Cauldron of Ghosts (45 page)

He leaned back again, letting the expression fade—not away, just . . . on hold.

There was silence in the room again, for a while. Quite a while, in fact. Jurgen Dusek was not given to hasty and reckless decisions.

Finally, he said: “All right. What are those recommendations?
Specifically.
Keep it simple. I’m just a modest gangster.”

Victor chuckled. “First, let me go. I need to track down that fellow and squeeze him dry. Second—before I go—we need to establish some reliable means of communication. Third, start taking the necessary steps to be ready to defend this building and evacuate your people—I recommend you define that term very broadly—into the tunnels. They’ll need food and provisions for a fairly lengthy stay. First and foremost, a safe water supply.”

“That’s not a problem,” said Chuanli, shaking his head. “This building has its own wells.” Then he looked a little startled at saying it. He was discovering himself on the precipice of joining another informal club, the one called
Hey-look-Victor’s-sucking-everybody-into-his-schemes-like-a-black-hole-again.

“That’s all you need to do, right now,” Victor concluded. “Please notice that none of this commits you to anything yet.”

“Except letting you walk out of here, free as a bird.” It turned out Dusek could put on an excellent menacing expression himself. Not in Victor’s league, true, but most respectable. “Free to go talk to the OPS, or whoever else might strike your fancy.”

Now, Victor’s face exuded nothing but good cheer. “Oh, come on, Jurgen. Do you really think
any
Mesan security agency could dream up a sting operation this outlandish?”

After a moment, Dusek laughed. “Point taken. You’re either what you say you are or you’re a complete lunatic. Either way . . . I guess you walk.”

He looked at the guards. “Put away your weapons. Triêu, we’ll need to figure out ways to stay in touch with him. We can start with the kids, but we’ll need at least one backup method.”

Chuanli nodded. “I’ll have Noel and Truong start the other preparations. Evacuation on the scale we’re talking won’t be easy.” He glanced at Victor and then looked back at his boss. “You need to give me some guidance here. Exactly how far do I interpret ‘our people,’ for this purpose?”

Dusek had kept looking at Victor. “What exactly did you mean earlier, when you referred to me elevating my status?”

“Figure it out, Jurgen,” Victor said, in that same cheery tone. “Once the Mesan powers-that-be come tumbling down—which they will, don’t doubt it for a moment—who replaces them? The slaves won’t be in any position to put together a new government. It’ll have to be based on the seccies. Who’ve never been allowed even a modicum of self-government and whose religious affiliations are all over the place. There’s only one really well-established and at least halfway-accepted authority among seccies, and that’s the gangs.”

Victor rose to his feet, indicating with a little gesture that Cary should do the same. “There’s already one well-respected star nation whose founders laundered themselves out of criminal status. Who’s to say it can’t be done again?”

* * *

As they followed a boy leading them out of the complex, Cary advanced a proposition in a tight, still-frightened whisper.

“
Watson-Levigne-Cachat-whoever the hell you are, you are fucking insane.”

Thereby joining another Victor club. Also not a fan club.

* * *

In the office behind, Triêu Chuanli waited patiently for his boss to answer his question. He knew it would take a while. But it would come eventually.

Finally, Dusek spoke. “How many people live in this building?”

“Nobody knows for sure. I’d say . . . thirty-five thousand, thereabouts.”

Dusek nodded. “What I figure too. Okay, then. They’re all our people. Every man, woman and child.”

Chapter 50

“He changed the plan
again?
” Yana threw up her hands. “Why do we even bother making plans at all?”

Anton chewed his lower lip as he read the note over again. “What Victor would tell you is that plans aren’t blueprints, they’re simply guides that lead you to the next plan.”

Satisfied that he hadn’t missed any nuance, Anton removed the chip and disposed of it by the crude and simple method of chewing on it a few times and swallowing it. He thought the things were rather tasty and wondered if whichever twisted mind in Haven’s now-happily-defunct State Security’s tech department had designed the disposable data chips had done that deliberately.

