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Spider-Man: The Venom Factor Omnibus

Page 65

by Diane Duane


  “Report,” said the man behind the desk.

  “Operation Stifle is going along nicely,” said the redheaded man. “The last few—sanctions—are being taken care of. No one who knew about the Miami processing plant will be left alive within two days.”

  “Very good. It’s not just a matter of ‘loose lips’ and possible betrayals. Loose ends are so untidy….” He turned over some of the paperwork on the desk with one hand, leaning his chin on the other, pausing for a moment to listen to the faint rumbling from outside. “I would do something about the soundproofing,” he said absently, “except that, in a little while, there won’t be any point, will there? How are the container shipments going?”

  “They’ve almost all reached their secondary destinations. Our teams will be breaking them down into their final sizes over the next two days.”

  “Very well. Keep an eye on the timing of this phase, the pickups and so forth. It would be very annoying if the authorities discovered one of these shipments by mistake. Or detonated it, for that matter.” The big man smiled slightly, turned over another page.

  “Oh, and the guest suite is ready, sir.”

  “Excellent. I would hate to have Spider-Man miss this denouement; it will be so delightful to watch him realize that, for once, for all his meddling over all these years, there’s genuinely nothing he can do to stop the process.” A metal tentacle arched slowly over the man’s back, bent down to tap, like someone’s drumming fingers, on the table. “We’ll see if it’s true what they say, that heroes break hardest when they break. Are we sure the sanction teams are properly equipped?”

  “Yes, sir, and there are six of them. We’ll have no trouble bringing him in for the big blowoff.”

  The big man chuckled. “Blowoff. Yes. I do so love the vernacular. Very well. Anything else that needs my attention, Niner?”

  “Not at present, sir.”

  Sitting back in his chair, the big man smiled. “It’s always so satisfying,” he said, “to be in the last stages of a project, watching all the pieces come together. You can go, Niner.”

  The redheaded man left quietly. The four metal tentacles attached to the big man’s waist descended to curl and wreathe around him in a contemplative way as he folded his hands, closed his eyes briefly.

  Day Hundred is coming.

  FIVE

  PETER woke up to the smell of coffee. He had come to bed very quietly, but MJ had been sprawled under the sheets, so fast asleep and looking so wrung out that she probably wouldn’t have noticed if he’d played himself a lullaby on a tuba. His last thought before closing his eyes was that her day had apparently been pretty much like his.

  Now, with the scent of fresh coffee filling the apartment, he rolled over and yawned. “Aha,” came a voice from down the hall. “I know that sound.” MJ was already fully dressed and made up, and not just the usual casual-but-pretty. This was the full nine yards.

  “Where are you going?” he said, blinking the remains of sleep from his eyes.

  “Work!”

  “But I thought your hand—”

  “Not my hand. My voice.”

  “Wait a minute. Wasn’t lipstick involved in this somehow?”

  “Yes, it was. But that unhappy episode seems to have borne a different sort of fruit. Come on and have some breakfast, and I’ll tell you all about it. But first, you’d better look at the news.”

  Peter yawned again and got out of bed, wrapping himself in his bathrobe as he padded toward the kitchen. “The way you say that, I’m getting tempted to put an ax through the screen.”

  “Oh, I dunno. It’s not the TV’s fault.”

  He wandered in just as the morning newsreader was repeating her headline stories. “—muggers are now in hospital at Bellvue, suffering from serious injuries—” she was saying, but it was the placard behind her head that caught his attention. It showed Venom’s tongue-lolling, grin-distorted face.

  “Oh, wonderful.”

  “Yes,” said MJ, pouring him coffee. “I don’t like having to be away from you when he’s around.”

  “It’s not like we haven’t tangled before, and I’m still okay—”

  “‘Okay,’ he calls it,” said MJ and snorted derisively. “With your ribs broken and your head bashed in half the time, and lumps and bumps and bruises all over your body, and cuts and scrapes and scratches and dueling wounds, this is some new definition of ‘okay’ that I’m not familiar with.”

