“All right!” There was a sound like piano wire snapping in his voice. “All right, you got it. You got it.”
I paused, then reached for the door handle. His voice scaled up.
“I said you got it, man. Hand, man. Hand. Matthias Hand. He’s the man, he sent us, fucking stop, man. I’ll tell you.”
Hand. The name he’d blurted earlier. Safe to bet he’d cracked for real. I turned slowly back from the door.
“Hand?”
He nodded jerkily.
“Matthias Hand?”
He looked up, something broken in his face. “I got your word?”
“For what it’s worth, yeah. Your stack goes back to Mandrake intact. Now. Hand.”
“Matthias Hand. Acquisitions Division.”
“He’s your controller?” I frowned. “A divisional exec?”
“He’s not really my controller. All the tactical squads report to the chief of Secure Operations, but since the war they’ve had seventy-five tac operatives seconded directly to Hand at Acquisitions.”
“Why?”
“How the fuck would I know?”
“Speculate a little. Was it Hand’s initiative? Or general policy?”
He hesitated. “They say it was Hand.”
“How long’s he been with Mandrake?”
“I don’t know.” He saw the expression on my face. “I don’t fucking know. Longer than me.”
“What’s his rep?”
“Tough. You don’t cross him.”
“Yeah, him and every other corporate exec above departmental head. They’re all such tough motherfuckers. Tell me something I can’t already guess.”
“It isn’t just talk. Two years ago some project manager in R and D had Hand up in front of the policy board for breach of company ethics—”
“Company what?”
“Yeah, you can laugh. At Mandrake that’s an erasure penalty if it sticks.”
“But it didn’t.”
Deng shook his head. “Hand squared it with the board, no one knows how. And two weeks later this guy turns up dead in the back of a taxi, looking like something exploded inside him. They say Hand used to be a hougan in the Carrefour Brotherhood on Latimer. All that voodoo shit.”
“All that voodoo shit,” I repeated, not quite as unimpressed as I was playing it. Religion is religion, however you wrap it, and like Quell says, a preoccupation with the next world pretty clearly signals an inability to cope credibly with this one. Still, the Carrefour Brotherhood were as nasty a bunch of extortionists as I’d ever run across in a tour of human misery that took in, among other highlights, the Harlan’s World yakuza, the Sharyan religious police, and, of course, the Envoy Corps itself. If Matthias Hand was ex-Carrefour, he’d be stained a deeper, darker shade than the average corporate enforcer. “So apart from all that voodoo shit, what else do they say about him?”
Deng shrugged. “That he’s smart. Acquisitions muscled in on a lot of government contracts just before the war. Stuff the majors weren’t even looking at. The word is, Hand’s telling the policy board it’ll have a seat on the Cartel by this time next year. And no one I know’s laughing at that.”
“Yeah. Too much danger of a career change, decorating the inside of taxis with your guts. I think we’ll—”
Falling.
Leaving the ID&A format turned out to be about as much fun as coming in. It felt as if a trapdoor had opened in the floor under my chair and dropped me down a hole drilled right through the planet. The sea of static slithered in from all sides, eating up the darkness with a hungry crackling and bursting against my combined senses like an instant empathin hangover. Then it was gone, leached out and sucking away just as unpleasantly, and I was reality-aware again, head down and a tiny string of saliva drooling from one corner of my mouth.
“You okay, Kovacs?”
Schneider.
I blinked. The air around me seemed unreasonably twilit after the static rush, as if I’d been staring into the sun for too long.
“Kovacs?” This time it was Tanya Wardani’s voice. I wiped my mouth and looked around. Beside me the ID&A set was humming quietly, the glowing green counter numerals frozen at 49. Wardani and Schneider stood on either side of the set, peering at me with almost comical concern. Behind them, the resin-molded tawdriness of the whoring chamber lent the whole thing an air of badly staged farce. I could feel myself starting to smirk as I reached up and removed the skullcap.
“Well?” Wardani drew back a little. “Don’t just sit there grinning. What did you get?”
