Not For Glory (13 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Killing Ground

Thellonee, New Britain

1628 34th Street, New Portsmouth

01/13/44, 0323 local time

Assistant Prefect Nigel Dunfey was unimpressed as he sat back in the overstuffed chair. I could tell that he was unimpressed because his eyes were narrowed and his thin lips were pursed in a frown. I could tell that the chair was overstuffed because somebody had once spent some time with a knife, hacking at it to relieve the condition.

He shook his head. "I find it difficult to agree to give those orders, Inspector-General. Telling the district constabulary commander to keep his men away from here? No matter what happens?"

He looked at the other men in the dingy room of the even dingier hotel. "One would almost think you were planning some sort of military assault, except that I know you are all unarmed, and . . ." He couldn't find a polite way to say the obvious, that the Sergeant and the other oldsters would stand no chance against young hoodlums in peak condition, so he just gestured at the Sergeant and the other oldsters and left it at that.

I gave it another try. "You've got a serious gang problem here, Prefect. There'll be a whole stack of flimsies with a whole pile of recommendations a couple of weeks after I get back to Metzada"—
and have my number one assistant distill and regurgitate some platitudes into a format that you won't mind paying for
—"but right now, I can tell you what one problem is: the Vators have hired an offworld consultant, too. We're just going to walk on in, and take him out. Period. That should make things a bit easier for you, at least in terms of this gang."

He was about to open his mouth to protest, so I raised a hand. The last thing I wanted was for him to argue himself into a corner that he wouldn't want to back out of.

"It seems to me that if you're going to be paying the kind of money that we're going to charge you, then you really ought to take our advice about the small things, if not the large ones."

He was wavering, so the Sergeant threw in a friendly smile and an open-handed gesture. "What kind of trouble do you think we're going to get into? We're just a handful of men, unarmed." He opened his coat to show just how unarmed he was.

I let the conversation flow around me while, on the street below, a skimmer pulled up to the curb and settled itself down. Three men got out: Zev, Paulo Stuarti; and Adazzi, the Casa ambassador. Dov was waiting for them at the curb; he led them into the building. We had another room rented for them to watch from. More listen than watch, really, and more to wait until it was time for them to come in to watch Zev and Imran pick up the pieces than listen.

"But
how
are you going to get him out? That's what I don't understand. Maybe you don't realize how dangerous those . . . children are. They're not really children, the bloody little savages."

The Sergeant chuckled. "Nothing to worry about. We'll just walk in, let them scare us a bit, then let them talk themselves into letting us go, together with their adviser. No problem. Do scared for him, Yehoshua."

Frail, white-haired Yehoshua Bernstein trembled, his lower lip quivering, for just a moment, until he stopped and smiled.

"Don't worry about it, Prefect," Bernstein said.

"Then why do you want to be certain you won't get help?"

I spread my hands. "It's just that if they do decide to, say, fire off a few rounds in order to get us trembling, we don't want to have to worry about a flying squad of proctors crashing through, and getting them all nervous." I smiled. "I'm a staff officer, myself, and I don't like having any armed man nervous."

"Well . . ." he
tsked
a couple of times. "It's against my better judgment. You could get hurt. But it is your choice. . . ." The prefect took out his phone and snapped it open, then issued a few blunt orders. "Yes, that's for the next hour. After that, I'll call you and advise. Dunfey out."

His phone snapped shut just as Imran's hypo hissed against his upper arm; Dunfey started to struggle, but the medician tripped him into the Sergeant's waiting arms, the two of them lowering him efficiently to the floor as the drug took effect.

Imran quickly searched the prefect, coming up with a compact wiregun and two spare clips. "Colt WireKing," he said, tucking it into his belt, quirking his lips for a moment before he stowed the clips in his right rear pocket. "Not a bad little wiregun," he said as he smiled down at the unconscious policeman. "Going to be a hero, you are."

The Sergeant shook his head. "Not if somebody notices that gas-hypo bruise on his upper arm."

"What bruise? I don't see any bruise. All I see is a heroic wound." Imran had already unrolled his medikit and selected a scalpel. "The hero got injured, that's all."

