Cauldron of Ghosts (24 page)

As a general rule, Anton Zilwicki disliked plans which had too many moving parts. The Demon Murphy was the unceasing foe of those who became too enamored of their own cleverness, and Zilwicki had adopted the KISS Principle as his guiding light long, long ago. In this instance, however, he’d considered every aspect of the insertion plan, and assuming they were going to actually continue with what Duchess Harrington had so aptly described as their insanity, he was satisfied this was the best way to go about it.

Besides
, he thought, looking down at the hologram
, she really is a sweet little ship. I’m going to enjoy playing with her. And this time I’m not going to spend T-weeks on end playing cards and listening to Andrew whistle. What’s a little possibility of mayhem and disaster compared to
that?

Chapter 25

Cary Condor took off her hat and hung it on a peg next to the door. Like everything else in their apartment, the peg was an antique. It was a piece of actual wood, made from one of the trees called nackels that covered much of Mesa’s lowlands. Nackelwood had no interesting grain; no aromatic odor; nothing. Its sole virtues were that it was readily available, easy to work and cheap.

It was a fairly common material used for furniture in seccy areas—but even in seccy areas most small items like clothing pegs were made of modern extrusile memory foams. As the hat drew near, the foam’s embedded sensorium would cause it to extrude as a peg shape, which it would withdraw once the object was removed. Using a wood peg, on the other hand . . .

The thing was rigid, fixed, immovable, an actual
safety hazard
. What if you slipped? You could lose an eye on the damn thing.

But that was admittedly far down the list of dangers they faced. So Cary didn’t give the peg more than a perfunctory scowl before hanging up her hat and turning to her companions.

Just one companion, as it turned out. Karen was still asleep.

“How is she?”

Stephanie was sitting at the small kitchen table. “No better—but no worse, either, from what I can tell. I think her condition may have stabilized, at least a little.”

Sighing, Cary pulled out a chair and joined Stephanie at the table. “What makes the whole thing so horrible is that if we could just get her some decent medical care . . .”

“We could heal her. Completely. New legs, new organs, the works. With modern medicine, it wouldn’t be that hard and not even too expensive.” She shrugged. “For all the good that does. We might as well wish for our own spacecraft and no-questions-asked orbit clearance, while we’re at it.”

Cary laughed. “And a pilot, don’t forget! Neither one of us knows a thing about operating spaceships.”

“Or even flyers, in your case,” said Stephanie. “Hell, I can barely manage to handle a simple flyer myself.”

Cary winced. She’d flown with Stephanie, once, with Stephanie at the controls.

Once. It was an experience she’d sworn never to repeat. Most seccies—Cary and Stephanie were no exception—had little experience operating equipment beyond whatever they might learn on a job. Most seccies who knew how to fly learned the skills as cabbies, personal valets or lorry drivers. Stephanie’s experience had come entirely from a few months she’d spent working for a restaurant as a parking attendant.

Cary
hated
Mesa’s overlords. Manpower, Inc., the Jessyk Combine, any and all of them. She knew that David Pritchard’s detonation of the nuclear device at Green Pines had been tactically insane—not to mention suicidal for himself. But she’d never had any trouble understanding the emotions that had driven him to do it.

More than half of Mesa’s population was kept in conditions of chattel slavery, without even the hope of manumission. The descendants of slaves who’d been freed centuries earlier when manumission had still been legal, seccies like Cary herself, lived in conditions that were better but only marginally so. Worse, actually, in material terms, more often than not. But unlike an outright slave, a seccy had a certain degree of personal freedom. Very circumscribed freedom, granted, but at least someone like Cary didn’t have to account to a master or mistress for everything they did or every step they took.

Her angry musings were interrupted by Stephanie. “Look, there’s no point chewing on ourselves over Karen’s situation. The truth is, we’re lucky any of us are still alive. Once David—and damn him again—set off that bomb, something like this was bound to happen.”

Cary couldn’t help but shiver. The weeks following the detonation at Green Pines had been . . .

