Keith closed his eyes and pressed his lips together.
”What’s the matter, Keith? No stomach for the hard decisions?”
Keith held Tauber’s gaze for a moment, then looked away. He glanced at a clock on Tauber’s wall and jumped up with an exaggerated sense of urgency.
“Look at the time! I’ve got to go, Hank.” He grinned apologetically. “Appointment with one of your merchanter friends on a new case.”
Tauber rose, too, and looked over his guest with undisguised suspicion.
“A new case?”
“Yeah.” Keith shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Uh, let’s see.... Clark? No—” he tapped his temple “—Clarkson. Jared Clarkson. Yeah—that’s it. Jared Clarkson. Merchanter First Class on the R-4 run about two years ago. Says some colonists tried to poison him with tainted squawker meat just before the return trip because he refused to smuggle colonial goods to black-market friends of theirs on Earth.”
Tauber frowned but said nothing. He remembered Jared Clarkson. Straight as an arrow. Would he have filed a lawsuit like this?
Keith looked at Tauber with strange, almost imploring eyes. He seemed to be debating with himself about something.
“Listen, Hank, about the zappers, I really wish you’d—”
“What, Keith? You wish I’d just leave ’em floating around the Earth like so much space junk? All that firepower, and you don’t want me to use it. Is that it?”
“It...it’s just that—” Keith stammered.
“Yeah, Keith, I know. It’s not your fault. You’ve been conditioned, living in a world where weakness is king, and manhood is a lost art. But all that’s going to change. Just trust me.”
Keith bent his head and rubbed the back of his neck. “Okay,” he said with a sigh and an unconvincing half-smile. “Guess I’ll have to.”
“Just stay away from the park on Saturday,” Tauber reminded him, opening the door.
Keith nodded and crossed the threshold.
Tauber watched the lawyer’s receding figure for a few seconds before closing the door, then returned to the mundane task of picking up the papers that still lay scattered on the floor near his computer. More and more lately, Daniels reminded Tauber of Derek Marsden. Not physically, of course. Daniels was taller and more athletic looking than the thin, wiry Marsden. And though Daniels didn’t lack a sense of humor, he lacked Derek’s sense of adventure and wild abandon.
Then why does he remind me of Derek? Tauber asked himself. And, as quickly as the question formed in his mind, he knew the answer: Daniels was beginning to remind Tauber of the post-accident Derek Marsden.
Before that terrible day, Derek had been one of the best, Tauber recalled. Absolutely fearless, the man would try anything once for fun—twice for spite. The word “consequences” wasn’t even in his vocabulary. Never had anything more serious on his mind than proving his mettle and having a good time. And what ideas he had for good times! Tauber paused in the midst of straightening some papers and smiled at the memory of a particularly clever prank the “bad boy” crew had pulled on the chief cook in Alpha Colony on their first trip to the Asteroid Belt.
“Dammit, Derek!” Tauber said aloud.
Tauber shook his head and, with a mighty effort of will, fought off a spreading sadness that threatened to engulf him.
Keith Daniels wasn’t Derek Marsden, Tauber reminded himself sternly, but Daniels was becoming a big question mark. He was doing a good enough job with the lawsuits, but Tauber suspected the lawyer still wasn’t sold on Operation Strong Man, despite the fact that he mouthed all the right slogans. Maybe it’s that girlfriend of his, thought Tauber, the one who saved Althea Milgrom’s life back in November.
Tauber put the papers in a neat pile on his computer desk, then turned the machine off and went to the terminal with the CDN hookup. He attached a small, gray box to the keyboard, entered a series of numbers and then flipped a scrambler switch on the box. A moment later, the face of the bearded giant appeared on the screen.
“Kronis here,” the giant said grumpily. “What is it?”
“I’ve got a job for you.”
Kronis looked bored.
“Of course you do,” he said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have called.”
Tauber was irritated by the remark, but he resolved to say nothing about it.
“Yes. Well, you know the lawyer who’s been handling all the merchanter lawsuits? Keith Daniels?”
