Kris Longknife's Bloodhound, a novella (10 page)

“Well, we took a wrong turn twice, but other than that, I think we did rather well.”

“What’s it been, twelve hours since they snatched me?”

“You’re wife called me when you didn’t make it home to help the kids with their homework.  Boss, do you really think someone as old as you can keep up with the kids today?”

“No, but I like to think I can.  And then what happened?”

“Your boss declared you missing when I explained what we’d been up to.”

“I would have thought she’d say good riddance.”

“You wrong her greatly, boss, and be careful.  She’s in the next room.  Anyway, it was easier than we expected.  You know when you asked me to put a trace on those Merchant Marine skippers?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I put a trace on you, too.  Then double checked it when you pulled that acid briefcase joke on me.  Good thing I did.  We knew your computer, and I did a check on your burn phone, but we found a third trace on you.  Quiet little thing, something that showed up but we couldn’t do an ID on.  Still, where you went, it went, so we tagged it into our tracker.  You have any idea what it was?  Because the other two went dead after you left the fishing pier.  That one just kept on whispering ‘Here I am.  Come get me!’”

“I’ll tell you about it later,” Taylor said, managing to wiggle himself out of bed while his hands were still cuffed and his feet still shackled.  Not having them chained together was almost wonderful.

“Here’s the key,” Rick Sanchez said, coming in the room.  “Boss, did you really get your ass into an orgy?”

“No,” Taylor said firmly, and maybe a bit primly.

“You know he didn’t Rick, we had him under surveillance before the entertainment arrived,” Leslie said, just as primly.

“Well, there’s a video running out there that shows him dipping his wick with the best of these thugs,” Rick said.  “I’m thinking of keeping a copy to keep me warm in my long bachelorhood.

“Destroy it.” Taylor said.

“Can’t,” Rick shot back.  “The big boss says it’s evidence.  We’ll match our video against theirs and call it conspiracy to blackmail.”

Taylor shrugged.  “The bigger book we can throw at them, the better.  How soon can I get Arlen in an interrogation room?”

“Ah, boss,” Leslie said, “you’re up to your neck in this case.  You can’t do the investigation.”

“This is not a case.  It will never see a judge,” Taylor said.  “It’s too hot to go that route.  It will be handled otherwise, for better or worse.  Now, let’s get down town and see how well Mr. Arlen Cob can sing.”

Chapter 13

The surroundings were familiar and drab.  A table.  Some chairs.  A prisoner in cuffs.  This prisoner was cool.  Arlen had been cool from the moment Taylor first saw him in the doorway of the Lost Dutchmen.

How do I break that ice?

Taylor nodded to his boss and subordinates, took the formal paper that his boss handed him, and went to beard the cool Mr. Cob.

In the interrogation room, Taylor crossed to the table and sat down facing Cob.

“We’ll make this short and sweet,” Cob said calmly.  “I want my lawyer.  He’ll be here in ten minutes, then we’ll begin a lawsuit that will have the bureau giving me its budget for the next five years.  Other than this, I ain’t saying a word.”

“Terrorist don’t get lawyers,” Taylor said just as calmly.

“You can accuse me of kidnaping you.  Nothing else.  And that will never go to court.” 

Was there a hint of worry there?

Taylor pressed on.  “We’ll ignore the other charges against you for now. I don’t hold a grudge.  But you, me boyo,” Taylor had to admit he liked the slight involuntary flinch he got from Cob at turning that familiarity around, “are charged with aiding and abetting a terrorist.  Under the law, terrorists and their allies don’t get lawyers.”

“There’s no such law!” came in an explosion from Cob.

“Oh, but my bureau lawyers tell me there is.  An old, one might even call it ancient law, folded into the Society of Humanity’s judicial code from long ago, and, as it seems, left in our legal code from our days in that by gone society.  Yep, boyo, you’re a terrorist and will be tried under those codes.”

Cob was at a lost for words.  His lips moved, but nothing came out.  Finally he took a deep breath.  “I am no terrorist.  I’m not aiding and abetting any terrorist.  I don’t know where you dreamed that up, but you’ve got nothing like that on me.  Sooner or later, you’ll have to answer my employer, and then,” his confident smirk came back, “I’ll own your ass.”

“On the contrary.  You and your employer are involved in aiding and abetting terrorists.  To whit, delivering equipment and technology under the proscribed articles list for foreign sale to alien terrorists bent on the destruction of all humanity,” Taylor kept his voice as matter of fact as twenty years of work at the law allowed him.  He tasted the sound of his voice and found it good.

Cob had the smarts to blink several times after the charge was given him.  Then he shook his head.

“I don’t know nothing about no shipment of anything to aliens, or anybody else,” came out calm, but the “I swear to God,” showed he was taking the heat to heart.

“You were told to hold me for two, maybe three weeks.  Strange that.  Over the next two weeks, a large shipment of technical information, a library to keep it in and examples of quite a lot of restricted gear and machinery was due to be shipped up to the Nuu Yards.  In two weeks’ time, a pair of huge ships fitting out there were also due to be completed.  Coincidence?  I doubt it.”

Taylor paused to let that sink into Cob’s thick skull.

“Those ships during construction were specifically modified from what you’d expect for conventional trade among human planets to specific conditions suitable only for going out to make contact with the space aliens Kris Longknife encountered in her circumnavigation of the galaxy.  With the cargo arranged for them and the technological information in them, those huge alien mother ships could beat a quick trail to our door.  You’ve seen the pictures of what those monster ships look like, haven’t you?”

“Yeah, I saw it.  Couldn’t miss if for the couple of days it was on the news.”  Cob was actually showing signs of being thoughtful.  “Ugly things.  I remember when it was just six battleships threatening to blow Wardhaven back to the
Stone Age.”

