Saturn Run

by Stanley Salmons

  “Thank you.”

  “There’s another thing. In Mr Rostov you have made a powerful enemy. As I’ve explained, we have little time for Mr Rostov and his amateurish operations. As long as you’re here you’ll be protected from the trouble he could send your way. They don’t dare to meddle with us on our own territory. It would, however, be unwise to walk around town on your own. Next time they may get to you first, and I don’t think you would enjoy their hospitality.”

  Dan didn’t buy everything he was saying. There was nothing amateurish about the operation he’d been part of – it took a lot of people and a lot of organization. He was right about the rest, though. It would be good to have some protection, even if didn’t extend beyond the confines of this building.

  Virgilius went on to outline a few more details of the employment package. The whole thing sounded like a piece of cake and just what he needed at this point. They shook hands on it.

  He left the office an employee of Mr Virgilius and his company.

  *

  Behind the façade it was organized crime again, of course, just a different syndicate. They seemed to be bigger than Rostov and Dan wasn’t even sure Mr Virgilius was the top man. They had a good legitimate front in the hotels and casinos. As long as the work didn’t incriminate him he felt safe enough. He had a room in the hotel as his base and he could use all the hotel’s facilities for eating, laundry, and so on. In his position it could hardly have been a better deal.

  To start with he did a few runs, most of them standard tropospheric flights. Then there was a gap, then a few more trips. The work appealed to him: the craft were well maintained and well appointed and the distances and the number of passengers varied all the time.

  At last he was doing the job he wanted: flying passengers. He considered adding the flying hours to his personal log but he was sure he’d never be able to use them – Mr Virgilius would hit the roof if he knew a record was being kept of his secret business meetings. It was academic; with or without the flying hours no legitimate airline would employ him now. In any case the very notion of looking for a job was laughable when he didn’t even dare go outside without protection. Rostov’s thugs probably knew where he was by now; they were itching to get their hands on him and for all he knew there’d be one of them watching the building around the clock.

  He had to be on hand the whole time, in case he was needed. But between trips there were long periods when nothing happened. At first he didn’t mind. He did a lot of reading and used the hotel’s health centre to work out every day. After a while, however, he started to feel restless. He was longing to see Neraya again but he dismissed the thought. The reasoning was the same as before, and there was now an even more compelling argument: if Rostov’s gang got the slightest hint of an association they could use her as a way of getting to him.

  He started to feel bored and cooped up. Eventually the inactivity got too much for him and he went downstairs to investigate the Casino bar.

  21

  The Casino bar was where the staff in Virgilius’s organization tended to gravitate when they were off duty. Senior management staff were an exception – they stayed in their offices on the top floor most of the time and were rarely seen in the bar unless they happened to be entertaining a client. But the rest of the personnel – and that now included Dan – would hang out at the bar if there wasn’t much on. They kept themselves apart from the customers and nobody minded them being there – in fact it was good for business because it made the bar look like it was humming even when things were slack.

  People tended to stay in the group they worked with. The croupiers weren’t around very much. If they weren’t occupied at the tables they were in the hotel’s manicure salon – and not just the girls. Dan had never seen people so fussed about their hands – some of them wore little white gloves the whole time. At the other end of the scale were four people who were referred to in-house as Security Personnel. They looked so much like the men he’d seen around Rostov that he didn’t need to ask what their special skills were. Although they usually kept themselves to themselves it was too small a world for him not to get to know them. He learned their names: Jamie, Hank, Oscar, and Felipe. To his surprise they were quite friendly towards him, and Dan was pleasant in return, although he never felt completely comfortable around them; he thought they might be unpredictable companions. Hank and Felipe were in fact the two who’d first brought him in to see Mr Virgilius. So far as he could tell, it occasioned them not the slightest embarrassment. Errands like this aside, their main role appeared to be that of bodyguards and consequently Dan often had them as co-passengers when he took one or more of the senior people on a stratospheric. It turned out that this was the key to their good relations.

