by Mel Odom
I waited till we were in the elevator to address him. “Jorge, you could ask the captain for a reassignment.”
He looked at me with annoyance. “Why would I do that?”
“As Captain Karanjai noted, this is going to be dangerous and we’re going to be more or less on our own. If you’re not comfortable with that, maybe—”
He cut me off with a sharp tone. “I’ll get comfortable with that.”
I left it alone, but I knew I wasn’t comfortable with the situation either. I didn’t want to lose another partner.
Chapter Twenty-Six
For five hours, Royo and I cycled through known connections the NAPD had for fixers in Heinlein. The department had a list of people—snitches—they usually did work with as confidential informants. Fixers were also the people criminals went to in order to fence goods and get leads on potential illegal enterprises in the megapolis—for a price.
During that time, the nosies were in full bloom and Gordon Holder’s black market enterprise was the news of the day. I kept a news feed on constant download through my PAD and scanned newsrags to see the progression of the story through the various outlets.
The tension was evident on the streets too. People living in a bubble—and that was essentially what living on the Moon was like—usually tried to pretend that the walls around them didn’t separate them from vacuum and boiling heat or lethal cold that was on the lunar surface. Thinking like that could lead to hysteria and chronic depression. Moon madness was a real thing, and it occurred more often when there was a full moon, though mental health agencies couldn’t fathom why.
Knowledge of a potential terrorist threat changed that deniability. Traffic on the Beanstalk was jammed as Heinlein residents went on sudden “vacations” to earth. There was a rumble that the megapolis government was considering suspending all but essential business travel for an unspecified time because cargo shipping prices were going up now that space was at a premium due to all those extra bodies. Those rate changes were starting to affect the economic market, and that was something the corps didn’t want to happen.
So far, no decision about interrupting personal travel had been reached.
At a few minutes past 1800, we stopped at a Vietnamese noodle place for Royo and Rachel to grab a quick meal. Royo was showing signs of fatigue from too little sleep and the constant grind of walking into potentially dangerous situations.
Rachel remained watchful and kept her own counsel. She sat apart from us at one of the small, circular tables so she could better protect us. She ate left-handed and her right hand never came out of her duster pocket where I knew she carried a large-caliber pistol.
“So what do you think, Drake?” Royo slurped his noodles and kept his pensive gaze roving.
“You’ll have to clarify your question.”
“Do you think we’re going to catch up with these guys that hijacked the cargo?”
“I don’t know.” My prognostic abilities didn’t stretch to parameters like that without more information.
Royo slurped more noodles into his mouth and chewed. “Do you think that cargo was actually munitions?”
That was easier to predict. “Yes. Or some other black market merchandise. But given the nature of the munitions plant and Holder’s corp, it has to be munitions.”
“Guns would be bad, but I can’t help thinking that maybe this is something worse. Like explosives.”
Placing explosives at key positions inside the various vulnerable areas where large amounts of people gathered would be disastrous. Even though Heinlein was deliberately sectioned off to deal with microscopic meteor penetration, a concerted terrorist attack would leave a huge number of fatalities that couldn’t be prevented. I had run several scenarios and didn’t like what I saw. The NAPD was stretched thin providing extra layers of security.
“That would be worse.”
Royo didn’t finish his noodles after that, even though I encouraged him. “I keep thinking what it would be like, you know? Getting caught in a sudden evac of atmosphere.” He shook his head. “I don’t want to die like that.”
“There are safeguards in place throughout the megapolis.”
“Yeah, sure, but you and I both know that safeguards are better in some places than others.” Royo pushed his bowl away. “But these guys that killed Holder and took those weapons have got an endgame in mind. I don’t like the fact that we don’t know what that is.”
I wanted to allay his fears, so I went with the least dangerous scenario. “They could have simply wanted the weapons to sell. The profit margin from that alone would be worth the risk they took.”
“How much could you get for what those crates contained? Especially after all the heat got turned up looking for them?” Royo shook his head. “Fixers who would be fencing the stuff would take a deep cut—if they even touched it. The hijackers might be stuck with whatever they glommed off that tube car, unable to offload it. No, there was too much risk for too little reward just to sell those goods. There’s gotta be something else to this.”
I thought so too, but it didn’t seem necessary to worry him any further by agreeing with him. He hadn’t asked a question.
I tapped into NBN and picked up the highlights of the story again. Serena Holder, nee Swan, had released a tearful statement to the media. Blond and beautiful, every millimeter the Nordic princess, she sat in a conservative studio and talked to Lily Lockwell, but she kept addressing the audience.
“You’re hearing shocking things about Gordon, but I can tell you that none of what you’re hearing is true. My husband wasn’t that kind of man. Nobody that is saying those things can prove anything.” She broke down for a moment and tears glittered down her cheeks, and the vid operator caught them just right to show them off. Lily reached over and placed a hand on Serena’s shoulder. When she was composed again, she began speaking once more. “Gordon was a good man. He wouldn’t have betrayed his corporation. He wouldn’t have betrayed my father. He wouldn’t have betrayed…me.” Her voice trailed away.
