Young Bleys - Childe Cycle 09 (35 page)

Accordingly, he stayed with it until he finished. When he was done, he checked his wrist monitor and was surprised to see that over an hour and a half had gone by.

But, by the time he had reached the end of them, context had begun to make most of the shorthand intelligible; and he was already in possession of a great deal of information about a great many people.

Dahno had been in a position to make a fortune as a blackmailer, if he had chosen to be one. Obviously, he did not. These bits of information were saved to help him round out his understanding of a particular problem so that he could advise a client of the best action to take as a result.

Bleys punched for another look at the one file that had taken him completely by surprise. In the original sorting of the files it had been right behind the secret sign and the statement asking anyone who stumbled across these files to back out of them. This particular file was not one that Bleys had expected to find. It was called:

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

In case of my death everything to do with my business and my personal possessions all pass to my younger half-brother Bleys Ahrens.

I leave it to him to take care of Henry MacLean and his sons, Joshua MacLean, William MacLean, and any other members of that family that may eventuate in the way of descendants. In the case of Bleys Ahrens pre-deceasing me, all that I possess should go to Henry MacLean and his descendants. These files will automatically become no longer secret, if the fact of my death is entered into the regular files.

There was a facsimile signature,
Dahno Ahrens,
and down below that another facsimile signature,
Norton Brawley,
with below it the word
legalist
and below that the notation of a date some eight years before by Dahno Ahrens and the executing legalist placing it in official registry that day.

Bleys allowed himself a moment of being touched by the document. Then he put away the feeling, blanked the screen, and closed the secret files, removing the key from its slot and putting it back in his pocket. He sat back in his chair thoughtfully.

The files had been a storehouse of useful information, but the two things he was most interested in learning were nowhere spelled out in them. The answers to two questions.

Who was Dahno's actual second-in-command? Dahno had always said that he wanted Bleys for that post; but all this time

Bleys knew that his half-brother could not have worked without a lieutenant. Yet Dahno had made no reference to anyone like that, and no one else seemed to have any idea that Dahno's staff consisted of anything but himself and the two office workers.

Also, where were his armed men?

They were, Bleys knew, called
"Hounds."
He had run into a number of references to an abbreviated version of that word. But never with reference to anything important. No numbers, names, or history of any kind. Yet, this was information that Bleys knew Dahno could not have failed to have.

All the other-world subheads, in spite of never having any reason to imagine such a group was necessary to their organization, had developed something along that line—with the single exception of Kinkaka Goodfellow on Harmony, who had been free of all unauthorized elements.

Whether this had been for the reasons that Bleys suggested to Dahno at dinner just the night before, or not, the fact was that Kinkaka was the only exception. All the others had come to it either spontaneously on their own, or with a secret nudge from Dahno.

It was necessary, Bleys thought, that he find the shadow second-in-command that Dahno must have been using. Otherwise he would never be sure that the reins of the organization were firmly in his own grasp and that this other, whoever he was, understood Bleys was in charge.

It was necessary that Bleys know all about the Hounds, or whatever they were called, simply because—as he had suggested to Dahno sometime back, on nothing but his supposition that such an organization must be in existence—they were a danger to Dahno and the organization as it stood now. They would also be a greater danger to all Others in the future Bleys foresaw. The Others could not afford at any time to fall back on the use of force.

He got up from the chair and went back into his regular office. He had ordered a couch built long enough for even his oversized frame to stretch out comfortably upon. He lay down on it now; and let his mind run free, associating between the files he had just studied. First, the question of the second-in-command. Whoever he was, the references to him must appear more frequently than references to anyone else.

The practices his mind had developed for searching out such information went to work as he lay, completely relaxed, letting his conscious thoughts roam where they would. After a while they turned up the bit of code that had been in the files as " Id." The "one" had always been a numeral one and the "d" had been lower case.

These had always associated with something that might involve a legal component; and in some cases the legal connection was actually mentioned. It made Bleys think of the legalist who had countersigned Dahno's will. If "Id" stood in any way for him, there were certain things to recommend him for the position of second-in-command.

The first of these was the fact of his being so frequently mentioned in the secret files. Beyond that, there was the possibility that if it actually was him, then the "Id" at least signified a person; and no other bit of shorthand in context that could stand for a person cropped up so frequently.

Finally, Bleys' mind began to explore the situation—as a legalist it would be entirely reasonable that Dahno should consult with him as frequently as a second-in-command would need to be seen by Dahno without attracting attention.

