Karadon (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  “Of course I knew it was drugs, I won’t insult your intelligence by pretending otherwise, but I swear, Mr von Strada, I swear on my daughter’s life, he told me it was toxies and I believed him. I thought it was just that buzz makeup that was just starting to come out of Chartsey. If he’d told me it was DPC or who it was working for I’d never have...” he broke off as Alex picked up his coffee and took a sip, his manner chillingly remote. Seeing that protestations of his innocence were not going to impress the skipper, Leo took a drink of his own coffee and tried a new tack.

  “Anyway, I thought it was toxies. I never opened the crates, obviously. I did just as Mr Jorgensen said. I told people they were tet, they bought them and went off just like usual. Mr Jorgensen said that arrangements would be made the other end to pick the crates up from the warehouses. I know it may make me sound stupid but it was only then that I started to realise that I was in on something, well, major. Up till then I’d really thought that Mr Jorgensen had been sold this container of toxies on the QT himself and was just looking for a way to get it groundside. It was only when I realised how many different worlds it was going to and that he’d have to be making arrangements at all those places that I realised how organised it was. When Mr Jorgensen paid me for sending the stuff out it was like more money than I could have made in five months normal trading.”

  He looked at Alex, his expression imploring.

  “What can I say?” he said. “I needed the money. I told myself it was only toxies, no worse than smuggling whisky. And quite frankly, after two years of being so skint I could barely afford a decent shirt to my back, I liked having money again. I like to dress nice, to be able to go out, to call for rounds without worrying whether I can afford it. And it was only toxies, you know? That’s what I thought anyway. I told Mr Jorgensen I’d handle any more cargoes like that he wanted, and he said he’d have plenty more for me.”

  He paused and took another drink, his hand unsteady now. “I found out it was DPC on the third container,” he said. “Mr Jorgensen told me the other two had been DPC as well and I realised, I’m in this up to my neck. He told me it was no big deal, that if we didn’t ship it, someone else would. I said, “But DPC kills people!” and he said I was being stupid. Nobody makes people take drugs. They go after them because they’re weak, stupid, addictive personality types, losers who’ll go after any hit they can score to block out the misery of their lives for a while. If it wasn’t DPC, they’d be scoring something else. And anyway, he said, the media talked a load of cack about DPC and it being addictive on the first hit and all that. He said he took it once just to try it and he was fine, a bit of a hangover next day but nothing like withdrawal, he hadn’t needed to go into rehab or anything, had never taken it again. He said that “addicted from the first hit” thing was a myth that addicts perpetuated because they’d blame anything but themselves for them being addicted. They liked to be able to say that someone else had given them the stuff first time without them knowing and since then it had had this overwhelming power over them because that was a way they could duck responsibility for taking it, see? That’s what he said, anyway, and it seemed to make sense to me at the time.

  “And anyway, Mr Jorgensen said that the people we were working for wouldn’t like it if one of their distributors started becoming, you know, unreliable. I asked him what he meant, because as far as I was concerned I was working for him, and he said that the drugs were being supplied by a “company” on Dortmell. I knew what that meant, I’m not stupid. It was another couple of years before I found out it was the Landorn gang, but I knew it was one of the gangs, there. So, you know, on the one hand, shut up and keep doing as I’m told, get rich, on the other, try to back out of it and find myself having a very convenient accident. They killed that guy, you know, Tully McVay. Mr Jorgensen found out he’d switched a crate of tet for one of DPC and was trying to sell the DPC himself.”

  The evasive way he looked to the side as he said this made Alex suspect that it had actually been Leo who’d told Durb Jorgensen about the switched crates, though perhaps without realising the consequences. It would be many days later, in a far more detailed interview, that Leo would admit this.

  “Mr Jorgensen was actually joking about it, after,” he said, with horror still evident as he spoke of it. “He joked about dropping a container on him. It was then I realised, you know, that I had no choice, I just had to keep my head down and do as they said.”

