Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut (15 page)

Uh oh
, Lee thought. 
Our little friend, calling back to threaten me?
 “Hello?” she said again.

“Ms. Enfield,” said a voice, another male voice, also certainly processed; but not the same as the last one.

“Who’s calling?”

There was a pause, as much uncertainty on the other party’s part, Lee thought, as anything to do with the processing software. “There are some parties who’re interested in keeping you from progressing much further with your present investigations,” the voice said.

A number of them, I’d say; which one do you represent?
, Lee was tempted to say, and didn’t. “Like your little friend just now,” she said, “was 
he
 one of yours?”

The voiced paused. “What?”

“The man who suborned the alarm system in my house, closed it up after him, and waited for me in the dark, almost certainly with the intent to either put me in the hospital or kill me.”

Genuine surprise. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Then you may be good at getting comm numbers, but you’re not real well informed otherwise.” Lee was fuming, and also bemused. Possibly this person was 
not
 attached to the attempt on her life just now. So this was some different loony. 
And why is he calling me here rather than at the office?
 The answer suggested itself instantly: 
Because there’s no recording software on this line…and someone knows
 
it. Boy, is
 that 
going to change in the next day or so!
 Yet she still found herself getting a haunted feeling, with nothing to base it on, nothing that would ever stand up in court, something purely subjective.

A tall, dark shape…

Ridiculous. That silhouette’s been on your mind for days…that’s all it is.
 But still she could hear Gelert saying, 
Follow your hunches…

“I’m sorry you’ve had trouble.”

“I’m sure you are, but you still haven’t identified yourself…so you have ten seconds to explain what you want.”

“There are people who want to give you a hand.”

Lee laughed. “Where were they this evening? I could have used them in the kitchen.” 
Okay, that
 
sounded slightly hysterical. Fine. I have some hysterical coming.

“Hagen isn’t one of them.”

Lee went quiet for the moment. “And? Five seconds.”

“He knows what you know.”

She had to laugh again. “Who was it,” she said, “who suggested that the perfect way to get someone to leave town was to send them a message that said, ‘Flee, all is discovered’? What makes 
you
 think you know what I know? Any more than Hagen does?”

“There are more people than just ExTel,” said the voice, “who know what was in Omren dil’Sorden’s personnel records.”

Alfen!
 Lee thought.

“Some of them are becoming nervous at what a thoughtful examination of those personnel records might reveal,” the voice said. “Some of them are in quite high places… if not 
the
 highest. They’ll be trying to have you removed from the case to prevent that.”

The highest…?
 Lee thought. Her thoughts abruptly went back to Le Chalet Perdu, to that beautiful, silent man sitting across the room, listening, impassive, taking everything in, revealing nothing. “I’d say someone’s made a start on that already,” Lee said. “What kind of help have you got in mind?”

“Advice. When an opportunity to leave town comes up,” the voice said, “take it.”

Lee smiled sardonically. “What career I have hasn’t been built on running away.”

“You won’t be running away. It’ll be pursuit. But it’ll have the advantage of not looking like it.”

Lee sat silent for a moment. “I’ll think about it. Assuming anything of the kind happens.”

“Don’t just think about it. Your position is getting worse. You’re likely to wind up in a situation where it’d take the roses of Aien Mhariseth themselves to get you off with your skin intact,” the voice said. “Kind of a shame you don’t have one of those in your pocket to start with. It’d save you a lot of trouble. Now, and later.”

“It’s not something I expect to find in my pocket anytime soon,” Lee said. “Let’s stick with the subject.”

“But it’s very much to the point,” the voice said. “One could do all manner of things with such an instrumentality.”

Oh, really? What are you leading up to here?
 “For whom, exactly?” Lee said. “Who stands to benefit?”

“The power of such an artifact, if imported without Alfen interference, would be considerable in this world,” the voice said. “Its mere presence would render some Alfen technologies transparent…some ineffective. Insofar as this touches on those who vanish without the benefit of any technology known in Earth’s universe, I’d think the effect would be of some interest to you.”

Lee went first hot, then cold. “Accessing confidential material pertaining to an investigation in process is a serious crime,” she said.

