House of the Sun (32 page)

The corporator blinked wordlessly for a moment; I guess senior veeps or whatever don't get screamed at very often. Then his brows drew together in a nasty-looking scowl, and he snarled, "You've got a lot of gall—"

"That's not all I've got, you slot," I broke in again. "You
owe
me, okay? You said so, and I'm holding you to it. I've found out a few things over here about Yamatetsu's operations that might attract a little unwanted attention,
karimasu-ka!"
That was pure bluff, of course. I didn't have any dirt on Yamatetsu—nothing I could use, at least. But Barnard didn't have to know that.

Not that the gambit worked anyway. His nasty scowl became an equally nasty smile. "I doubt it, Mr. Montgomery. I seriously doubt it. And as to debts? Well, I consider any beholding I might have felt toward you to have been voided when you broke security."

That set me back a little. "Play that one back," I told him. " 'Broke security
'
?"

Barnard looked almost pityingly at me. "I expected better of you, Mr. Montgomery." And with that, he reached out to cancel the connection.

"Wait,
" I barked. "Just wait a tick, okay?" Barnard's face shifted into an expression of much-put-upon patience, but at least he didn't hang up. "I'm not running a scam here," I told him as sincerely as I could. "I don't know what the frag you're talking about."

"I seriously doubt that."

"It's
true,
frag it all," I shouted back. "Tell me what the frag you're talking about. Then, if I
did
'break security,' I'll snivel and crawl and kiss your hoop at midday in downtown Kyoto, or whatever the hell you want. But at the moment I honestly don't know what the frag you're accusing me of." Barnard gave a long-suffering sigh. "The
Ali'i,
Mr. Montgomery," he said wearily. "Your meeting with the
Ali'i
. It was supposed to be confidential." He hesitated. "Or, at least, the fact that you were serving as my agent was supposed to be confidential.

"Yet what did you do? Virtually the moment you left the Iolani Palace, you started spreading the word that you were a corporate emissary, conveying personal messages from the Corporate Court to King Kamehameha V. Do you have any understanding of how damaging that has been?"

I shook my head. "Bull
drek,
I did that!" I shot back. "Pure, unadulterated
kanike,
okay? I didn't tel! anyone. Look somewhere else for your security leak, goddamn it." Barnard's voice was deceptively quiet, and his expression had settled into a cold, emotionless mask. "But I did look elsewhere, Mr. Montgomery. With no success whatsoever.
You
are the only possible leak."

"Bull
drek
I am
!
" I shouted again.

"If not you, then who?"

"What about Ho himself?"

"Ho?" Barnard laughed aloud at that. "That's the last thing Ho would leak. If the rival faction in the legislature plays their cards right—and there's no reason to expect that they won't—he stands to lose his throne . .. and possibly more. Try again, Mr. Montgomery, hmm?"

"Christ,
I
don't ..." I pulled up in midbluster. Maybe I did know. "Do you know someone named Quentin Harlech?" I asked.

"The name doesn't mean anything to me."

"Then maybe you should run it through your 'puters and your databases and your legions of fragging
informants,
Barnard. I'd lay long odds that Harlech's the one who blew your op." Yes ... as I spoke, I grew steadily more convinced that it
had
been the strange elf. After all, hadn't he as good as admitted that he'd blown my cover? I hadn't known what he was yapping about at the time, but now I thought I had it chipped.

Barnard's expression made it clear that he wasn't even a little convinced that I was telling the truth. But at least he didn't seem to be quite so convinced I'd ratted him out. "I'll
run the name," he said slowly.

"While you're at it," I suggested, "why don't you tell me what the frag's going on here? Okay, so the word's out King Kam's talking to the megacorps. So what?"

Barnard sighed again, and shook his head. "Haven't you been paying any attention whatsoever to the political situation in the islands?"

"Like I told you before, I've had other things on my mind recently," I said dryly.