  On one occasion Hank, Oscar and Felipe were still out on a job; Jamie was on his own and he joined Dan at the bar. Unlike Hank and Felipe, Jamie was only slightly built but he spoke and moved with a quiet deliberation that was probably deceptive. As they were chatting, Jamie turned to him and said:

  “You know something, Dan. We had a lot of pilots in here, they give the boss men a heap of respect, and us they treat like dirt. We go on a trip with you, you treat us all the same. I like that about you.”

  Dan recovered from his surprise by laughing good-naturedly. “Well, Jamie, that’s because you are the same to me – you’re all my passengers. I’m paid to get you from A to B. If I can, I’ll try to make sure we’re both in one piece when we get there. That’s my job.”

  “Yeah, still nice, though. Know what I mean? Refreshing.”

  There was a fifth man associated with that group: Rudi Meyer. He was around less often than the others, and they treated him with a slight deference that suggested he might be closer to the people upstairs.

  The senior management themselves were unforthcoming when they flew with him. Mr Virgilius would give him a nod; his close associate, Mr Aaron, would ignore him. There were one or two others but he didn’t know their names. Perhaps it was better not to know.

  The only people with whom Dan had any professional affinity were a motley collection of individuals who included other casino and bar staff and the drivers. Although it looked friendly enough, the friendliness was within the group, and newcomers tended to be frozen out. It wasn’t in Dan’s nature to push his company, so it didn’t bother him if it took a while for them to accept him. In the end it was one of the drivers who spoke to him first.

  He was small and wiry, his name was Ferris, and he wasn’t just a driver: he was a wheelman. At first Dan didn’t know the difference. He certainly couldn’t understand why Ferris was called a wheelman because all he ever drove were very hot skimmers and, as Dan knew very well, there is no wheel in a skimmer, just foot pedals and a stick between the knees with the trimming buttons where the thumb falls. Ferris explained it to him.

  “A wheelman is paid to drive fast. Comes from the days before cybercrime, Dan – y’know, when gangs used t’do things like holdin’ up banks and suchlike?”

  “Yes…?”

  “Well, the wheelman is the guy who waits for ’em outside. The rest of the gang pile in and he drives ’em away fast. See?”

  “But why ‘wheelman’?”

  “Ah, well, years gone by they used to drive away in a groundhugger. You steered that with a wheel. I guess the name stuck.”

  The only groundhugger Dan had ever seen was his father’s tractor, and the whole idea of anyone trying to get away fast in that struck him as completely hilarious. He dissolved into laughter and Ferris must have seen the funny side of it, too, because before long the pair of them were hysterical. After that it was natural to seek each other out any time they happened to be in the Casino bar together.

  On one occasion they were sitting at their usual table when Dan confessed that he was a bit fed up being at a loose end. He hadn’t done any flying in over a week.

  “Hey, Danny,” Ferris said. “You wanna come out for a spin with me? I need t’keep in practice, y�
��know.” He wiggled his fingers in the air as if playing an imaginary instrument.

  “Sure, why not?” Dan replied, not knowing quite what he was letting himself in for.

  They went down to the basement where he’d first entered the building and he watched Ferris unlock a sleek silver Zetach skimmer. He gestured to Dan.

  “Hop in.”

  He glanced across, checking Dan’s harness was fastened, then pressed a button. The engine started with a deep howl. The craft levitated, then cruised quietly out of the basement park and up into the airlanes outside. At that point he took off.

  It was hair-raising. Ferris’s reflexes were lightning sharp. His eyes darted back and forth between mirrors, monitors and the front screen; his feet dipped and one hand moved the stick this way and that. He would change lanes without any reduction in speed, horizontally or vertically or both at once, sometimes with only inches to spare, and every change of direction was a ninety-degree bank. Dan clung to his seat, his knuckles white, his mouth dry. After what seemed like an age Ferris slowed to a cruise, entered the basement park, and lowered the skimmer into its reserved place. The motors whined down. Dan released the harness, got out slowly, extended a trembling hand to the car’s roof, and leaned on it for a few moments to recover his equilibrium.