Kronis bent his big head forward. “I know him.”
“I want you and your men to keep a close watch on him. Keep track of every move he makes, every communicator call he places or accepts.”
“What’re we looking for here, Lieutenant?”
“We’re looking for any indication that he’s trying to give information to the enemies of Operation Strong Man. And don’t call me ‘lieutenant.’ You were never even in the Merchant Fleet.”
The strong lines of Kronis’s face hardened. “It’s not my fault I was too big.”
Tauber nodded impatiently. He had no desire to go into the story of frustration and anger that brought Kronis to Operation Strong Man’s attention. He just wanted the man to do a job.
“Yeah, Kronis, I know. Point is, I want you to watch Daniels. If he tries to contact any officials except in line with the lawsuits he’s working on—anyone like Althea Milgrom, for example—you and your boys grab him and take him to 435 Nottingham St., Apartment 12. Got that?”
“Sure, Tauber—435 Nottingham St., Apartment 12. What’s that—some kind of safe house?”
“In a way, Kronis, in a way. At least it’s a safe house for us. If Daniels makes any suspicious move, I want him kept under guard at the Nottingham address until further notice. Got it?”
Kronis nodded.
“Good,” said Tauber. “Then set the surveillance in motion right away. Oh, and Kronis....”
“Yes?”
“I don’t want him contacting his girlfriend, either.”
Kronis nodded again. “If he does, we cut him short and take him to Nottingham.”
“Right.”
“It’ll be taken care of,” Kronis said simply. “Anything else?”
Tauber shook his head. “That’s it. I’ll be in touch when I need you again.” With that, Tauber cut the connection and disengaged the scrambler.
Now then, Tauber said to himself as he returned to his off-line computer, I’ve got some messages to send to a certain zapper.
Chapter 27: A Day at the Park
Children were romping on the playground and running across the grass. Couples out for a leisurely walk on a lovely spring morning were strolling along tree-bordered paths. A light breeze gave a delicious zest to the very air. At the open-speech area in the center of the park, three men and one woman were making the necessary arrangements for this afternoon’s presentation. It all seemed quite idyllic.
Keith felt out of place in this picture as he glanced nervously over his shoulder. No sign of them. Perhaps he had managed to elude them after all. Although they must have known where he was headed. Then again, maybe not. Maybe Tauber didn’t want to give them any hint of what he was planning. Maybe he doesn’t trust them any more than he trusts me.
It was only hours after he left Tauber’s apartment four days ago that he began to sense he was being watched. At first, he was inclined to attribute it all to paranoia—a condition that had become somewhat familiar to him since his association with Tauber. He was confused, too. He wasn’t quite sure how he felt about Tauber or Operation Strong Man. The man had a powerful personality—no question about it. Keith was simultaneously drawn to and repelled by the Strong Man philosophy. He had been mulling all this, considering whether to feed his latest information on Tauber’s plans to Rayna, when the feeling of being watched first hit him. It wasn’t until several hours later that his vague suspicions were confirmed: The same large, bearded man he’d seen several miles away on leaving Jared Clarkson’s place had also shown up at Maybo’s Cafe, a law
yer’s hangout that Keith frequented.
When he arrived home, he found a message from Rayna inviting him to join her Saturday afternoon at John Martin Roberts park for a scheduled HV broadcast of an Althea Milgrom speech. Keith had felt sick then. He might be able to talk himself into doing nothing about Tauber’s plans as long as they affected only some anonymous park-goers, but he couldn’t stand by and let Rayna get hurt—maybe killed.
So he’d placed the call. Or rather, he’d tried. There had been no answer. With a growing sense of urgency, he’d rushed out of his apartment and taken the Trans-Mat to Rayna’s building. It never occurred to him that his pursuers might simply use the booth’s “repeat” option to follow him.
