CHAPTER SIX
The thugs’ shoes moved down the street, disappearing into the pedestrian and vehicle traffic that was finally starting to move again. Picking my moment, I rolled out from under the car into the street, stood up, and returned to the walkway.
From my earlier, more limited vantage point, I’d assumed Jasper was looking at the menu post of a restaurant. Now, from this angle, I could see that the modest doorway Varsi had disappeared into was in fact the entrance to a private club. It was the placard giving the name and membership requirements that Jasper had been pretending to study.
I didn’t bother to read the placard as I strolled past the door. No matter what the restrictions were, I was a hundred percent sure I wouldn’t fit them.
The main entrance was never the only way into places like this, of course. Rear exits and service doors were the two most obvious avenues for the aspiring sneak, but their very popularity meant that any security system worth its promotionals already had them solidly covered. Less obvious were air ducts and sewers, the former impractical for a whole host of reasons, the latter so utterly disgusting that only the very desperate ever tried it.
Fortunately, I was nowhere near that desperate.
Three mortar shells had been dropped on the stake-out crowd a block away, but our block had only been hit with one. That suggested either that the person who’d been lobbing them off the rooftops decided we didn’t merit that many shells, or that he hadn’t had time to drop all of them before he had to run.
Of course, it could also be that he’d only had one shell left after dealing with the other crowd. But that option left me with nothing, so I decided not to think too much about it. I continued down the street to the end of the block, where I found a small curio shop with inattentive clerks. Slipping into their back room, I found the stairs leading upward and climbed the three flights to the roof.
All of the block’s buildings were joined by a common roof, as I’d already concluded from the street-level design. Setting off through the forest of vent tubes, rain channels, and low eave walls, I backtracked toward the scene of our attack.
For once, the most pessimistic option turned out not to be right. There were indeed two unused smoke shells waiting abandoned for me on the roof. Not left behind because the attacker had lost interest or run out of time, but because two of the disposable launcher’s three tubes had malfunctioned.
Perfect.
Carefully, I cut the tubes open with my multitool and removed the shells. They were nicely compact, about twenty-five centimeters long and seven in diameter, though such things always looked a hell of a lot bigger when they were coming straight down at you. Like most mortar rounds they were impact triggered, with safety catches that would be opened as they traveled through the tubes. Picking up both shells, I continued my trek back to the private club.
Varsi’s comments about Roma Blue and steamers had implied that part of the draw of the place was high-end cuisine, and as I got within range of the cooking vents I could tell that guess had been correct. From the aroma wafting up onto the roof I tentatively identified the dish of the day being something that included butter, olive oil, and tomato. Selene, had she been here, could have rattled off the full list of ingredients, how many cubic centimeters there were of each, and possibly come up with the dish’s recipe.
Fortunately, I didn’t need any of that. All I needed was to get the weather cap off so I could drop one of the shells down the vent tube.
Since I couldn’t get in to see Varsi, I’d simply get him to come out to see me.
As my father used to say, If you can’t raise the bridge, lower the river.
I’d been a bit concerned that the shell might be too wide to fit into the tube, but once again that worry was for nothing. Once the weather cap was off, the shell fit into the opening with a good millimeter or two to spare. There was probably a mesh or filter of some sort at the bottom of the vent to keep anything from landing in the soup, but that was okay—the impact would trigger the shell, and with the smoke being heavier than air it would flow into the kitchen without a problem. As a nice bonus, mixing the smoke with the kitchen odors should help disguise the telltale burnt-sugar smell that Varsi might recognize.
By the time the first whiffs of smoke came drifting up the vent tube, I was already halfway back to the curio shop and my path back down to the street.
There was theoretically a fifty-fifty chance as to which door Varsi would pick for his exit. But knowing the man’s ego, I couldn’t imagine him voluntarily stepping out of an upscale establishment into a service alley. Not unless he was specifically and repeatedly being shot at. Possibly not even then.
So I was waiting a dozen meters down the street from the main door when he appeared, moving along among the other patrons and staff as they fled from the smoke.
“Mr. Varsi,” I called. I started to move toward him.
And came to a quick halt as one of the two bodyguards who’d apparently been left inside during the earlier street meeting moved protectively in front of him. “I just want to talk to him,” I said soothingly, making sure my open hands were visible.
“Well,” Varsi said, stepping out from behind him and giving me one of those soulless looks he did so well. “I thought that might be you. You ruined what was left of my steamers.”
“I’m sorry about that, sir,” I apologized. “But I needed to talk to you, and I didn’t think they’d let me inside.”
