The Ramal Extraction (16 page)

In the Rajah’s conference room, Ganesh looked as if he had been hit by a van, and neither Cutter nor Jo were surprised at his appearance, both of them having seen the vid showing the reason why. There was a vaguely medicinal smell about him.

Fuck with the Vastalimi, get the claw.
He was lucky to be alive.

Jo noticed that Rama, the prospective son-in-law, was not there. She said so aloud.

The Rajah said, “I thought it better to speak to him of this privately later.”

The big man pointed at the table, upon which was a sand-colored sheet of something like paper with writing on it. Looked as if it was Devanagari—Manak Hindi, a bit of which she could understand when spoken, but couldn’t read. The sheet was inside a clear plastic cover, sealed all the way around.

Ganesh looked at the Rajah, who nodded once.

The security chief said, “This was found tacked to a lamppost at the end of Smuggler’s Alley, two kilometers from the palace.”

“Forensics?” Jo asked.

“Nothing apparent—no DNA, fingerprints. It is foolscap folio bamboo paper, made by Hakkas Manufacturing, in Depok, Balaji.”

Ah. Rama had a hard-on for the ruler of Balaji. That the paper came from there might be enough for him to blow a valve.

Ganesh continued: “This paper is used for official archive hard copy from Pahal to Hem, including here in our country, and often in high-end POD editions of
The Vedas
. One of those rests on every other coffee table on the planet. The ink is standard India jet, available at any artist-supply market, applied, our technicians say, with a metal nib.

“It was affixed to the post by four brass thumbtacks, also clean.”

“Cameras?”

“None directly covering the lamp. The four security cameras nearest to the location all malfunctioned precisely at midnight. Those farther away have been downloaded, and the recordings scanned. Thus far, nothing of use has been found there.”

Jo and Cutter exchanged glances.

“What does it say?” Cutter asked.

Jo had already snapped an image, stored it in her optical aug. She would be able to call up the image whenever she wanted. Whatever Ganesh had to say, they could check it with their own translator later.

“It says, ‘We have your daughter, and she lives but by our sufferance. Your mercenaries are no threat to us. The ransom will be the equivalent to ND ten million. Await further instructions.’”

Jo figured the Rajah could come up with ten million in pocket change, though that part was tricky. Any kidnapper with half a brain would know how easy it was to mark any kind of tangible ransom. Cash, even old, used bills, could be steganographed with something virtually undetectable,
unless the scanner had the code. Somebody with the money could examine it under a microscope and not find anything, but the first note to pass under a scanner programmed with the find-it code would trip silent alarms. And in a case like this, every commercial and government scanner in the system would get that code. Buy a packet of soup mix at the local market way out in the country, in the middle of nowhere? They’d collect you before you got two klicks away.

Likewise, gems could be micronumbered invisibly, unless you were an expert and knew exactly where to look. A couple of those in a bag of one- or two-carat stones would be enough.

Platinum could be tagged with tracers that were inert until a coded scanner bathed them. Bank transfers could carry a find-me code.

The smartest way would be to have an e-transfer, then have that rerouted through additional transactions, which would strip out the original deposit code. Put it in Bank A, and by the time it got to Bank Z, which could be done quickly, following it would take a while. At some point along the way, the electronics could be changed into something more tangible: cash, gems, a shipful of guns or pharmaceuticals, and be half the galaxy away by the time the law caught up to the transfer.

That would take some organization, but the kidnappers had already proven they had plenty of that.

Gunny saw Singh coming out of Doc’s suite, and she drifted over to see how he was doing.

“Singh. How you holdin’ up?”

“I am better.”

Didn’t sound like it to her, but she didn’t press it.

“When we got back to the hopper, I saw you,” he said. “You and the others, none of you were afraid, what we had done did not seem to bother you at all. It was”—he said
something in a dialect she didn’t recognize—“how to say it? A stroll in the field? for you.”

She shrugged. “You get used to it. How old are you?”

“Twenty summers.”

“When Ah joined the Army, you would have been two.”

“Are you that old?”

She laughed. “Gramps would bust a gut laughin’ at that one. Yeah, Ah’m that old. And trust me, Ah was way more rattled than you were first time we saw lethal action.”

“I find this hard to believe.”

“Oh, it’s true. You like Doc’s story? Let me tell you mine…

“My first tour was with the Unified Terran Army, the Kiwi Police Action. Six of us on patrol came across a liquor still in the woods above the Lower Nihotupu Reservoir, Waitakere Ranges, maybe twenty-five klicks southwest of Auckland. We were hunting Maori insurgents, and we figured some of them were brewing it—the embargo was dogged down pretty tight by then.

“Ah was a doe-private grunt, just turned seventeen, my first field op. Our sergeant was a tight-ass from Beijing, the guy on point was from Fiji.

“Our com gear was for shit, off-line more than it worked, and we were using LOS jive-signs, maybe half of which I knew. First two of those you learn? ‘Duck!’ and ‘Haul ass!’

“The Fijian was a third-tour guy who loved the forest, busted back to corporal from sergeant for punching out civilians in an off-base watering hole. The man could disappear behind a blade of grass. He found the still and doubled back to tell us. Him, we trusted.

