Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future (12 page)

“Santiago.”

He laughed. “You and ten thousand
other journalists.”

“I’m different,” said Virtue
seriously. “I’m going to get him.”

“I wish you luck.”

“I don’t need luck,” she replied.
“I need information.”

“You probably know more about
Acosta than I do.”

“Forget Acosta,” said Virtue.
“He’s a dead end. I need something else.”

“Such as?”

“Someone who can tell me where
Santiago is.”

Smythe laughed again. “Why don’t
you ask for a million credits while you’re at it? One’s as likely as the
other.”

“This person doesn’t have to know
Santiago’s headquarters. He just has to point me in the right direction.”

“What the hell makes you think
anyone on Pegasus has any dealings with Santiago?”

“Because, with all due respect for
your beautiful city, it’s not exactly a vacation spa. Acosta was here to
deliver some goods or some money, or else to pick something up. He probably
didn’t deal directly with the person I want—but that doesn’t mean you can’t
help me find that person.”

“Are you telling me Acosta worked
for Santiago?” asked Smythe.

“Indirectly. I doubt that they
ever met. Acosta was just a conduit for stolen goods, or perhaps money. What I
need from you is the name of the biggest operator in Hektor.”

“Harrison Brett,” replied Smythe
without hesitation.

“Does he have a criminal record?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about it.”

“He’s got thirty arrests.”

“Any convictions?”

Smythe looked uncomfortable.
“Two.”

“Suspended sentences?”

He nodded.

“Who’s he paying off?” she asked
quickly.

Smythe shrugged. “Everybody.”

She smiled. “Come on, Leander—this
is Virtue you’re talking to, not some slob in your newsroom. You know what I
want.”

“Why not just put the pressure on
Brett?” he asked in a tone of voice that implied he knew the answer as well as
she did.

“How do you pressure a man who
knows he can’t go to jail?” she replied. “The name, please.”

“I don’t know any other name,” he
said.

“Not smart, Leander,” she said
ominously. “Not smart at all.”

“It’s the truth,” he replied
defensively.

“
I
know
another name, though,” she said. “The name I know is Leander Smythe. I even
know some facts to go with the name. Want to hear them?”

“No,” he said, puffing rapidly on
his cigarette.

“They’re interesting facts,” she
continued. “They’re all about how he falsified evidence on his first big story
and helped send an innocent man to jail for eight years.”

“You
covered
for me, for Christ’s sake!” he hissed. “If you knew he was innocent, why didn’t
you block the story when you had the chance?”

“Oh, he deserved to go to jail,”
she said pleasantly. “He was a bastard from the word go, and the police had
been trying to nail him for years.” She stared seriously at him. “But the fact
remains that he was innocent of the charges that were brought against him based
on your information.”

“Then you should have said
something at the time.”

“I did,” she replied, finishing
her drink. “I told you that you owed me a favor in exchange for my silence, and
that someday I’d be by to collect it.”

“You know,” he said unhappily, “I
never did like you much. You were always too ambitious, always scheming and
plotting.”

“Why should I deny it?” she said
calmly. “I’ll only add that it’s people like you who made it easy.”

“What’ll you do when you finally
get to the top, and there are no more bodies to climb over?”

“Mostly, I’ll enjoy it,” she
replied. “And I’ll protect myself a hell of a lot better than the rest of you
ever did.”

“How many other favors have you
stockpiled over the years?” he asked bitterly.

“A few.”

“And how many other people have
you blackmailed with them?”

“I’m not blackmailing you,
Leander,” replied Virtue. “I have other leads. If you don’t want to do me a
favor, you don’t have to. Just forget I asked.”

“You mean it?”

“Absolutely.” She paused. “Of
course, I’ll have to pay a visit to your superiors. After all, I’m a
journalist—and what you did qualifies as news, even after all these years.” She
smiled. “Don’t worry; you won’t go to jail for it—but you’d better find a new
profession.”

“Have you ever done anything, even
once, with no thought of a return?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“How old were you? Six?”

“Younger. And I immediately
decided that there was no percentage in it.”