Hideous. Mesa’s security forces had gone berserk. They’d ripped through the seccy quarters like weasels set loose in a chicken coop. Their official rationale had been “rooting out terrorists,” but that had been an excuse—and one they didn’t care at all if anyone believed. They’d simply been wreaking vengeance.

Ironically, that very savagery was probably all that had kept Cary and Karen and Stephanie from being captured. The security forces had been so engrossed in random slaughter that they’d actually been a little lax in punishing real enemies.

So, keeping just half a step ahead of their pursuers, Cary and her two companions had managed to escape, although Karen had been terribly injured in the process. But the security forces had captured most of their former confederates.

They’d caught the leader of their group, Carl Hansen, within a few hours after Green Pines. His corpse, rather. Carl had committed suicide when he realized he had no chance of escape. If he hadn’t, the security thugs would have caught everyone. But Carl’s suicide bought the rest of them a little breathing space.

Cary didn’t know who else might have also escaped. Unfortunately, they couldn’t use the drop boxes to reestablish contact with any of them who’d done so. Angus Levigne had set up those locations, and he’d been insistent on keeping knowledge of them restricted to a small circle. The only ones in that circle who were still alive were the three women in that apartment.

A finger poked her shoulder. “Hey, snap out of it,” said Stephanie. “Whatever place you’re at right now, it’s not doing you any good. Let’s concentrate on the moment. Did you find out anything today?”

Cary realized that she had wandered off mentally. That happened to her a lot, just as the nightmares came to her almost every night. She knew she was suffering from a bad case of PTSD—which, like Karen’s injuries, was a medical condition that could be easily cured if she had access to the right treatment.

Sure. All she and Moriarty had to do was steal a flyer, hope that Stephanie wouldn’t kill them in a crash along the way, steal a shuttle at the spaceport that neither of them knew how to operate so they could reach orbit where they could steal a spacecraft neither of them knew how to operate so they could travel to a planet neither of them knew how to navigate to where they could get the medical assistance they needed from nobody they knew which they’d pay for with money they didn’t have.

The tough problem, of course, would be evading Mesa’s orbital defenses.

She couldn’t help but break into laughter. Genuine laughter, too, even if it was probably a bit hysterical.

“Well, the drop box had nothing, as usual. But I did meet that person you were told to look for.”

Stephanie’s lips tightened. “So, at least that . . .” She took a breath. “Wasn’t wasted.”

Stephanie had been the one who’d made the initial contact with the district’s criminal gang. Since they didn’t have any money to spare, she’d paid for the information they needed a different way.

It had been unpleasant, certainly, but no worse than anything they’d already been through. Both of them had spent time in the custody of the security forces, in the past, being interrogated. “Interrogation,” in the parlance of Mesa’s security thugs, routinely included rape. That was almost invariably true for young women, usually true for young men, as likely as not for middle-aged people and not unheard of even in the case of the elderly.

Cary had gone through it twice. The worst of it, in a way, had been the bizarrely impersonal nature of the brutality. Her rapists had seemed to be acting out some sort of routine, as if what they were engaged in was just part of a job. It wasn’t simply that they treated her as slab of meat; so far as she could tell, they really didn’t see her as anything else. They might as well have been butchers working at their trade.

She shook her head, shaking away the memories at the same time. She could do it with those, because she’d been able to get psychological treatment afterward that had prevented the trauma from getting fixed into PTSD.

“Anyway, what you learned turned out to be true. I went to that bar he told you about.”

“The Rhodesian Rendezvous.”

“Yeah. Talk about a dive! That place is a little scary. Well, more than a little. The only people who seem to hang out there are roughnecks to a man—and I do mean
man.
I was the only woman in the place.”

She chuckled, very dryly. “For once, I was glad I don’t look like you.” Cary wasn’t unattractive. But she wasn’t nearly as good-looking as Moriarty.

For her part, Stephanie made a face. “Trust me, girl. Looking like me is as much of a curse as a blessing. Anyway, what happened then?”

