The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (6 page)

“For the armor, ten days, maybe two weeks. I have to acquire an authorized user certificate first.”

“I don’t need one.”

She raised her cocktail glass and took a sip, looking at him over the rim. “That doesn’t help me, because I do need it. Look, the rest of your list is either in storage or floating around the underground market, I can pull it in over the next few days. But that armor, that has to come from legitimate suppliers, and they have to have the certificate before they’ll even let it out of their factory.”

“Can you get the certificate?”

“I can.”

“How much?” he asked before she could start on her sales pitch.

“In Velaines dollars, a hundred thousand. There are a number of people involved, none of them cheap.”

“I’ll pay you eighty.”

“I’m sorry, this isn’t some kind of market stall. I’m not bargaining. That’s the price.”

“I’ll pay you eighty, and I’ll also pay you to package the rest of the list the way I require.”

She frowned. “What sort of packaging?”

Adam handed over a memory crystal. “Every weapon is to be broken down into its components. They are to be installed in various pieces of civil and agricultural equipment I have waiting in a warehouse. The way it’s laid out, the components will be unidentifiable no matter how they are scanned or examined. The instructions are all there.”

“Given the size of your list, that’s a lot of work.”

“Fifteen thousand. I’m not bargaining.”

She licked her lips. “How are you paying?”

“Earth dollars, cash, not an account.”

“Cash?”

“Is that a problem?”

“Your list will cost you seven hundred and twenty thousand. That’s a lot of money to carry around.”

“Depends what you’re used to.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out a thick bundle of notes. “That’s fifty thousand. It’s enough to get you started and prove my intent. Once you’ve assembled the list, give me the location of your secure warehouse where I can send my machinery. When it arrives there, I’ll pay you a third of the remaining money. When you’ve installed it, I’ll pay you the remainder.”

Rachael Lancier’s poise faltered slightly. She gave her bodyguard a glance, and he picked up the notes. “It’s good to do business with you, Huw,” she said.

“I want daily updates on the state of play.”

“You’ll get them.”

Chief Investigator Paula Myo left her Paris office three minutes after getting the call from Sabbah. It took her eighteen minutes to get across town to the CST station. It was only an eight minute wait on the platform for the next express. She arrived on Velaines within forty minutes.

Two senior detectives, Don Mares and Maggie Lidsey from the Tokat metropolitan police, were waiting for her when the taxi delivered her to their headquarters. Given the level of the request for cooperation from the Intersolar Serious Crimes Directorate, the two detectives had no trouble requisitioning a conference office and departmental array time. Their captain also made it clear to them that he expected them to provide genuine assistance to the Chief Investigator. “She’ll file a report on our operational ability when this is over,” he said. “And the Directorate has political clout, so be nice and be useful.”

With Don Mares sitting restlessly beside her, Maggie Lidsey used her e-butler to call up the Chief Investigator’s file. Broad columns of translucent green text began to flow across the virtual vision generated by her retinal inserts. She skipped through the information quickly; it was a refresher rather than a detailed appraisal. Everyone in law enforcement knew about Paula Myo.

The headquarters array informed the two detectives their guest had arrived. Maggie focused on the lift doors as they opened, banishing the ghostly ribbons of text. The conference office on the eighth floor of the metropolitan police headquarters building had glass walls, as did every cubicle on the same floor. From her viewpoint, Maggie could see the whole layout. At first nobody paid much attention to Paula Myo as she walked down the main corridor, followed by two colleagues from the Serious Crimes Directorate. In a white blouse, prim office suit, and sensible black shoes she fitted perfectly into the bustling compartmentalized work environment. She was slightly short by today’s standards when eighty percent of the population had some kind of genetic modification. Not that she lacked physical stature; she obviously stuck determinedly to an exercise routine that kept her fitness level an order of magnitude above anything the metropolitan police required from their officers. Her thick raven hair had been brushed straight so that it hung well below her shoulder blades. The Human Structure Foundation on Huxley’s Haven that had so carefully developed her genome had selected a mix of Filipino and European genes as a baseline, giving her a natural beauty that was utterly beguiling. A rejuvenation five years previously made it look as if she were now in her early twenties.

