Cauldron of Ghosts (36 page)

So, she used Bertie and his taxi. It was certainly a lot more convenient than any alternative she could think of. And if—as they certainly were—someone was watching and would report the incident to one or another security agency . . .

She knew what Victor would say.
Who cares? Just another seccy drunk or drug addict being taken home by a friend. It’s called hiding in plain sight.

He could be aggravating, at times. It was a good thing she was in love with the man. Or the same hands that could clean and jerk two hundred and seventy kilos would have long since crushed his windpipe.

Chapter 40

“Are you going to stare off into space the rest of the day?” Yana demanded. She placed her hands on her hips—and then immediately snatched them away. She
hated
that newly developed mannerism. It was hard to combat, though, given her new hips.

Anton glanced up and smiled. “Actually, I wasn’t staring off into space, lost in my own thoughts. I was just contemplating the wisdom of the bard.”

“The ‘bard’? What are you, giving names to your computers now? This’ll end badly, Anton, I warn you.”

“The term refers to an ancient poet and playwright by the name of Shakespeare. I was thinking of a line from one of his greatest plays.
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
”

He withdrew a data chip from the console, pushed the chair back and rose to his feet. “Almost literally rotten. The rats are deserting the sinking ship called Mesa. I’m now sure of it. I’ve run seven different correlations and they all come up with the same result. Well . . . allowing for values of ‘same result’ that are pretty damn generous.”

Yana knew the result he was talking about. One of the enjoyable things about working with Anton and Victor was that neither one of them was prone to security-for-its-own-sake. The mathematical techniques Anton had been using to crunch his data were beyond her grasp, but she knew what he’d been looking for.

“How damn generous?” she asked.

He grimaced. “Let’s put it this say.
I
can see a pattern—okay, through a glass darkly, I admit—but if I tried to present this to most analysts they’d tell me I was hallucinating. The statistical equivalent of spots in my eyes from staring at something too long. And if I tried to present the data in a court of law I’d be disbarred for incompetence. If I were a lawyer in the first place, which thank you very much I am not.”

She nodded. “That’s okay, Anton. My money’s on you, and the other analysts can take a hike. If you say the pattern is there, I’ll take your word for it. But do you have any sense for hard numbers yet?”

“Hell, I don’t have any sense for
soft
numbers yet.” He shook his head. “We could be looking at anything from a few thousand people to . . . a hundred thousand? Maybe even a quarter of a million.”

He scowled at the data chit in his hand. “But I’d be surprised if the figures aren’t actually at the small end. The best numbers I can crunch are the ones involving fatal accidents. Those are intrinsically harder to fuzz up, assuming someone’s trying to, than things like job vacancies and fashion purchases. That’s presuming that Mesa’s authorities aren’t engaged in complete fakery, but I think that’s a fair presumption. This isn’t a full-blown police state, and there are some real problems with outright fraud conducted on a massive scale. It’s not that easy to pull off and you run the risk—which gets bigger as time passes—of corrupting your entire system.”

“By ‘complete fakery,’ what do you mean?”

“For instance, reporting fatal accidents that never happened at all. Or, conversely, making the results of fatal accidents vanish entirely. To do the first, you need the collusion of . . . hell, tons of people. First responders, med technicians, police—not to mention news reporters. Doing the other is even harder. Unless you impose a completely totalitarian regime, which opens up its own Pandora’s box, you wind up constantly stumbling over your own lies.”

Yana frowned. “I . . . think I’m following you. What you’re saying is that if you want to ‘disappear’ someone in a fatal accident you have to arrange for an
actual
accident—preferably one that does kill somebody—but which has a logical built-in explanation for the fact that there’s no corpse of the person you wanted to disappear.”

“Exactly. Blow up a luxury liner in mid-ocean as just happened to the
Magellan.
Blame it on Ballroom terrorists. Very few bodies recovered so the passenger list comes from computer records. Blow up a shuttle right over Ganymede Canyons, probably the most rugged and inaccessible terrain on the planet. No bodies recovered.”

Yana pursed her lips. “What were the total fatalities in the
Magellan
incident? Three thousand?”