  Then she sighed and sat down, looking at her own coffee cup. “I don’t like it, Tiger. What if he’s come back to settle things? He’s had plenty of time to recover after the last fight.”

  “And so have I. But there’s no way to tell with him. And I can’t worry about him right now; I’ve got other things on my mind. And you? What was your day like?”

  “Oh, please.” She told him about meeting Lalande and the others at Baja, about the lipstick shoot, and finally about the small, smiling man who had come up to her and given her his card. She pushed it across the table to him, and Peter grinned.

  “Film and television? Steady work, maybe?”

  “I don’t know yet. I called him earlier this morning to set up a meeting, and it turns out he’s a voice director for this studio. They do animation, and he wants to audition me, to see”—she smiled—”that should be, to hear, if I’ll be good for some series that he’s working on.”

  “It could be steady work, then. How does voice pay?”

  “Well, I’m still a SAG member after Secret Hospital, so there’s no problem at the union-card end. If he wants to hire me, I can start right away.” MJ picked up the business card and put it away again. “And after yesterday, it would be a real pleasure to work at something that didn’t involve bright lights, and people running around screaming, and having to do the same shot over and over again because last time it wasn’t just quite right. In fact, after yesterday I’d seriously consider ditch-digging.”

  She finished her coffee and eyed him over the rim of the cup. “You were out late. How did it go?”

  “Yes, well…” Peter gave her a much-edited version of the interview with Dmitri, and its aftermath, then watched her nod dubiously.

  “At least the shooting didn’t break out while you were actually there,” she said. “But I don’t like the idea that this guy immediately tried to kill Mel. What’s to say he won’t try to kill you, too? After all, you both heard the same things.”

  Peter raised his eyebrows. “I’m not sure that his people even knew that I was there. But they sure knew that Mel was—and they knew he’d taken a cab even after that little shuffle in the subway station. He was being watched, but I must have gone unnoticed. Not important enough, maybe.”

  “A backhanded compliment, if you like. Let’s keep it that way. There are some kinds of importance nobody needs.” She checked her watch. “Gotta go, Tiger. Where’ll you be today?”

  “I’ve got pictures to develop, and then I thought I might follow up on the lead that Sergeant Drew gave me. His source of cell phone information. After yesterday we’re gonna need some other source of help, because we’re not gonna get it from CellTech.”

  “Right,” she said and kissed him. “I’m off.”

  “Only a little, and it hardly shows.”

  Her eyes twinkled at him as she headed for the door. “We should try to get you on Letterman sometime,” she said and shut it behind her.

  Peter chuckled. He got up, washed, shaved, dressed, and did some morning maintenance for Spider-Man, mostly involving refilling the web-shooters. Then he took out the cell phones from the van last night and stared thoughtfully at them, especially the one on which the call from Galya had come through. Just ordinary cell phones; brand differences, design differences, model differences, and otherwise no different from every other cell phone in the city. Peter put on his Spider-Man mask to muffle his voice, picked up the ordinary phone, and dialed for Sergeant Drew.

  The sergeant was up to his neck in work, as usual, and was jus
t on his way out to a court appearance when Spidey got through. “Listen,” he said, “just call this number,” and he rattled off a seven-digit number. “Got it?”

  “Got it. That’s a 212?”

  “Yeah. If there’s a problem, say I cleared you. Then wait.” And Drew hung up.

  Peter dialed the new number, and waited. A moment later, a very soft feminine voice said, “Doris Smyth.” “Uh, Ms. Smyth, my name is Peter Parker, and I’m a friend of Spider-Man, who—”

  “Oh yes. Sergeant Drew called me to say that Spider-Man might be in touch. Or have someone do so on his behalf.” Peter noticed the phrasing, and was briefly, cautiously intrigued by it. Did Drew suspect? Or was he likely to, after finding out just who Spider-Man had assigned to make the visit in his place? Well, there was nothing for it now but to press on—though not regardless. Rather more cautiously than that. Ms. Smyth continued, “The sergeant didn’t say much more than that this involved a very interesting problem. Would you like to come up to my place and discuss it?” The voice was warm and friendly.

