Halo | Page 2

materiel, verified voucher signatures with personnel records, cross-checked the personnel records themselves against government databases, and traced the backgrounds and movements of the people they represented; they read contracts and back-chased to their bid and acquisition; they verified daily transaction logs.
Hard, slogging work, all patience and detail, and so far it had shown nothing but the usual inefficiencies--Grossback didn't run a particularly taut operation, but, as of the moment, he didn't seem to have a corrupt one. However, neither he nor SenTrax Myanmar was cleared yet; Gonzales's final report would come later, after he and the memex had analyzed the records at their leisure.
Gonzales stretched and rubbed his eyes. As usual at the end of short-term, intensive gigs like this, he felt tired, washed-out, eager to go. He said to Grossback, "I've got a company plane out of here late this afternoon to Bangkok. I'll connect with whatever commercial flight's available there."
Grossback smiled, obviously glad Gonzales was leaving. Grossback was a slight man, of mixed German and Thai descent; he had a light brown complexion, black hair, and delicate features. He wore politically correct clothing in the old-fashioned Burmese style: a dark skirt called a longyi, a white cotton shirt.
During Gonzales's time there, Grossback had dealt with him coldly and correctly from behind a mask of corporate protocol and clenched teeth. Fair enough, Gonzales had thought: the man's operation was suspect, and him along with it. Anyway, people resented these outside intrusions almost every time; representing Internal Affairs, Gonzales answered only to his division head, F.L. Traynor, and SenTrax Board, and that made almost everyone nervous.
"You leaving out of Myaung U Airport?" Grossback asked.
"No, I've asked for a pick-up south of town." Like anyone else who could arrange it, he was not going to fly out of Pagan's official airport, where partisan groups had several times brought down aircraft. Surely Grossback knew that.
Grossback asked, "What will your report say?"
Surprised, Gonzales said, "You know I can't tell you anything about that." Even mentioning the matter constituted an embarrassment, not to mention a reportable violation of corporate protocol. The man was either stupid or desperate.
"You haven't found anything," Grossback said.
What was his problem? Gonzales said, "I have a year's data to examine before I can make an assessment."
"You won't tell me what the preliminary report will look like," Grossback said. His face had gone cold.
"No," said Gonzales. He stood and said, "I have to finish packing." For the moment, he just wanted to get out before Grossback did something irretrievable, like threatening him or offering a bribe. "Goodbye," Gonzales said. The other man said nothing as Gonzales left the room.
----
Gonzales returned to the Thiripyitsaya Hotel, a collection of low bungalows fabricated from bamboo and ferro-concrete that stood above the Irrawady River. The rooms were afflicted by Myanmar's tattered version of Asian tourist decor: lacquered bamboo on the walls, along with leaping dragon holos, black teak dresser, tables, chairs, and bed frame, ceiling fans that had wandered in from the twentieth century--just to give your average citizen that rush of the Exotic East, Gonzales figured. However, the hotel had been rebuilt less than a decade before, so, by local standards, Gonzales had luxury: working climatizer, microwave, and refrigerator.
Of course, many nights the air conditioner didn't work, and Gonzales lay sweaty and semi-conscious through hot, humid nights then was greeted just after dawn by lizards fanning their ruby neck flaps and doing push ups.
He had gotten up several of those mornings and walked the cart paths that threaded the plains around Pagan, passing among the temples and pagodas as the sun rose and turned the morning mist into a huge veil of luminous pink, with the towers sticking up like fairy castles. Everywhere around Pagan were the temples, thousands of them, young and flourishing when William the Conqueror was king. Now, quick-fab structures housing government agencies nested among thousand year old pagodas, some in near perfect condition, like Thatbyinnu Temple, myriad others no more than ruins and forgotten names. You gained merit by building pagodas, not by keeping up those built by someone long dead.
Like some other Southeast Asian countries, Myanmar still was trying to recover from late-twentieth century politics; in Myanmar's case, its decades-long bout with round-robin military dictatorships and the chaos that came in their wake. And as was so often the case in politically wobbly countries, it still restricted access to the worldnet; through various kinds of governments, its leaders had found the prospect of free information flow unacceptable. Ka-band antennas were expensive, their use licensed by permits almost impossible to get. As a result, Gonzales and the memex had been like meat eaters stranded among vegetarians, unable to get their nourishment.
He'd taken down the memex that morning. Its functions dormant, it lay nestled inside one of his two fiber and