“Indeed they wouldn’t have.” He cocked his head slightly. “You should know that Billings and Coolidge are rather annoyed with you right now.”
The two thugs I’d kicked during my escape, no doubt. “I’m sorry about that, too,” I said. “I didn’t know at the time that they were with you.”
“After today, they may not be,” Varsi said, his voice sending a fresh shiver up my back. Varsi generally allowed his people a single mistake each. Today’s incident may have put Billings and Coolidge over their quota. Hopefully, it hadn’t put me over mine. “You said you wanted to talk?”
“Yes, sir.” I looked around at the knots of people gazing in fear or bemusement at the smoke drifting out the door, and at the other, less curious, people who were just trying to get around them. “Could we go somewhere with a bit more privacy?”
He eyed me another moment. “There’s a small park a block over,” he said. “Riley?”
“Yes, sir.” The man who’d stepped in front of him inclined his head toward the street. “That way,” he said. “Straight across.”
“And then?”
“And then just keep walking.”
***
My first, biggest fear was that Varsi would let me get halfway across the street and then have Riley shoot me in the back. To my relief, he didn’t. My next, slightly smaller fear was that I would make it to the park, discover that Varsi hadn’t followed, and then spend the rest of my short life looking over my shoulder until Varsi’s men found a less conspicuous time and place to shoot me in the back.
Once again, my pessimism proved to be overstated, or at least premature. For Varsi, finding out what I had to say apparently outweighed whatever damage my smoke bomb had done to his steamers.
I’d assumed the park would be a casual open space nestled in among the city’s buildings, stocked with grass or other ground greenery, small trees, and maybe benches and a child’s play structure. It turned out instead to be a walled combination of a Zen garden and fernery, complete with a neatly dressed door steward at each of the two entrances and a special ID card required for entry, the whole thing rising out of the center of the grassy space I’d originally expected. In retrospect, it seemed likely that the park and the exclusive club we’d just left were probably a package thing.
Varsi was passed through the door with a courteous nod, the steward reaching to a control beneath his lapel to buzz us in. Varsi’s bodyguards didn’t get any such nods, but I spotted the sort of knowing look pass between them and the steward that I’d often seen exchanged when professional soldiers or ex-soldiers ran into each other. For me, it was neither the nod nor the look, but rather a long and unpleasantly suspicious stare.
A minute later Varsi and I were seated alone on one of the benches, gazing out at patterns of stone, fern, and delicately raked sand.
“Tell me first what you’re doing here,” Varsi opened the conversation. “I admit to a certain degree of surprise when I was told of your arrival. Especially when I was also told you were in the company of a badgeman.”
“There was no intent of deception or subterfuge,” I assured him. So he wasn’t here for me, after all. That was both a relief and, oddly enough, a bit of a letdown. “I was hired to do a crockett job by a man named Geri. When the job was finished, he asked me to bring him here.”
“His full name?”
“He never gave it.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“I’ve met other people who wouldn’t give me their names,” I said. “They’re never the sort you feel comfortable pressing with questions like that.”
“Yet you said yes to his job?”
“He paid very well. We needed the money.”
“As usual,” Varsi said. “I assume he’s the badgeman you were seen with in the taverno?”
“Well, he’s got a badge, anyway,” I said. “But he never mentioned any InterSpiral connections until he flashed it.”
“You think he’s an imposter?”
“Probably,” I said. “Actually, I’d say almost certainly. If he was sticking to an undercover role hard enough not to identify himself to me when he first brought us to Pinnkus, I can’t see the situation in the taverno being worth blowing his cover over.”
“Perhaps the situation was more dire than you realized.”
“Could be,” I conceded. “But there’s also the thing with the van he stole when the smoke mortar hit. I’ve never heard of even a badgeman with a warrant being able to override an Everlock protocol as fast as he did.”
“Someone special, then,” Varsi said. “Why did he bring you to Pinnkus?”
I hesitated. But the fact that Varsi had been willing to travel all the way to Pinnkus strongly suggested he already knew what was going on. “He said there was a woman hiding here who had a valuable secret,” I said. “He wanted me to find her.”
“Did you?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Are you certain?”
I looked sideways at him. His eyes were still on the garden, but there was an ominous tightness along his jawline. “We hadn’t found her as of the point where we were smoke-bombed and the others left me here,” I said. “Has something happened since then?”
He was silent another few seconds. I looked at the sand, noticing for the first time that there was an almost eerie luminescence that swept periodically across the furrows, presumably stimulated by hidden lasers or focused ultraviolet lights. The glow varied in intensity as it flowed across the landscape, sometimes barely visible, other times bright enough to rival the cloud-muted sunlight from above.
