The Ganymede Club (28 page)

Lola thought immediately of Spook. He had tried to help her sort out Bryce's muddled and contradictory background, and she had encouraged him. But if she had exposed him or Bat to danger
("Look after Spook, don't let him get into trouble "),
then it was all her fault if . . .

"As for what we should do next," Bryce was continuing, cutting off that troubled train of thought. "I don't know. We can't leave him trussed up like that forever. On the other hand, we can't let him up to have another go at you, or me, or anyone else he chooses. So I say we visit the person who set him onto us, and find out what's really going on."

"But what about him?" She glanced down at Jinx Barker.

"You stay. When I said
we
make a visit, I actually meant
me.
"

"I can't let you."

"So give me an alternative. We have to discover what all this is about, because it's obvious that somebody thinks I'm something I'm not. The obvious person to talk to is Alicia Rios, and from what you told me, she's not that far from here. Are you willing to leave him here alone?" Lola's shiver gave the answer. "I thought so. Nor am I. And we couldn't possibly take him with us."

There was a gleam of manic excitement in his eye. Lola recalled the hurtling space scooter, skimming within inches of a mottled mountain of rock and ice. That had been his idea of
pleasure.
But these dangers were likely to be far more subtle.

"What will you say to her?"

"I don't know. Something innocent. It will depend on what she says to me."

"Be careful."

"I will." Again he seemed changed, older and more aware of himself than she had ever seen him. He was nodding his head thoughtfully. "I know how to be careful. I know it very well. And unless you have any other suggestions I ought to be on my way—before Alicia Rios has time to suspect that her plans are not working out."

* * *

Joss Cayuga was still on Ganymede. The brawls of the big world made him nervous, and he would much rather be safe on Lysithea, but he had learned to follow his instincts. His last meeting with Alicia Rios had left him profoundly uneasy.

Allowing Jinx Barker direct and personal interaction with a haldane had been an act of pure folly. Worse than that, though, was Alicia's admission that Barker had been crazy enough to bring Lola Belman to a First Family party. That was Jinx's braggadocio, the very opposite of discreet behavior—and Alicia Rios had gone right along with it. According to Lenny Costas, Belman had seen both him and Dahlquist, while Alicia had actually walked right up to the haldane and done everything but talk to her. Inviting attention like that was asking for trouble. It forced the question, How much could Jinx Barker be trusted? And, since Alicia Rios apparently had infinite faith in the man, a second question: Had Alicia herself become an intolerable risk for the Ganymede Club?

Cayuga had been hiding out in a travelers' terminal on one of the upper levels, close to Ganymede's biggest spaceport. He had been there for two days. It was a perfect place to remain unnoticed, because, although food and accommodation were available around the clock, everyone else was in transit. Every few hours a different set of strangers rolled in, each preoccupied with worries of ship timetables and manifests.

Cayuga consulted his watch. He had told Alicia that he would call her at about this time. She would be in her own quarters, but she believed that he was far away on Lysithea.

He left the restaurant and made his way to a booth in the travelers' communications center. His call could not go to Alicia directly through Ganymede circuits, or she would notice the absence of signal travel time to and from Lysithea. Cayuga requested a call route via a relay station on Callisto, including a half-minute hold on signals forwarded in each direction. He waited patiently while the connection was established to Callisto and back to Alicia's home deep in Ganymede, and waited again for Alicia to pick up. He was becoming convinced that she was not there as planned when at last her face appeared within the display volume.

"Cayuga? Where have you been? I called you an hour ago, and all I got was a low-level fax. You need to change him, by the way—he's still a Jeffrey Cayuga facsimile."

"I will, as soon as I get some free time. I've been up near the surface, reviewing the defense systems. What's the status with Jinx Barker?"

While the message was beamed to Callisto and back, he decided to leave a higher-level fax in charge the next time he was away. The level-two fax that he had been using was not very smart, and a clever questioner might be able to trick it into revealing things about Lysithea that Cayuga did not care to have known.