  Alex recalled the extensive intelligence they had of Leo Arad living the high life on Karadon. He went out clubbing almost every night, wore expensive clothes and clearly loved being the centre of attention. This was not the picture of a man who had only carried on handling drugs because he was too frightened to do otherwise. Alex said nothing, however. They would chisel away at Leo’s story over time, patiently working their way to the truth. For now, it was important to get him to feel comfortable in talking to them, so Alex was merely being an attentive listener.

  “It sounds weird but it came to be, well, normal.” Leo admitted. “There were occasional upsets, if word came that a shipment had been picked up by customs, or their ships came into port, but Mr Jorgensen always said not to worry, Customs are just a joke.

  “There was that thing with Jaz Michel, too. Customs managed to extradite him because he’d left his fingerprints and DNA on a shipment that got picked up at Canelon. Mr Jorgensen tried to stop it, saying the evidence had been planted, but the board overruled him. Then Jaz Michel said that if Mr Jorgensen didn’t get him off the station he’d start thinking about doing a deal. I don’t think he really meant it, you know, but he said it and that was enough. They took him on the Pallamar. They said they were taking him to Dortmell but they killed him two hours out. Skipper Endel spaced him.”

  Edrin Endel was the skipper of the Pallamar, a villain to the bone.

  “I saw someone die like that once,” Leo said. “Six years ago, here at the station. A hullwalker was out on one of the ships and was swinging out on a safety line. It broke or came off the ship or something, and he was just…” he snapped his fingers, “gone. Just a puff of light. They say there’s no time to feel anything, that it happens in a millisecond. Is that true, do you think?”

  Alex nodded. He’d seen a hullwalker swinging on a safety line once, too. It was a common enough stupidity. Clumping across the hull on magnaclamp boots was slow and hard work. Swinging out on your safety line felt free and easy. If that tether broke, however, and you fell out of the superlight field, every atom in your body would explode. It happened so fast there was no way you could feel any pain. Many spacers considered it a good way to go, fast and painless and sending you streaming out amongst the stars as superlight tachyons. It was doubtful that Jaz Michel would have seen it that way.

  “You’re sure Endel spaced him?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. Mr Jorgensen told me about it,” Leo said, guardedly. “I’ve never had much to do with Skipper Endel myself. Frankly, he’s a psycho. He’s been terrorising the shipping around here for years. I know people think Mr Jorgensen is in on that with him but he isn’t you know, honestly, he doesn’t like it either. He says its unnecessary, draws attention and scares off the spacers. But Skipper Endel doesn’t listen to him. The way he talks to him, to Mr Jorgensen, it’s obvious that he’s the boss. Skipper Endel, I mean. I think he’s higher up in the gang. He talks about having been to Dortmell, sometimes, and drops hints about having met someone very important there. I think he may even have met Mr Landorn, you know, the Mr Landorn. Anyway he tells Mr Jorgensen to shut it if Mr Jorgensen tries to complain about the piracy thing, and Mr Jorgensen waits till he’s gone and then says he’s an idiot.”

  Alex betrayed no amusement at this insight into the relationship between Jorgensen and Endel. He just took another sip of his coffee.

  “So, how much drugs have you handled for them, in the last eight years?” he asked.

  “I’ve, er, never actually worked it out,” Leo confessed. “I mean, it�
��s not something you keep a record of, is it?” He seemed oblivious to the fact that Logan Tantrell, a clerk in the shipping office, had done exactly that. “We get a container in every couple of months, roughly. Five or six a year. So… probably around forty containers, perhaps a few more.”

  “At sixteen and a half tons of DPC per container,” Alex commented, “that’s more than six hundred and sixty tons. And since most DPC shipments make three to four times that much of actual street product, you have trafficked, at a conservative estimate, two thousand tons of drugs onto the streets of our worlds. Would you agree with that, Mr Arad?”

  Leo looked shaken.

  “I suppose it must come to that,” he conceded. “I just hadn’t worked it out that way. But… yeah. Yeah, it would be about that. More, if anything. I just… well, I can’t say anything except that it just came to be so normal. Then we got word that the Fleet had seized a shipment, a whole container load on its way to us. That was you, obviously.

