The Credulity Nexus (19 page)

Suddenly, it
was obvious. Blake would have passed it on to someone else.

But who in LA
could he trust? Rik ran through all the people he knew, all the
people Blake knew, and drew a blank. Somewhere else, then. Of
course! Blake had arrived at work late that morning, but only by
fifteen minutes. Not long enough to do much, but plenty of time to
stop off at a post office and send it to someone.

And there was
only one, screamingly obvious choice of who that would be; only one
mutual acquaintance Blake would be sure could be trusted to protect
Rik's interests.

Maria.

“
God, I'm so stupid!”

Rivers got up
from the chair. She didn't even bother to make a snide comment.
“You know where it is!”

“
I know where it was a few days ago. And I
know where to start looking.”

“
So?”

“
So tell your friends to have that scramjet
waiting for us. Tell the captain we need an orbit that's handy for
a landing in North America. And get out of my room before I kick
you out.”

She looked at
him for a moment, then shook her head and headed for the door. “You
are so full of shit. This better be a good lead.”

Rik didn't
answer, just watched her go. The problem now was how to find Maria
without tipping off Celestina's people too soon that she might have
the package. He was under no illusions that they'd leave the
tracking to him once they got a sniff of their quarry. They'd go
after her themselves and try to beat him to it.

An idea began
to form, but it needed work. He pulled himself round to face the
door. The first thing he needed was to get to the galley. Hunger
had started gnawing at him, and he felt the need for thick
sandwiches and good strong coffee to kick his brain back into
action.

The
governments of the world gave up on manned space exploration early
in the twenty-first century. By then, private commercial groups
were doing it better and cheaper. With the usual vigour of
unfettered entrepreneurs seeing the possibilities of fortunes to be
made, the 'final frontier' was blown wide open. Space tourism in
low Earth orbit was followed quickly by micro-G factories, then
asteroid mines and ore processing plants. The first space bridges
and the advent of small, cheap focus fusion rockets turned the
whole thing into a bonanza. Soon there were lunar mines and
settlements, private space yachts, new rock-and-roller space
stations and big industrial ventures on Mars and on the moons of
Jupiter and Saturn. Space became the fastest-growing industrial
sector in the system.

Many fortunes
were made, but it wasn't until the first off-world murder occurred
– in what was then the small mining encampment of Heinlein – that
anyone really worried about policing humanity beyond Earth's
atmosphere.

Several
countries were quick to lay claim to the privilege. Too quick.
Others were only interested in making sure their own nationals,
working in space, would not be subject to foreign jurisdictions. In
the end, it was agreed that space would be under the protection of
the United Nations. Special units within the UN's Peacekeeping
Force were established, equipped and sent to keep the peace among
the fractious, previously lawless, space colonies.

The UNPF was
welcomed by the big corporations – who happily paid a small tax for
its upkeep – and was grudgingly accepted by everyone else. The
rough-and-ready mining and industrial camps began to feel more like
small towns, and this in turn attracted a different, more permanent
kind of settler, and all the service industries growing townships
needed.

But Lieutenant
Lincoln Eugene Burleigh of UNPF, Lunar Ops, 3rd Mobile Force
Reserve, knew it would be some time yet before things settled down
to a level he might find acceptable. Towns like Heinlein were still
mostly filled with young men trying to make a fast buck doing
dangerous, dirty jobs. Colony towns everywhere were still infested
with misfits and lowlifes left over from when they had no law at
all.

Lieutenant
Burleigh knew how to deal with that kind of problem, and his
superiors at Field Headquarters generally left him to it. But he
wasn't sure what to do about this. His desk display showed a
'person of interest' alert for one Rik Sylver 3 Drew, citizen of
the USA, citizen of Luna. Last known address: The Harsh Mistress,
Heinlein. Current whereabouts: unknown. The instructions were to
arrest and detain pending extradition. No reasons were given, but
the initial request came from a CIA Director.