They’d kept him locked up in a small, poorly lit room at the north end of town. It wasn’t until three o’clock this morning that he had managed to escape, defeating the electronic door lock while his guards slept. His efforts to contact Rayna had been unsuccessful so far. She didn’t answer her communicator, and he didn’t want to lead his former captors to her door. His efforts to get the police or the park authority to cancel Milgrom’s speech had merely resulted in frustration and loss of precious time as he was challenged over and over to produce evidence of an imminent zapper threat—evidence he didn’t have.
And so here he was at the park, eight hours after his escape, hoping desperately to find Rayna and get her away from this place before it was too late.
She’s probably not even here yet, Keith thought. When was Tauber planning his attack? Would he trigger the zappers before the speech, or would he wait, hoping to catch Milgrom herself in the line of fire? He massaged his temples. Put yourself in Tauber’s place, Keith told himself desperately. Think it through the way he would.
“Mommy! Mommy!” a small boy’s voice called out, breaking Keith’s line of thought—which seemed to be going nowhere in any event. “Lookit my balloon!”
Without thinking, Keith glanced in the direction the boy was pointing. A bright red, helium-filled balloon was climbing skyward, to the mixed excitement and consternation of its former owner.
“Oh, Stevie!” the mother said sternly. “I told you to hold onto the string!”
Suddenly, and for no apparent reason, the balloon seemed to burst. Stevie exploded into tears as his mother tried to comfort him.
“It was just a balloon, Stevie,” she told him. But the boy cried all the louder. “My balloon!” he said. “Want my balloon!”
The rest of their words were lost in the distance as mother guided son off to see the other sights of the park. Keith was about to turn and resume his search for Rayna when he caught sight of a tall, bearded man coming up the walk from the Trans-Mat center. Quickly, he ducked behind a nearby tree, his heart pounding madly. He licked his lips, suddenly conscious that his mouth had gone dry, and he struggled to keep his shallow breathing even. He felt keenly on edge, like an athlete measuring, watching, waiting for just the right moment to make the crucial leap that would take him over the hurdle.
***
Tauber’s 11th-floor hotel room afforded him a perfect view of John Martin Roberts Park—close enough to watch the fun but far enough away to be safe. Now if these zappers had been the earlier models, it might be a different story. The targeting mechanisms in those things were so unreliable that a number of life domes had been badly damaged by strikes intended for targets several kilometers away. The Z-48 model, though, had proved itself over and over. It was accurate to within 30 centimeters from standard Earth orbit.
The simulation Tauber had run on his off-line computer at home verified the result: He would be safe here, and he would be able to observe the carnage personally. He took a deep breath, but it wasn’t air he was inhaling. It was the intoxicating scent of power.
There had been a chance that Daniels’ suspicions might be right: Wraggon could have had his robots mess up the zappers’ basic programming, either by directing the zappers to hit unauthorized targets or else by locking out new instructions from Earth. That’s why, after using his off-line computer to encode the signal in a way that would appear meaningless to anyone monitoring CDN transmissions, Tauber had sent override instructions through his CDN-linked communicator. If the new instructions were locked out, there would be some sort of error message. But no such message appeared on his terminal. So now all he had to do was use the hotel communicator to send the trigger code to a zap miner drifting far above him in synchronous orbit over Los Angeles.
Tauber smiled and looked at his watch. Almost noon. Only two more hours until the big moment. The moment that would put an end to the political aspirations of Althea Milgrom and put Operation Strong Man in charge for good. For an instant, he forgot his earlier musings on the advantages of being the power behind the scenes, and he saw himself standing before a wildly cheering throng. Maybe I won’t let Rensselaer have all the glory after all, he thought.
Rensselaer was at the United Nations today. He was scheduled to report to the General Assembly on the latest developments in dealing with the colonies. That would fit in well, too. Just as Rensselaer was telling them how serious the situation is, Milgrom would be trying to say the communications with the colonies have been fakes. But no one will be able to claim that this zapper attack is a fake. The park will look like an abandoned rock quarry by time this is over, Tauber chuckled to himself. Milgrom won’t have a prayer of convincing anyone that the colonies weren’t behind this—especially since she’ll probably be dead.
