by David Weber
"The stage is yours, Edie."
Chapter Forty-Two
"Do you really think there's someone here who'd be interested in hiring us?" Yana's eyes, as she inspected the interior of the bar, were as skeptical as her tone of voice. "Talk about a dive."
"No, I don't. DuChamps wouldn't have spent that much time with me if they were just thinking of pawning me off in a routine transaction."
"Then why are we here?"
"A test, I figure. Dusek wants to see if I really have the credentials."
Sitting across from him at the small table in a corner, Yana continued her casual inspection of the place. So it would seem to any observer, at any rate. The fact that she spent at least a minute doing so would be understandable enough. Any woman as good-looking as she was would have a few trepidations about being in the place.
Victor had done some quiet checking after Triêu Chuanli had more-or-less ordered him to spend time at the Rhodesian Rendezvouz. He'd discovered, not to his surprise, that the place was notorious for being a hangout for mercenaries, even by the standards of notoriety that held sway in the worst seccy district of Mesa's capital city. It was one of those places where the police were said to always come in pairs—except no policeman had set foot in the Rhodesian Rendezvouz in over eight years. According to the stories he'd heard, the last one to do so had left in a body bag.
There'd been no repercussions, apparently. The cop had been new to the police force and trying a private shakedown of the bar. If the owner hadn't had his own people take care of the problem, the district's police captain probably would have done it for him.
Victor had spent years in districts similar to Neue Rostock. For a spy like himself, they were often good places to go to ground or set up an operation. There were some disadvantages to working with criminals, to be sure. But the one great offsetting advantage was that very few hardened criminals were burdened with anything in the way of idle patriotic impulses. As long as they got paid, they didn't care who you were or why you were doing whatever you were doing—which they didn't want to know, anyway.
Every planet with a large population had districts like this in their major cities. The Neue Rostock was by no means the worst Victor had run across. Two of the slum areas in Nouveau Paris, one of them less than a mile from where he'd been born, were just as rough or worse. And, everywhere, there were certain standard practices. Not quite formal rules, but very close. One of them was that any establishment—certainly one like the Rhodesian Rendezvouz—had to pay off the cops to stay in business. But the pay-offs were done in a proper and orderly manner, from the top down. Freelance policemen were not welcome and usually didn't last long.
The only thing out of the ordinary at all about Mesa was that the police were almost completely indifferent to what happened in the seccy slums. The cops left the maintenance of order in these districts to the bosses who ran them. As long as they got their baksheesh, they simply didn't care what happened there. And, being fair about it, the bosses probably maintained order at least as well as the police would have done, and the cut they took from every business was no worse than taxes would have been.
Still, it was a rough sort of order—at least, in a place like the Rhodesian.
"It'll be the three at the table on the south wall," Yana predicted. "The ones who came in a few minutes ago."
She spoke softly also; but, just as Victor had done, she relied on their scrambling equipment to protect them from being overheard by eavesdroppers. Nobody would think anything of that, either. Such equipment was pretty much de rigueur in a place like this. If there was any blind trust or milk of human kindness to be found on the premises, it'd be in the paws of a blind mouse hiding in a hole somewhere.
"I think you're right. They're avoiding looking at you. Half of the other men in the place haven't stopped ogling you since we came in."
Yana's cold smile appeared. "You sure you want to handle this? I can take care of it myself, you know."
"I don't doubt that. But I'm the one they want to find out about."
In point of fact, Yana was a bit nervous. Not because of the three men at that table. She ate alpha males for breakfast. What made her nervous was the man she was with.
Victor Cachat. Her friend Lara, not long before she died, had made the quip that with Victor on your side, you don't need to make any bargains with the devil.
It was true enough. She saw the men at the table push aside their chairs and come to their feet. All three were large, muscular, and obviously experienced when it came to physical confrontations. They were probably all mercenaries.
She sensed a very slight motion in Victor's right arm and knew that he'd slid the pistol all the way down his sleeve. He'd be holding it there, on his wrist, with just one finger. One quick motion—very well practiced in simulation chambers, Cachat being Cachat—and the gun would be in his hand.
As three more babes in the woods are about to find out.
* * *
Jurgen Dusek leaned forward to study the recording Chuanli had brought him. The three men were now within two meters of the couple at the corner table.
They were almost certainly carrying weapons. One of them was, for sure. Jurgen could see the pistol butt peeking out from under his jacket. Careless of him. But in practice there was no chance he'd get accosted by the police—not in Neue Rostock—and as long as he kept the weapon technically out of sight the barkeeps at the Rhodesian wouldn't make any objection.
All three men had that certain sort of smile on their faces that Jurgen recognized from long experience. Dangerous thugs, about to prove it once again, taking the first steps in a familiar dance. When the dance was over—clearly, they didn't expect it to take long—they'd have some new female company to enjoy and a punk would have learned his true place on the pecking order. Maybe he'd survive the experience, maybe he wouldn't.