“A little less—and over a hundred bodies were recovered. Still, the total number of missing-presumed-dead-identities-reconstructed-by-computer came to more than twenty-seven hundred persons. But, of course, only a small percentage of those would have been mysterious disappearances. The great majority would have been legitimate.”

“Why do you say that? I’d think . . . Oh. I see your point. This goes back to what you were saying earlier—unless you set up an outright police state, it’s not all that easy to just make people vanish.”

“No, it isn’t. What you’d have to do . . .” He thought for a moment. “Ha. That’s an idea. We need to check to see who if anybody, and I’m willing to bet it was nobody important, survived from the departments that oversee passengers and crew. I’m not sure what they’re called on a luxury liner.”

It didn’t take Yana more than a moment to follow the logic. “Yes. Kill off anyone who could personally contradict the official roster. But . . . what about the shuttle accident in the Canyons? They couldn’t possibly—ah.”

He smiled. “Sure you could—just make sure all the people you ‘disappeared with no bodies recovered’ were people without any close relatives. Preferably, with no very close friends, either.”

“Right. Because no one else would make a huge fuss if the hunt for the bodies was called off because . . . How would they put it? ‘Conditions were too dangerous for further operations.’ ”

Then, she shook her head. “But, if you’re right, even big incidents like the
Magellan
aren’t enough to disappear people in even four figures, much less five. The shuttle could have only accounted for twenty or so. That’s one hell of a lot of ‘mysterious’ shuttle accidents being called for. No way people wouldn’t get suspicious quickly. Those things don’t crash that often. You just can’t disappear thousands of people using those sort of custom-fit retail measures.”

“Exactly—and the implications of that are pretty frightening. If I’m right . . . what happens when the people behind this pattern
do
start disappearing people in large numbers?” Anton closed his fingers over the chip. “We’ve got to get this to Victor as soon as possible. Is that ragamuffin of his hanging around?”

“He won’t be, most likely, but he’ll have one of his minions out there. I still think Victor is nuts, using that pack of street kids.”

Anton chuckled. “His own Baker Street Irregulars. Don’t second-guess him, Yana. In his own line of work, Victor’s better than anybody. If he says the connection is secure, I’ll take his word for it.”

“Oh, sure. I’d no more argue the point with him than I’d argue with a snake over proper slithering techniques. Even if I thought the snake was crazy.”

* * *

Ten minutes later, they left the ship. To all appearances, on another one of the Hakim grandee’s shopping sprees. By now, they’d established that those took place on a regular basis.

Spaceport regulations required them to leave via a gate at ground level before they could use any of the air traffic lanes. In the space just beyond the gate, a crowd of seccy beggars had gathered as they always did. Most of them were youngsters, since the seccies had learned long ago that the chance of cadging money from visiting offworlders was greatly improved if the beggars were children.

Most such visitors would ignore the beggars and have their air cars aloft as soon as they passed through the gate. But the Hakim grandee seemed to take a (probably sick) pleasure in personally dispensing money to those less fortunate. So, as she did routinely, she leaned out of the window of her vehicle and placed credit chits in grubby little hands.

Oddly, she didn’t just toss them in the air and let the children scrabble for her largesse. It seemed highly unsanitary, but . . .

She could certainly afford the best antiseptic and preventive medical care, after all. Presumably her method allowed her to think of herself as a veritable saint.

Of sorts. One of the security people monitoring the spaceport’s traffic had dubbed her Angel Boobs three days after she arrived.

* * *

Yana outdid herself that day. In addition to the usual jewelry, fine art and very expensive clothing, she came back with a banded coramine lizard from one of the worlds in the Astophel system. Anton thought the creature was hideously ugly—not to mention being fifty centimeters long and weighing in the vicinity of twenty kilos. But there was no denying that its hide coruscated like a rippling rainbow.

“What does the damn thing eat?” he asked, glancing back from the driver’s seat.

“Dwarves, I was told. Main reason I bought it.”

“You’re still holding a grudge about the tits, aren’t you?”

* * *

The girl who took the chit with the imbedded data was named Lily Berenger. She was only nine years old but she was well-trained. As soon as she saw that she was surrounded by other kids, she dropped the chit on the ground. Screeching with anxiety, she stooped to pick it up, immediately popped it into her mouth and started fighting with another girl as if they were struggling over possession of the item.

