“The report of my death was an exaggeration.”
— Samuel L. Clemens
“Say what?”
“Winfield and Johnson, the top execs at Chapultepec & Castle,” said Rosalind.
“But they’re dead!”
“I told you they could have staged it,” said Sally.
“Are they actors?” asked Max. “Is that why they’re special?”
“They’re actors, alright,” said Rosalind. “Just not the kind you see in the movies or on television.”
“More like bad actors,” said Poly.
“Max, would you ask Aunt Sally to bring out the special prisoners?” requested Rosalind. “We need to talk to them.”
“Okay, Mommy!”
Max ran out of the grand living room at high speed. Sometimes I’m sure human children must have internal congruencies—how else could they have so much energy?
“Did you have a chance to interrogate them?” I asked.
“Sorry,” said Poly. “We froze everyone who entered the room, indiscriminately. I zapped them before I realized who they were.”
“Think they’re thawed by now?”
“Should be,” said Cornell. “We gave the goons a second zap, but not Winfield and Johnson.”
The two of them proved they were no longer chilled out by walking into the room, led by a triumphant-looking Max and followed by Sally, holding a mini-sweetener. The executives’ hands were securely tied in front of them with expensive Hermès scarves.
“You!” said Johnson, giving me an angry glance like I was an incompetent subordinate leading an underperforming division.
“Son of a…” said Winfield.
He stopped himself when he remembered Max was in the room. Even villains have virtues, I suppose.
“How did you get here?”
I silently answered Winfield’s question by pointing at the broken window and the bits of safety glass on the floor. Max noted my gesture and started to move in that direction.
Winfield and Johnson exchanged a glance, shook their heads in a WTF expression, and sat sullenly.
“Have a seat,” said Poly, “and start talking.”
The two of them sat side by side in the center of a large sectional sofa, looking wary—and a bit nervous. The rest of us were in nearby chairs or on the right-angled portions of the sofa. I perched on the arm of the chair where Poly was sitting.
“Stay away from the edge,” said Rosalind, using her maternal radar.
Max dutifully moved away. Chit left me and flew to land on my son’s shoulder. I don’t know what she whispered to him, but the two of them went to the back wall where the Verne Wells & Company models were located. I think Chit wanted to try operating the toy Martian tripod from the inside.
Cornell brought our prisoners a couple of glasses of a dark amber liquid from the bar. Their bound hands had just enough play to grasp the tumblers.
“Drink up,” he said. “I expect you’ll need some liquid courage.”
“You’re with them now?” asked Johnson, looking from Poly to me.
“Unlike some people, they’re not trying to kill me,” responded Cornell.
“Why did you kidnap us?” asked Rosalind.
I was enjoying this interrogation. The former bad guys were doing all the work.
“It’s all a big misunderstanding,” said Scott Winfield. “We weren’t trying to kidnap you, we were trying to get you out of harm’s way.”
“What do you mean?” asked Sally.
“After The General shot down our plane, we were afraid you’d be next in line for removal,” Winfield replied.
“We need your help,” said Johnson, “if we’re going to stop him from terminating us…”
“…with extreme prejudice,” added Winfield.
“Then why send your goons to sweeten and kidnap us?” asked Rosalind.
“They may have gotten carried away,” said Winfield. “We just asked them to bring you here in a hurry.”
“We were the ones carried away,” said Rosalind, “and we didn’t appreciate it.”
“Sorry about that,” said Johnson.
She actually did look sorry. I could understand how it happened. Give a goon a sweetener and he’ll want to use it.
“Good help is hard to find,” added Cornell, “especially with what you’re probably paying.”
“Your team didn’t do much better,” said Winfield.
“That wasn’t me,” said Cornell. “That was Zwilniki. He was always trying to cut corners and go with the lowest bidder.”
I filed that away for future reference. Low-quality mercenaries could have been why Zwilniki’s forces were so easy to defeat.
“Let me get this straight…” said Poly.
“Aren’t you the person I fought at the power station?” asked Winfield.
“Yes, and I was kicking your butt,” said my partner.
“Until Josie and I kicked yours—and your friend’s,” said Winfield.
“I wouldn’t call pulling a gun on me kicking my butt.”
“Details,” said Winfield.
Poly glared at him and he closed his mouth.
“You said you’d brought your associates here for their own protection—so The General wouldn’t try to kill them, too?” asked my partner.
Johnson and Winfield nodded. Winfield drank some of the liquid in his glass and grimaced.
“And you wanted help from Rosalind and Cornell and Sally to help take him down?” Poly continued.
“Correct,” said Johnson.
Now she took a sip of whatever was in her glass. I guessed it was an expensive single malt scotch. That was Cornell’s style, especially when he wasn’t paying for it.
Poly looked over at Rosalind and Rosalind picked up her cue.
“We’d agreed to work with Jack and Poly to take down The General before we were abducted.”
Cornell and Sally both confirmed Rosalind’s statement.
“If we join forces, our odds of winning go up,” said Poly.
Cornell coughed—it sounded like he was covering up a rude comment.
“What?” I said.
