Read The Peyti Crisis: A Retrieval Artist Novel: Book Five of the Anniversary Day Saga (Retrieval Artist series 12) for Free Online Page B

with her evidence bag of soiled clothes, and leave it in the bottom of her own closet until she figured out what to do with it.
    The lightheadedness had returned—not because she was still suffering from ODS, but because she had forgotten to breathe.
    She could breathe now.
    She was nearly done with her task, and with her shift.
    And then she could pretend that this horrible day never ever happened.

 
     
     
     
    NOW

 
     
     
     
    EIGHT
     
     
    LUC DESHIN SLAMMED his hand on the lists covering the top of his desk. The lists, nothing more than holograms, split apart into a thousand pieces. When he lifted his fist, the pieces reassembled.
    He stood up and turned his back on his entire office.
    Dammit.
    Just before the second attack on the Moon a week ago, Deshin had met with the Retrieval Artist Miles Flint at the offices of their mutual attorney, Celestine Gonzalez. Deshin had several reasons for meeting with Flint.
    The authorities weren’t solving the Anniversary Day attacks. From what Deshin could tell, through his usual monitoring of law enforcement, the authorities hadn’t a clue about anything. They were going in circles, if they were doing any work at all.
    Deshin walked over to the floor-to-ceiling windows in his office. The office had a 360-degree view of the entire city. Armstrong had been lucky on Anniversary Day: the city had lost its mayor, but little else. Nineteen other domes had been attacked, and twelve had had holes blown through them.
    Millions of people had died.
    Deshin had nearly died, since he had been at a meeting in Yutu City. He’d lost friends and colleagues and security staff—more people than he cared to think about.
    Had the attack in Armstrong succeeded, he might have lost his beloved wife Gerda and his amazing son Paavo. And Deshin wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it.
    He had been too far away.
    So he had started to investigate immediately after the attacks, and discovered a hell of a lot more than the so-called authorities had. And what he had discovered unnerved him.
    He met with Flint because he liked the man and Flint had done him a good turn a while back, actually saving Deshin’s family by getting rid of a personal threat.
    No matter what Flint thought of Deshin (and Flint made it clear he didn’t really like Deshin at all), Deshin respected the hell out of Flint.
    That respect got confirmed just last week. All of Deshin’s sources confirmed that Flint had helped the Moon’s Security Chief, Noelle DeRicci, thwart the second attack—by a group of Peyti lawyers who had been undercover on the Moon for decades. Those lawyers, also clones like the Anniversary Day attackers, had been designed as suicide bombers. They activated on the same day, and would have destroyed another million lives and domes and everything else.
    It was enough to make even the most dug-in businessman want to move off Moon. Only Deshin didn’t know any place safer, especially if whoever was masterminding the attacks wasn’t aiming at the Moon, but at the Earth Alliance itself.
    He blinked and made himself look at the city. He loved this place. Cranes still rose from the area around the first bombing, four years before Anniversary Day, almost hiding the neighborhood housing Dome University. Beyond that was the former slum where he had grown up and where he later invested a fortune buying ancient real estate and turning it into housing for young professionals.
    That hadn’t even been his first fortune. He had money in dicey places, and he dealt with a lot of shady types.
    Hell, he was a shady type, although he’d been trying to clean up his act since he and Gerda adopted Paavo. But some acts weren’t so easy to clean. He still had—and used—a lot of connections that he was certain the Armstrong Police Department (the Pre-Anniversary Day Armstrong Police Department, anyway) would have loved to confirm.
    He turned slightly, saw the glinting roofs of the homes in his neighborhood. They