Cherryh, C J - Alliance-Union 08 (13 page)

I've fallen into a trap,
he thought.
But how could I have avoided it? What did I do wrong?

"Do you agree?" she asked.

"Yes. So long as you keep your end of it. And I get
my
transfer back to my father's wing."

"Oh, no, that's
not
part of it. You stay here. What's more, you and I are going to have an ongoing understanding. You know—your father's a very proud man. You know what it would do to him, to have to choose whether to go to the Bureau and lose everything over what you've done, or keep his mouth shut and
know
what you're involved in to keep that assignment for him. Because that's what you've done. You've handed me all the personal and legal missiles I need—if I have to use them. I've got a way to keep your father quiet, an easy way, as it happens, that doesn't involve him getting hurt. And all you've got to do is keep quiet, do your work, and wait it out. You've got exactly the position you bargained for—hostage for his release; and his good behavior. So what I want you to do, young man, is go put in an honest day's work, give me the BRX reports by the time your shift's over, and let me see a good job. You do what you like: call your father, tell him Grant's gone missing, tell him as much as you like. I certainly can't stop you. And you come to my Residency, oh, about 2100, and you tell me what you've done. Or I'll assume it's gone the other way."

He was still thinking when she finished, still running through all of it, and what she meant; but he knew that. He tried to find all the traps in it. The one he was in, he had no trouble seeing. It was the invitation he had dreaded. It was where everything had been going.

"You can go," she said.

He walked out past Florian in the outer lab, out into the hall, out through the security doors and upstairs into the ordinary hallways of Wing One operations. Someone passed him on the way to his office and said good morning to him; he realized it half the hall further on, and did not even know who it had been.

He did not know how he was going to face Jordan. By phone, he thought. He would break the news by phone and meet his father for lunch. And get through it somehow. Jordan would expect him to be distraught.

Ari was right. If Jordan got involved in it, everything that was settled became unsettled, and for all that he could figure, Jordan had no hand to play.

At best, he thought—go along with it till he could get control of himself enough to think whether telling Jordan the whole story was the thing to do.

Whatever the time cost.

"What we did . . ." Justin turned the stem of his wine-glass, a focus to look at, anything but Jordan's face. "What we did was what we always planned to do, if one of us got cornered. Her taking Grant—was to pressure me. I know—I know you told me I should come to you. But she sprang that on us, and there wasn't time to do anything but file a protest with the Bureau. That'd have been too late for Grant. God knows what she might have put him through before we could get any land of injunction, if we could get one at all—" He shrugged. "And we couldn't win it, in the long run, the law's on her side and it would foul everything up just after everything was settled on the Fargone deal, so I just—just took the only chance I thought would work. My best judgment. That's all I can say."

It was a private lunch, in the kitchen in Jordan's apartment. Paul did the serving, simple sandwiches, and neither of them did more than pick at the food.

"Damn," Jordan said. He had said very little up to that point, had let Justin get it out in order. "Damn, you should have told me what was going on. I
told
you—"

"I couldn't get to you. It'd make everything I did look like it was your doing. I didn't want to lay a trail."

"Did you? Did you lay one?"

"Pretty plain where I'm concerned, I'm afraid. But that's part of the deal. That's why I stayed here. Ari's got something on me. She's got me to use against you, the way she planned to use Grant against me. Now she doesn't need him, does she?"

"You're damn right she doesn't need him! My God, son—"

"It's not that bad." He kept his voice ever so steady. "I called her bluff. I stayed around. She said— She said that this is the way it's going to work: you get your transfer as soon as the facility is built, earnest of her good faith. Then I get Grant to go out there to you, earnest of mine. That way—"

"That way you're left here where she can do anything she damn well pleases!"

"That way," he reprised, calmly, carefully, "she knows that she can hold on to me and keep you quiet until her projects are too far advanced to stop. And the military won't let you go public. That's what she's after. She's got it. But there's a limit to what she can do—and this way all of us get out. Eventually."