  “Certainly. That is, if it’s convenient.”

  “No problem at all.” And she supplied him with a posh East Side address.

  “Is there an apartment number?”

  “Just forty-fifth floor. You’ll know it when you see it.” There was a small chuckle. “The building ends quite soon afterwards.”

  “I’ll be there in, uh, twenty minutes.”

  And in twenty minutes, Peter was looking up at a sleek and expensive forty-five-floor apartment building and muttering, “Good grief,” under his breath. A sleek and expensive doorman opened the sleek and expensive door for him, and Peter stepped inside.

  As he passed, the doorman said, “Apartment?”

  “Uh, I was only told the floor. Forty-fifth.”

  “Ah, that would be Mrs. Smyth. Right this way, sir.” He directed Peter to an elevator—as sleek and expensive as everything else he had seen so far—then reached inside, punched 45, and smoothly withdrew from between the smoothly closing doors.

  When it stopped, and the doors opened smoothly, he was looking out into a small private lobby with only one door leading off it. Then the door opened.

  Peter wasn’t quite sure what he had been expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this. Standing in the doorway was a genteel little old lady, with pale, fine skin that was barely wrinkled, except for the demure pattern of smile and laughter lines around her eyes and mouth. Wearing a dressy little green tweed jacket-and-skirt set, with a dark, high-necked blouse and a discreet string of pearls, she looked as if she were going out to take tea somewhere nice and swap gossip with a couple of duchesses.

  “Ms., er, Smyth?”

  “Mrs.,” she said, “but call me Doris. And you’re Peter Parker?”

  “That’s right.” They shook hands, and she gestured him in. Peter walked into one of the biggest and most beautiful apartments it had ever been his pleasure to see, wonderfully furnished with antiques and expensive porcelain: the Irish Belleek that MJ lusted after, the Meissen that Kate Cushing liked so much, beautiful old couches upholstered in crimson and gold Regency stripe, with wood that gleamed with the same deep, lustrous patina as Mel Ahrens’s old typewriter, polished breakfronts and bureaus, and behind all of these, floor-to-ceiling windows with a truly astonishing view.

  It was not at all the sort of place where he expected to find help for his and MJ’s cell phone problem.

  “Forgive me,” Peter said, “but—Well, I’m just blown away. This view goes right ’round, doesn’t it?”

  “Oh yes. I have the whole floor. My late husband used to be in shipping. He was quite successful, but, well, George isn’t with us anymore.” She cleared her throat. “Anyway. Sit down and have a cup of tea, and tell me what your problem is.”

  They sat down at a handsome glass-topped table at one end of the huge main living room, and Peter explained what had happened to MJ’s phone. “Yes indeed,” said Doris. “There’s a lot of that nonsense going around. Very nasty. And of course, the phone companies aren’t wildly eager to do anything about it. All they want is to cover their assets, so to speak, and expenses too, of course. They’ll happily take it out of their subscribers’ pockets.”

  “I’ve noticed that,” Peter said.

  “Yes, quite. So much easier than trying to find a way ’round the problem. But then, that might cost money. You don’t have the phone with you at the moment?”

  “No, I don’t. My wife’s got it, and she’s out on business.”

  “All right,” Doris said. “Well—”

  “Forgive me,” Peter interrupted, “but I’m not sure that you—I mean, what do you do about this kind of thing?”

  “Come back this way, Peter Parker, and I’ll show you.”

  She led him out of the living room and across the kitchen, out the far side, and into another room that was as big as both the first two rolled into one. Bookshelves were here, and more beautiful old furniture, and a corridor that led along one side of the building, walled with more floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the cityscape below.

  “I just can’t get over the view,” Peter said again. It was true; he’d been as high, or higher, when out web-slinging, but that had never been an activity conducive to rubbernecking.