“For all the good it will do us,” Cornell replied. “Increasing our odds of success from five percent to ten percent isn’t much.”
Sally surprised me by chiming in. “It’s doubling our chances.”
I was a bit more optimistic, but that was probably because I didn’t have all the data.
“What do you two bring to the table?” asked Winfield, looking at Poly and me.
“Can’t be much compared to us,” said Johnson, reinforcing her colleague’s arrogance. “After all, we’re executives with an entire corporation’s resources behind us.”
“And detailed knowledge of our segment of The General’s operation,” added Winfield.
Rosalind cut them off. “Think again. You’re both declared dead. The General has installed a new management team to run C&C.”
“And your understanding of your portfolio in The General’s operation is growing more out of date by the hour,” said Cornell. He crossed back to the bar and poured himself a glass of the same stuff he’d given our prisoners. This time, I got a look at the label: Glenmorangie Pride.
My phone buzzed. I looked down at its screen. “Over four thousand galcreds a bottle,” it read. I was impressed, and I don’t even drink. Still, it would be coming out of Chapultepec & Castle’s budget—or would it? No, Winfield and Johnson were smart enough not to charge renting Nicky Stone’s fortress villa using an easily traceable corporate account.
“And you know so much more?” asked Josephine Johnson in her flay-the-underlings voice.
“I do,” said Cornell quietly.
Say what? Cornell was higher up in The General’s organization than Winfield and Johnson? If those two were part of the Nine, did that make Cornell the Mouth of Sauron?
“The General practices good organizational security,” said Cornell. “Chief lieutenants know everything about their own silos, but n
othing about the others. Only a few of us have been allowed to work across multiple silos.”
“Well aren’t you special,” said Johnson.
“Yes, he is,” said Sally.
Every time she spoke it came as a surprise.
Josephine Johnson turned around to stare at Sally.
“And who are you, sweetcakes,” she asked, “the flippin’ Queen of May?”
Sally trained her mini-sweetener directly at Johnson and gave her a far-from-friendly smile. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
Poly and I could both see this was getting out of hand. We needed to cooperate if we were to have any chance at taking down The General. My phone decided to exercise its initiative and made a loud noise resembling a coach’s whistle. It made my ears ring, but it got everybody’s attention.
“Are you in or out?” asked Poly. “Our odds of success are higher if we work together. Or you could catch the next starliner to Midgard or Terminus and hope The General doesn’t come after you.”
Midgard was an Earth colony word somewhat colder than Terra, settled primarily by Scandinavians and Finns. Fifty percent of it was covered by glaciers, but the land near its equator was on a par with Manitoba—in winter. Agriculture there was mostly hydroponics and cabin fever was endemic. It was only a garden spot if you were growing rocks. The residents were working on warming the place up, but it would take a few more generations.
Terminus wasn’t much better. It was a distant, resource-poor planet settled by a small colony of human academics five years after first contact. The colonists, inspired by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, were trying to write the definitive Galactic Encyclopedia. Unfortunately, academic infighting brought their grand project to a standstill. It also turned out that faculty members can’t run planets effectively. The government, infrastructure, law enforcement and immigration services were currently controlled by a cabal of political science graduate students evenly split between Marxists and anarcho-capitalists. Broadcasts of their deliberations rated almost as high as ones from the United States Congress.
“Good luck with that,” said Cornell.
Winfield and Johnson looked uncomfortable. They whispered to each other. My phone would be able to tell me what they said later, if it mattered. After lots of sotto voce discussion and several lemon-sucking faces, they appeared to make up their minds.
“We’re in,” said Johnson.
She seemed reluctant, but I expect joining us counted as the lesser of two evils.
“There are some ground rules,” I said.
Everybody looked at me. This was new.
“First, no killing.”
Several faces looked at me like I was a wimp for requiring that condition, but they’d have to lump it. After a few beats our new and newest allies nodded.
“Second, we share what we know.”
I didn’t expect this requirement to have much impact, but I’d put it on the table so I’d have a good reason to pull information out of the others when it felt like they were holding back. This time the nods came faster. I knew everyone except Poly was lying, but took what I could get.
“Third, no hidden agendas.”
Rosalind smiled and Cornell laughed. Sally covered her mouth with the hand that wasn’t holding her mini-sweetener. Johnson and Winfield looked serious.
“Okay,” I said. “I know we’ll all have hidden agendas. There will be important choices to make about who controls what after we take down The General.”
Everyone nodded.
“But if we don’t put those agendas on the back burner and focus on The General’s defeat, our odds of success go way down. Can we work together to accomplish our primary goal first, then switch gears to see what we can get out of it individually?”
I looked around the room.
“Rosalind?”
“I can do that.”
“Cornell?”
“Yeah, yeah. All for one and all that nonsense.”
I stared at him.
“Okay. I’m in,” he said. He made a sword thrust gesture, turning his words into a joke and diffusing some of the tension in the room.
“What he said,” added Sally.
Chit’s deep voice came from the back of the room near Max.
“I’m in,” she said. “Gotta stick together so I can keep you out o’ trouble.”
“Thanks,” I said.