Jordan said nothing, for a long, long while, then lifted his wine glass and took a drink and set it down.

And still said nothing, for minutes upon minutes.

"I should never, never have kept Grant," Jordan said finally, "when things blew up with Ari. I knew it would happen. Damn, I knew it would, all those years ago. Don't ever,
ever
take favors from your enemies."

"It was too late then, wasn't it?" Justin said. The bluntness shocked his nerves, brought him close to tears, an anger without focus. "God, what could we do?"

"Are you sure he's all right?"

"I haven't dared try to find out. I think Ari would have told me if she knew anything different. I set everything up. If the number I gave him doesn't answer, Krugers will keep him safe till it does."

"Merild's number?"

Justin nodded.

"God." Jordan raked his hair back and looked at him in despair. "Son, Merild's no match for the police."

"You always said—if anything happened— And you always said he was a friend of the Krugers. And Ari's not going to call the police. Or try anything herself. She said that. I've got all the ends of this. I really think I have."

"Then you're a damn sight more confident than you ought to be," Jordan snapped. "Grant's somewhere we're not sure, Krugers could have the police on their doorstep—Merild may or may not be available, for God's sake, he practices all over the continent."

"Well, I couldn't damn well phone ahead, could I?"

Jordan's face was red. He took another drink of wine, and the level in the glass measurably diminished.

"Merild's a lawyer. He's got ethics to worry about."

"He's also got friends. Hasn't he? A lot of friends."

"He's not going to like this."

"It's the same as me coming to him, isn't it?" He was suddenly on the defensive, fighting on the retreat. "Grant's no different. Merild knows that, doesn't he? Where's ethics, if it turns Grant over to the police?"

"You'd have been a hell of a lot easier to answer for. If you'd had the sense to go
with
him, for God's sake—"

"He's not ours! He belongs to the labs! My being with him couldn't make it legal."

"You're also a minor under the law and there're extenuating circumstances—you'd have been
out
of here—"

"And they'd bring it to court and God knows what they could find for charges. Isn't that so?"

Jordan let go a long breath and looked up from under his brows.

He wanted, he desperately wanted Jordan to say no, that's wrong, there is something— Then everything became possible.

But: "yes," Jordan said in a low voice, dashing his hopes.

"So it's fixed," Justin said. "Isn't it? And you don't have to do anything unless the deal comes unfixed. I can tell you if I'm getting trouble from Ari. Can't I?"

"Like this time?" Jordan returned.

"Better than this time. I promise you. I promise. All right?"

Jordan picked at his sandwich, sidestepping the question. It was not all right. Justin knew that. But it was what there was.

"You're not going to end up staying here when I transfer," Jordan said. "I'll work something out."

"Just don't give anything away."

"I'm not giving a damned thing away. Ari's not through. You'd better understand that. She doesn't keep her agreements longer than she has to. Grant's proof of that. She's damned well capable of cutting throats, hear me, son, and you'd better take that into account the next time you want to bluff. She doesn't think any more of you or me or anyone than the subjects in her labs, than the poor nine-year-old azi down there in the yards that she decides to mindwipe and ship off to some damn sweathouse because he's just not going to work out; because she needs the space, for God's sake! Or the problem cases she won't solve, she won't even run them past my staff—she's not going to use that geneset again anyway and she damned well put three healthy azi down last month, just declared them hazards, because she didn't want to take the time with them, the experiment they were in is over, and that's all she needed. I can't prove it because I didn't get the data, but I know it happened. That's who you're playing games with. She doesn't give a damn for any life, God help her lab subjects, and she's gotten beyond what public opinion might make of it—that's what she's gotten to, she's so smart they can't figure out her notes, she's answerable only to Union law, and she's got that in her pocket—she just doesn't give a damn, and we're all under her microscope—" Jordan shoved his plate away and stared at it a moment before he looked up. "Son,
don't
trust there's anything she won't do. There isn't."

He listened. He listened very hard. And heard Ari saying that accidents at Reseune were easy.

