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Inferno - Caliban 02

Page 28

by Roger MacBride Allen


  Kresh picked up the piece of paper and got up from behind the desk. He began pacing the room, going back and forth, back and forth, at a rather deliberate pace, his full attention on the paper. He went back to the desk and picked up the pen again. He scratched something out, and wrote something else Ill.

  The door annunciator chimed, and Kresh pushed a button on his desk.

  The door opened, and Justen Devray came in.

  “Well, Justen,” Kresh said. “It would appear I have a job for my Rangers. ” He handed Devray the paper. “Contact Cinta Melloy and coordinate with the 888. Pull these people in, Justen. All of them. Now. And I want you and Melloy here as well. With you it’s an order--but you can extend my invitation to Cinta. I have a feeling she’ll accept.”

  Devray looked at the list and shook his head. “Maybe Melloy will want to come,” he said. “But some of these people aren’t going to like it,” he said.

  “Just get them,” Kresh said. “I want them all here, in this office, and I want them here in two hours.”

  Devray nodded, and then, after a moment, remembered to salute. “Yes, sir,” he said. And with that he turned and left, Kresh using the door button to let him out.

  Kresh watched Devray leave, waited a minute, and then followed after, using the ID scanner plate by the door to make it open. Kresh stopped and examined something in the door frame on his way out. Whatever he found seemed to please him, and he went on his way. The room sensed that there were no humans about, and faded the lights down.

  Leaving Donald alone in the dark. In more ways than one. He wanted to follow, to stay with his master--but no. Alone. Let him work it out alone. The Governor could always summon Donald if he needed him.

  “I have to go, Gubber,” Tonya said.

  “You could protest it!” Gubber said. “Claim diplomatic immunity. Refuse to go. It was bad enough the way Caliban just vanished and ended up in jail. I barely knew him, and it scared me half to death. If it happened to you, I couldn’t bear it. Don’t go. Don’t let them get you. Stay.”

  “That could only make things worse,” Tonya said, her tone far less calm than her words. “I know this hasn’t been easy for you. But I promise you it will be over after tonight. I don’t know why Kresh wants me, but he does. I don’t know if I’m a suspect, or a witness, or if he just wants to chat about terraforming. He wants me, and I have to go.”

  “But why?”

  Tonya took a step or two toward the door, then turned and looked back. Logically, she knew it was going to be all right. Nothing was going to happen. But she had no such confidence on the emotional level. Fear was loose in the world. “I have to go,” she said, “because we live on this world, you and I. We live here, and Alvar Kresh might be the only man who can save it. If I fight this, with all the legal ways I might, that can’t be good for him.

  “And as of today’s announcement, what is bad for Alvar Kresh is good for Simcor Beddle.”

  Kresh tried to relax. He took a quick shower, changed into fresh clothes, had a quick bite to eat--and tried to settle himself down. He found the Residence library and selected a booktape to read, more or less at random. He sat there, with the words scrolling past his eyes, not taking in more than one word in ten of the story.

  Calmly. Slowly. He started the tape over a half-dozen times before he gave up. He could not concentrate on anything else but the case. Because now, all of a sudden, he had a case.

  He had more than that. He had the answer. He was as certain of that as he had been of anything in his life. But for all of that, it would still be easy--very, very easy--for him to make a mistake. Kresh set the tape aside, and thought it through again, and again.

  Justen Devray came in the library almost precisely two hours after Kresh had sent him off.

  “They’re all here,” he said. “Waiting for you. ”

  “Good,” said Kresh. “Good. Then’s let go see them.”

  Justen led Kresh up the stairs to the Governor’s office--to his office--and ushered him inside. Kresh took a deep breath and faced a roomful of people who had to be thinking they were all suspects in Grieg’s murder. In the Governor’s murder, he told himself. And you’re the Governor now. Kresh glanced to the wall niches, and was relieved to see Donald there. Nice to know there was someone here who was utterly, unquestionably, on Kresh’s side.