  “Skipper Endel got very agitated about that. He turned up and he and Mr Jorgensen had a huge row about it, shouting at one another. We’d been hearing all this stuff about you, you see, this new unit the Fleet had formed, using prisoners and all that, months before, and then suddenly there was all this stuff about how you’d taken down the Teranor. Within a week they were starting to say that you might be sent out here. Mr Jorgensen said it was just luck, you getting the Teranor, that somebody had tipped you off. He reckoned you’re just a normal Fleet ship, really, and all that stuff about you using prisoners was cack. He knows people at Chartsey, see, and he reckoned they’d told him what really happened.

  “Skipper Endel wasn’t having it, though. He said he’d been hearing stuff about you for years, that you were big on this anti-corruption thing in the Admiralty. He said you’re reckoned to be able to kick even the stroppiest crew into line, too, which was why so many of ‘em got sent to you.” For someone who claimed to have had little dealing with Edrin Endel, he was remarkably well informed about the pirate skipper’s opinions.

  “Skipper Endel said that if you were going to be a problem, if they couldn’t buy you off, they’d have to take you out. When we heard you’d been sent to Therik, the Pallamar went there too.”

  Alex nodded again, very slightly. The Pallamar had arrived in port just before the Heron had come out of spacedocks. Alex had done nothing about that. Nobody had. Nothing was more certain than that if they had managed to obtain a search warrant, despite the Pallamar’s anti-harassment order, they would have found nothing incriminating on that ship. Edrin Endel was highly intelligent and always one step ahead of the game.

  Whatever he might have been planning at Therik, however, had been thwarted by the Heron departing far more quickly than anyone could have anticipated. The media had been allowed to believe that they were just going out on a first training flight, accompanied by the Hermes as a safety precaution, and were likely to be back in a few days. The latest mail courier from Therik had informed Alex that the Pallamar had waited in port for just over a week before departing themselves. They’d given their destination as Chartsey, a route which would not take them to Karadon. No ship could be held to the destination they’d filed at leaving port, however, so there was no telling where they might really have gone. Alex was really, really hoping that they’d turn up here. None of that showed in his face, however, as he waited for Leo Arad to continue.

  “Then, obviously, you turned up here,” Leo’s tone became resentful, “and everything went to hell. You’ve obviously got someone on the inside, right? I mean, how else could you have known about the crate on the Fancy Free, straight away, when you came into port?”

  Alex’s expression gave nothing away, and after a few seconds of looking expectantly at him, Leo recognised that the skipper was not going to disclose the source of his information.

  “Well, obviously you have,” he said. “You even said my name, on holovision, right there, bang, naming me as someone you wanted to arrest, and Mr Jorgensen. That rattled me, I don’t mind admitting it. Mr Jorgensen said we should get rid of the rest of the crates, too, just in case you got Mr Dayfield to let you on board. Then they found the other drugs and they were talking about extraditing me. I mean, the journalists, and people on the station, they were saying that was enough to extradite me, but you weren’t filing the papers. Mr Jorgensen said that if it came to it they’d get me a good lawyer and if I kept my mouth shut they’d see me all right, like Blinda. Blinda Toms, that was.

  “I don’t handle all the consignments, see. I only do the ones that are being shipped as tet or cindar. Some of the ships, like the Demella, buy it straight as DPC. Mr Jorgensen deals with those himself. Blinda, in the office, used to help him out with it, but she got to thinking it was okay to offer it to any ship she thought might be up for it, see, and she thought any ship that was a bit old or tatty would be up for taking a crate. Anyway she offered it to the wrong ship and ended up being extradited and going down for three years. She kept her mouth shut, though, so they took care of her – got her an early release. Mr Jorgensen said they’d give her ten thousand dollars for every month she spent inside. That’s more than two hundred thousand, you know?”