Someone in Dahno's position, which was essentially that of a lobbyist, could be expected to run into legalistic problems. Particularly concerning bits of legislation with which the majority of his Member clients were concerned.

In short, it was perfect cover for a second-in-command.

Bleys tried for more evidence from what his mind remembered of the files, but nothing came. He abandoned that subject for the moment; and went instead to the one of the armed retainers.

If they existed, as he was sure they did, they would be referred to there. They would be bound to come up from time to time as decisions had to be made about them, or Dahno had some reason for having to do with them.

To Bleys' knowledge, Dahno had never made any use of them during the time that Bleys had been here with him on Association, away from the farm and in Ecumeny.

It was possible, of course, that situations had come up in which Dahno had been successfully able to hide from him that his private army had been used. But Bleys could not believe it. To a certain extent their use would be against Dahno's basic, part-Exotic attitude toward people and life. Only unavoidable necessity would cause him to use them as Hammer Martin had tried to use two of his to assassinate Bleys. It could only happen if Dahno were personally and seriously threatened. But now, he was.

For the last four years at least, Bleys had been in a position to judge pretty well whether any such threat or emergency had come up. As far as he knew—with the single exception of Linx, which had proved false—no one disliked Dahno and no one was out to get him in any way. There had been minor crises involving his clients, and to a certain extent threatening to involve him along with them, that had cropped up during that period; but none of them were the kind that in Bleys' judgment of his brother would justify Dahno's using force at any point, let alone armed force.

—But he must have had some occasion to visit them, to see them face to face in all that time. Bleys' mind ran once more through the secret files, much faster than any memory device could have done so—and suddenly something jumped out at him, dated five years ago.

It read:

hs to Moseville, 15 Circle Drive, Box 149

The
"hs"
had meant nothing to him the first time he had seen that entry. He assumed it was shorthand for the name of some client. Moseville was a city about half the size of Ecumeny and about nine hundred kilometers distant. It was on the edge of a resort area; both it and the resort area were surrounded by a large belt of fairly rich farmland, broken into large farms.

Now, it struck him suddenly that Moseville was in many ways an excellent location for the hidden fighters. It was far enough from Ecumeny not to be considered usually as having any connection with the governmental city. But Moseville was also large enough so that it could satisfy the recreational needs of any such group of armed retainers. Either the resort area or the surrounding farmland would be practical as a place to set up a training school and permanent camp.

The possibility that their address was in the farmlands occurred suddenly to Bleys, now.

The name
"Circle Drive"
implied a road that went nowhere.
"Box 149"
indicated that perhaps it was simply a circular post office drop-off spot, lined with rural mailboxes to which the locals came to collect their mail.

His mind, having made that jump, made another,
"hs"
suggested the word
"Hounds";
and the
"hs"
suddenly connected in Bleys' mind with the thought that the legalist, who might be Dahno's shadow lieutenant, could make all the personal contacts with them. Dahno need never go near the place.

Also if
"hs"
could stand for
"Hounds,"
"Id"
could stand for
"first dog."
It was the sort of thing to tickle Dahno's particular sense of humor. Together, the two codes fitted a pattern: the second-in-command was to seem to operate within the law and the retainers outside it.

Bleys' mind ran swiftly through the secret files once more, picking up tiny little scraps and bits of possible evidence that shored up this pattern of interpretation and indicated that his translation of the shorthand in both cases was correct.

The pattern seemed to hold. Bleys checked the monitor on his wrist to find out if the legalist who had signed Dahno's will was in town, in Ecumeny itself. Norton Brawley had a legal office less than thirty blocks away.

CHAPTER
30

Bleys needed to
find out about the shadow lieutenant and the Hounds as quickly as possible, so that no surprises came out of anywhere to trip him up while Dahno was gone. Norton Brawley was closer; but he preferred to confront the man— after all, it was only a suspicion—with as much information in hand as possible; and that included all that could immediately be known about the Hounds.

So, it should be the Hounds first.

Bleys flew to Moseville, in a self-drive atmosphere craft, with an auto-pilot to back up his own knowledge of handling such craft. He parked the aircraft at the local airport and rented a hovercar.

A phone call to the local postal department established the fact that 15 Circle Drive was one of many such places as he had imagined—drop-off spots for rural mail—merely a circular stretch of road with postal boxes side by side all along it. The 15, apparently, did not refer to a point on the circle drive, but that it was the fifteenth of such Circle Drives, in the southwest country just beyond Moseville.

It was late afternoon when he got there. This turned out to be fortunate because it was a time of day when a number of the boxes were being emptied by people who lived in the rural area but worked in the city, and were now on their way home and had stopped to pick up their mail.