“Who did your bounty hunter have
to kill for you before you teamed up with him?”

“Actually, he had to postpone
killing someone,” said Virtue. “But we’re straying from the subject. I need a
name.”

He nervously lit another cigarette
before his first had gone out. “You must understand: I can’t be connected with
it.”

“You won’t be,” she assured him,
leaning forward intently. “The name.”

“This is it?” he said. “You’ll
never bring up that damned story again?”

“I promise.”

He sighed. “Dimitri Sokol.”

“How big is he?”

“Very. He’s a multimillionaire,
he’s a director of half a dozen corporations, he’s held a couple of political
offices, and word is that he’s about to buy himself an ambassadorship to Lodin
Eleven.”

“Better and better,” she said with
a predatory grin. “What have you got on him?”

“Officially, nothing.”

“Come on, Leander. Just blurt it
all out and then forget you told me. Women?”

Smythe shook his head. “Not a
chance.”

“Men? Little boys? Drugs?”

“Just money. He bankrolled a
smuggling operation out in the Binder system, though I think it would take you
a couple of lifetimes to pierce through his corporate veil. I’ve got a feeling
that he was peripherally involved in a couple of murders six years ago—
very
peripherally—and I know he’s given and taken bribes.
Anyway, somewhere along the way he decided that he wanted to be respectable,
and he’s been cleaning up his image for the past three years.”

“And now he wants an
ambassadorship?”

“So I’m told.”

“Okay, Leander—start giving me
names and dates, and then I think we can go our separate ways.”

“I don’t
know
any names and dates for sure. It’s all gossip and conjecture.”

“I know. Now let’s have them.”

“Damn! I wish I could give you a
suicide pill or something, just in case this doesn’t work.”

“I wouldn’t take it.”

“I know,” he muttered.

Their lunch arrived, and while
they ate—she enthusiastically, he totally without interest—Smythe laid out such
details of Sokol’s dealings as he had been able to piece together. Virtue took
no notes, but he knew that she’d be able to recite the list verbatim a month
later.

“I’ll try to set up an appointment
with Sokol for tomorrow afternoon,” Virtue announced when they were finished
with dessert and sipping their after-dinner drinks.

“What makes you think he’ll see
you?” asked Smythe.

“Turn down an interview with a
journalist from Deluros with an ambassadorship in the offing?” she replied with
a chuckle. “Not a chance.”

“Since when are you from Deluros?”

“Since tomorrow morning.”

“He’ll check you out before he
sees you.”

“I know,” said Virtue. “That’s why
you’re going to program my new credentials into your network’s computer. It’s
the first place he’ll look if he has any doubts about me.”

“The hell I will!” he exploded,
then lowered his voice when he realized he was attracting the attention of the
other diners. “That’s above and beyond our agreement,” he said, lowering his
voice.

“True. I won’t threaten you with
your ... ah, journalistic indiscretion again. I gave you my word, and I intend
to keep it.”

“Then that’s settled,” he said
firmly. “I’m not loading false credentials in the computer.”

“The choice is entirely yours,”
she said. “I suppose I’ll just have to tell Sokol to verify my position with
you personally.” She shrugged. “There’s always the chance that he won’t put two
and two together and figure out who gave me the stuff I’m going to use on him.”

“You’d do it, wouldn’t you?” he
said furiously. “You’d really do it!”

“Nobody’s going to stop me from
finding Santiago—not you, not anyone. I’ve staked my career on it.”

“Then why don’t you find another
career? Go raise a family or something, instead of blackmailing your old
friends. Jesus, but I feel sorry for your partner!”

“He’s pretty good at taking care
of himself. I think your sympathy would be better spent on a sweet, innocent
girl like me.”

“Innocent of
what
?”
he said disgustedly.

“You
will
remember to change my credentials, won’t you?” she said sweetly, pushing back
her chair and standing up.

“Yes,” he muttered. “I’ll change
them.”

“And one more thing, Leander.”

“What other little favor can I do
for you?” he asked. “Pluck out my eyeballs so you can play marbles with them?”