“That guy was there, all right. The one that—what was his name? I can’t remember—told you to ask for.”

“Jake. Something. I don’t remember his last name. For that matter, I’m not sure he ever gave it to me.”

“Well, for whatever it’s worth, at least Jake didn’t cheat you. Triêu Chuanli was there, all right. In one of the back rooms, not in the main area of the bar. I had to do some fast talking to get to see him, but they finally let me.”

Stephanie’s lips quirked. “Bet they made it like some sort of royal audience.”

“Actually, no. Well,
they
did—the two goons who ushered me back there, I mean—but Chuanli himself was pretty low key. He was even polite. Asked me to sit, if I wanted any sort of refreshment. Ha!” She smiled. “Just as if I was a proper lady and he was a proper gentleman offering tea and crumpets. Whatever crumpets are.”

“They’re a goofy type of pancake. The ancient Angleterrans used to eat them, whoever they were.” Moriarty made an impatient shooing motion with her hand. “Keep going.”

Cary decided to cut the small talk that had followed for a few minutes. Triêu—he’d insisted on being on a first name basis—really had been quite pleasant, even cordial. If she hadn’t known he was some sort of higher-up in a criminal cabal, Cary would have thought he was a professional of some sort. Maybe even a university professor.

Good-looking guy, too. But again, she shook her head.

“The long and the short of it is that, yes, he’d be interested in our merchandise whenever we see fit to present him with it. He was obviously curious as to why we didn’t have it right now—or even have a date in mind. But he didn’t push that at all.”

“Is that the long or the short? And whichever it is, what’s the kicker? There’s got to be one.”

Cary smiled. “Bad expression. I should have said, ‘the short and the short of it.’ What it came down to was, yes, he’d be willing to buy. No, he wasn’t slobbering all over himself with eagerness. This sort of merchandise, it seems, does have a market but it’s a pretty erratic one and if it takes too long maintaining the merchandise in good condition can cost enough to eat up any profits he might make. You can’t just stuff it into a freezer. So—this is the kicker—the price isn’t that great. He’ll give us a deal. We either take a straight-up payment—”

“For how much?”

Cary gave her the amount, in all three currencies Chuanli had offered to deal in. Moriarty grimaced.

“That’s not much,” she said. “Wouldn’t keep us going for more than another three months, tops.”

“Or we can share part of the risk with him. We could wind up with quite a bit more, if he can turn the merchandise around quickly. Or we might end up with even less than the straight-up price, if it takes too long. In whatever case, though, we don’t get paid until he makes the sale. Or sales—which is more likely—if he winds up having more than one customer.”

Stephanie grimaced again. “That means we have to trust him, too.”

Cary and pursed her lips. “I don’t think that’s actually a problem, Stephanie. It’s hard to explain, but . . . I get the sense that when you deal with someone like Chuanli, it’s taken for granted that everyone is acting in good faith. Honor among thieves, I’d guess you’d say. That’s probably because since nobody can appeal a dispute to the courts, nobody wants to take a risk that the swindled party comes back at you with bloodshed in mind.”

Stephanie rolled her eyes. “Oh, right.” She spread out her hands, indicating the cramped apartment. “We’re practically awash in hit men. Oh, wait. I guess that’d have to be hit girls, since there are no actual men here.”

“Hey, look. Nobody ever promised us a rose garden.”

“Yeah, but is it too much to ask for a
cactus
garden? This is pushing it.” Stephanie chewed on her lower lip for a few seconds. “So what do you think? Go for the better but riskier deal?”

“Yeah.”

She chewed on her lip for a few more seconds. “Okay. What the hell. We may as well keep living dangerously, given our track record.”

Chapter 26

Lajos Irvine’s boss George Vickers had done one thing right, at least. The two assistants he’d provided Lajos looked to be a lot more capable than the numbskulls he’d been provided the last time his superiors decided he needed support.

