Sister Carlotta used her new security clearance like a scalpel, most of the time, slicing her way into the information establishment, picking up answers here and new questions there, talking to people who never guessed what her project was, why she knew so much about their top-secret work, and quietly putting it all together in her own mind, in memos to Colonel Graff.
But sometimes she wielded her top security clearance like a meat-ax, using it to get past prison wardens and security officers, who saw her unbelievable level of need-to-know and then, when they checked to make sure her documents weren't a stupid forgery, were screamed at by officers so high-ranked that it made them want to treat Sister Carlotta like God.
That's how, at last, she came face to face with Bean's father. Or at least the closest thing to a father that he had.
"I want to talk to you about your installation in Rotterdam."
He looked at her sourly. "I already reported on everything. That's why I'm not dead, though I wonder if I made the right choice."
"They told me you were quite the whiner," said Sister Carlotta, utterly devoid of compassion. "I didn't expect it to surface so quickly."
"Go to hell." He turned his back on her.
As if that meant anything. "Dr. Volescu, the records show that you had twenty-three babies in your organ farm in Rotterdam."
He said nothing.
"But of course that's a lie."
Silence.
"And, oddly enough, I know that the lie is not your idea. Because I know that your installation was not an organ farm indeed, and that the reason you aren't dead is because you agreed to plead guilty to running an organ farm in exchange for never discussing what you were really doing there."
He slowly turned around again. Enough that he could look up and see her with a sidelong glance. "Let me see that clearance you tried to show me before."
She showed it to him again. He studied it.
"What do you know?" he asked.
"I know your real crime was continuing a research project after it was closed down. Because you had these fertilized eggs that had been meticulously altered. You had turned Anton's key. You wanted them to be born. You wanted to see who they would become."
"If you know all that, why have you come to me? Everything I knew is in the documents you must have read."
"Not at all," said Sister Carlotta. "I don't care about confessions. I don't care about logistics. I want to know about the babies."
"They're all dead," he said. "We killed them when we knew we were about to be discovered." He looked at her with bitter defiance. "Yes, infanticide. Twenty-three murders. But since the government couldn't admit that such children had ever existed, I was never charged with the crimes. God judges me, though. God will press the charges. Is that why you're here? Is that who gave you your clearance?"
You make jokes about this? "All I want to know is what you learned about them."
"I learned nothing, there was no time, they were still babies."
"You had them for almost a year. They developed. All the work done since Anton found his key was theoretical. You watched the babies grow."
A slow smile crept across his face. "This is like those Nazi medical crimes all over again. You deplore what I did, but you still want to know the results of my research."
"You monitored their growth. Their health. Their intellectual development."
"We were about to start the tracking of intellectual development. The project wasn't funded, of course, so it's not as if we could provide much more than a clean warm room and basic bodily needs."
"Their bodies, then. Their motor skills."
"Small," he said. "They are born small, they grow slowly. Undersized and underweight, all of them."
"But very bright?"
"Crawling very young. Making pre-speech sounds far earlier than normal. That's all we knew. I didn't see them often myself. I couldn't afford the risk of detection."
"So what was your prognosis?"