His comm rang,
so he punched a command and the alert was replaced by a text
message from the UNPF, Lunar Ops’ top-ranking officer – Major
Estoban Herez no less – advising him of the imminent arrival of two
CIA agents who would be liaising with him on the Drew case.

Burleigh
started pulling up files on everybody who might have anything to do
with Rik Sylver 3 Drew, working on the assumption that it was no
coincidence that he had so recently responded to a disturbance at
The Harsh Mistress. It was probably also no coincidence that the
Drew sisters had died in a gunfight there a few days ago.

Something odd
was going on, right there in Burleigh's precinct, something big
enough to have spooks flying up from Earth and Major God-Almighty
Herez telling him to give them his full co-operation.

“
Right under my goddamn nose,” he growled,
and people around the office glanced across at him. He didn't like
it one little bit. This Drew character, he could see from Rik's
file, was a two-bit, ex-cop PLEO, scratching around for jobs,
coming up with barely enough work to keep up the renewal payments
on his PLEO license. How did he warrant all this
attention?

He put in a
call to his immediate boss at Field HQ, Captain Okeke, and went
back to scanning files. When the scowling face of Major Herez
himself appeared in the display, Burleigh almost fell off his
chair.

“
What is it, Lieutenant?”

“
Er, sir, I didn't mean to...” His first
thought was that it was a routing stuff-up. His second thought was
how he'd explain to the Captain that he hadn't meant to bypass the
chain of command.

“
Everything 3MFR does from now on comes
straight to me, Burleigh. You got that?”

“
Yes, sir!” He really did not like the idea
that the Major knew him by name. No good could come of
that.

“
So what's on your mind,
Lieutenant?”

“
Permission to speak freely,
sir?”

Herez hadn't
stopped scowling for a moment. Nevertheless, he said, “Go
ahead.”

Ah well,
nothing ventured... “I would just like to know what the fuck is
going on, sir. I'd like to know why two CIA guys are coming onto my
patch, and why you signed an order telling me to pull down my pants
and bend over for them, sir? And I'd really like to know what this
guy Drew is supposed to have done before I truss him up, stick an
apple in his mouth and throw him out the airlock.”

It was hard to
say whether the major's frown softened for a moment. “You're
understandably protective of your jurisdiction, Lieutenant. I can
respect that. And you're concerned that you are being asked to do
something which might even be illegal.”

Yes
, Burleigh thought.
It had crossed my mind.

“
Sir, speaking off the record–”

“
Nothing's off the record, soldier. Not
when we're dealing with matters at this level – and our friends in
the CIA may have asked their friends in the NSA to ensure that the
record is complete.”

“
Yes, sir.”

“
So just rest easy, Lieutenant. Everything
is under control, and everything you do is under my full and
personal authorisation.”

“
Yes, sir.”

“
Anything else?”

“
No, sir.”

Well, well,
well. Burleigh stared at the empty display shaking his head slowly.
After a moment he stood up and all eyes turned to him.

“
Listen up, you worthless bunch of old
ladies. Whatever you're doing, you better stop it right now before
you go blind. From this minute on, we, the heroes of the 3rd Mobile
Force Reserve, have only one single purpose in our miserable,
misbegotten lives, and that is to find this man.” He punched Rik's
picture up on the wall screen.

“
And to that end, I want to know who his
friends are, what his dog's called, where he learned to dance, and
how he has the nerve to wear that shirt in public. Don't let me
hear about nobody doing nothing that is not directly connected with
dragging this sorry specimen's ass through that door and laying his
oversized carcass at my feet.

“
Do I make myself clear?”

The room
chorused a loud “Yes, sir!”

“
Then why is nobody doing anything about
it?”

As his staff
hurried to make themselves busy, Burleigh took a seat and leaned
back to look at Rik's image. “What have you done, you lucky
sonofabitch, to earn yourself so much attention?”