They probably had. Say whatever else you would about the murderous bastards, SS had been thorough and systematic.

“Victor is nuts,” Yana said firmly.

“Nuts or not, he’s got a track record that suggests he knows what he’s doing. And it’s a moot point now, because he’s forced the issue and we need to get the hell out of Dodge.”

“Who or what is ‘Dodge’?”

“Old Terran slang phrase. Dodge was a town in the middle of the western hemisphere’s northern continent that was either the most dangerous place in the world or the most boring, depending on the version you hear. In this application”—he gave the yacht’s salon a quick and somewhat nostalgic examination—“it means we either need to get off the planet or vacate the ship.”

“Why would we have to do either one? The Mesans haven’t given any sign they’re suspicious of us, and we’ve been here for two months now.”

“If Victor’s right, Yana, the situation’s about to explode. At that point, two things will happen. Well, one of them for sure and the other with a probability way higher than I want to risk. The for-sure thing that’s going to happen is that the security agencies’ suspicion meter is going to go through the ceiling. The thing that’s way too likely to happen is that the spaceport is going to be targeted.”

“Targeted by who?”

“And isn’t that a fascinating question?” He started collecting all the data chips and portable drives and stuffing them in a briefcase. “Let’s go. We need to meet with Victor right away. We’re bound to be gone for at least a day so pack as much as you can fit in an overnight bag. Even if they inspect us, that’ll pass muster.”

Yana frowned at his briefcase. “Yeah, sure, I’ve stayed over at hotels in the city a couple of times before. But how are you going to explain all the software if we get stopped?”

Anton grinned at her. “Little trick I picked up from Victor. The first thing anyone will see if they look at the software is a wild and woolly collection of fetish pornography. That’s if they look with the sort of portable reader security guards will carry. If we get taken in to security for a more rigorous exam it won’t hold up, but Victor swears that ninety-nine guards out of a hundred will take it at face value because who’d like fetishes that weird if they weren’t genuine?”

Yana’s interest perked up. “Really? Like what?”

Anton sealed up the briefcase and headed for his cabin. “My favorite’s toxophilia, arousal from archery. You wouldn’t believe the poses people get into. Remember: one overnight bag, that’s it.”

* * *

“You were the shooter who came through the front entrance,” said Triêu Chuanli.

Since it was a statement rather than a question, Thandi decided to ignore it. She kept her attention on the man behind the desk, whom she presumed to be Jurgen Dusek.

“Mr. Cachat said you have some skills that would be useful to us,” said Dusek. His hands were splayed across the desk as if he were trying to hold it down. Thandi suspected that was an unconscious reaction on his part, that of a man prepared to thrust himself out of harm’s way should it prove necessary.

It seemed Victor was right, then. The destruction of the Chinnies had established their credentials with Neue Rostock’s boss in a way nothing else could have.

That came as something of a relief. She’d have disliked the idea that the butchery had been pointless. The problem wasn’t with her conscience, exactly. She and Victor had researched their target and if ever nine people richly deserved to be exterminated, it was Willie the Chin and his pack of sadistic thugs. But Thandi was a professional soldier. As hardboiled as she was from her background, training and experience, she disapproved of killing unless it had a clearly defined and coherent military purpose.

“I was an officer in the Solarian Marines, with both staff and combat experience.”

“What’s your name?”

“You can call me Evelyn del Vecchio for the moment.”

Chuanli frowned. “Why are you being cagey about your identity when Cachat isn’t?”

“There are reasons. Just take my word for it.”

She and Victor had discussed the matter and decided on this course of action. On the one hand, they didn’t want to tell outright lies to Dusek, because that could backfire on them eventually. On the other hand, it would be too risky to give them her real identity. Victor Cachat and Anton Zilwicki had notoriety, but unless you were aware of their reputations—which no one on Mesa outside the inner circles was, because those same inner circles had blacked out almost all news from Manticore and Haven—their titles didn’t mean much. “Special Officer” could be anything or nothing, and Zilwicki didn’t even have a formal title.