The Sergeant nodded judiciously. "Not enough, though. Give him a wound in the belly, too. Make sure the hole goes all the way through; wouldn't want them to find the wrong bullet inside."

"Aw, Tzvi, that's—"

"—how we're going to do it."

I straightened myself. "I'd better go speak to the ambassador. Take care of things here."

Ambassador Gianpaulo Adazzi was not happy as he paced back and forth in the other room we'd rented, on the floor below. "I don't understand what I'm doing here. Major Stuarti practically
forced
me into the skimmer, and . . ."

"And brought you here to see a demonstration," I said. "The word is you're thinking of hiring some private company, instead of Metzada." I shrugged. "Makes no difference to me, personally, which side of the war we come down on," I lied. "But I thought you might want to watch a little demonstration."

I jerked my thumb at the window. "Across the street and down the block is the headquarters of a youth gang called the Vators. There are about twenty, thirty of them in there right now, many of them armed. One of the reasons they're in ascendancy over the other local gangs is that they've managed to get some guns."

"Oh?" He was starting to get interested, despite himself. "Just one of the reasons?"

"Yeah. It's the secondary one, matter of fact." I made him wait while I pulled out a tabstick and fired it up. "Also in there is an exiled Metzadan citizen, name of Shimon Bar-El. You may have heard the name. Seems that he took on a job as a tactical adviser to the Vators, and they're not eager to let him go."

The ambassador shrugged. "Why not make them an offer for him? I'm sure they could use money."

There wasn't any threat in Dov's voice as he said, "We don't do that. We don't buy our people back with money." If I hadn't known him better, I would have been worried by his flat tone, by the blank way he looked at the ambassador, as though ticking off kill-points on an anatomy chart.

But I did know him better. Shimon wasn't interested in Dov taking offense at mere words.

Adazzi raised an eyebrow. "It can't be that policy dating back to the twentieth century, can it?"

"Thirteenth," I said. "Agree with it, disagree with it, but get your centuries right. In 1286, the German emperor imprisoned Rabbi Meir ben Baruch of Rothenburg—for trying to emigrate to Eretz Yisrael, by the way. Rabbi Meir died in prison seven years later, not allowing his people to ransom him, for fear of setting the wrong kind of precedent. Rabbi Meir's precedent has been broken too often since. It won't be broken here and now."

Adazzi nodded. "So you're going to break out Shimon Bar-El. Where's the rest of your force?"

I smiled. "He's upstairs, probably putting his medician's kit back together. No, Ambassador, it's just us. One good master private, a staff officer, and five old, retired soldiers are going to walk in, and take him out."

He smiled at that. "What's the trick?"

I smiled back at him. "There isn't one."

The outer room had been a shop of some kind, once; against the gray wall, empty, dusty cases stood, displaying their invisible wares to ghosts.

Four of the Vators stood the six of us against a wall. They frisked us thoroughly, professionally, a sharp-eyed fifteen-year-old going through our overcoats inch by inch. Beyond them, a steel door stood shut, grillework about eye-level, ragged weapons ports quite probably concealing pistol barrels.

There was a metallic taste at the back of my mouth; I swallowed to get rid of it, but it didn't go away.

"They're clean, Michael," the boy said, turning his head to the grille.

"Well, then, let them wait for a while," sounded from beyond the grillework. "We're doing some business here."

In the distance, I could hear a familiar voice. "The thing you're going to have to learn, Michael, is that justice isn't done in the dark. That's part of the difference between becoming a government and remaining a gang."

None of us looked at each other, but Yehoshua Bernstein leaned against the wall, and was immediately prodded to up-lightness by the pistol-barrel of the weasel-faced teenager at his right.

There was a long pause. "Well, search them again, and then let them in."

The room was larger than I'd expected; they'd cut through the wall between two buildings and made one large assembly hall, a hundred yards across and twenty deep.

Over against the far wall, a haphazard pile of mattresses was stacked alongside neat pyramids of water bottles and food tins. The Vators didn't look like they were planning for a siege, but it looked like they were ready for it, with troops as well as provisions: there were thirty-seven Vators in the room, split about three-to-one male, with a few cases in doubt.