“Some other time, perhaps.”
Suddenly she was serious. “I’m sure everything will go smoothly—but just in
case I don’t come back, or get word to you that I’m all right, I want you to
contact Sebastian Cain.”

“Who the hell is that?” he
demanded.

“The Songbird.” She gave him the
registration number of Cain’s ship. “He should be in the Altair system in the
next day or two.”

“What message do you want me to
give him?”

“I should think
that would be obvious,” she replied. “I may die unmourned, but I sure as hell
don’t plan to die unavenged.”

Since Black Orpheus never returned
to the populated worlds of the Democracy, and Dimitri Sokol never left them,
it’s only natural that he gave Sokol neither a verse nor a nickname. They never
met, never crossed paths, never even knew the other existed—which was probably
just as well: Black Orpheus wouldn’t have liked him much. Orpheus loved the
uninhibited, colorful men and women of the Frontier; Sokol was calm, calculating,
and self-controlled. Black Orpheus painted his word pictures in primaries;
Dimitri Sokol was a pastel.

Sokol was a civilized man, and as
such he indulged in the crimes of civilization. If a man had to be killed, his
hand may have held the checkbook, but it never touched the weapon. If there was
smuggling or black marketeering to be done, he put so many holding companies
and middlemen between himself and his hirelings that he might as well have been
on Deluros VIII itself. He craved respectability, which Black Orpheus
disdained; and he disdained notoriety, which Black Orpheus dedicated his career
to perpetuating.

Orpheus would have considered him
a hypocrite, which is certainly one interpretation; but the truth of the matter
was that Sokol managed to walk a very fine line between his deeds and his
expectations with a skill that even the Bard of the Inner Frontier would have
admired.

He had vacation homes on Seabright
and Pollux IV, and a suite of offices—which he hadn’t visited in years—on
Canphor VII. He made large donations to charity each year and had recently paid
for an addition to a hospital in Pallas Athena, the oldest of Pegasus’ seven
enclosed cities. He was a patron of the arts and could always be counted upon
to support the local symphony orchestra and ballet with handsome contributions;
he no longer donated to the opera, but it was common knowledge that he
disapproved of his daughter’s liaison with one of the lead tenors, and nobody
thought any the less of him for it.

He had spent most of his working
hours during the past two years in his penthouse atop one of Hektor’s more
desirable residential buildings. There were twelve rooms in all; nine served as
the family’s residence—a son and two daughters still lived with him—and the
other three rooms, with their own private entrance, had been converted into an
office suite.

It was just after noon when Virtue
Mackenzie presented herself in the building’s lobby, waited while a security
woman announced her arrival, and then took an elevator directly to Sokol’s
office suite. Upon emerging, she found herself in a small reception foyer,
where a secretary told her that she was expected and ushered her into an
opulently furnished study.

“He’ll join you in just a moment,”
said the secretary, returning to his post by the elevator.

Virtue took that moment to examine
her surroundings. Two of the walls were covered with artwork from all over the
Democracy, most of it expensive, some of it good, none of it showing any
consistency of taste. A third wall, composed of floor-to-ceiling windows,
afforded a dramatic view of a blue river and a deep ravine just beyond the
dome. The carpet was plush, made of some wiry alien fabric which seemed to
shrink from the touch of her foot, then instantly moved back and pressed against
it once she had set it down. There was a large holographic videoscreen, the
controls of which were built into the arm of a leather couch. There were four
matching chairs, two of them almost pristine, the other two showing some signs
of wear. An alien musical instrument, bulky as a piano but of a type she had
never seen before, was carefully angled into a corner. Atop it were six small
cubes, each containing a hologram of a member of the Sokol family. She picked
up one containing the representation of a lovely young woman and examined it.

“My youngest daughter,” said a
firm, friendly voice, and she turned to find that Sokol had entered the room.

He was a tall man, burly without
being overweight, with a well-groomed shock of steel-gray hair and a dapper
mustache. His eyes were a deep blue, his nose absolutely straight, his chin
square without being prominent. He wore an elegantly embroidered suit of a
style that had recently been popular on Deluros VIII.