Even though she knew she should never judge anyone by physical guise, Maggie Lidsey had trouble taking the girl seriously as they shook hands. With her size and fresh looks, Paula Myo could quite easily be mistaken for a teenager. The giveaway was her smile. She didn’t seem to have one.

The other two Investigators from the Directorate were introduced as Tarlo, a tall, blond Californian, and Renne Kempasa, a Latin American from Valdivia, who was halfway toward her fourth rejuvenation.

The five of them sat around the table, and the walls opaqued. “Thank you for such a swift response,” Paula said. “We’re here because I have a tip-off that Adam Elvin has arrived on Velaines.”

“A tip-off from who?” Don asked.

“A contact. Not the most reliable, but it certainly needs investigating.”

“A contact? That’s it?”

“You don’t need to know, Detective Mares.”

“You were here nine years ago,” Maggie said. “At least, that’s the official entry in our files. So I’d guess your man is Sabbah. He’s a member of the Socialist Party, as was Elvin.”

“Very good, Detective.”

“Okay, we’re here to help,” Maggie said. She felt like she’d passed some kind of test. “What do you need?”

“To begin with, two surveillance operations. Elvin has made contact with a man called Nigel Murphy at the seventh chapter of the local Socialist Party here in town. We need to keep him under constant watch, virtual and physical. Elvin is here to acquire arms for Bradley Johansson’s terrorist group. This Murphy character will be his link to a local underground dealer; so he can lead us to both of them. Once we have the connection, we can intercept Elvin and the dealer at the exchange.”

“This all sounds very easy and routine,” Maggie said.

“It won’t be,” Tarlo said. “Elvin is very good. Once we’ve identified him, I’ll need a detective team to help backtrack his every movement to the moment he arrived. He’s a tricky son of a bitch. The first thing he will have done is establish an escape route in case this deal blows up in his face. We need to find it, and block it.”

“You guys know it all, don’t you?” Don Mares said. “What he’s doing, where he is. I’m surprised you even need us.”

Paula looked at him briefly, then turned her attention back to Maggie. “Is there a problem?”

“A little more information would be appreciated,” Maggie said. “For instance, are you sure he is here to contact an arms dealer?”

“It’s what he does. In fact, it’s all he does these days. He’s just about given up on the Party. Oh, he’ll throw the local chapter a bone or two for cooperating with him. But he hasn’t really taken any part in the movement since Abadan. The Party’s executive cadre effectively disowned him and his entire active resistance cell after that fiasco. That’s when he hooked up with Bradley Johansson. No one else would touch him, he was too hot. Ever since then he’s been the quartermaster for the Guardians of Selfhood. The acts they commit on Far Away make Abadan seem quite mild.”

Don Mares grinned. “Managed to get any of the money back yet?”

Tarlo and Renne gave him hostile stares. Paula Myo looked at him without saying anything. Don met her gaze levelly, showing no remorse.

“Is he likely to be armed?” Maggie asked. She glared at Don; at the best of times he could be an asshole, and today he seemed to be going out of his way to prove it.

“Elvin will probably be carrying a small weapon,” Renne Kempasa said. “But his main armory is his experience and guile. If there’s any kind of physical trouble, it won’t be him that starts it. We’ll have to research the arms dealer carefully; they tend to lean toward violence.”

“So no money, then,” Don persisted. “Not after—what is it now—a hundred and thirty years?”

“I also need your office to try and track down Elvin’s export route,” Paula said. “The CST security division will cooperate with them fully on that.”

“We’ll liaise with our captain over officer allocation,” Maggie said. “We’ve already arranged for you to have an office and access to the departmental array.”

“Thank you. I’d like to brief the observation teams in two hours.”

“Tight schedule, but I think we can manage that for you.”

“Thank you.” Paula hadn’t moved her gaze from Maggie. “No, I haven’t got any of the money back yet. Most of it is spent on arms deals like this one, which makes it particularly hard to track and recover. And I haven’t gotten this close to him for twenty years. So I will be seriously disappointed if an individual screws this up. It will be a career-wrecker.”