  Since the League’s currency had been revalued during the Little Dark Age, two hundred thousand dollars was a fortune. A minimum wage job on Chartsey would earn just over four hundred dollars a month. A high end sports car could be bought for around ten thousand. Even a man with expensive tastes like Leo Arad would consider two hundred thousand to be serious money.

  “But you didn’t fancy doing twenty years for a couple of million?” Alex queried, drily.

  “I did not,” Leo confirmed, and took another drink of coffee to steady his nerves. “I mean, for a start, there is a big difference between a year or two in an open prison doing community work and going along with “being rehabilitated”, and doing hard time in max security. And for another thing, the more I thought about it, the more sure I was that they would never take that chance on me. Mr Jorgensen knows I’m no tough guy. Even if I made it through the trial without cracking under the pressure to talk, prison might break me. I know too much. They wouldn’t take that risk. I could see the way they were looking at me, Mr Jorgensen and Mr Ardant. They knew that nobody would believe an accident, but I could see them thinking of ways to get rid of me. I’m as sure as I can be that they’d have faked my suicide.

  “I don’t think they knew I had the gun. I bought it a few months back from Jablenko, the crewman on the Demella. I just felt I needed something to defend myself with if Skipper Endel tried anything. I’d said I didn’t like it, see, when we found out you were being sent here, it rattled me, and Skipper Endel said that if I was scared he’d give me a ride on the Pallamar. It was just the way he said it and laughed. I didn’t want to go the same way as Jaz Michel, so I bought the gun, just for protection. I was keeping it hidden in my shower till all this kicked off. Since then I’ve had it in my pocket. I never intended to use it, I swear on my daughter’s life.”

  Alex gave him a look which betrayed some part of the revulsion he felt for this man.

  “You say that a lot,” he observed, “swearing on your daughter’s life. She’s a student at Chartsey Uni, I understand.”

  “Yes,” said Leo, with a sour look at that. “And no ordinary college, neither. No, madam has to go to Carlford!”

  Chartsey System University encompassed many hundreds of campuses around the planet. Carlford, the most prestigious, was also one of the oldest, boasting a quadrangle that dated back six hundred years. If Alex’s daughter had lived and had got into Carlford, he would have been proud beyond measure. To Leo, however, it was clearly a grievance. Carlford would certainly be a great deal more expensive than an ordinary city campus.

  “Quite an achievement,” Alex observed, politely, but watching for Leo’s reaction.

  He snorted. “She only got in because of all the private tutors her mother hired to get her through the entrance exam,” he sa
id. “And guess who has to pay for it all, of course, muggins here,” he indicated himself.

  Alex regarded him without expression.

  “It does not occur to you, at all,” he asked, “that the Landorn gang, finding that they can’t get at you, may target your daughter? I can understand you not feeling any particular responsibility towards your ex-wife, but your daughter, Mr Arad? In all the demands about protection for yourself, you have not expressed any concern about her at all.”

  “She can take care of herself.” Leo said callously. “They – Mr Jorgensen and Mr Ardant – know that we’re estranged, anyway. I haven’t seen her since she was nine. She was a greedy, spoiled little madam then, taking after her mother, and the only times I’ve heard from her since have been via the lawyer saying she wants something. Well, my liability ends the moment she graduates, so at least that will be off my back.”

  Alex held his coffee mug in both hands, doing a quiet breathing exercise as he fought back a desire to fling its contents into Leo Arad’s face.

  “I see,” he said, after a pause. “Well, that gives me an overview of your involvement with the gang. You are, however, going to have to give me something far more substantive than that to earn immunity from prosecution. Giving evidence against Durb Jorgensen isn’t enough. Nor are things that he told you about the gang substantive enough to stand up in court. We need direct evidence of Durb Jorgensen’s involvement with Edrin Endel and of the connection to the Landorn cartel. Ideally, backed up by recordings and copies of documents. Did you not keep anything?” he looked searchingly at the other man. “Not in a private device? You didn’t have either a wristcom or pocket comp on you when you boarded.”