“So is conspiracy to commit murder,” said the voice. “So is murder itself. And there are worse crimes that have no names as yet. But soon they may.”

Lee held very still, experiencing more strongly than ever again that shadowy behind-the-back feeling that she was becoming more and more deeply involved in something that, if not stopped, would involve a lot of death. “It would help to be dealing with someone who could declare himself or herself,” she said, “rather than someone too scared to come out in the open.”

“Sometimes fear can be useful,” that voice said. It sounded almost cheerful. “Goodbye.”

The connection cleared itself. Lee sat there looking at the dark screen for a long time. Finally, she finished her xoco and made the rounds of the house one last time, irrationally, looking into every shadow, and spending a long few moments looking up at the now boarded-up and bolted-over patio doors. They looked unusually vulnerable, despite the armor-laminate on the boarding, despite the steel strips, despite the thought of the unmarked out in the alley and the unmarked out in front.

Fear can be useful
, the voice had said.

But to whom?
 Lee thought, and took that uneasy thought with her to bed.

*5*

“Mikki was right, Lee,” Gelert said down the comm. “They’ve gone public with the Five-Interpol homicide report.”

She chuckled. “Well, certainly the juicy parts have finally started to make the news.”

She had been up early, not anything to do with the report: rather her own shredded nerves, which were taking revenge on her the way they usually did…a stomach that felt like a bowl full of acid, a head that ached even after the aspirin. So the early news had caught her at a low ebb, and had (bizarrely) cheered her up. Mikki certainly had been right; the Five-Interpol report had been leaked as soon as it decently could have—no more than two days before the “official” publication date, if there was such a thing anymore—and every news agency that came across it was mining it for the kind of content that suited it best. Now she sat on the living room sofa, her legs curled under her, drinking xoco in a kind of amused acknowledgment of The Drink That Saved Her Life, wondering at the wide spectrum of response to the report. Even the newspeople at the local muckraking tabloid station had found as much material for scandal in the Five-Interpol report as she had…though certainly not in the same places.

ARE ELVES THE WORLDS’ BIGGEST RACISTS? was the question plastered all over that station’s sister “paper,” the one with the naked broads on page three. “The Pulchritude Paper,” Gelert usually called it, having a strictly out-of-species take on human pulchritude (“Not nearly enough breasts,” was his usual comment). But the typically ample charms of the lady on three were somewhat overshadowed by the facing headline, which said, A MONOPOLY REVEALED!

Only to your mouthbreathing readers
, Lee thought uncharitably. To them, Their Paper apparently felt it would be big news that Alfheim strictly controlled rights of access to its universe, technological information native to it, and nearly everything else that made life worth living…and was therefore Inherently Evil, possibly even communist. The problem (for the Pulchritude Paper’s lead writers, anyway) was that Alfheim also had a king, and therefore seemed unlikely to qualify as a communist domain. The Paper tried flinging some speculative mud at the Elf-King (“mysterious…secretive…extravagant, world-hopping lifestyle…”) but was unable to make much of it stick: no one seemed able to find any evidence of murder, insanity, or even a romantic attraction in his history (much less a divorce), and they had been unsuccessful in getting any Alfen to reveal any scandalous secrets about him. To the Paper, of course, all of this was in itself evidence of a conspiracy. To be mysterious and secretive automatically meant that you had something to hide, and anyone who couldn’t be bribed into revealing juicy secrets about a head of state must be under some kind of duress, possibly even going in fear of their lives.

“They don’t bribe nearly high enough, that’s their problem,” Lee said under her breath, turning over the flexible display that she used to show her the papers. “Gelert, come on, I’m fine. I’m coming in.”

“You stay right where you are,” Gelert said from the office. “There’s nothing happening here that you need to know about.”

“I’d rather you’d let me be the judge of that.”

“After your bodyguard arrives.”

“Oh please,” Lee said. “Someone else to drink my xoco. I really need this.”

“After last night, I’d say you really do,” Gelert said, “so don’t give me trouble about it. It’s only until we close this case out, Lee: just deal with it.” He lay there in his office, looking casually over at his own commwall. “But what a day in the news. It’s not a question of putting the cat among the pigeons: it’s 
tigers
 out there.”