His watch showed 2030 when he exited the shower and picked it up to put it on ... in an apartment entirely too quiet and depressingly empty.

He was halfway glad not to spend the night here, with the silence and Grant's empty room, glad the way biting one's lip did something to make a smashed finger hurt less, that was about the way of it. Losing Grant hurt worse than anything else could, and Ari's harassment, he reckoned, even became a kind of anodyne to the other, sharper misery she had put him to.

Damned bitch, he thought, and his eyes stung, which was a humiliation he refused to give way to on her account. It was Grant had him unhinged, it was the whole damned mess Grant was in that had his hands shaking so badly he had trouble with the aerosol cap and popped it a ricocheting course around the mirrored sink alcove. It infuriated him. Everything conspired to irritate him out of all reason, and he set the bottle down with measured control and shaved the scant amount he had to.

Like preparing a corpse for the funeral, he thought. Everyone in Reseune had a say in his future, everyone had a mortgage on him, even his father, who had not asked his son whether he wanted to grow up with a PR on his name and know every line he was to get before he was forty, not, thank God, a bad sort of face, but not an original, either, —a face carrying all sorts of significances with his father's friends—and enemies; and Ari cornering him that first time in the lab storage room—

He had not known what to do, then; he had wished a thousand times since he had grabbed hold of her and given her what she was evidently not expecting out of a seventeen-year-old kid with a woman more than twice old enough to be his grandmother. But being seventeen, and shocked and not having thought through what his choices were before this, he had frozen and stammered something idiotic about having to go, he had a meeting he had to make, had she got the report he had turned in on a project whose number he could not even remember—

His face burned whenever he thought about it. He had gotten out that door so fast he had forgotten his clipboard and the reports and had to rewrite them rather than go back after them. He headed toward this appointment of Ari's, this damnable, no-way-out-of-it meeting, with a carefully nurtured feeling that he might, maybe, get something of his self-respect back if he played it right now.

She was old, but she was not quite beyond her rejuv. She looked—maybe late forties; and he had seen holos of her at twelve and sixteen, a face not yet settled into the hard handsomeness it had now. As women six times his age went, she was still worth looking at, what she had was the same as Julia Carnath's in the dark, he told himself with a carefully held cynicism—and better than Julia, at least Ari was up front with what she was after. Everybody in Reseune slept with everybody else reasonable at some time or another, it was not totally out of line that Ari Emory wanted to renew her youth with a replicate of a man who would have been three times too young for her when
he
was seventeen. The situation might have deserved a real laugh, if things were not so grim, and he were not the seventeen-year-old in question.

It was not sure he could do a damned thing, but, he told himself, she might at least be an experience: his was limited to Julia, who had ended up asking him for Grant—which had hurt so badly he had never gone back to her. Which was about the sum of his love affairs, and he had almost decided Jordan was right in his misogyny. Ari was a snake, she was everything reprehensible, but the key to the whole thing, he thought, was his own attitude. If he used it, if he handled it as if it were what Jordan called one of his damnfool stunts, then Ari had no weapon to use. That was the best way to take care of the problem, and that was what he had made up his mind to do—be a man, go along with the whole mess, learn from it (God
knew
a woman Ari's age had something to teach him ... in several senses)—let Ari do what she wanted, play her little games, and either lose interest or not.

He reckoned he could take a page from Ari's notebook—that a seventeen-year-old wasn't going to be besotted with a woman her age—but a woman her age might have a real emotional need for a handsome, good-humored CIT bedmate. Let her get hooked.

Let
her
have the problem, and him have the solution.

Age and vanity might be the way to deal with her, the weakness no one else could find, because no one else was the seventeen-year-old boy she wanted.

His watch showed 2105 when he walked up to the door and rang the bell of Ari's apartment—the five because he meant to make Ari wonder if he was going to show or if instead he and Jordan were going to come up with something; and no more than five because he was afraid if Ari thought that, then Ari might initiate some action even she might not be able to stop.