Tauber went to the window overlooking the park, opened the sash and leaned forward over the ledge. Look at them all, he mused, surveying the tiny figures below. A colony of ants. No. Not ants. Ants work together collectively. Ants have a common purpose. No, they’re not ants. They’re just grains of sand. And this is my beach!
***
Rayna stood at the window in the park’s recreation building and heaved a sigh.
“What is it, Rayna?” Althea Milgrom asked, a half-finished cup of coffee on the table before her. “You seem particularly on edge today.”
Rayna turned to face Milgrom and lifted her hands in a gesture of confusion. “I really don’t know what it is, Althea. I should be feeling great. For most of the past year, I’ve felt like a helpless captive on a doomed, runaway train. Thanks to you and Derek, I’m beginning to have some real hope again. But....” She shook her head, unable to complete the sentence.
“Are you worried about that friend of yours?”
Rayna’s heart did jumping jacks in her chest as she joined Milgrom at the table.
“That’s it, isn’t it, dear?”
Rayna smiled half-heartedly. “Maybe you’re right. Things have been—well, let’s say things have been strained between Keith and me since I first came to you back in December. I kept hoping he’d come around—that he’d realize we had to work with you to stop Tauber.”
“Tauber can have a pretty powerful effect on people. Take it from me.” Derek Marsden’s face was creased into an unusually thoughtful expression. Rayna looked at him with frank curiosity. Marsden had said little about his relationship with Tauber, but what he had revealed suggested that the two men had once been quite close.
“Hank always had a way getting other people to do what he wanted them to do,” Marsden said.
If Marsden was trying to reassure her, it wasn’t working, thought Rayna. Was Keith now one of those doing what Tauber wanted them to do? The thought—one she’d been struggling mightily not to think—depressed her thoroughly.
It wasn’t the first time she’d considered the possibility that she was losing Keith to Tauber’s sinister influence. She’d tried to reason with him, cajole him, even seduce him away from what she now saw as Tauber’s insidious clutches. There were moments when she thought she was winning, when the old Keith seemed to be back. But then he’d see Tauber again, and once again the strength that was part of his character was distorted into a cruel parody of itself—twisted into a cold, indifferent sharpness that chilled Rayna even as she thought ab
out it.
One evening a few weeks ago, after a particularly upsetting meeting with Keith, she’d even resolved to try her grandfather’s psychic techniques, as described in his papers and Alec Zorne’s laboratory notes. But all she’d gotten for her trouble was a severe headache and the sense that she was behaving like a jackass.
“Why don’t you just have another cup of coffee and try to relax,” Milgrom suggested. “We have another hour and a half before we have to face the lions out there.”
The corners of Rayna’s mouth curved upward slightly. “If I have much more coffee, I think I’ll explode. Mind if I take a little walk around the park?”
“Actually, that sounds like a wonderful idea!” Milgrom said. “You stayed up half the night with me working on this. Didn’t even get home to sleep in your own bed. You’re certainly entitled to a break.” She chuckled warmly. “If I could wander around here without being recognized, I think I’d join you. But then, I still have some finishing touches to put on this speech. Maybe you should join Rayna, Derek.”
Marsden shook his head. “No way, Althea. I’m not leaving you alone after what happened here last time.”
Milgrom reached for Marsden’s hand and patted it tenderly. “Don’t be silly,” she insisted. “There are security guards at the doors and around the open-speech area. I’ll be just fine.”
Marsden looked hard at Milgrom. “Are you sure, Althea?”
“Go!” she commanded with a warm laugh.
Marsden brushed back an errant forelock of straight, blond hair but made no move toward the door. Milgrom smiled at him and nodded. “All right,” he said finally. “Let’s go, Rayna.”
Rayna glanced from Marsden to Milgrom and back again. Then she followed Marsden out into the park.
“You care a great deal about her, don’t you?” Rayna said after awhile as they walked up the path toward the open-speech area.
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