That had been Isabel Bardasano’s doing. The now-deceased former head of Alignment Security had normally been as sharp as they come. But that time, the fieldcraft of the meatheads she’d handed Lajos had been so bad they’d given themselves away to the targets as soon as they encountered them. Being fair to Bardasano, she’d been in a hurry and the only forces she had immediately at hand were some of Mesa’s security people. They hadn’t been part of even the outermost layers of the Alignment and were accustomed to dealing with seccies. They’d also had the vicious nature and the overconfidence that normally infected a “security force” whose brutality and violence was unchecked by anything remotely like “legal rights” on the part of their victims. A very little bit of that was enough to turn even once-intelligent human beings into arrogant, head-breaking thugs, and Lajos’ hastily assigned “backup” had been at their trade entirely too long.

To make things worse—not to mention terrifying—the targets in question had been the deadliest bastards Lajos had ever run across in his entire career. One of them, especially. That maniac had gunned down all three goons in that many seconds—no, probably less. Lajos didn’t remember too well because he’d been so frightened.

He’d been even more frightened a short time later when the two targets dragged him into a tunnel and had a short discussion over whether or not to kill him. That they’d do so without hesitation had been manifestly obvious. Lajos still woke up sometimes with nightmares of the cold gaze of the gunman. Those black eyes had been as merciless as a spider’s. He’d never forget them.

This time around, though, the higher-ups seemed to have had their heads screwed on straight. These two agents were part of the Alignment and had the earmarks of people with experience in the field against serious opponents. They were the police equivalent of elite special forces, not uniformed goons. Lajos didn’t have any doubt that the men would handle themselves just fine if it came down to rough stuff. Which, hopefully, it wouldn’t. Lajos had no romantic notions concerning violence. If all went as planned, his transactions and dealings with Mesa’s seccy underworld would be as banal and unexciting as grocery shopping.

Lajos finished reading through his notes and turned away from the monitor. “I’m thinking our best bet is to approach either Jurgen Dusek in Neue Rostock or go the other way and see if we can get someone in Lower Radomsko interested.”

Neue Rostock was at the center of the seccy districts in the capital. It was a heavily crime-ridden area and Dusek was the district’s acknowledged crime boss. Not the only one, but what ancient gangsters would have called the
capo di tutti capi
.

Lower Radomsko presented a different picture. It was also well into the central areas inhabited by seccies and was, if anything, even more crime-ridden than Neue Rostock. But its underworld was disorganized, dominated by a multitude of small gangs none of whom recognized any master.

“I’d go for Neue Rostock,” advised Stanković. “Dealing with Dusek will be a lot easier than trying to deal with that mob of crazies in Lower Radomsko.”

Martinez issued a little grunt, which seemed to indicate his agreement.

Lajos leaned the same way as Stanković, but for the moment he decided to play the devil’s advocate. “Yeah, that’s true—but so is the corollary. If things go wrong, dealing with Dusek will be a lot
less
easy. I’ve never dealt with the man before, but I know a lot about him. By all accounts, once you scratch that gangster-politesse veneer of his you’re dealing with Attila the Hun’s first cousin. He’s the mean one in the family, by the way.”

Stanković chuckled. “Yeah, I’ve heard the same thing. But . . .” He turned his head sideways a little, to give Lajos a slanted gaze. “Don’t take this the wrong way, boss, but I don’t think you’ve had much experience in Lower Radomsko.”

“None at all,” Lajos agreed. “Personally, that is. I know a fair amount about it, though, just from—” He waved his hand. “Stuff.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. The thing is, you really have to spend time there to get a good sense of it. Freddie and I never did ourselves but we worked with a Mesan security agent—one of the Tabbies—who’d spent years there. The stories he had to tell . . .” He shook his head. “The place is a shithole.”

Lajos leaned back in his chair, his interest rising. “Go on,” he said.

“It’s . . .” Stanković groped for words.

“Fucking lunacy,” provided Martinez.

His partner nodded. “That’s about right. It’s just chaos, boss. You’ll think you’ve made a deal, gotten some sort of arrangement—this happened to the Tabby
three times,
I’m not kidding—and the next minute some other asshole has shoved his way in and you’ve got to start all over. One of those times he told us he wound up having to deal with four gangs. And it wasn’t any big money deal, neither.”