  Kresh looked around the room at all of them. Leving, Devray, Welton, Melloy, Beddle, Verick, Phrost, Caliban, Prospero. The humans among them looked edgy, upset, nervous. Even the two robots looked a bit ill at ease. As well they might. “Fredda, you’re here because I assumed you’d want to see the end of it. You’re in the clear. As for the rest of you,” he said, “I have a problem. A very simple problem, but one with no simple solution. And my simple problem is this: It has come to my attention that you’re all guilty.”

  It took a full ten seconds of stunned silence before they started shouting their denials.

  15

  “ALL GUILTY OF different crimes,” Kresh said. “But guilty just the same. You were the one that did it, Cinta.”

  Cinta Melloy looked startled. “Me? Are you out of your mind? I might have a little dirt under my nails, but I didn’t kill anyone.”

  “No,” Kresh agreed, “you didn’t. But you were the one who gave me the clue I needed. “ And it did no harm at all to rattle you and everyone el. ”e in the room by saying it that way, Kresh thought.

  “What clue was that?” said Cinta.

  “At the fire,” Kresh replied. “You said something about not being invited, and showing up anyway. ”

  “That’s your big clue?” Cinta asked.

  “That’s my big clue.”

  “I hardly see how those words are the basis for accusing anyone of murder,” Prospero said.

  “Oh, you and Caliban don’t need to worry about murder charges either,” Kresh said. “You are here precisely because I no longer suspect you. You have cleared yourselves of all charges--aside from attempted blackmail--without anyone realizing it.”

  “How so?” Caliban asked.

  “By not connecting the term ‘Valhalla’ to a garbled rendition of its meaning, “ Kresh said

  “Alvar--Governor Kresh--for stars’ sake stop playing games!” Fredda said. “Just tell us whatever it is you have to tell us.”

  “Be patient, Fredda,” Kresh said. “We’ll get there. ” He turned to the robots. “Caliban, Prospero, you told Donald. Now tell me--and I would urge you not to hold anything back, if you value your survival. When you came here, to this office, to meet Grieg, what was your plan?”

  “To threaten him with the simultaneous exposure of every scandal on this planet if he decided to exterminate the New Law robots,” Prospero said.

  “And you made this threat?” Kresh asked,

  “We did, couching it in the most polite terms possible, “ Prospero said. “However, he did not seem at all upset or perturbed by it. ”

  “I would go further than that,” Caliban said. “He seemed rather amused by the idea, as if he didn’t for a moment think we would carry it out.”

  “And would you have?” Kresh asked.

  The two robots looked at each other, and then Caliban spoke. “We were to meet the next day and begin preparing our materials for release,” Caliban said. “Then we heard that Grieg was dead, and of course canceled the plan. ”

  “How did you get your information. ” Fredda asked.

  “Slowly,” Prospero said. “Gradually. The rustbacking network is full of tipsters and rumormongers. And there is an old axiom to the effect that those who would seek the truth should follow the money. We studied a great number of transactions, legal and otherwise. They taught us much.”

  “Tell me some of what was in that material,” Kresh said. “No, better still, let me tell you. You had proof that Simcor

  Beddle here was taking Settler money--perhaps without knowing that he was taking it. ”

  “But I--” Beddle began.

  “Quiet, Bed
dle,” Kresh said. “You’re not Governor yet. Right now you’ll speak when spoken to. ” He turned back to the robots. “You also had proof that Sero Phrost and Tonya Welton were in the smuggling business together. ” Another little stir of reaction, but Phrost and Welton both had the sense to keep quiet. “Proof that Tierlaw Verick’s bidding group had been bribing government officials. Verick was also linked to the rustbackers--along with half the planet, it seems to me, but I doubt you would divulge that little tidbit.”

  “Now just a moment,” Verick protested. “I did no such--”

  “Quiet, Verick. ” Kresh said. “And you also had proof that Commander Devray and Captain Melloy here were both in possession of proof of criminal acts in high places and were not acting upon that information.”