“She’s not doing herself any good getting up in front of an audience.” Shelly stood beside me at the table. “She’s just making herself a target and giving the nosies more raw emotional traction to deal with. The more tears, the more they’ll pump the story up.” She frowned. “Where is her father? Why isn’t he putting a stop to this?”
That was an interesting question. I would have told Shelly that but I was sitting so close to Royo and he wasn’t part of that conversation. Magnus Swan had disappeared into a black hole as far as the media was concerned.
Lily Lockwell leaned in a little closer to Serena. She spoke like she was a confidant. “You have to understand, Serena, that even though they have your assurances, many people in Heinlein are concerned because the corp execs at Skorpios Defense Systems are laying the blame at your husband’s feet.”
Through angry tears, Serena shook her head. “I don’t know. They’re either simpletons or guilty of something themselves. My father is taking steps to find out what was really going on at Skorpios.”
Beside me, Shelly cursed. She didn’t do that often.
“What do you mean?” Lily’s voice took on an even more somber timbre.
Serena sat up a little straighter. “My father is a very important man. Very important and very powerful. If anyone can get to the bottom of Gordon’s murder and clear his name, my father can.”
“Interesting.” Shelly smiled a little. “Is Serena lobbying for the clearing of her husband’s name? Or is she shoring up her father’s public image?”
The same question had occurred to me. I didn’t know. I did know that Argus, Inc.’s involvement with Gordon Holder’s alleged black market dealings was being questioned. But that was being done quietly. None of the brass at the NAPD, including Commissioner Dawn, wanted to ruffle Magnus Swan’s feathers. Or cause a hiccup in the stock market.
But it wouldn’t be long before the nosies gave in to the scent of blood and went after Argus,
Inc. as well. Or at least pursued Magnus Swan. He’d never owned any media stock like a lot of other corps did. That particular portfolio diversity wasn’t aimed at a profit margin, but rather as a stopgap to eliminate media attention during sensitive times.
Finished with his meal, Royo stood and threw his trash into the recyclable bin.
Rachel did the same, then she turned to us and smiled in a way that was more smirk than smile. “Maybe we should go find out who Holder was really selling those weapons to.”
Royo gazed at her angrily. “Are you trying to tell us you knew who that was this whole time?”
“I know a guy who does.”
“Then why haven’t we gone to this guy before?”
“Because we didn’t have an invitation. Now we do. And it’s going to cost Karanjai plenty from his snitch fund.” She headed for the door and we followed.
* * *
“Is this guy a friend of yours?” Royo was still sullen over the turn of events.
We stood outside a small repair shop down in the blue-collar district. Every megapolis had those places, the areas where urban renewal hadn’t quite caught up with the decay from hard living and people who merely survived instead of lived. Apartment units there generally got condemned, evacuated, gutted, remodeled, and priced more expensively.
The Harriman District was an anomaly. One of the first built in Heinlein, it was named after one of the author Robert A. Heinlein’s most famous characters: Delos David Harriman, the “man who sold the Moon,” from a short work of the same name. As one of the longest-lived areas, several parts of the district were zoned as historical. Considerable legal pressures were required to free up sections for rezoning, and until enough of them were negotiated, real estate developers weren’t interested in bidding on the new construction.
“No, he’s not a friend.” Rachel watched the repair shop with sharp interest. “You’ll want to keep that in mind. He’s one of the most dangerous men you’ll meet in the megapolis. If he decides that he doesn’t want to talk to us, we walk. No questions asked. Understood?”
Irritably, Royo nodded. “If this guy’s so dangerous, I don’t know why we don’t bring a group of uniforms down here with us.”
Rachel lectured like she was talking to a small child. “Because I negotiated this meeting. Because Captain Karanjai wants this part of the investigation kept off the grid. And because Westlake would be gone by the time we got through the front door if we tried that. Unless he hung around to watch one of his secbots shoot you through the head for giggles.”
Royo scowled, but he didn’t say anything further.
I knew that we were being observed. I’d invaded the seccam network across the street long enough to ascertain all eyes were trained on us. Then my probe had been repulsed with a cyber attack that had almost caught me off guard.
Westlake’s defenses were good.
An in-depth review of the man’s name through NAPD databases hadn’t turned up anything significant. There were whispers about the man here and there, but he had never been brought into court. Westlake was a cipher, something that was believed to exist, though there was no conclusive evidence to relay anything further of him.
The shop was small, no more than seven meters of storefront, and located at the bottom of a six-floor stack in a commercial building that was only half-occupied by businesses that included a dentist, a psychiatrist that had been up on charges for being too free with his prescriptions, a dry cleaner, a massage parlor, a funeral home, and a tattoo artist. A handmade sign on the third floor advertised the presence of a palm reader as well.
The shop was simply called REPAIRS. One-way images pulsed across the transplas and advertised different items that were for sale as well as services offered. Evidently the proprietor was skilled in electrical, cyber, and mechanical devices. He even offered cyber-prosthetic adjustments.
With the adverts running across the transplas, I couldn’t see in. But I spotted the three flashes of light—red, violet, and green—easily enough.
So did Rachel. She took a quick breath and nodded. “Okay, let’s move.” She had both hands in her duster pockets now and I knew she had weapons in both.