  “I used t’be a racing driver, see,” Ferris said, closing his door. Dan smiled weakly. This nugget of intelligence came as no surprise at all. He straightened up and they walked over to the elevator.

  “Yeah, I was doing real well for a time,” Ferris continued as he pressed the button. “A lot of people had me pegged for the World Championship but,” he shrugged, “y’know, I didn’t care one way or th’other about all that stuff. I wasn’t in it for the Championship, I just liked driving fast. Then a few of my buddies got killed on the circuit so I decided to quit while I was ahead. I miss it some, but it’s okay here. This job’s an easy number.”

  Ferris and Dan were both pilots of a sort, and they got on well enough, but even when Ferris wasn’t driving he seemed permanently restless, eyes flicking around and movements quick and twitchy, like a squirrel’s, so he wasn’t all that relaxing to be with.

  Ferris was the man they chose if they wanted to get somewhere fast – or away from somewhere fast. If they just wanted a nice sedate ride they wouldn’t use him, they’d use someone like Ted Logue. Ted was a smooth driver and a smooth individual. He wore well-cut suits and silk pocket handkerchiefs and put a lot of gel on his hair. He fancied himself as a ladies’ man but he was too suave and ladies didn’t go for it. Dan would often sit with him and Ferris. None of them ever drank anything alcoholic, but they would have a juice together and Ted would try to make a pass at the girls.

  For this Dan could hardly blame him, because the girls were extremely good-looking. Apart from the croupiers there were what they called the “company bunnies”. Their job was to latch onto customers and make them spend more on the tables and on drinks than they’d intended to. It was generally supposed that they would render other services too, on which the house no doubt took a large percentage. When business was slow they would come over to the bar for a drink and a chat and Dan got to know most of them. He was young and fit and one or two seemed to be attracted to him. Certainly he was aware that they were turning it on. They would cross their long legs, and use their hands to smooth their tight little skirts down their thighs; they would sit up close to him, and move their bodies in a subtle way that filled his head with perfume, and part their lips and throw dark looks his way. That sort of thing was so automatic for them that Dan couldn’t even be sure it was intentional, but in any case he wasn’t interested; he didn’t want that kind of involvement. As they were talking he would look into their eyes and it seemed to him that there was nothing behind them, except perhaps for a small central processor that could compute rapidly what you were worth and how much of it you planned to push in their direction. He found himself wondering what they would do in ten years’ time when their looks began to fade and the men started to pass them over for younger girls, but the way they were drinking and doing drugs most of them weren’t going to last long enough to find out. If he cast his mind back to Bunny and Neraya it seemed to him that these girls weren’t just different: it was like they came from another planet.

  Kelly was the youngest of the company bunnies; she was just twenty. She was a very pretty girl, with blonde hair, big blue eyes, dazzling white teeth and a complexion like porcelain. He didn’t have anything going with her either, but she was comfortable around him and they often met up at the bar in the evenings. To Dan she seemed a lot softer than the other girls. She drank a bit, but that was all. He had no idea how she got into this game, and it wasn’t any of his business to ask. When she was with a client she put on a bright and breezy manner because that was part of her job. Dan didn’t expect her to be that way with him and she wasn’t. When she dropped the façade there was an air of melancholy about her.

  “You’re a decent guy, Danny,” she said to him one evening, when nothing was moving in the Casino and they were just sitting up at the bar. “Not like most of the men round here. They spend all their time looking at my cleavage.”

  “You find that hard to understand?” he replied lightly. “It’s a very nice cleavage, you know, and there’s a good deal of it on show.”

  She pursed her lips for a moment. Then she said, “You wear a uniform, Danny?”