“Just looking for a runaway slave,” said Martinez. “The bounty amounted to pocket change. But for the sorry-ass screwballs in Lower Radomsko”—he rubbed a thumb and two fingers together—“what you and I would call pocket change is worth killing over.”

“He got the runaway, eventually,” said Stanković. “But not before five people had been killed—one of whom was the runaway herself. Got her throat cut by one gang just so another one wouldn’t get the bounty.”

“Screw Lower Radomsko,” said Martinez.

Lajos laughed and raised his hands in a mock gesture of surrender. “Okay, okay, guys. I’m convinced. Neue Rostock it’ll be, then.”

Lajos was pleased. More than a decision had been arrived at here, he knew. A working relationship had been moved forward, too. He’d been worried about that a little. Lajos’ entire career had been as a lone wolf. He had no experience handling other agents and hadn’t been sure if he had the skills or aptitude for it. Judging from the friendly expressions on the faces of Stanković and Martinez, though, it seemed he did.

* * *

“What’s up, boss? Did you get the results from—”

Seeing the people already sitting in Lisa Charteris’s office, Zachariah McBryde abruptly stopped talking. When he got the summons to report to Charteris—which came via personal courier, which was unusual but not unheard-of—he’d assumed she wanted to discuss one of the projects they were working on.

That couldn’t possibly be what she’d summoned him for, though, he now realized. Two of the four scientists in the room had no connection to the work he was doing, and he didn’t recognize one of them at all.

But the icing on the cake was the presence of Janice Marinescu. He hadn’t seen her since the meeting where she informed Zachariah and Lisa that Operation Houdini was being set underway.

He got a sharp, sinking feeling in his stomach. The experiments he’d been running lately had been difficult enough to keep his mind focused. As time went by with no further notice or even mention of Houdini, he’d managed to half-forget about the issue. And now here it was, back in full force. There could be no other reason for Marinescu’s presence.

“Okay, we’re all here,” Marinescu said. “The five of you in this room are the people from this science project who’ve been selected for Houdini. Lisa Charteris is in overall charge of the center. Three of you”—she glanced briefly at Zachariah and the two scientists he knew—“are task force directors, and Gail Weiss is . . . let’s just say she has special skills we don’t want to lose.

“As you’ve probably already guessed, Houdini has just gone from alert status to active status. The first division is already being taken off-planet. Unfortunately, we’re evacuating a lot more people in a shorter span of time than we’d foreseen. That means we’re forced to use avenues of exfiltration that we hadn’t planned on originally. Many of us—including all five of you in this room—will be evacuated via Manpower shipping.”

One of the task force directors, Stefka Juarez, made a face. It had been an involuntary reaction and the expression left her face within two seconds, but Marinescu spotted it and gaze her a hard gaze. “Is there a problem, Ms. Juarez?”

She didn’t wait for an answer before continuing. “It’s a little late in the day, don’t you think, to discover you have qualms about Manpower’s activities. You’re in the inner layers of the onion and have been since you were a teenager. You’ve known for years—and if you had any disagreements you certainly kept them quiet—that the Alignment’s long-term goals required the development of genetic slavery. And still do—and will, for several more generations.”

She stopped and gave all of them that cold gaze. “The same goes for the rest of you. So if it turns out—which it has—that you have to be exfiltrated by ships from the slave trade, deal with it. You may have been able to keep your hands clean in your scientific work, but others of us—me, for one—have not enjoyed that luxury. You’ll forgive me if I don’t have any sympathy for your current plight. Which, as plights go, isn’t much.”

She stopped to look at each one of them in turn, for a second or two. “Do any of you have anything you want to say?”

All of them were silent. Charteris and Gail Weiss shook their heads.