And in one of those brighter surges, as I looked back at Varsi, I saw something I hadn’t seen before: small lines and curves etched faintly into sections of the skin of his face. The reflection from the sand faded away, and as normal light regained its prominence the lines vanished.
But they were there. More than that, I’d seen that sort of thing before in the preliminary layout surgeons used in preparation for reconstructive surgery.
Only there was nothing wrong with Varsi’s face that required reconstruction. If anything, the idea of changing his face went in the exact opposite direction. For many in the criminal underworld, his was a face that demanded instant respect and servitude. The only reason he might want it changed was if he didn’t want or need it anymore.
Like if he was preparing to run?
“I received news from the spaceport while we were walking from the club,” he said into my thoughts. “Your ship, the Ruth, took off ten minutes ago.”
I stared at him, questions about his future abruptly forgotten. What the hell? “You’re sure?”
An instant later I wished I could call back the words. People like Varsi didn’t like having their statements questioned.
Fortunately, he seemed more interested in my reaction than in taking personal offense at my question. “You didn’t know they were leaving?”
“No, of course not,” I said. “Why would Selene—?” I broke off. “No. Of course it wasn’t Selene. It was one of the others.” I frowned. “But didn’t I hear you say you had people at the spaceport?”
“I did,” Varsi said, his voice somehow going even colder. “Both of them are dead.”
“Oh,” I said awkwardly. Dead, and probably not from natural causes.
Also probably not from the kind of carelessness that would induce them to turn their backs on Selene, Geri, and the Kalix. If their deaths were connected to the Ruth, that only left— “Freki,” I muttered. “Geri’s partner. He stayed with the ship.”
“Does he also masquerade as a badgeman?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “If he has a badge, he never showed it to me.”
“You seem to know very little about these people,” Varsi said with a hint of contempt. “What about the Kalix?”
“I know even less about him,” I said. “He was in the taverno when Geri and I went in. He popped up again while Selene was trying to track down our target, claiming he knew a woman who was in danger somewhere near the spaceport and asking for Geri’s help.”
“This woman being Tera C?”
So she was indeed the woman Varsi and his people were looking for. I’d never really doubted that, but it was nice to have it confirmed. “I don’t know,” I said. “He couldn’t identify her picture. Geri had decided we’d go check it out when that smoke bomb hit.” I shrugged. “You know everything else.”
“Do I?” he countered. “Everything else?”
“I just meant—”
“Do I know who these two men are or who they work for?” Varsi demanded. “Do I know who this Kalix and his female friend are? Do I know whether the Kalix and your other friends are secretly working together?” His eyes narrowed. “Do I know whether or not Selene found Tera C?”
“I’ve told you everything I know, sir,” I said, trying to keep my voice level and sincere.
“Perhaps,” he said, his tone not giving any clue as to whether or not he actually believed that. “I assume that if further information comes your way you won’t hesitate to share it with me.”
“Of course,” I assured him quickly.
“Good.” He held out his hand. “And as long as we’re here…?”
I frowned. “Sir?”
“You said your new employer gave you a crockett job.”
For a split second I considered telling him that the Bonvere Seven survey had come up dry. It certainly wouldn’t be the first or last time something like that happened. Furthermore, with the sample ampules back on Ringbar where Geri had left them, there was no way for Varsi to prove otherwise.
More to the point, if he was on the cusp of changing his face and vanishing into the ether, it might be smart to hold onto the last of the Bonvere seeds until the next boss emerged from the scramble and I could make a deal with him.
But people like Varsi didn’t concern themselves with concepts like proof or reasonable doubt. And as I looked into his eyes I realized that there were lots of other planets out there with interesting seeds.
Unfortunately, giving in to the inevitable was going to cost me the literal ace up my sleeve. But there was nothing for it. Varsi wanted the seeds, and he wanted them now.
As my father used to say, Three people can keep a secret if one is you, the second is trustworthy, and the third is dead.
In Selene, I’d found someone in the second category. If Varsi thought he could actually walk away from a major criminal organization, even one he was in charge of, he might well end up in the third.
I glanced over my shoulder as I took off my jacket, noting that Varsi’s two bodyguards were still back by the door. If I turned a little ways toward Varsi, they wouldn’t see what I was doing. I turned the necessary few degrees, pushed up my sleeve, and popped the rear access panel in my arm.
“Interesting,” Varsi said thoughtfully as I pried out the ampule and handed it to him. “I always suspected you had a special hiding place in the event that customs or Trailblazer inspectors became curious. But I didn’t expect something like that.”