Dusek now looked at the man still seated at the table. If McRae was carrying any weapon, it wasn't visible. There was no sign of the pistol that Thiêu had sold him. In fact, he seemed oblivious to the menacing trio approaching him. So far as Jurgen could tell, McRae hadn't noticed them at all. The good-looking blonde sitting across from him had spotted them coming, sure enough, but she didn't seem too twitchy either.
Chuanli had told him it was interesting.
"What's your name, sweetheart?" asked one of the three men, when they came up to the table.
The blonde glanced at him, shook her head, and pointed at McRae. "Ask him."
McRae didn't even glance at them. "She's my woman. Leave it at that." His tone of voice was that of a man thoroughly bored.
The man who'd made the initial advance began to bridle. "Listen, shithead, you—"
McRae somehow had the pistol in his hand. He brought it up, still seated, and shot the man in the chest. As he began to crumple, the Havenite rose, smoothly and easily, and shot him in the head. Twice. Then shot the man to his left, then the one to his right. Three shots each. The first center mass, then a double-tap to the head.
It all took maybe three seconds. Only one of his victims even got a hand on a gun, and he didn't succeed in pulling it out of its shoulder holster. When it was over, half the floor of the bar was covered in blood and brains and the other dozen or so patrons—all of them very tough people in their own right—were pale-faced with stunned surprise.
"Which word in 'she's my woman' does anybody in this bar have trouble understanding?" the gunman asked. He still sounded thoroughly bored.
"Jesus H. Christ," said Jurgen Dusek. "Run it again, Chuanli."
The crime boss watched the recording three times over. Each time looking to see . . . anything that would make that gunman seem like a human being. Or even a normal sociopath.
Nothing.
After watching the recording four times, though, Dusek understood what had happened. It wasn't that McRae was some sort of "fast gun." True, he'd figured out a way to get the pistol into his hand without anyone spotting it, and then he'd moved qu
ickly and surely, with not a single wasted motion. But any man well trained, familiar with weapons and in good condition could have done the same.
No, the secret was mental. This guy was one of those very rare people who could kill at the proverbial drop of the hat. He hadn't needed the stages of emotional escalation that even hardened thugs required, as quickly as those stages might pass. With him, everything had been instantaneous. Recognition of threat, calculation that the threat was best handled ruthlessly, start the killing.
"Talk about a hardcase," he muttered. "No wonder Saint-Just tagged him. You talk to him afterward?"
"Yeah. I waited a bit, you understand. It took the barkeeps a while to clean everything up. The three guys he shot weren't any complication. The working arrangement they had with Jozef was just providing him with occasional muscle."
Jozef Ortega was no more sentimental than any under-boss. He worked for Jurgen anyway. Chuanli had been waiting nearby and had been called in by the barkeeps as soon as the fight was over. He could have been there in thirty or forty seconds, but he stretched it out to five minutes. McRae would probably figure out the whole thing had been a setup, but there was no reason to make it obvious. That might even be a little dangerous.
The rest would have been routine. Clean up the place, quietly threaten whatever patrons—probably none—might have an inclination to shoot their mouths off, and then pitch the three corpses into the garbage disintegrator of the restaurant next door. Dusek owned the restaurant as well as the Rhodesian, and he'd provided it with a top-of-the-line disintegrator. And then paid bribes to the police and the sanitation department to have all the recorders and detectors disabled. Nobody except the people involved would ever know what happened to those bodies.
"Give Jozef a payoff for lost services from his three guys. Ex-guys. Just to keep him from having hard feelings."
Chuanli nodded. "And McRae?"
"Is he willing to talk further? Or is he holding a grudge?"
"Yeah, sure. Cold-blooded killer be damned, boss. He probably figured out we set it all up, but it's not like he suffered any damages. He's got to eat like anyone else—not to mention keeping that big blonde happy. And for that he needs to get some work."
Dusek pursed his lips. The remaining issue that had to be considered was whether this McRae fellow was actually an agent for . . .
It wouldn't be any government agency or corporate security service. Not, at least, of any government or corporations Dusek was familiar with. This guy was just plain too murderous.
But that still left the Ballroom as a possibility. Not likely, but it couldn't be ruled out altogether. Dusek had no loyalty to Mesa, but he also wasn't a fool. This planet was his place of business—a very profitable one, too—and keeping that business up and running required him to avoid pissing off the powers-that-were.
A triple killing, when the dead men were thugs themselves and had no important patrons or allies, wouldn't concern the Mesan authorities. Not one that took place in this district. But if there was any Ballroom connection, the official indifference would end abruptly. Twice in his life, Jurgen had seen what happened when Mesa took off the gloves and really went after someone in the seccy districts. "Due process" and "reasonable force" were meaningless noises. They'd think nothing of leveling entire city blocks and butchering everyone in them, just to kill one person they were after.
That said . . .
Dusek figured he could probably ignore the problem, as long as Inez Cloutier hired McRae and got him off the planet quickly. It really wasn't likely, after all, that a former inner circle StateSec person would have anything to do with the Ballroom. True, the Havenites had always been opposed to genetic slavery. But so what? The one thing every former StateSec whom Dusek had ever encountered had in common was that they were mercenaries. And what did the Ballroom have to offer them?