General Thandi Palane, commander of Torch’s armed forces, on the other hand . . .

By now, many people on Mesa including seccies and slaves had heard of Torch. They knew very few details, as a rule, and most of them probably never heard of Thandi. But it wouldn’t matter. All it would take is for one greedy underling in Dusek’s gang to decide that reporting her to the authorities would be more rewarding and less risky than going along with Dusek, and Mesa’s security agencies would be put on full alert.

That would probably be happening soon, anyway, at which point they’d tell Dusek the truth, but one of the few religious saws that Victor was partial to was
sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

Fortunately, Dusek decided to drop the issue. “Fine. Evelyn it is. How much experience have you had defending—or attacking—a building like this one?”

“Not much. Hardly anyone does. That’s because the worst nightmare a ground forces officer can imagine would be to try to take a building like this by force. Usually, you try to avoid it at all costs. If you absolutely must neutralize this sort of structure and can’t take the time for a siege, you call in the navy and have them break it down with KEW penetrators dropped from orbit.”

“So what’s to stop Mesa from doing that to us?”

“Nothing. But Victor and I don’t think they’ll start that way. The problem with using KEWs in your own backyard is that while they don’t leave a lot of contamination to clean up the way nukes do, they still make one hell of a mess. It’s hard to contain the side effects, too, in a big city.”

“Side effects?” said Chuanli. “What do you mean?”

“Power conduits. Water mains. Sewers. Transport tubes. Almost all the guts and blood and nerves of a city are subterranean. You know how you’re always supposed to check with the authorities before you dig anywhere? That’s so you don’t accidentally cut through something you don’t know is there. And in a city as old as this one, there’s almost
always
something down there you don’t know about. You got a map of the city?”

Dusek nodded. “Bring it up, Triêu.”

His lieutenant fiddled with his com for a moment. A virtual screen appeared against one of the side walls. After a little more fiddling, a map of Mendel appeared.

Thandi started using the laser pointer feature on her own com. “Okay. Here’s city center. Moving out toward the seccy ring districts, here’s Neue Rostock. And then moving still further out in a straight line we find . . . Oh, well, what is this? Looks like a major power plant.”

“It is,” grunted Dusek. “That’s Generator Station Number Three. Two of our people work in maintenance there.”

Chuanli’s lips twisted a little. “That’s ‘maintenance’ as in they oversee janitor bots. Not ‘maintenance’ as in they’re highly trained and skilled workers who know how to do critical stuff. Those jobs are reserved for citizens.”

Thandi nodded. Virtually all residential towers in any city would have their own fusion reactors in the basement. They didn’t cost that much, reactor mass was cheap, and it made sense to use a distributed power net for a city whose individual structures might house up to a quarter million people. And especially since those structures could become literal death traps if the power went
down
suddenly and unexpectedly. Connecting all the towers to a central grid gave the entire city a huge degree of redundancy, and even in an emergency that knocked out the entire grid, a tower’s dedicated reactor would keep
its
vital environmental systems and grav shafts on line. But it was still cheaper to build centralized power collection ground stations stations for orbital power satellites to fill the needs of things like industrial sites, public parks, space ports, and other major infrastructure. Reactor mass might be cheap, but
sunlight
came completely free of charge. But the need for it to be collected and distributed did create its own vulnerability.

“Doesn’t matter who works there,” she said. “What’s important at the moment isn’t the plant, it’s the
location
. Where do you imagine the power conduits go, from the plant to”—her pointer flickered around the central area of the metropolis—“places the powers-that-be really care about?”

She looked at Dusek and smiled. “And don’t tell me you don’t know, because no slum dweller worth her salt hasn’t figured out how to tap into those conduits.”