  “George always said I should be comfortable in my old age, and I’ve always liked to see what’s going on around me. This seemed to be the best way to combine both wishes. And here we are.” She opened up a door on the left that might once have led into a guest bedroom.

  Now the guests would have to be communications experts from the CIA. At the very least.

  What had once been a bedroom was now packed with more electronic equipment than he had seen in one place since the last time he passed through the Fantastic Four’s headquarters. From floor to ceiling along every wall, mounted in studio-quality instrument racks, were banks and banks of scanners, fiber-optic phone connections in bundles as thick as packs of spaghetti, ISDN linkages, phone-band radios, what seemed to be short-, medium-, and long-wave radio receivers bristling with buttons. Everything was black, very expensive, and very professional.

  “George always said I should have a hobby,” Doris said to Peter, “and I never could get the hang of knitting. And as for casting off, I must have created the longest single sock in history. But he left me quite a bit of money—”

  That’s an unnecessary observation, Peter thought, looking again at the cool, dark racks of equipment and feeling them gaze back at him with tiny LED eyes.

  “—and I always did like keeping in touch with people. Listening to what was going on. And what comes through here is so much more interesting than most talk shows, don’t you think?”

  “But isn’t it, er, sort of illegal to listen in on private communications?” he said, staring at yet another floor-to-ceiling wall of equipment, this time so complex that he couldn’t even guess at what it was meant to do.

  “Not if the government gives you everything they want you to listen with.”

  “Um,” said Peter. There were some statements that went beyond words.

  “You know, I had one of the first cell phones sold in New York City,” Doris said. “And about ten others. I got cloned, too. It made me cross.” She said it quietly enough, but there was something about the glint in her blue-gray eyes that suggested it wasn’t a good idea to make Doris Smyth cross.

  “I started doing some research into hacking, and phreaking, and all the other ways a phone company could be cheated. It got very interesting. So I started buying equipment to look into the problem myself, and quite soon after that I tracked down the people who had cloned my own phone. It was easier then: they left a track through the ether half a mile wide. Once I had done that, I contacted the phone company and passed the information along. They were so impressed that,” she smiled up at him, “they hired me. I do fairly well. Something like a ten percent identification rate, which I gather is pretty good. The end result is that all three of
the major cell companies here—including CellTech—use me as a security consultant. I charge them what the market will bear, and in some cases I do work pro bono. That will be you, young man. Or rather, your wife. They socked you for—how much was it?”

  “Four thousand and change.”

  She tutted disapprovingly. “A young couple like you can’t be expected to pay that kind of money. We’ve got to do something about these regulations. They’re hurting people. It’s not your fault that half the criminals in New York are making cell phones work for them. It’s only to be expected, though. If something is worth money, then someone, somewhere, will work out a way to steal it.” She led the way out of the room, and closed its door behind her.

  “Surely there have to be other consultants working on this kind of thing,” Peter said as they walked back up the glass-walled corridor. “So how come you’re doing so well? It could just be natural talent, of course.”

  Doris glanced up at him again, and smiled. “Flatterer. If your wife finds that you’re wasting perfectly good compliments on eighty-year-old grannies, you’re going to get in trouble!”

  “Eighty?”

  “But I don’t look a year over sixty, right?”

  “Really, you don’t. What’s your secret?”

  “Snoopiness, and having something to do. Something really interesting. Everyone should have something really interesting to do, even if they have to keep it a secret. Have you?”

  “Er, I do a lot of freelance photography, for the Bugle and for—”

  “Oh? Would I have seen any of your pictures?”

  “You would have seen some in the Bugle over the last week, yes.”

  “Then you’re a celebrity! Well, you have to come and sit down, finish your tea, and tell me all about it.”

  “I’m not a celebrity, not really,” Peter said. “It’s my wife—” But it was no use. He got to sit down again with Doris, and tell her all about his wife, and especially about MJ’s stint in Secret Hospital.

 

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