  Devray and Melloy seemed about to protest, but Kresh cut them off. “Not a word, either of you,” he said, with enough steel in his voice to silence both of them. “Both of you did have such information, and both of you informed Governor Grieg of it. Justen, you told him about Tierlaw’s bribery, and, Cinta, you told him about Sero Phrost smuggling Settler hardware and passing the proceeds to the Ironheads. I’ve seen Grieg’s files. I know. Grieg didn’t do anything about the information, either, for the same reasons you both kept quiet.”

  “And what reason would that be?” Phrost demanded, daring to speak.

  “He was afraid that if he pulled on one thread, everything else would unravel, “ Kresh said. “ Arrest Sero Phrost, and Phrost would implicate Tonya Welton. Grieg needed Welton’s support. Grieg also knew the Spacer bid on the control system would probably collapse without Phrost. Arrest Verick, and Grieg knew he would lose the Settler bid on the system.”

  Devray looked confused. “But wait a second. The robots just said that Grieg didn’t seem to care if they blew the lid off everything.”

  “Exactly,” Kresh said. “Because, on the night he died, he knew it didn’t matter anymore. He had made his final decisions about the control system, and about the New Law robots. He was going to announce them the next day. What the robots were doing was threatening to sweep all his enemies out of the way, and threatening to do so at the exact moment he no longer needed to keep his enemies happy. “ Kresh turned toward the robots. “He couldn’t smear his opponents without making himself look very, very bad. But you two could. You were threatening him with the biggest favor of his political career.”

  “It couldn’t all be good for him,” Melloy protested. “With that much mudslinging set loose, he would have gotten messed up a little himself. Someone would have tried to fight back.”

  “Fight back at who? The robots?” Kresh asked. “They were the ones about to release the material, not Grieg. But even if you’re right--and you probably are--Grieg would have accepted any amount of damage to his prestige if it meant getting rid of Simcor Beddle.”

  “And you are saying Grieg no longer cared because he had made his decisions,” Caliban said. “Might I ask what those decisions were, and if you intend to abide by them?”

  “I do not wish to answer either of those questions, just at the moment,” Kresh said. “I have a rather cryptic note Grieg made to himself. I believe it contains his answer. But I don’t need to decipher the note. Tierlaw Verick here has done it for me.”

  “He told you what Grieg had decided?” Fredda asked. “When? I never heard it.”

  Tierlaw Verick opened his mouth to protest again, but then thought better of it.

  “Good thinking, Verick,” Kresh said. “If I were you, I wouldn’t say one thing more.”

  “But what did he say?” Fredda asked. “What did I miss?”

  “You heard everything I did,” Kresh said. “And his reactions told me what Grieg’s decisions were. ”

  “Then he was telling the truth,” Caliban said. “When he came out of Grieg’s office, he told Prospero and myself we were going to kingdom come. An archaic reference to the hereafter. He was telling us that Grieg had decided to destroy the New Law robots.”

  “And that scared the hell out of you, and you went into Grieg full of bluff and bluster and threatened him before he even had a chance to tell you he intended to destroy you. ” Kresh shook his head. “A mistake. A very serious mistake on your part. ”

  “A mistake in what way?” Caliban asked.

  “And you claim to be high-function beings,” Donald said, speaking for the first time as he stepped down from his wall niche. “If you were true robots, human behavior would have been your constant study, and you would not have erred. Can you truly understand so little of human nature?”

  “What do you mean?” Caliban asked. “Governor Kresh, is he speaking with your authority?”

  “Donald is speaking for himself,” Kresh said, “but he’s getting it right for all of that. Go on, Donald.”

  “It might be logical to expect Governor Grieg to tell you his decision in the same way no matter what that decision was, but that is not the human way. It does not account for the Governor’s personality. To expect him to act in such a way takes no account of the emotions of pleasure in bringing good news, or the embarrassment and sorrow humans feel when reporting bad news for which they are responsible. It would not be in Grieg’s character to call you into his office and tell you he intended to wipe you out. You would have found out by seeing it on the news, or by written notice--or by getting a blaster shot through the head.”

  “What are you saying?” Prospero demanded.

  “That you should have known his decision would be in your favor as soon as he asked to see you face-to-face,” Donald said.