“Enough,” I said. “I think we’re ready to deal now.”
PART TWO
COMMERCIAL CONSIDERATIONS
In any agenda, political or otherwise, there is a cost to be borne. Always ask what it is, and who will be paying. If you don’t, then the agenda makers will pick up the perfume of your silence like swamp panthers on the scent of blood, and the next thing you know, the person expected to bear the cost will be you. And you may not have what it takes to pay.
QUELLCRIST FALCONER
Things I Should Have Learned by Now
Volume II
CHAPTER NINE
“Ladies and gentlemen, your attention, please.”
The auctioneer tapped a finger delicately onto the bulb of her no-hands mike and the sound frub-frubbed through the vaulted space over our heads like muffled thunder. In keeping with tradition, she was attired, minus helmet and gloves, in a vacuum suit of sorts, but it was molded along lines that reminded me more of the fashion houses on New Beijing than a Mars exploratory dig. Her voice was sweet, warm coffee laced with overproof rum. “Lot seventy-seven. From the Lower Danang Field, recent excavation. Three-meter pylon with laser-engraved technoglyph base. Opening offers at two hundred thousand saft.”
“Somehow I don’t think so.” Matthias Hand sipped at his tea and glanced idly up to where the artifact turned in holographic magnification just beyond the edge of the clearing balcony. “Not today, and not with that bloody great fissure running through the second glyph.”
“Well, you never know,” I said easily. “No telling what kind of idiots are wandering around with too much money in a place like this.”
“Oh, quite.” He twisted slightly in his seat, as if scanning the loosely knotted crowd of potential buyers scattered around the balcony. “But I really think you’ll see this piece go for rather less than a hundred and twenty.”
“If you say so.”
“I do.” An urbane smile faded in and then out across the chiseled Caucasian planes of his face. He was, like most corporate execs, tall and forgettably good-looking. “Of course, I have been wrong in the past. Occasionally. Ah, good, this looks like ours.”
The food arrived, dispensed by a waiter on whom had been inflicted a cheaper and less well-cut version of the auctioneer’s suit. He unloaded our order with remarkable grace, considering. We both waited in silence while he did it and then watched him out of sight with symmetrical caution.
“Not one of yours?” I asked.
“Hardly.” Hand prodded doubtfully at the contents of the bento tray with his chopsticks. “You know, you might have picked another cuisine. I mean, there’s a war on and we are over a thousand kilometers from the nearest ocean. Do you really think sushi was such a good idea?”
“I’m from Harlan’s World. It’s what we eat there.”
Both of us were ignoring the fact that the sushi bar was slap in the middle of the clearing balcony, exposed to sniper view from positions all over the auction house’s airy interior. In one such position, Jan Schneider was at that moment huddled up with a snub-barrel hooded-discharge laser carbine, looking down a sniperscope at Matthias Hand’s face. I didn’t know how many other men and women might be in the house doing the same thing to me.
Up on the holodisplay over our heads, the opening price slithered in warm orange numerals, down past 150 and unchecked by the imploring tones of the auctioneer. Hand nodded toward the figure.
“The
re you are. The corrosion begins.” He started to eat. “Shall we get down to business, then?”
“Fair enough.” I tossed something across the table to him. “That’s yours, I think.”
It rolled on the surface until he stopped it with his free hand. He picked it up between a well-manicured finger and thumb and looked at it quizzically.
“Deng?”
I nodded.
“What did you get out of him?”
“Not much. No time with a virtual trace set to blow on activation, you know that.” I shrugged. “He dropped your name before he realized I wasn’t a Mandrake psychosurgeon, but after that he pretty much clammed up. Tough little motherfucker.”
Hand’s expression turned skeptical, but he dropped the cortical stack into the breast pocket of his suit without further comment. He chewed slowly through another mouthful of sashimi.
“Did you really have to shoot them all?” he asked finally.
I shrugged. “That’s the way we do things up north these days. Maybe you haven’t heard. There’s a war on.”