He didn't dignify that with a response. "Gordon Ho's position depends on a kind of balancing act, you might call it," he went on as if I hadn't even spoken. "The megacorporations on one hand, certain factions within his own government on the other."

"Na
Kama'aina
," I put in, just to show I wasn't totally brain-fried.

"Na
Kama'aina,
yes. If the
Na
Kama'aina
faction can prove to the populace that their king is toadying to the megacorporations, the people will remove him from power. If, on the other hand, the corporations are dissatisfied with Ho's efforts to maintain a stable business climate,
they
will remove him from power."

I nodded: pineapple plutocrats all over again,
neh
? "So what's going on?"

"The former, of course," Barnard said flatly. "Events have obviously been manipulated to stir up anticorporate sentiments—among the people as a whole, but more important among various militant groups . . ."

"ALOHA."

"Of course," he acknowledged. "You know, of course, that the assassination of Tokudaiji-
san
has been positioned as a corporate maneuver.

"And there have been other ...
provocative
actions
... as well."

I blinked at that. I hadn't heard of anything else, but then, as I'd told Barnard, I'd had other things on my mind of late, like dragons and high-velocity ordnance.

Barnard continued, "And now, your revelation that . . ."

"It wasn't me, frag it all
!
"

"It hardly matters," he pointed out coldly. "The revelation that the
Ali'i
has been enjoying private meetings with representatives of the megacorporations is damaging enough, regardless of its source."

"But hell, he's
got
to meet with megacorp reps sometimes," I pointed out.

"Of course. But it's the secrecy surrounding your actions that makes them appear so damaging. If Gordon Ho were truly acting in the best interest of his people—and not feathering his own nest through private concessions to the megacorporations—why would such secrecy be necessary?

"Consider the situation," Bamard went on. "How would
you
interpret a clandestine meeting between the head of
your
government and the personal representative of a senior megacorporate executive, hmm?"

Okay, frag it, I got the point. Sure enough, my paranoia wouid kick in, and I'd conclude the government muckamuck was cutting a private deal, and had his tongue firmly up the corp-rep's hoop. "So what kind of drek's coming down?"

"Just what you'd expect," Barnard said grimly.
"Na
Kama'aina
spokespeople in the legislature are putting pressure on the
Ali'i
. Others are stirring up the populace against him."

"Any violence?"

"Not yet." There was a nasty tone of inevitability in his voice.

"What about ALOHA?"

"Poiiclub members are involved in the agitprop, as one would expect," Barnard explained. "So far, though, they seem to be keeping a low profile."

"But you don't expect that to last."

"No."

"And then what?"

Barnard shrugged, suddenly looking even older than he had the last time I'd seen him. He might as well have been withering away from some ugly wasting disease.
(Frag,
I found myself wondering,
why
do
people
go
to
the
trouble
of
climbing
the
corporate
ladder
if
it's
going
to
harsh
them
out
like
this?)
"It depends, I suppose," he said quietly.

"On what?"

"On ALOHA's actions. On Gordon Ho's replacement, if his throne is actually usurped. The megacorporations don't take kindly to threats against their operations."

"They'll take over Hawai'i?"

Barnard nodded. "If forced to do so, yes, they will."

"So it all might come apart?" I leaned toward the screen. "Then get me the frag
out
of here, Barnard. This isn't my country. It's not my fight, and it's none of my fragging business, okay?"

"Unacceptable," he snapped instantly. "I need someone on-site to keep me informed on developments."

I pounded the table; the telecom jumped.
"Frag
you,
Barnard!" I yelled. "You don't need me. You've got Christ-knows-how-many spooks and stoolies and squeals and yaps and informants
!
"

He nodded. "And every one will lie to me if it's in his best interest to do so."

"And I
won't
lie to you, if it's in
my
best interest? Get actual
!
"

"Of course you'll lie if forced to it, Mr. Montgomery," Barnard agreed with a smile. "But your needs are different from my normal contacts, and your ... er,
bias
... will be different from theirs. The truth will, presumably, lie somewhere between your description and theirs."