“Sergeant Wang was a class-one asshole, chickenshit to the core, he would have called in a nuke-drone to take out an empty plastic barrel if our com had been working, but since he couldn’t raise anybody, we went in for a look.

“Nobody home we could see. Our motion detectors didn’t catch anything, our wide-look IR cams gave us nothing but the sig from the heat-pump induction heater under the barrel of mash they were cooking. No insurgent glows.

“Wang decided they musta heard us coming and trucked. He decided we’d toss a willy-peter into the camp and burn it down.

“The Fijian volunteered to do the grenade, and since Ah was the newbie, Ah got sent along to cover his ass. Walk in the park, blowin’ shit up with nobody around.

“We got there, the others stayed back eighty meters in the woods. There was a two-hundred-liter aboveground camo tank half-full of hooch they’d already distilled. The Fijian emptied his water canteen and filled it from a spigot on the tank, tasted the stuff.

“‘Whoa! This shit has got some
kick
!’

“He offered me a sip, but Ah wasn’t interested.

“He set a white phosphorus grenade next to the tank.

“‘Twenty seconds!’ he hollered, and we were fixin’ to truck, since it was gonna make a big, bright fireball when all that alcohol went up.

“Ah was already turned round, my back to the site, when the Maori came out the ground. Had a spiderhole dug next to the barrel, the heat from the inducer enough to hide his sig from our WLIR. Smart, and probably he’da stayed there ’cept he heard the Fijian yell out the grenade’s timer and he figured he was gonna get barbecued in his hole, which he surely would have.

“That Maori had a drum-fed gunpowder shotgun, an antique, probably alternating buckshot and solid slugs, and he blew out the Fijian’s face with his first shot.

“I dropped and spun as he fired, and his second and third shots just cleared my head.

“My weapon was an old BTY subgun, six-millimeter caseless-pistol plasma-capacitor. Piece of low-bid shit, as likely to jam or short-circuit after three or four rounds as not,
even if you spent an hour every day cleaning and tuning the sucker, which Ah had done for all the fucking good it did me.

“I got off four and sure enough, that fuckin’ Betty shorted—but three of those for sure hit the Maori solid.

“Big man, two meters, 130 kilos, easy, those tribal tattoos they like all over his face, body, and arms. No shirt, so I saw the puckers in tachypsychia-time when the pellets hit, the first two three centimeters apart dead-center sternum, the third one higher and to his left, all of them heart punches. I like to think the fourth went into one of the other three holes.

“Man was dead, but didn’t know enough to fall down.

“Somebody in the squad started hollerin’ and shootin’. My weapon was fucked. Ah ate dirt and the Maori laid onto the trigger and hosed the air over me on full auto, sounded like the rage of Yahweh. Ah figured Ah was history as soon as he realized all he needed to do was drop the muzzle a hair, but ’fore he could, the grenade lit and he got charbroiled into crispy terrorist. His ammo cooked off, that willy-peter burned the shit out of everything for twenty meters, but he was a fire shadow ’tween me and it, and Ah walked away without a blister.

“Eighteen years ago. Give me a stylus, I can draw you the pattern of tats on the man’s face.”

Gunny looked at the boy. “Nobody is a born killer. And nobody ever forgets the first time they get laid, nor the first time they spike somebody. Right now, it’s fresh and warm, but it will cool, and you will get past it.”

He looked doubtful, and he might be right. Some people never did get past it. They didn’t continue on in the Army, unless they stayed REMFs. And what was the point in that?

Singh was rattled, but he didn’t have the feel of somebody who would curl up and let it take him.

Kay went to see the Rel. If she could track down the source of information that led them into a trap, she might be able to find a connection that led deeper. It was a logical line of inquiry.

She returned to the public house where she had questioned the Rel. It was as dim and moist as it had been before, and there were Rel there; however, the one she wanted was not among them.

Again, the herbivores froze at her approach. She picked the one that looked the most terrified.

“I need to speak with Zeth of the Hallows,” she told him. “Where is he to be found?”

“I-I-I d-don’t kn-kn—”

“Then best you point me to somebody who
does
know, or you will regret it for the remainder of your short and miserable life.” She was in no mood to be denied and wanted to be sure that came across.

Apparently, it did.

“B-B-Boot-Booterik is Zeth’s sib.”

“Which one is he?”

“H-He is n-n-not here.” Off her look, he hurriedly added, “I have an address where he lives!”

“Provide it.”

He rattled off a street and number.

She stood. “Do not attempt to contact either of these individuals, Rel. If you do, I will find out about it.”

“I w-w-won’t.”

She turned and left.

Outside the pub, she activated her com, to call Sims Captain. She didn’t think she would need help, but it was the unit’s protocol.

“What’s up, Kay?”

“I have a lead. The location is Footpad Alley, number sixteen. A Rel’s domicile. I am on my way there and—” She stopped. What—?

Coming around the corner was a man with a sidearm pointed in her direction.

“Kay?”

She dodged to her left, jinked right and left again, and charged at the gunman.

He fired, but missed, a gas-propelled missile of some kind—

She sensed the second man behind her. She stutter-stepped and cut right, but—

—too late. She heard the second gun cough, felt the dart sting her high on the left side of her back—

She managed to reach the first gunman as he fired and missed again. She laid her right claws across his throat and ripped away flesh and cartilage down to the spine.

She spun…

Things went dark—