  “Sure, when I’m flying.”

  “Well, this is my uniform. No different. Comes with the job.”

  “I guess so. Don’t take it the wrong way. I wasn’t judging you.”

  At that moment someone called out to her from the Casino. “Hey, Kelly, you’re wanted!”

  She gave Dan a little grimace and looked at him sadly. “Gotta go, Danny.”

  “Take care, beautiful.”

  “Take care yourself, flyboy.”

  She tried to sound jaunty, and she might have succeeded if the last bit hadn’t stuck in her throat.

  22

  Over a period, through his conversations in the Casino bar, Dan began to put together a picture of the way Raymond Virgilius operated. In common with many other top executives he believed that a business could not remain still: if it didn’t expand it would shrink. But Virgilius was a political animal. Where other syndicate bosses had a tendency to weigh into a new area and simply fight it out with their rivals, Virgilius had a more refined approach. He surveyed the market and opportunities very carefully, then put out feelers to organizations already operating there. These would usually end up in a high level meeting, at which he would invariably offer them some clear benefit, in return for which the two organizations would cooperate, or at least limit their operations to certain districts or spheres of activity. This was his style; he had no wish either to take over other outfits or to eliminate them. He also had a remarkable ability to distance his own feelings from transactions, and this enabled him to reach agreements with people he personally despised. There was no question that he had the strength in personnel and materiel to conduct a full-scale gang war. Fortunately it was not often that negotiations foundered so badly that he was driven to that extreme, although Dan learned that the man had been obliged to get tough more than once with the Rostov syndicate. Violence was, however, a last resort. It was simply poor business to squander human and other resources like that if there was another way.

  Agreements depended on trust, and he was not dealing with trusting individuals. The only way to succeed was to ensure that every agreement was honoured to the letter. This required discipline on the part of every member of his staff and he demanded discipline. Virgilius ran a tight ship.

  Sometimes it was Virgilius who did the travelling, taking with him senior colleagues, like Mr Aaron, and a heavily armed escort, which would include Jamie, Hank, Oscar, and Felipe and additional men drawn from their home bases in other hotels belonging to the organization. Dan would fly them all out to their destination and back. He himself took no i
nterest in the nature of these visits; he knew from bitter experience that it would be unhealthy for him to do so. Sometimes the talks would take place in the upper floors of Virgilius’s own headquarters. Again nobody would say very much but people knew that something was up: the drivers would be busy, the “security personnel” would be placed on a heightened state of alert, and sometimes extra people would be drafted in.

  One evening Dan was sitting unsuspectingly at the Casino bar chatting to Manny, who served the drinks. Manny broke off the conversation to take an order from Jamie, Hank, Oscar, and Felipe, who’d just come in.

  “What’s your pleasure tonight, gentlemen? The usual?”

  “Make it alcohol-frees, Manny,” Hank replied. He winked in Dan’s direction. “Got to stay sharp tonight.”

  Dan raised an eyebrow but said nothing. He watched them sit down at a table on their own and soon Manny was taking a tray of drinks over. Just then Ted came into the bar. Dan strolled over to him.

  “Something up, Ted?”

  Ted often learned a lot from listening to the conversations taking place in the back seat of his luxurious skimmer, and today was no exception.

  “Some of the big hitters from Rostov’s outfit are here for talks. I picked them up at the airport.”

  “Rostov? I thought Virgilius hated his guts.”

  “He does – and it’s mutual. But Rostov’s doing time right now. The guy he left running the show is one Raoul Hernandez. Virgilius must have seen it as an opportunity. Seems Hernandez is receptive to the idea of a more congenial relationship. You want a juice?”

  “Sure.”

  Ted went over to the bar and had a few words with Manny.

  The mention of Rostov’s organization gave Dan a queasy feeling in his stomach. He wondered what the implications would be for him if the two syndicates came to an agreement. Would he be part of the deal?