Don Mares tried to sneer off the threat. He didn’t really succeed. Maggie thought it was because he’d realized the same thing she had. Paula Myo never smiled because she didn’t have a sense of humor.

Adam was finishing a rather splendid early breakfast at the Westpool Hotel when his e-butler informed him that an unsigned message had arrived in its hold file. It had come from a onetime unisphere address, and the text it contained was encrypted with a key code that identified the sender to him immediately: Bradley Johansson.

Outwardly, Adam drank his coffee quietly as the waiters fussed around the restaurant tending to the other guests. In his virtual vision, he prepared the message for decryption. His wrist array was worn on his left arm, a simple band of dull malmetal that flexed and expanded constantly to maintain full contact with his skin. Its inner surface contained an i-spot that connected to his OCtattoos, which in turn were wetwired into his hand’s nerve fibers. The interface was represented in his virtual vision by a ghostly hand, which he’d customized to a pale blue, with sharp purple nails. For every tiny motion he made with his flesh and blood hand, the virtual one made a scaled-up movement, allowing him to select and manipulate icons. The system was standard across the Commonwealth, giving everyone who could afford an OCtattoo direct connection to the planetary cybersphere. He guessed that most of the businesspeople having breakfast around him were quietly interfacing with their office arrays. They had that daydreaming look about them.

He pulled the appropriate key out of its store in his wrist array, represented by a Rubik’s Cube icon, which he had to twist until he’d arranged the surface squares into the correct pattern. The cube opened up, and he dropped the message icon inside. A single line of black text slid across his virtual vision: PAULA MYO IS ON VELAINES.

Adam just managed to hold on to his coffee cup. “Shit!”

Several nearby guests glanced over to him. He twitched his lips in an apologetic smile. The array had already wiped the message, now it was going through an elaborate junction overwrite procedure in case it was ever examined by a forensics retrieval system.

Adam never did know where Bradley got half of his information. But it had always been utterly reliable. He should abandon the mission right now.

Except … it had taken eighteen months to plan and organize. Dummy companies had been established on a dozen worlds to handle the disguised machinery exports to Far Away, routing and rerouting them so that there would be no suspicion and no trail. A lot of money had been spent on preparations. And the Guardians wouldn’t receive another shipment of arms until he could set one up. Before he did that, he needed to know what had gone wrong this time.

They had been so close, too. Rachael Lancier’s last call confirmed that she had put together about two-thirds of the list. So close.

Maggie Lidsey’s car drove her into the headquarters building underground parking lot an hour before she was due on shift. She’d been working longer hours ever since the case started. It wasn’t just to curry favor with Paula Myo; she was learning a lot from the Chief Investigator. The woman’s attention to detail was incredible. Maggie was convinced she must have array inserts, along with supplementary memorycells. No aspect of the operation was too small for her to show an interest in. Urban myth certainly hadn’t exaggerated her dedication.

The elevator in the lobby scanned her to confirm her identity: only then did it descend to the fifth basement level where the operations centers were situated. The Elvin team had been codenamed Roundup, and assigned room 5A5. Maggie was scanned again before the metal slab door slid aside to admit her. The interior was gloomy, occupied by three rows of consoles with tall holographic portals curving around the operator. Each one was alive with a grid of images and data ribbons. Laser light spilled out from them in a pale iridescent haze. A quick glance at the ones closest to the door showed Maggie the familiar pictures of the buildings that Rachael Lancier used to run her car dealership from, along with shots from the team’s two shadow cars showing Adam Elvin’s taxi as they followed him through midtown.

Maggie requested an update, and quickly assimilated the overnight data. The one item that stood out was the encrypted message delivered to Elvin’s e-butler through the Westpool Hotel node. She saw Paula Myo sitting at her desk at the far end of the room. The Chief Investigator seemed to get by on a maximum of two hours’ sleep per day. She’d had a cot moved into her office, and never used it until an hour after both main targets had retired for the night. And she was always up an hour before the time they usually got out of bed. The night shift had standing orders to wake her if anything out of the ordinary happened.