avatars’ conversation indicated, Kai wasn’t part of the Alliance. They’d simply stuffed the USB into his notebook and hired him to ensure that Echika found it. The chimeric virus had never been a product of the TFC; according to A, it was a “state secret.” Now it made sense that they hadn’t found any traces of the TFC manufacturing biological weapons in Al Bahah.
Instead, the virus was the top secret weapon of some country or another. That, in turn, made her think back to what had happened in Philadelphia. They’d visited a medical laboratory run by the Pentagon, and the person who met them, Miller, was the chief of the Contagion Biology Laboratory. The person to tell them the chimeric virus originated from the TFC was Cook from the NSA. If all of that was false, did that mean the virus was of US origin?
More importantly, the person who asked the Special Investigations Unit to cooperate was Director Schlosser.
If Investigator Gardener was to be believed, the director and Greg were acquaintances, and it was through his connections that Gardener had found employment in the bureau. So if the director had only done that to make Greg owe him…
Echika felt everything go dark. If this was the case, then the people involved with the Alliance weren’t just anyone. When she and Fokine were in the medical research facility in Philadelphia, everyone there but them…had been part of the Alliance.