“That would be illegal power bootlegging,” Dusek said mildly. “One of our more profitable lines, as it happens. We charge half what the utility company does. Got customers coming out of our ears. I have to keep it within limits, of course, or we’d start getting heat. Too bad. If I could charge what the market would bear I could retire.”

He leaned back in his chair, now using his hands for that purpose. Clearly, thoughts of defensive reactions had slipped his mind. “I see what you’re saying. I imagine one of those KEWs would punch a hell of a big hole in the ground.”

Dusek started gently tapping his fingers on the desk, while looking at the map image.

“All right. So how do you think they’ll start?”

He looked away and gave Thandi a very friendly smile. “But I’m forgetting my manners. Triêu, do the honors, will you. Evelyn, what’ll you have? Coffee? Tea? Whiskey? Beer?”

Thandi glanced at her com. It was after noon.

“Whiskey, with a beer chaser.”

Victor would have a fit, if he were here. The boy was
such
a prude about some things. But, first, Thandi was pretty sure that whiskey-and-beer would cement her credentials, especially because—point two—with her metabolism and constitution, getting drunk was a lot easier said than done. She’d only managed to do it twice in her life.

All of which Victor knew perfectly well, but he’d still have a fit. Mr. Deadly Do-Wrong Mow-’em-Down-Without-Blinking.

Go figure.

Happily, he wasn’t here.

* * *

Lajos Irvine recognized the man as soon as he turned away from the shop window he’d been looking into. He was the one who’d been with the woman who stumbled.

“Hey—” He started to call out a warning, but Stanković and Martinez were already drawing their guns.

But the man already had his
aimed
—no, he was
firing
. One shot each, striking Irvine’s two bodyguards in the hollow of the throat. An assassin’s target, right above where body armor would end. Too high to hit the aorta and kill someone instantly, but still with a good chance for a fatal wound and, no matter what, instantly incapacitating.

Both men dropped their pistols and clutched their throats, staggering back. Two more people—man on the left, woman on the right—stepped out of doorways to either side of the corridor a few meters further down. Both held flechette guns. Both fired, shooting the legs out from under Stanković and Martinez, then raced forward and shot them again at point blank range.

So Lajos surmised anyway. He didn’t actually see what happened once the two moved past him. That’s because he was preoccupied.

Staring at a pulser barrel aimed right between his eyes at a range of fifteen centimeters would do that.

“This is theoretically foolish on my part,” the man said. “Bringing a gun this close without firing it can be risky, against the wrong opponent. There are at least two ways you could try to disarm me before I could fire.”

He paused for perhaps a second. “But you’re not going to do that, are you?”

Again, he paused. Lajos stared at the barrel, paralyzed.

“That was a question, if I didn’t make it clear.”

Perhaps the most frightening thing, oddly, was the way the man talked. Evenly, calmly—the tone seemed as level as a pool on a windless day. And just as placid.

Lajos didn’t have any doubt this man could and would kill him without hesitating, if he chose to do so.

His throat felt as if he’d been shot himself. He couldn’t speak. So he shook his head. Violently—until he brought it to a sudden halt.

“Good. Now, turn around and follow my associates. Callie, lead the way, if you would.”

Lajos turned and . . . came close to vomiting. What flechette guns fired at close range did to a human head was . . . was . . .

Neither Bora nor Freddie really had heads any longer. Their brains were splattered all down the corridor, horrid little gray-white chunks of meat soaked in blood.

The woman stepped around the blood and opened yet another door in the corridor. This one led into another shop. Baked goods.

Where was everybody? The shopkeepers? The customers?

He glanced around furtively as they passed through the bakery, expecting to see the corpses of the proprietor, customers—
somebody.

How could everyone just . . . be gone?

Lajos wasn’t accustomed to this sort of violence, but he wasn’t the least bit stupid. He knew the answer; it just took him a little while before he was able to accept it.