“Hopefully, no one else will, either,” I said, sealing the panel again. “I don’t know how useful those will be. Selene just said they showed promise.”
“Perhaps,” Varsi said. “I’ll have them examined and the appropriate payment entered into your account on Xathru.”
“Thank you.” I braced myself. “Though under the circumstance, perhaps this one time we could make it cash?”
“Under the circumstances?”
I’d been thinking about his imminent and presumably unannounced departure into the misty void. Belatedly, I realized that was a topic best left untouched. “My ship leaving Pinnkus without me,” I said instead. “I need to figure out where they went and get after them, and credit transfers from off-world tend to be pretty slow.”
“I see.” Varsi reached into his jacket, dropping the ampule into a pocket and emerging with a billfold. “Shall we say ten thousand?”
“That would be good, yes,” I agreed. A seed that Varsi’s organization could extract a new street drug from would be worth at least ten times that amount, I knew. But I was hardly in a position to bargain.
“Excellent.” He pulled out two five-thousand-commark bank checks and handed them to me. “And just as a reminder: when you find Tera C, you’ll contact me immediately.”
“Of course,” I said with a fresh tightening of my throat. Not if we found her, but when. He fully expected me to deliver, and he wouldn’t be happy if I didn’t.
“Excellent.” He stood up, waving me back as I started to do likewise. “No—stay here awhile. As long as you want, in fact. Meditate, calm your heart and soul, and plan your next move.”
“Thank you, sir.” In other words, he’d already been seen entering with me and apparently didn’t want to risk that connection being reinforced by us also leaving together. Varsi’s commitment to employee loyalty only went one direction.
I watched him collect his bodyguards and exit through the door we’d entered by, then started a mental countdown. I’d wait until he had time to get back to the club, I decided, then get out of here and see what I could find out about the Ruth.
Another two minutes should do it. I turned back to the garden for one final look at the sculpted sand—
I frowned. Half hidden beneath a particularly shaggy cluster of ferns at the near edge of the sand pit, staring right at me, was a small furry creature.
My first thought was that a rat had gotten into the garden, or possibly that it was a permanent resident. But it was too big for that, too long. More like a ferret.
And then, I got it. The animal wasn’t a ferret, at least not one of the Earth variety. It was one of the Kalix’s two shoulder pets.
But that was impossible. The Kalix had been in the van with Selene and Geri when they all roared off together. How could one of his ferrets be here now?
Could Geri have kicked everyone out before he and Freki absconded with the Ruth? But the spaceport was a good thirty kilometers away. How could the ferret have made it all the way back here already?
Unless in the mad scramble to get in the van he’d gotten lost.
I sighed. Bad enough that I was stuck here on my own. Now I had another lost soul to take care of.
“Come here,” I said, leaning toward him and beckoning. “Are you lost? Come on, I won’t hurt you. Are you hungry? I’ll bet you’re hungry.”
For a moment he didn’t move. Then, cautiously, he crawled out from under his fern canopy and skittered toward me. “Come on,” I said again, wondering if he would remember me. Some animals could make connections that quickly, but I had no idea whether this was one of those.
But he was still coming. “That’s right,” I said, beckoning again. “Come on.”
He stopped at my feet and looked expectantly up at me. Mentally crossing my fingers, I reached my right hand down to pick him up, switching at the last moment to my left. If he was a biter, he might as well get it out of his system with my artificial hand instead of the flesh-and-blood one.
But he didn’t bite, or claw, or even squirm. I got him up and onto my lap, and for a moment we just looked into each other’s eyes. I’d heard you could gauge the intelligence of an animal that way, but if so I was damned if I could do it.
In the meantime, I’d promised him something to eat. “Come on,” I said, standing up. I thought about putting him on my shoulder the way the Kalix had, realized he would either fall off or dig in with that impressive set of claws, and instead crooked my left arm across my stomach and settled him there.
The door steward was still standing guard as I opened the door, staring off into the distance. I gave him a friendly nod as I passed, didn’t get so much as a glance in return, and turned toward the street. I would find a runaround, I decided, head over to the spaceport, and see if I could cajole someone into giving me some details about the Ruth’s departure. If I spotted a food cart along the way, I’d stop and try to find something the ferret liked.
“Hey! You!”
I looked toward the voice. Three men were standing beside one of the buildings across the open green area a dozen meters from the walled garden. Two of them were keeping a wary eye on the steward—and vice versa, which I now realized was where he’d been staring and why he hadn’t acknowledged my nod—and the third glaring at me.
“Yeah, you,” he growled. The spokesman detached himself from the wall and stalked toward me, his two buddies right behind him. “You. Roarke.
“Traitor.”