“Ah, yes,” He seemed to notice my uniform for the first time. “So you’re in the Wedge. I wonder, how would Isaac Carrera react to news of your incursions into Landfall, do you suppose?”
I shrugged again. “Wedge officers get a lot of latitude. It might be a little tricky to explain, but I can always tell him I was undercover, following up a strategic initiative.”
“And you are?”
“No. This is strictly personal.”
“And what if I’ve recorded this and I play it back to him?”
“Well, if I’m undercover, I have to tell you something to maintain that cover, don’t I. That would make this conversation a double bluff. Wouldn’t it?”
There was a pause while we looked impassively at each other across the table, and then another smile spread slowly onto the Mandrake executive’s face. This one stayed longer and was unmanufactured, I thought.
“Yes,” he murmured. “That is so very elegant. Congratulations, Lieutenant. It’s so watertight I don’t know what to believe, myself. You could be working for the Wedge, for all I know.”
“Yes, I could.” I smiled back. “But you know what? You don’t have time to worry about that. Because the same data you received yesterday is in locked-down launch configuration at fifty places in the Landfall dataflow, preprogrammed for high-impact delivery into every corporate stack in the Cartel. And the clock is running. You’ve got about a month to put this together. After that, well, all your heavyweight competitors will know what you know, and a certain stretch of coastline is going to look like Touchdown Boulevard on New Year’s Eve.”
“Be quiet.” Hand’s voice stayed gentle, but there was a sudden spike of steel under the suave tones. “We’re in the open here. If you want to do business with Mandrake, you’re going to have to learn a little discretion. No more specifics, please.”
“Fine. Just as long as we understand each other.”
“I think we do.”
“I hope so.” I let my own tone harden a little. “You underestimated me when you sent the goon squad out last night. Don’t do it again.”
“I wouldn’t dream—”
“That’s good. Don’t even dream about it, Hand. Because what happened to Deng and his pals last night doesn’t come close to some of the unpleasantries I’ve been party to in the last eighteen months up north. You may think the war’s a long way off right now, but if Mandrake tries to shaft me or my associates again, you’ll have a Wedge wake-up call rammed so far up your ass you’ll be able to taste your own shit in the back of your throat. Now, do we understand each other?”
Hand made a pained face. “Yes. You’ve made your point very graphically. I assure you, there will be no more attempts to cut you out of the loop. That’s provided your demands are reasonable, of course. What kind of finder’s fee were you looking for?”
“Twenty million U.N. dollars. And don’t look at me like that, Hand. It’s not even a tenth of one percent of what Mandrake stands to make from this, if we’re successful.”
Up on the holo, the asking price seemed to have braked at 109, and the auctioneer was now coaxing it upward a fraction at a time.
“Hmm.” Hand chewed and swallowed while he thought about it. “Cash on delivery?”
“No. Up front, on deposit in a Latimer City bank. One-way transfer, standard seven-hour reversibility limit. I’ll give you the account codes later.”
“That’s presumptuous, Lieutenant.”
“Call it insurance. Not that I don’t trust you, Hand, but I’ll feel happier knowing you’ve already made the payment. That way, there’s no percentage in Mandrake fucking me over after the event. You don’t stand to gain anything from it.”
The Mandrake exec grinned wolfishly. “Trust works both ways, Lieutenant. Why should we pay you before the project matures?”
“Other than because if you don’t I’ll walk away from this table and you’ll lose the biggest R and D coup the Protectorate has ever seen, you mean?” I let that sink in for a moment before I hit him with the relaxant. “Well, look at it this way. I can’t access the money from here as long as the war’s on; the Emergency Powers Directive ensures that. So your money’s gone, but I don’t have it, either. To get paid, I have to be on Latimer. That’s your guarantee.”
“You want to go to Latimer as well?” Hand raised an eyebrow. “Twenty million U.N. and passage offworld?”
“Don’t be obtuse, Hand. What did you expect? You think I want to wait around until Kemp and the Cartel finally decide it’s time to negotiate instead of fight? I don’t have that kind of patience.”