The kidnapper’s eyes wandered off to the left wall of the interrogation room.  “People were pretty pissed about that.  That Kris Longknife was the toast of the town for a whole week.”

“It did wonders for her dad’s re-election, didn’t it?”

“Yeah.  Bunch of sheep,” Cob snapped.  Then seemed to think better of it.  “But this is still a political matter.  It’s gonna be settled by the Longknifes, not by sending me to jail.”

“You sure of that?  Even if we take it that you were just an uninformed pawn, you’re still up for kidnaping an agent of the Bureau of Investigations in furtherance of a conspiracy to provide critical secrets to the most God awful terrorists we’ve ever seen.  Remember those pictures of the mother ship?  Huge.  Imagine the mob of soldiers they’ve got.”

The prisoner gulped.  Hard.

“But you didn’t know.  Still, you won’t be seeing a conventional court.  You’ll be sentenced, probably for life.  You hear any stories about our prison on HellFrozeOver?  I understand they use the prisoners for genetic experiments.  Stuff too deadly or dangerous to risk anywhere closer to Wardhaven.”

Cob’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. 

Taylor gauged the emotions running riot on his prisoner’s face.  Denial didn’t get much play time.  No, most of it was raging terror, descending in a vicious cycle from bad to worse.

It had been a long time since there had been any problem with terrorists.  Still, every couple of years there would be a spat of movies on the topic.  Each generation seemed to make the deeds of the terrorists more despicable . . . and the response of society more brutal and horrendous. 

Taylor wondered which movies were playing in Cob’s mind.

“What can I tell you?” came out as little more than a whisper as the man’s stare fixed on the table.

Cob was broken.

“I want to know about ship captains.  Merchant ship officers.  Have you been involved in tracking any of them?  Do you know anyone who has?”  Taylor shot his words hard and fast, machine gun fashion.

Cob seemed to reel back in his seat.  He took two deep breaths before saying a word.

“Me, no,
I
got
you
,” came out more as spit than words.

“Who got the merchant marine officers?”  Taylor knew he was fishing in thin air, still he cast his hook, sure there was a bigger fish out there somewhere.

“Kittikon.  He got asked to check out some merchant skippers for the old man.  He thought it was scut work.  Nothing to it, except for one.  ‘Crazy shit coming out of the top floors,’ he told me over a beer, two, no, three weeks ago.  They had him chasing down a skipper for the Star Line that had never sailed a mile in a freighter.  He thought maybe the old man was going senile.  The gal was a commander in the Navy.  A real hot rodder in her destroyer.  That mean anything to you?” was more a plea than a question. 

“And where might I find this Kittikon?” Taylor asked.

“I don’t know.  I haven’t seen him much around the shop lately.  But then, you were keeping me kind of busy.  You got a lot of friends in high places.”

“And you reported all my comings and goings.”

“Yep, every one of them.  Well, all but that dame you met at the Galleria.  Who was she?”

“As you’re aware, I ask the questions, you answer them,” Taylor said, hardly willing to tell this man that he knew no more about this technical whizz than he did.  “I believe you may have been of some help, Mr. Cob.  I’ll see that something to eat is brought into you.”

“A steak with all the trimmings?” he said, slipping back into the something of the wise ass he’d been earlier.

“Not on the bureau’s budget.”

“Thanks for nothing.”

“It will be better than jail fare, I assure you,” Taylor said, and headed next door to consult with his boss and Leslie.

The young agent was already using her wrist unit to call up Mr. Kittikon. 

“Employed by Nuu Security for the last ten years.  He seems to have gone up the organization with more than the usual speed.  No criminal involvement.  Not so much as a traffic ticket in our database,” Leslie reported.

“Can we track him?” the boss asked.

“No ma’am,” Leslie replied.  “I tried as soon as Cob here spit out his name.  Nuu agents usually stay on the grid, but this guy has been off it for, oh, the last three weeks.”

“So this problem has been developing for the last three weeks,” Taylor said.  “Since before Kris Longknife paid her visit to us.  She was right, this project has been underway for at least a month.  Likely from the time they changed the design of those two ships in the Nuu Yard,” Taylor said.

“So, we need to track someone off the grid,” the boss said.  She gnawed her lower lip for a long moment, then made her call.  “Agent Chu, you are authorized to access the Prometheus database.  I will have a letter added to your file from me authorizing this as soon as I can get back to my desk.  Get started on it now.”

Both Taylor’s and Leslie’s eyebrows shot up.  Prometheus was a project left over from the long ago Iteeche War.  It took in all the take from every camera on Wardhaven, both private and public, and collected it into one huge database.  Officially, no one had access to it.  Taylor had not even dared to ask to access it to track Kris Longknife, but had made due with the usual piecemeal data pulls that the authorities regularly used.

Prometheus was so off limits that officially, it didn’t exist.  Still, parliament regularly granted the small sums needed to increase the project’s storage servers the tiny staff of technicians needed to handle the new feeds that they kept adding to the project. 

It was too powerful for anyone to use, but also too powerful for those in power to give up.

Taylor’s boss would be in very hot water when it was found she’d authorized its use.  Prometheus, being moribund, had no procedures for authorizing access.  No ones authority, not even the prime minister’s, included granting access to Prometheus. 

No doubt, that topic would come up later.

Chapter 14

Two hours later, Taylor was wondering what all the excitement was about Prometheus.  It didn’t appear to be worth a damn.

Of course, part of the problem was that they were accessing data in the vicinity of the Longknife Tower.  Taylor had concluded that the tower would be the perfect place to pick up the trail of Security Specialist Kittikon. 

He was very wrong.

In the recent past, while in hot pursuit of Kris Longknife, Taylor had gained some personal experience with the level of security at Longknife Tower.  He had not been impressed.