He got back in his hovercar and drove on around the circle until he came to someone at a box who could not have seen him when he got out of the car to look at Box 149. Seated within the car, his unusual height was not so noticeable.

He stopped the car, put down the window and leaned out to speak to a man with a long narrow face under a receding hairline of brown hair, with a wart on his chin, who was just turning away from the box from which he had collected his own mail.

"My apologies," Bleys said to him, "my brother's been at whatever place that's connected with Box 149. I've been writing him at that address. I didn't realize it was a drop-off address, like this. I thought I'd surprise him. I've got some unexpected time off from the business that brought me into Moseville. Do you know the area around here? How would I find the place which gets its mail from Box 149?"

Rural people on both Association and Harmony tended to be generally friendly and helpful to strangers, as long as the prickly matter of religion did not come up between them. This man was no different. He rubbed his chin with the wart on it, thoughtfully.

"Yes, I know it," he said; "it'd be easier for me to show you the way there than give you directions, though. Do you want to follow my car and I'll lead you to it?"

"Thank you," said Bleys.

He rolled the window up. The other man got back into his own maroon-colored hovercar and led the way off the circle onto the road; on which it turned left and drove some little distance, making right- and left-hand turns which Bleys stored in his memory, noting something at each turn that could be used as an identification point later on. The other car stopped at last before a long and high stone fence, with a pair of heavy steel gates set across the entrance road through it.

The maroon hovercar driver rolled his window down, stuck his head out, and called back to Bleys, who had also put his window down and looked outside.

"This is it!" called the guide. "Punch the button under the screen in the wall to the right of the gate and you can talk to them up at the house. They can open the gates from there for you."

"Thanks!" called Bleys. The other waved a dismissive hand and drove off.

Bleys turned his attention to the seat beside him and went through the motions of gathering things together, until his guide might not look back through his rear-viewer, and wonder why he had not gotten out to press the gate button.

Finally the other car turned off on a crossroad and disappeared behind some trees.

Bleys stayed where he was, looking out through the window on the passenger's side of the car at the gate and the screen with the annunciator stud below it. Gate and wall itself were built with extraordinary sturdiness. There was no sign of special protection about the wall, but Bleys suspected that there would be a variety of alarms there.

He started up his car and drove along until he found the same crossroad that his guide's car had turned off on. That vehicle was only a maroon speck in the distance, now.

Bleys got out; and, using a pair of compensating binoculars in the growing dusk, looked up and down the wall. It continued across in front of him, turning a corner visibly at last to his right and apparently went back from the road. But on his left, it stretched out for quite a ways, until it disappeared in some trees.

Bleys drove up as far as the trees and found, as he had rather thought there might be, an unpaved road leading in among them. He drove his hovercar far enough down this to hide it from anyone passing on the road, got out and walked on through the trees until he came out on their far side and could once more examine the wall. It had turned from the road already and was headed back at a right angle.

Now that he was beyond the trees, he could see that the wall ran back from the road only about a hundred yards further, then took a sharp right angle to wall the back of the estate, or whatever it was. Clearly, it was not an ordinary farm.

He went back to his car. He had come prepared for the fact that he might have to take some kind of action right away. It might be safer to leave now and come back at another time; but the chances of getting in and out of Moseville without attracting attention were greatest if he did everything on this first trip.

Back at the car he opened a suitcase and changed completely into black clothing, including a tight hood over his head, covering all but his face; black gloves and a pigment to black out the skin of his face. Finally, he put night lenses into his eyes. The lenses were made to gather available light whenever the level of outside illumination dropped below a certain level—as the daylight already had—but not interfere in the case of normal levels of lighting.

He took with him a number of small devices, some small sensing equipment; as well as a couple of throwing knives— one inside his boot, with its handle hidden by his pantleg over the top of the boot; and the other in a sheath on a cord around his neck, and hanging down under his black jumper beside his upper spine.

He also took with him a vial of specially prepared scent for any guard dogs that should be within. At last, ready to go, he approached the stone wall opposite his woods.

By this time it was quite dark. However, his lenses were picking up as much vision as a pair of night glasses held to his eyes would have done. One of the things that Bleys had included in his studies was just such burglar-type work as he was now engaged in. As with a great many other of the things he quietly studied, this had not been one he had had any particular immediate plans for using; but had only felt might come in useful, in later years. Now, he found himself putting to use his sneak-thief techniques earlier than expected.

He reached the wall but was careful not to touch it. Examining it with his sensors, he found nothing until he