"So what do you want to do with McRae?" asked Chuanli.
Dusek made his decision. "Just have somebody keep track of him. It doesn't have to be any sort of elaborate tailing operation, Chuanli. That costs real money. Just somebody keeping an eye on his lodgings. Letting us know when he leaves, when he comes back, his daily routine."
"Can't find out where he goes without tailing him, boss."
"Who the hell cares where he goes? We're not in the least bit interested in this guy, Chuanli. He's bad news. A full-bore psychopath—and good at it. The sooner he's off the planet, the better. We just want to turn a nice profit getting him off, that's all. For that, we don't need to know anything we don't know already. He's legitimately StateSec, was all that mattered. Good enough for this market."
Chapter Forty-Three
Jack McBryde sat in his comfortable office, watching the smart wall opposite his desk, and worried.
The wall was configured to show bird's-eye views from the ceiling-mounted security pickups scattered throughout the facility for which he held primary responsibility. From those views, an uninformed observer would never have guessed that the entire Gamma Center was buried under better than fifty meters of the planet Mesa's dirt and rock. Actually, it was buried under the foundations of one of the commercial-zoned towers which fringed the outskirts of Green Pines, as well. Its original construction had been handily concealed by all the other activity involved in building Green Pines in the first place, and it was far enough out from the residential district that it had no "full-time" neighbors to notice anything peculiar about it. Even better, perhaps, the fact that the tower above it was packed with specialty shops, financial offices, medical service providers, and better than a dozen various government and corporate offices provided ample cover for the comings and goings of the Center's seven hundred-odd scientists, engineers, and administrators and the security people responsible for keeping an eye on them.
The Alignment, however, had learned long ago that a troglodyte existence wasn't conducive to getting the very best out of creative people. That was why the Center's subterranean chambers boasted surprisingly high ceilings and large, airy rooms and offices. Corridors were broader than they had to be, with their smart walls configured to provide remarkably convincing illusions of open forest glades or—on the second floor—sundrenched, white-sugar beaches. The public areas' ceilings were likewise designed to give the impression that people inside them were actually outside, but the individual researchers' work spaces and offices were configured as the interior rooms they were, since quite a few people seemed to find it difficult to concentrate their full attention on the work at hand when they were "outside." On the other hand, the decision of exactly how to configure any team's work area was left up to the team's members, and the majority of them had opted for "windows" looking out on the same scenery their public corridors afforded. Better than half had added large "skylights" whose views of the sky matched the apparent time of day of the corridors which, in turn, were coordinated with the actual time of day outside the Center.
The result was a working environment which avoided the impression of being shut up inside a bunker (despite the fact that it was) and simultaneously kept the researchers' mental and physical clocks adjusted to the rest of Mesa's clocks when they finally got to head home at the end of work each day.
Unfortunately, that wasn't enough to keep all of them focused and productive, McBryde reflected gloomily, and tapped the virtual keyboard key which selected the view of Herlander Simões' team, brought it to the center of his office's wall, and zoomed in on the hyper-physicist.
In some ways, Simões actually looked better than he had during his first conversation with McBryde, almost six T-months before. He was taking more care with his grooming, now, at least, and as far as McBryde could tell, he was actually getting more sleep. But the bouts of depression were still there. They seemed to be less frequent, yet, according to his therapist they were even deeper and darker than they had been, and McBryde himself had noticed over the last several weeks that Simões' occasional bursts of furious temper—which had never been a part of his amiable, easy-go
ing personality before his daughter's death—had grown increasingly violent.
He hadn't—yet—approached the point of actually laying hands on any of his colleagues, but his red-faced, vicious outbursts, often laden with intensely personal profanity, had thoroughly alienated his coworkers. Many of them had been his and his wife's close friends before Francesca's death, and some of those seemed to be trying to maintain at least a degree of personal contact with him, yet even they had retreated behind a protective barrier of formality. The other members of his team, however, despite any sympathy they might have felt, avoided him whenever it was remotely possible. When they couldn't avoid him, they limited themselves to the minimum possible number of words. It was painfully obvious they'd written him off, and three of them were at the point of making it clear they didn't sympathize with him. The best McBryde could say about those three was that they'd at least tried to avoid expressing their agreement with the Board's decision in Francesca Simões' case where Herlander was likely to overhear them. On the other hand, he doubted any of them would be particularly heartbroken if he did happen to hear.
Their current project was nearing its conclusion, which was both good and bad. The improvement to the "streak drive" likely to result from their R&D would be a significant plus, of course. And the fact that Simões had remained basically functional throughout was a major plus, both personally and professionally, for Jack McBryde. But the unfortunate truth was that despite his past record, and despite his obvious ability, Herlander Simões wasn't really uniquely important to the Alignment's research efforts. He wasn't irreplaceable—not in the long term, whatever the disruptive effect on dropping him from his team's current projects might have been. And McBryde had no illusions about what was going to happen to Simões, at least as far as his work at the Center was concerned, as soon as those current projects were all safely put to bed.