That girl’s name was Magda Yunkers and she was Lily’s best friend. She was also one of Hasrul’s “minions.”

The fight went on for some time and, to all outward appearances, looked pretty ferocious. Lily and Magda, like all of the minions, took great pride in their craftsmanship. The crowd of kids surrounding them cheered them on, needless to say, half of them because they enjoyed watching a fight and the other half because they were also minions and were part of the act.

Eventually, Lily emerged as the apparent victor. Strutting off with two friends in tow, she headed for the nearest transport tube. She was careful, as she had been even in the heat of the “fight,” to keep the chit firmly ensconced in her cheek. If she was stopped and interrogated by security officials or policemen, she’d swallow the chit. Unless the officials had a stomach pump with them and used it immediately, the material the chit was made from would be dissolved by her digestive fluids before they could detect it.

Yana thought Victor was at least half-crazy to put such trust in mere children. But he knew what he was doing. Twice, in the past, he’d used exactly such a group of slum children to serve as his auxiliaries. After the first such occasion, he’d had State Security’s tech people develop the material he’d used ever since for this purpose.

The nice thing about the material was its plasticity. It could easily be molded into a multitude of shapes and forms. Credit chits, old-fashioned coins, chewing gum—once he’d even used it to make a toy air car. And no matter what its form, two minutes in a kid’s stomach and it was nothing but molecules. None of them exotic, either, so even if the child’s stomach contents were extracted and analyzed they’d appear to be innocent.

The reason Victor was partial to using children for such purposes was because he understood the psychology of slum street kids perfectly. He’d been one himself. They could fold under torture, of course—almost anyone could—but they tended to have an exaggerated, even a romantic, conception of personal honor.
You take the king’s coin, you’re the king’s man
was a sentiment that came naturally to them. And they’d stick to it, as long as the “king” in question behaved toward them properly. They wouldn’t tattle on you, and they wouldn’t betray you. Not for money, at least.

Criminal overlords like Dusek and Chuanli understood them also, of course, which was exactly why they used such children as guides in their labyrinth. And if that suggested that patriotic secret agents and gangsters had a lot in common, well . . . Victor had figured that out for himself a long time ago.

* * *

In due time—much quicker than you might think—Lily passed the chit on to Hasrul Goosens. He, in turn, brought it directly to Victor even though normally Hasrul would have used one of the dead drops that Victor had set up for him.

He couldn’t use the ones that Cachat had originally set up for Carl Hansen and his seccy rebels because they were unsuitable for children. An obvious street kid riding elevators or wandering around a fish market would be automatically suspect, and why would such an urchin be going into an automated fortune teller booth?

This time, however, Hasrul wanted to see for himself the results of the favor he’d called in from Achmed. So he came directly to the safe house run by Steph Turner—understanding that the term “directly” was figurative. Hasrul was quite at home moving through the long-forgotten underground passageways of the seccy districts. There was no way a Mesan security agent would be able to follow him through that subterranean maze, and while there were certain dangers, they weren’t excessive. There were a number of human predators who prowled those passageways, but a dirty urchin wearing clothes that weren’t more than two grades above rags was not their natural target. The biggest danger was that he might run into one of the fairly large number of insane people who lived down there. But most of them were harmless, and he figured he could outrun the ones who weren’t.

On this occasion, he encountered no trouble at all.

Hasrul was expecting to get a lecture from the man he knew as Achmed on the subject of needlessly violating security protocols. But Achmed said nothing when Steph led the boy into the back rooms of the boutique.

Nothing except: “Came to see your mother, huh? Relax, kid. She’s doing fine.”

Thereby reinforcing Hasrul’s allegiance, which had been rock solid anyway. It didn’t occur to the boy that perhaps that was the reason for Achmed’s unexpected response. But he was only twelve, after all. Astute for his age and shrewd in the way such children often are. But not a master spy.

* * *

The medical unit seemed like something out of a fable to Hasrul. He knew they existed, but he’d never seen one. For seccies, unless they were one of the few who were well-to-do, “medical care” meant seeing a doctor or a nurse who had at least a modicum of training but not much in the way of equipment and that, fairly rudimentary.