“So.” The Mandrake exec set down his chopsticks and steepled his hands on the table. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. We pay you twenty million U.N. dollars now. That’s nonnegotiable.”
I looked back at him, waiting.
“Is that right?”
“Don’t worry, I’ll stop you if you get off track.”
The faint there-and-gone smile again. “Thank you. Then, upon successful completion of this project, we undertake to freight you, and presumably your associates, by needlecast to Latimer. Are those all of your demands?”
“Plus decanting.”
Hand looked at me strangely. I guessed he wasn’t used to his negotiations taking this path.
“Plus decanting. Any specifics I should know about there?”
I shrugged. “Selected sleeves, obviously, but we can discuss the specifics later. Doesn’t have to be custom. Something top of the range, obviously, but off the rack will do fine.”
“Oh, good.”
I felt a grin floating up, tickling the inner surfaces of my belly. I let it surface. “Come on Hand. You’re getting a fucking bargain, and you know it.”
“So you say. But it isn’t that simple, Lieutenant. We’ve checked the Landfall artifact registry for the past five years, and there’s no trace of anything like the item you describe.” He spread his hands. “No evidence. You can see my position.”
“Yeah, I can. In about two minutes you’re about to lose the biggest archaeological coup of the past five hundred years, and you’re going to do it because there’s nothing in your files about it. If that’s your position, Hand, I’m dealing with the wrong people.”
“Are you saying this find went unregistered? In direct breach of the Charter?”
“I’m saying it doesn’t matter. I’m saying what we sent you looked real enough for either you or your pet A.I. to authorize a full urban commando strike inside half an hour. Maybe the files got wiped, maybe they were corrupted or stolen. Why am I even discussing this? Are you going to pay us, or are you going to walk?”
Silence. He was pretty good: I still couldn’t tell which way he was going to jump. He hadn’t shown me a single genuine emotion since we sat down. I waited. He sat back and brushed something invisible from his lap.
“I’m afraid this will require some consultation with my colleagues. I’m not
authorized to sign off on deals of this magnitude, with this little up front. Authorization for the DHF needlecasting alone will need—”
“Crap.” I kept it friendly. “But go ahead. Consult. I can give you half an hour.”
“Half an hour?”
Fear—the tiniest flicker of it at the narrowed corners of his eyes, but it was there and I felt the satisfaction come surging up from my stomach in the wake of the grin, savage with nearly two years of suppressed rage.
Got you, motherfucker.
“Sure. Thirty minutes. I’ll be right here. I hear the green tea sorbet’s pretty good in this place.”
“You’re not serious.”
I let the savagery corrode the edge of my voice. “Sure, I’m serious. I warned you about that. Don’t underestimate me again, Hand. You get me a decision inside thirty minutes or I walk out of here and go talk to someone else. I might even stiff you with the bill.”
He jerked his head irritably.
“And who would you go to?”
“Sathakarn Yu? PKN?” I gestured with my chopsticks. “Who knows? But I wouldn’t worry about it. I’ll work something out. You’ll be busy enough trying to explain to the policy board how you let this slip through your fingers. Won’t you?”
Matthias Hand compressed a breath and got up. He sorted out a thin smile and flashed it at me.
“Very well. I’ll be back shortly. But you have a little to learn about the art of negotiation, Lieutenant Kovacs.”
“Probably. Like I said, I’ve spent a lot of time up north.”
I watched him walk away between the potential buyers on the balcony, and could not repress a faint shiver. If I was going to get my face lasered off, there was a good chance it would happen now.
I was banking hard on an intuition that Hand had license from the policy board to do pretty much what he wanted. Mandrake was the commercial world’s equivalent of Carrera’s Wedge, and you had to assume a corresponding approach to latitudes of initiative at executive levels. There was really no other way for a cutting-edge organism to work.
Don’t expect anything, and you will be ready for it. In Corps-approved fashion, I stayed in surface neutral, defocused, but underneath it all I could feel my mind worrying at the details like a rat.
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