She had to agree. Every news/info channel from the 
Financial Times
 down had gone through the Interpol report and found something “useful” for its readers. Of all the local news “papers,” the 
Times
 was probably the most thoughtful…but only insofar as its analysis used words with more syllables.
Five-Interpol Report Suggests Wide-Ranging EAT Conspiracy Between Alfen, Multinationals
, the column one headline said. The story had been passed, not to one of their investigative reporters, but to their leader writer; Lee suspected that some old scores were being paid off in the 
Times
‘s front office even as she read. “EAT” was “extra‘antitrust,’” the term used for an agreement which was suspected of having been constructed specifically to get around a given jurisdiction’s antimonopoly legislation. She scanned down the article.

…the tip of an investigative iceberg that will probably be years in the excavation, considering
 
Alfheim’s traditional reporting restrictions and equally restrictive attitudes toward legal“discovery” and extradition…

How do you excavate an iceberg?
 Lee thought, amused, while agreeing with the article’s thrust. She touched the control on the flat paper display in her lap to turn the virtual page.

…a veil of secrecy overtly justified by “world sovereignty” needs which has also covertly assisted
 
Alfen-supported multinational entities, as well as other ME’s and “nonphysical sovereignties,” in a
 
wide-flung network of (at least) collusion or (at best) corruption, all aimed at keeping Alfen
 
interests in control of the price and supply of fairy gold.

The Five-Interpol report collates for the first time evidence from police and security forces on
 
Earth, Tierra, Huichtilopochtli, Earth/Xaihon, and Midgarth. This unusually large sampling, taken
 
over five years in the above sovereignties and “compound” sovereignties, suggests that Alfen
 
interests have been using criminal means, even to the point of homicide, to influence and/or
 
control the price of fairy gold and FG futures on the major markets—a strategy that also finally
 
acts to control which markets, and which firms in which markets, have access to the single most
 
important manufacturing and infrastructure commodity in the Six Worlds. A disproportionate
 
number of the Alfen victims whose murders are detailed in the report were involved either in
 
industries intensively using fairy gold, or in banking or other financial institutions using FG or
 
trading in it.

The report lends uncomfortable credence to a theory some have long lacked facts to prove: an
 
increasing tendency in Alfen governments to limit “expedited” access to fairy gold to those
 
countries or multinational entities that either agree with Alfen interior/exterior policy or are
 
willing to carry it out.

Senior sources in the Alfen government have to date only said that they are carefully examining
 
the report and will have no comment at this time. But interworld opinion is likely to force their
 
hand, and some observers of Alfen affairs are already suggesting that the ramifications of the
 
report are so far-reaching—possibly extending even to the Office of the Laurin himself—that the
 
usual Alfen tactic of waiting quietly until the fuss dies down will be completely ineffective in this
 
case. Among the final recommendations of the report is that the UN&ME should empanel an
 
independent investigative committee to look for more concrete evidence of collusion or
 
conspiracy, the overt purpose of such a committee being to lift the cloud of accusation as quickly
 
as possible if no evidence can be found. If the UN&ME agrees with this assessment, the Elves will
 
have little choice but to agree to so seemingly reasonable a request—and will also know that the
 
other veto powers will not take it kindly if they use their own veto to derail the empanelment. In
 
the face of what would seem like guilty behavior, intended to hide real evidence of Alfen
 
conspiracy to restrict free trade and communications among the other five worlds, especially at so
 
potentially unstable a time—when a new world has just been discovered—it would not take long
 
for the mood in the UN&ME to shift toward sanctions should the Elves prove refractory…

Lee sat there thinking. 
The very highest levels
, her faceless caller had said. “Gel,” she said, “there’s something I want to look up. I’ll be back online later.”

“Fine.”

She waved the screen off; it reverted to its nonbusiness appearance, a gaudy Miro print, and leaned back on the sofa. No one was going to call her up and give her covert offers of help without it being in some way to their own advantage; she owed it to herself to find out why someone thought she would be such a likely tool to use. If there was some advantage in it for Lee, of course, the picture would change somewhat. 
I just have to keep my own curiosity from running away with me on this, that’s all
, she thought.

She could just hear Gelert laughing at the very idea. She raised her eyebrows ironically and started to get up to get some more xoco.