“I’m guessing the relationship your new friend has with the shop’s proprietor is one with a very transitory nature.” Shelly matched me step for step as I crossed the street.
I held the Synap in my duster pocket and considered the possibility that I should have brought another.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The door slid to the left as Royo reached for it, leaving him slightly at a loss for a moment. Rachel brushed past him and entered the shop. I trailed at her heels, a step to the right so I had a fairly clear field of fire. Royo followed us, cursing beneath his breath.
Inside, the shop looked disorganized and dusty. Curious, I pulled up the business’s tax records to have a look at past performance. The profits had placed the shop squarely in the lower income levels of Heinlein, and the owner of record was a corp called Haly’s Comet Enterprises.
The corp had a diversified portfolio that told me it had its fingers in a number of semi-legal businesses. Laundering money was just one of Haly’s services. The corp had been investigated several times before but only prosecuted on trivial charges that had resulted in small fines that had been quickly paid.
Plasboard shelves lined both side walls. Cubbies held a number of robotic units in various stages of disrepair, entertainment devices and sensie games, household appliances, and musical instruments. In front of them, bicycles and skateboards leaned against the cubbies. Old-fashioned paper price tags, not bar codes, dangled from some of the items. Most of them were dust-covered, and most of them seemed to be detritus that people had brought up with them from Earth, then realized that space was a luxury in a megapolis with limited oxygen scrubbing capabilities.
“Ah, Rachel.” The old man stood at the back end of the room behind a scarred counter and in front of a cubby of newer looking devices. He was short and squat, and I thought at first that he might be a failed clone of some sort until I read his DNA from his fingerprints across the transplas surface of the counter. Other than learning he was human, I learned nothing else. His DNA wasn’t on record anywhere. I filed it away.
“Westlake.”
The short man grinned, and the expression looked equally threatening and comical because the lower half of his face was broader than the top half, like a toad’s. He wore an ill-fitting unitard that was a motley brown color and wasn’t self-cleaning, judging from the assortment of stains that seemed ingrained. He was bald except for a fringe of cottony grey hair that ringed his head and hid his ears.
“I would say it’s good to see you, but you only come to see me when you need something.” Westlake didn’t seem to take offense at that.
Rachel smiled sweetly at him, but her hands didn’t come out of her duster pockets. “You know me too well.”
Westlake took a grimy rag from his back pocket and cleaned at his hands. Such a job was impossible for the condition the rag was in. He succeeded in moving some grease splotches around, then replaced the rag.
“You also know that I don’t give information away for free.”
“I can pay.”
Eyeing me, Westlake nodded at me. “Who are your friends?”
“NAPD Detectives Drake,” Rachel pointed her chin at me first, then Royo, “and Royo.”
Westlake smiled and I got the impression that he knew we were detectives already. I unspooled a foolie and tagged his systems with it, expecting it to be readily accepted because I disguised it as a climate reading. The shop may have looked old, but the climate controls were first rate.
So were the cyber defenses. My foolie got bounced immediately.
Lifting his hand in my direction, Westlake wagged a forefinger at me. “Naughty, naughty. A foolie like that should be considered an invasion of privacy.” Evidently he had cyber implants tied to his defense systems.
I returned his level gaze. “It�
�s not. This is a public business.”
“Perhaps, but that depends on what your little hunt would have turned up, doesn’t it? If you’d crashed through my firewalls and discovered something you shouldn’t have—and I’m not saying there’s anything to discover—your discovery wouldn’t stand up in court.”
“I’m not looking for something to stand up in court. I just like to know who I’m dealing with.”
Westlake nodded at Rachel. “She knows me.” Then he shifted his attention back to Rachel, who was glaring at me. “I’m not sure I care for your friends.”
“They’re not friends. Just people I’m doing business with.”
“One of these days you’ll have to decide which side of the street you’re going to play on.”
“Not as long as both sides pay me. I think that’s something you and I agree on.”
Westlake chuckled, and the effort sounded sincere. He reached under the counter and Rachel’s stance shifted, became more defensive. I followed suit.
Slowly, Westlake kept moving. “Nothing to be worried about.” He caught hold of something beneath the counter and brought up three bottles of flavored water. “I thought maybe I’d offer you a drink.” He glanced at me. “No disrespect, Detective Drake, but I know you don’t imbibe.”
I nodded.
Westlake placed the bottles on the counter, then produced a stainless steel bottle opener. He opened the drinks and allowed Rachel and Royo to take what they wanted. Westlake took what was left and managed a long draw. “So, Rachel, tell me why you wandered down this way. It’s been months since I’ve seen you.”
Rachel held her drink in one hand, but her other hand didn’t leave her duster. “Gordon Holder.”
Grinning, Westlake pointed at me with his bottle. “I thought that might be the case, what with Detective Drake along. He’s been with that particular investigation since the beginning. What do you want to know?”
“Who killed Holder.”
Westlake shook his head. “That’s something I don’t even know. Yet. But I will. Nobody keeps secrets in this megapolis forever.” He took a sip of his drink. “Ask me another question, or ask me that one at a later time.”