-oOo-

Fariba
Freymann's taxi whined laboriously as it rolled through the quiet
London streets. In the back, animated ads – for beachside
timeshares in Tenerife, and Holiday Inn's low-orbit weekend breaks
– vied for Fariba's attention. They were not getting it. She gazed
through the grimy windows as anonymous streets slid by, and thought
about Rik.

She was off
the case. Suspended. Under review. In the opinion of her section
head, she had demonstrated “a complete inability to do the simplest
bloody thing.” She found it disturbingly easy to see his point of
view. On the other hand, even looking back on it after several days
of cooling off, she still couldn't see what else she could have
done. Rik was a victim in all this, she was sure, not the scheming
collaborator her boss thought he was. He was just a poor, dumb lug
who had gotten himself caught up in something big and nasty – and
had then made some really stupid decisions.

He was
basically a good guy. The kind of guy who would be fine, with a bit
of looking after. She sneered at herself, realising she'd quite
like to audition for the job.
Don't you have enough trouble in
your life already?

The cab pulled up to the kerb, and she saw
she had arrived. The anonymous streets had been her own
neighbourhood. The drab apartment block nearby was where she lived.
She got out into a damp, chilly wind. The cab deducted its fare
from her bank account while its speaker hissed and crackled
something that was probably meant to be a thank you.

It took a huge
effort to keep moving up the steps to the second floor where her
apartment waited, empty and cold. The bag of groceries she'd bought
along the way dragged at her arm. Even her eyelids seemed to feel
the force of gravity more keenly than usual. Weary, aching and
depressed, she tried to decide whether she was too tired to cook
and eat a meal, or too hungry to go straight to bed and sleep.

Her cogplus
took forever negotiating with the apartment door before it would
open for her. She cursed the building's antique systems and pushed
her way in. Lights came on automatically as she passed through the
hall.

The kitchen
smelled of whatever was still in the pedal bin she hadn't had time
to empty before she left. She couldn't face opening the fridge and
figured the kitchen was cold enough to keep the groceries fresh
till the morning. She pulled a pint of bourbon out of the shopping
bag, poured herself two fingers and headed for the sofa. One drink
and ten minutes of netvid to unwind, then she was going to bed.

“
Hello Fariba.”

She jumped so
hard the bourbon splashed all over her.

The speaker
was a man of about thirty, thickset and sharp-eyed. He was sitting
in an armchair and had a stunner pointed at her. He must have been
waiting there in the dark all that time. A slight movement in her
peripheral vision told her there was another one to her right. She
didn't turn her head.

“
Who are you?” she asked, trying to keep
her voice steady. He had a London accent, she realised, which ruled
out a number of possibilities.

“
Don't ask stupid questions. Put this
on.”

He threw her a
plastic tie, obviously meant for her wrists, and she caught it. For
a moment she acted as if she didn't know what to do with the
remains of her drink. Then she took a step forward to put it down
on the coffee table. Just before it touched the glass top, she
threw it at the seated man. Not waiting to see his reaction, she
hurled herself to the right, straight into the second man.

She heard the
thwip!
of the stunner being fired, but she had no time to
worry about that. The man she had barrelled into was twice her
weight and built like a wrestler. He barely moved when her shoulder
hit his chest, but she was inside his reach and, for the moment, he
couldn't shoot her. She saw his gun. Not a stunner, this one, but a
big, semi-automatic .45 calibre monster. The kind of gun that her
firearms trainer used to get all fluttery and poetical about as she
spoke about its ‘stopping power’ and ‘penetration’. Fariba grabbed
it with both hands, putting all her weight onto the wrestler's
right arm and ignoring the other: the one that was reaching for her
throat.

She could see
the seated man beyond the gun. He was getting to his feet, turning
towards her, raising his stunner. With all her strength, she bore
down on the wrestler's trigger finger. Snarling like an animal, she
focused everything on forcing that beefy hand into pushing the
trigger back.