"Oh, just peachy fragging keen. 'Let's hang Dirk Montgomery's hoop out in the wind so we can contrast
his
lies with the lies from some other yaps.' Thanks tons, Mr. fragging Barnard."

My anger left him totally untouched. Well, hell, why not? All my bitching was about as meaningful in his worldview as the mewling of a fragging kitten. "Perhaps it will never come to that extreme," he pointed out quietly. "Who knows, Mr. Montgomery? Perhaps cooler heads will prevail in all of this." He was trying to convince me, but was a long fragging way from sounding terribly convinced himself.

* * *

The explosion woke me from troubled dreams at about oh-four-hundred.

I didn't know it was an explosion at first. In fact, I didn't know what it was that had roused me. For a few seconds I just lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. But then a second concussion hit the transpex picture window, sounding a dull thud. I was on my feet in an instant, dashing over to the window.

The second fireball was still roiling into the sky, a dirty red fire-flower blooming from the dark ground. It was far to the right as I looked out the window—that made it to the west. What was in that direction? The airport, for one thing, but I didn't think the explosion was that far away. (Hell, if it was, it must have been one fragger of a blast . . .) I wracked my brains.

Yeah,
that's
right
... I remembered part of Scott's quickie tour of Greater Honolulu. There was an island off the shoreline of Honolulu—Sand Island, or something equally uninspired—that was a kind of Special Enterprise Zone for corporate activities. From what I remembered of the geography, Sand Island was about the right distance away. ALOHA had been busy.

Think about it—what else would the story be? Two explosions? Despite what you see on the trideo or in the sims, drek doesn't just blow up on its own—not very often, at least. Almost invariably, when something goes boom, it's because some slag arranged for it to go boom.

The distant fire-flower faded, and I turned my back on it, crossing the room to slump back onto the bed. I'd hit the sack at about nineteen-hundred the night before, after spending the whole day just keeping a low profile around the hotel room. That meant I'd already gotten nine hours of sleep—more than I normally enjoy. So how come I still felt like a wet bag of drek? Aftereffects of the narcodart, obviously, or so it pleased me to tell myself. The other alternatives—"getting old," "slowing down," "burning out," "too drek-kicked to cut it any more"—were a lot less conducive to good self-esteem.

I snagged the remote from the bed table and keyed on the trideo. Quickly, I flipped through the channels: late-late-late show, early movie,
Zelda
Does
Zurich-Orbital,
a twenty-four-hour sports channel (What do they run at oh-four-hundred? It looked like Albanian-rules badminton or some drek.), two talking heads arguing economics, a brain-dead charcom, two more talking heads arguing but in Japanese this time, and on and on. I settled on one channel—
Zelda
got the nod, surprise surprise—and waited it out.

Maybe I
am
getting old. I nodded off before Zelda had boffed her way through half of the (remarkably well-equipped) "corporate executives" in the low-budget pornovid. Brassy music jolted me out of a doze, and I struggled to focus eyes and mind on an animated News Bulletin banner dancing across the trid screen.

Well. I'll condense what I saw. Like so many on-the-spot news reports, this one comprised a frag of a lot of "Well, Marcia, we don't really know squat about what's going on here, but at least we're the first network to tell you that live . .By flipping between channels, I managed to piece together most of the story, however.

I'd been right about the location: The two blasts
had
taken place in the corp zone on Sand Island. Apparently—this was the official story, at least, confirmed by a
Na
Maka'i
spokescop—terrorists had penetrated the corp zone's security and planted three jury-rigged "devices" in various locations. Intrepid security guards had found one of the bombs on Mitsuhama turf and managed to disarm it before it went bang. Unfortunately, two other "devices" had detonated, doing minimal damage to the property of Renraku and Monobe. There were no casualties, damage was extremely limited, and the
Na
Maka
'i
spokescop was confident that the guilty parties would be apprehended within hours.