The screen rang again. “Oh, 
now
 what,” Lee muttered. “Answer…” she said to the comms system.

Lee found herself looking at Matt’s face, and was horrified to feel the sudden wild affection that tore her at the sight of him, making her both want to weep and laugh, even though his expression was furious. 
It’s
 
just reaction
, she thought. 
Get a grip!

“Matt,” she said, and it was all she could manage.

“Well, you’ve done it again,” he said.

“Done what?”

“You’re all over the news. Prosecutor in Alfen murder case attacked, where was police protection, blah, blah, blah. If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect that you’d cooked this whole thing up to make me look stupid.”

You??
 So many possible responses instantly presented themselves that Lee was spoiled for choice. “
Making
 you look stupid? Why in the Worlds should we waste our time on 
that
 when God’s done it already?” was the first one, closely followed by, “Oh, 
I
 planned my own assault and possible murder to do something, anything whatever, good or bad, to 
your
 reputation? Call 
Webster’s
, because ‘self-centered’ is going to have to be redefined!”…And several other possible retorts, far juicier, more unprofessional, and indeed more actionable, suggested themselves as well. Lee could do little but concentrate on her breathing until she was sure which part of her was in control of her mouth.

“Did you look at the sweep?” she finally said, as gently as she could.

“What?”

“The psychoforensic data I got off the guy while he was holding me at gunpoint, in the dark, in my kitchen,” Lee said, “or thought he was; and when I shot him, and afterward, when he went over my back wall, and after that, out in the alley. Did you have a look at that?”

“Uh, no.”

“Do,” Lee said. “If he matches anything in the master database, let me know. I’ll be happy to assist the Assistant DA in pressing charges. Meanwhile, my compliments to the DA: thank him for the security detail.” Of course, the detail had almost certainly been Matt’s immediate response after some busybody at HQ called him last night: but at the moment, Lee didn’t care. “The casework he was inquiring about will be on his desk on Friday morning. Along with our invoice. Good morning, Mr. Assistant District Attorney.” And she waved the comm off and stalked into the kitchen.

In the living room, the commlink instantly started ringing again. “System, who is it?” she said.

“Last caller.”

“Refuse it. Redirect to the office.”

“Refused. Redirected.”

“Son of a bitch,” Lee said, getting down on her knees again to get more xoco. It would stay in that cupboard, she vowed, until she felt a lot happier about life. “How dare you, you, you…” It was too much trouble even to feel around for a satisfying epithet. “You,” Lee muttered, frustrated. She got up off her knees with a couple of rediscovered filter bags of the real xoco, not the instant stuff but the organic Aztec Black, and went rummaging in the upper cupboard for the drip coffeemaker. Lee packed the beanbags into the upper chamber and reached for the kettle. “Poor baby,” she said, dumping out what water remained from the instant xoco she’d made for the uniforms and the security people last night, and refilling the kettle. “I’m sorry I almost shot you…”

Which reminded her: she had secured the Sig back in its place in the gun safe, but it still needed to be cleaned and reloaded. 
Though maybe I shouldn’t, they may want it later for forensics…

Screw that. They don’t need it to be dirty for ballistics. And if someone else comes in here…
 Lee opened the undersink cupboard, touched the gun safe open, removed the gun, and took it over to the kitchen table to disassemble it on the kitchen counter while the kettle boiled.

The roses of Aien Mhariseth…

The doorbell rang.

“Oh, great,” she said, and went to answer it. “Peephole…” she said to the screen in the living room. It showed her the van from her security company parked outside, with a local glazier’s van right behind it; the security-system guy and the glaziers were standing on the doorstep. “Open,” Lee said, and the door swung wide. The three men walked in, and Lee was briefly surprised at the shocked look on their faces.

“We weren’t 
that
 late, lady,” one of the glaziers said.

Lee stood puzzled for a moment, then realized they were all staring at the gun in her hand. “Oh. Sorry!” she said. “I was just going to clean it. Come on, the broken doors are back here.”

She showed them into the kitchen, poured them xoco, poured some for herself, and put the gun away again: it would wait until later. Then she went back out to the living room. “Directional display,” she said, sitting down on the sofa again, “and refuse everything except calls from the office until further notice.”