  “And when Verick told you that you were going to kingdom come, he was just telling what Grieg had told him,”

  Kresh said. “Except he got it wrong. Grieg had been looking for a third way, some solution between tolerating the current intolerable state of affairs and extermination. And he found it. He found it and told it to Verick.”

  “I still do not understand,” Prospero said. “But now I do,” Caliban said, sitting stock-still, staring straight ahead. “Now I do. Valhalla. Grieg told Verick he was sending all the New Law robots to Valhalla. To someone living on Inferno, that is a place name. It is the place to which all New Law robots wish to escape, a hidden place as far away from human interference as possible. But Verick thought the Governor was speaking in metaphor, speaking of the old Earth legend from which the name is derived. Valhalla, the hall of the gods, where those who have died in battle will live. The afterlife. Kingdom come. ”

  “So you threatened the man who had found a way to save you,” Kresh said. “ And threatened to do the thing he would most love to have done, but dared not do himself. And, at a guess, that appealed to his sense of humor. So he told you to leave and not come back, hoping to have the public hear all about friend Beddle’s finances in the next day or so. The irony is that you had no motive for Grieg’s murder, even if you thought you did.”

  “So you still have every reason to suspect us,” Caliban said.

  “On the contrary, I am absolutely certain you two had nothing to do with the murder of Chanto Grieg,” Kresh said.

  “It sounds like you’ve got this whole thing figured out,” Melloy said, a bit grumpily.

  “I do,” Kresh said.

  “So tell us about it,” Cinta said. “If that wouldn’t be too much trouble.”

  “Too much trouble was exactly what it was,” Kresh said. “Fredda pointed that out. The plan was too intricate, too theatrical. That’s what I should have seen from the start. The plan had too many people in it, too many moving parts, too many bits of complicated coordination and timing--especially with someone as unreliable and plainly expendable as Ottley Bissal at the center of it. The plan required an assassin willing to do what he was told if the paycheck was big enough, someone willing to perform a despicable act--and yet someone foolish enough to trust the plotter who intended to kill him. Those are not job requirements that produce quality applicants. Whoever took on the job was bound to be someone who made
mistakes, who got sloppy. Someone like Bissal. That should have told me something. It should have told me the plan wouldn’t work. And sure enough, it didn’t.”

  “But Grieg was killed,” Fredda protested.

  “Not in the way the mastermind intended,” Kresh said. “Not in the way Tierlaw Verick planned.”

  Verick jumped up, and was halfway to Kresh before Donald could intercept him. Donald pinned the man’s arms to his side and dragged him back to his seat. “It was the basic problem of the whole case,” Kresh said. “We knew, even once Fredda spotted Bissal, that we didn’t have the real killer. Bissal was so obviously someone else’s creature. But whoever had sent him--and sent all the other conspirators along--had done a good job of staying hidden. It could have been anyone with access to the right sort of technology, and the wrong sort of people. It could have been anyone in this room. It could even have been me, I suppose. But it was you, Verick.”

  “You’re crazy, Kresh,” Verick half shouted. “How could I have done it? I didn’t even know Grieg was dead until one of the guards on my room told me.”

  “And it must have been a relief when the guard made that slip,” Kresh said. “You could stop acting. It made it that much less likely that you would make a slip. Good as you were, you knew you could not keep it up forever. And you were good. You even managed to fool Donald’s lie-detector system--and that requires some impressive training. Our files said you dabbled in theatrics. We did not know just how good an actor you were. The trouble was you’d made your slip already. One you couldn’t avoid.”

  “And what slip might that be?” Verick demanded.

  “You said there were two robots standing in the hallway when he came out of this office. Not three.”

  “But there were only two,” Caliban protested. “There was only Prospero and myself.”

  “But then where the devil was the door sentry robot?” Kresh demanded. “It was there, standing in front of the door, shot through the chest, when I checked the upper floor after discovering Grieg’s body. SPRs on other duties move around, but a door sentry robot does not go off post. Not unless it received orders to do so, from someone in authority to give orders.”

 

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