“Very well.” Marinescu had her hands folded in her lap. Now she unclasped them and pointed at the door. “When you leave here, each of you will be escorted by a member of the Genetic Advancement and Uplift League to a briefing room. There, you’ll be given the details of your evacuation route. Everything you need to know except the exact time of departure and the specific ship you’ll be taking. We won’t know that for a while yet. Right now, we’re only halfway through scheduling the evacuation details for the second division.”

The third of the task force directors, Joseph van Vleet, was frowning. “How will we know—”

“—when to leave? The same member of the Uplift League whom you’ll meet when you leave here will come and notify you. They will also accompany you throughout the evacuation. Every stage of it until you reach your final destination.”

Once again, Juarez grimaced. Zachariah barely knew her, since their work was in areas quite far removed from each other. He couldn’t help but wonder, though, how someone who’d been made a task force director could have such abysmal social skills.

“Is that really necessary?” she asked.

Marinescu looked at her the way a predator studies the weakest member of a herd. After a short pause, she said: “The very fact you ask that question demonstrates that it is.”

She turned her eyes onto the rest of them. “Do I need to explain again—how many times has each of you been briefed on Houdini? at least three—that the whole point of the operation is to prevent our enemies from learning
anything
about the Alignment. I should say, as little as possible about the Alignment and nothing at all about the inner layers of the onion—or even the onion’s existence. The only way to be sure of that is to follow two essential guidelines.

“First, no one outside the group selected for Houdini can know anything about it. That means
nobody.
That includes spouses, parents, children, siblings, cousins, friends—
nobody.
Second, nobody can be left behind who does know about Houdini.
Nobody.
Not. One. Single. Person.”

She paused again, to scan all of their faces. Looking for weakness, hesitation, indecision, vacillation . . . anything that would trigger her predator’s instincts. Her own gaze was pitiless.

Zachariah held his breath. The moment was . . .
dangerous.
Really, really dangerous.

“If you don’t understand exactly what that means,” she continued, “let me explain it to you as clearly as I can. If you tell anyone about Houdini who is not part of it, that person will be eliminated. So will any person that that person might have told. I stress
might
have told. We will bend the stick in the direction of caution, be assured of that.”

She nodded toward Lisa. “If Director Charteris tells her husband or any of her three children, to give a hypothetical example, all of them will be eliminated. Including herself, of course. Violating the tenets of Houdini will be considered high treason. Do you all understand me?”

Lisa’s face was drawn, but she nodded curtly. So did Zachariah and van Vleet. Weiss and Juarez just stared down at the floor.

“Just to be clear on this. ‘Telling anyone’ will be interpreted as broadly as possible. So don’t try—don’t even entertain the possibility in your dreams—to let your family and friends know you’ll be leaving by some circuitous or indirect means. Do not tell them that you’ll be going on a long trip soon due to your work. Do not give them unusual gifts. Do not take them on sudden vacations. Do or say absolutely
nothing
that is in any way out of the ordinary. And don’t doubt for a moment that you will be under surveillance. We will know if you do.”

She paused again. “I repeat: do you all understand me, in every particular?”

This time, everyone nodded.

“Good. Now, as to the second issue. It may turn out—this is not likely, but it can’t be ruled out altogether—that at some point in the evacuation, through no fault of your own, you become compromised. If that happens, the member of the—the Gaul, to hell with circumlocutions, will see to it that you do not fall into enemy hands. You won’t have to do anything. It will be done for you. If you need me to spell that out, I will do so.”

Again, the pause. By now Zachariah just wanted to get the meeting over with. He felt like he’d been beaten on the head with a club. Beaten on his spirit, rather—or soul, if he had one.

Marinescu was not one to let anything slide, however. “I repeat. Do any of you need me to spell out what this means?”

All five of them shook their heads.

“Good. Director Charteris, if you would lead the way? You will be followed by the others at five-second intervals in alphabetical order. After Charteris, Juarez goes, followed by McBryde and van Vleet. Ms. Weiss, you go last.”

Charteris was already on her feet and heading for the door. After a slight hesitation, Juarez got up and followed. After the director passed through the door, Juarez glanced at her timepiece. Five seconds later, she followed.