My phone buzzed and showed a thumbs-up symbol on its luminous screen.
Johnson and Winfield just looked at me unhappily.
“Untie them, please.”
My phone crossed the distance to our prisoners on a dozen tiny legs and used an extruded blade to cut their bonds. It was a shame to destroy a pair of expensive scarves, but I wasn’t particularly worried about destruction of property at the moment.
Johnson rubbed her wrists and Winfield stretched his limbs to encourage his circulation. Sally took a step back to keep her mini-sweetener out of range of Winfield’s arms. I’d have to emulate her and boost my paranoia level to deal with our new allies.
Poly spoke up. “Well?”
“I think you’re naïve,” said Johnson, “but I’m on board.”
“Me too,” said Winfield. “Let’s get to it.”
“An excellent idea,” said Poly. “Cornell, you seem to be closest to The General. What can you tell us?”
“Not as much as you might think. The General never meets anyone face to face. It’s always by phone or screen with his face disguised.”
I sighed. This was going to be harder than I’d hoped.
“I don’t know The General’s age or gender or even species, for that matter,” Cornell continued.
“The General might not be human?” asked Johnson.
She must be a Terran chauvinist, given the intensity behind her question. Since EUA was behind the Earth First Militant organization, that made sense.
“That’s the problem, Josephine,” said Cornell. “I don’t know. Have you and Scott learned anything more from your interactions?”
“No,” said Johnson, slowly shaking her head from side to side.
“The General has to be human,” said Winfield. “He’s all about Earth conquering the galaxy.”
“You’re probably right,” said Cornell, “and I’d make a large bet that he’s a Terran man, but my point is that we don’t have anything to go on.”
“You must have tried to figure it out,” said Poly.
“I tried,” verified Cornell, “but it’s not as easy as confirming that Batman is Bruce Wayne.”
“What?” said Max from the back of the room.
“Nothin’, kid,” said Chit. “Just some adults goofin’ around…”
“Ixnay on the oilers-spay,” said Rosalind to Cornell, making us all smile.
“We confirmed that the majority of his emails originate from servers in and near Atlanta,” said Winfield.
“After tracking them back through several layers of redirection,” added Johnson.
“From his vocabulary and the idioms he uses, I’d say The General is in his mid-to-late thirties, or learned English from someone that age,” said Rosalind.
“I don’t think English is his first language,” said Sally.
“What makes you say that?” asked Poly.
“Odd turns of phrase here and there,” said Sally.
I was surprised again. I wouldn’t have expected her to be high enough up in the EUA hierarchy to ever talk to The General directly.
Before I could raise the question, Poly beat me to it.
“Where do all of you fit into EUA?” she asked.
“We run Chapultepec & Castle,” said Winfield. “We’re part of the Nine.”
“Or we were,” said Johnson.
Poly looked at Cornell.
“I’m one of a very small group of troubleshooters reporting directly to The General,” he said. “We’re his eyes and ears across his organization.”
“But you do more than just look and listen,” I said.
>
“Correct,” said Cornell.
There was a lot in there he wasn’t saying.
“What about you?” asked Poly, turning her head to face Rosalind.
“My role is similar to my brother’s,” she said, “but more focused on external intelligence gathering.”
“So you spy on other companies and Cornell spies on EUA divisions?”
“That’s reasonably accurate,” said Rosalind.
“How about you?” Poly asked Sally.
“I support Cornell and Rosalind as necessary.”
“Like on Mission Impossible when they put a team together?” I asked, jumping in.
“Exactly like that,” said Sally.
I couldn’t tell if she was mocking me, but the odds were good.
“Whoopie,” I said. “The General could be any age, any gender, and any species. He, she or it is probably based in Atlanta, but could be anywhere. He’s probably a Terran chauvinist and may not be a native English speaker. Anything else?”
“He’s rich,” said Cornell.
“Uber rich,” said Rosalind.
“Top one thousandth of one percent rich,” said Sally.
“Why do you think so?” asked Poly.
“The size of EUA,” said Cornell.
“And EUA is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Sally.
“We’re talking oligarch-level or higher,” noted Rosalind.
I posed the question.
“People like… ?”
“Nicky Stone,” said Sally.
The owner of this fortress villa.
“Pablo Daniel Figueres,” said Cornell.
The man behind the Sirocco Legislative Network and the SLN Capital hotel.
“George Crispos or Janet Yu,” continued Cornell.
The CEO and the Chairman of GalCon Systems.
“Cross them off the list,” said Poly.
“But…” said Cornell.
“Cross them off.”
“Right,” said Cornell.
“Roger Joe-Bob Bacon,” said Rosalind.
“What?”
Poly and I both said the word at the same time.
“No way,” said Poly. “He’s too nice.”
“It’s a stretch,” I said.
“The point is,” said Rosalind, “we don’t know enough to count him out as a candidate.”
“I’ll concede the point—but what’s our next step?” I asked.
For a few seconds, nobody spoke. Then Poly recommended a course of action.
Xenotech General Mayhem: A Novel of the Galactic Free Trade Association (Xenotech Support Book 4) Page 4