Including the guards keeping an eye on us, I could count eleven guns: ten slugthrowers, only one wiregun. Except for our guards, all the weapons were tucked in belts or holsters, which was good. The gunmen were pretty much randomly scattered about the room, some sitting in stolen chairs, others sprawled on mattresses.

Three of the gunmen were girls, or female at least. They had that hard, I'll-slice-the-skin-off-your-face expression that offworld women get when they spend too much time around violence.

It looked like the Vators were holding a trial. It was easy to figure out who the accused was: he was tied to a chair. He sat halfway across the room, one of four people in a row of chairs next to a battered gunmetal-gray desk. Behind the desk was a vicious-looking boy of maybe eighteen, holding a Webster Multi wiregun pistol by the barrel, using it like a gavel. His face was thin and pocked, but his eyes moved slowly across us, as if he could see all the way through to what we really were.

For a moment, his eyes rested on mine. A hero would have returned his stare, would have manfully looked him in the eye, but I was just a cowardly gun-merchant, hoping to leave this room with both a deal and my skin, so I swallowed and looked away.

"All right, all right, shut up, everyone." He gestured toward us with the butt of the gun. "We'll be done with this in a few minutes. Until then, you just stay lined up and out of trouble—then we can talk some business." He turned to glare at the old man sitting in the middle of the group in front of him. "That good enough for you, Shimon?"

Shimon Bar-El smiled casually. "You're the boss, Michael. But it's fine with me." He looked a bit thinner, a bit paler, a bit older since the last time I'd seen him, but he hadn't changed much.

Of the four sitting next to the desk, Shimon was the only unworried one. At Shimon's left were a fiftyish, red-headed, red-faced man and a red-headed, teen-aged girl who might have been pretty if the right side of her face weren't black and blue, her right eye swollen almost totally closed. There was a long scratch on her neck that ran down from just below her ear and into the gray blanket she huddled in.

The man had a protective arm around her, although what good that would do escaped me.

A hero would have made a mental note to himself to drag them to safety when all hell broke loose, or at least to shout a warning, but I'm just a butcher.

On Shimon's right, the accused sat, bound efficiently to a chair, his ankles drawn back and tied to the rear legs, his hands bound forward. As he shook his head to clear the stringy blond hair out of his eyes, he looked more defiant than scared—but it was a close call.

Michael turned to us. "We're having a bit of a trial here. Although I'm not really sure why we're just trying Kevin, here."

There were nods and grunts of agreement from around the room.

"Excuse me," I said.

The guards started; Michael stilled them with a wave of his hand. "Go ahead."

"If you want us to come back later, we're at your disposal."

He gave a grin that he probably thought was wolfish. "You don't want to be around for this?"

I shook my head. "I don't mind, either way. But if you want us to stay, then you probably should let us know what this is all about."

He thought it over for a moment, then nodded. "Kevin was—
is
one of my squad leaders. We're discussing a complaint here that his squad dragged Fiona here off the street to pull the train."

He looked at the girl; she hid her face in the blanket and huddled closer to her father.

"And a fun little train-pull it must have been. That's not the problem."

He paused for a moment to stare at a group of six boys and three girls who were off by themselves in the corner of the room, away from the rest. None of them were armed, and at least two of the boys were a little wild-eyed, but the other four boys and all three of the girls had gotten the point that only Kevin was on trial.

"Fiona," he went on, "is the daughter of old man Foster, here, who has a tucker shop just inside of Vator territory. You pay your taxes regular, Foster?"

The red-headed man nodded, once, quickly. "Yes, yes, I do, I do—"

"Shut up."

The red-headed man shut up.

"Now," Michael went on, "Shimon here says that since we Vators are on our way to becoming a government, we're supposed to give something for the taxes we collect." He rose and walked over to Fiona and her father, putting a hand under her chin and looking her face over very carefully. She stared back at him, a rabbit looking at a snake. "I sort of like being a government, if I'm going to have to live the rest of my life in this shithole of a neighborhood."