"It's going very well," said Alicia Rios at last. "In fact, the first and most difficult part is complete. Barker took his haldane-friend on a very special date last night. No one but Barker knows where they went—not even me—and he assured me that there would be no physical evidence. She's definitely history at this point. Otherwise Jinx would have called me today and said there had been a hitch, and I have not heard from him. Next he plans to deal with the others—the patient and then the brother and the brother's friend. Jinx hardly knows them, and they don't know each other very well, so no one will connect them or suspect him when something happens to them. All right?"

"Excellent. He is sure that is enough, and there is no need to spread the net wider? Maybe there should be others."

"Be reasonable, Cayuga. He says that's everyone. We have to trust Jinx."

"I trust no one."

"Well, we have to stop somewhere—otherwise there will be no one left on Ganymede."

"No one except members of the Ganymede Club? That would be acceptable. Never forget the stakes, Rios. We have too much to lose. When will Barker complete the rest of his work?"

"Today. I am expecting him to call me when it is done, and then I will call you."

"At once, if you please. This situation is not at all to my liking."

Cayuga terminated the connection but remained seated in the booth. He ought to feel relieved, and did not. "We have to trust Jinx." There you had it, the problem with Alicia Rios. She hardly seemed to realize that Jinx Barker was not a Club member. Better if she had said, "We must check constantly on everything that Jinx does."

Almost without thinking, he consulted the Ganymede directory. The listing of licensed haldanes showed the name, Lola Belman, and the full routing. He placed a call, directly this time, and waited. He was expecting an answering service, a fax, or possibly no reply at all. There was a long delay, until he was sure that no one was there and he was ready to cancel. When his finger was already on the button, the display volume came alive, a breathless voice said, "Yes?," and a woman's face appeared.

Cayuga hit the disconnect instantly. With instinctive caution he had disabled the video link from his end, even though he had not expected a human to answer. It was remotely possible that she would be able to trace him, but only if she were already in tracking mode before the call came in. She would not have had time to enable it in the split second that they were connected. He, on the other hand, had been concentrating hard on his display. Her face, whoever she was, was clear in his memory. He returned to the directory and asked for access to information files on haldane services. It took a minute or two to locate what he wanted, but the file on every licensed haldane, as he had hoped, included an image ID.

He waited until retrieval of the image of Lola Belman was complete. His warning voices had already told him what he might see. Sure enough, here it came: Lola Belman was the woman whose worried face just two minutes earlier had filled the display. A worried woman, but certainly alive. According to Alicia Rios and Jinx Barker, she had died last night.

Cayuga did not waste time cursing. He recorded the image and then at once placed another call. This time he needed the video link. He waited impatiently until Lenny Costas's frowning face appeared in the display.

"Lenny, we have a problem. A big one."

"Another one?" The big greying head nodded slowly. "You know, I am not surprised, even though Jinx Barker and Alicia are supposed to be fixing everything."

"They are a major part of the problem." Cayuga summarized for Lenny Costas his conversation with Alicia, and what he had since learned. At the end he said, "We must seek the concurrence of the rest of the Club, but I think that you and I have to be ready to act—at once. Barker and Rios, by their actions, are threatening everything that we have worked so hard to create."

Costas shrugged. "Again, you fail to surprise me. Are you proposing what I think you are?"

"Yes."

"For both Jinx Barker and Alicia Rios?"

"Yes."

"Barker, without question. But she is a member of the Club."

"True. And she should therefore have taken her responsibilities much more seriously. We are all bound by the same rules, Lenny. We must recognize the same consequences."

"It is easy to
say
that we must deal with Jinx Barker. But you, Cayuga, warned me long ago how difficult that might be."

"Less so if we act before he suspects. I am willing to take that responsibility if you will handle Rios."

"You give me the easy one. I know her schedule, where she is, what she does. What about Barker? We do not know that he even returned from his assignment with Lola Belman."

"Let me worry about that. As an additional action I propose to do what Jinx Barker failed to accomplish with Lola Belman. I hope that she, with suitable persuasion, will also be able to tell me the location of Jinx Barker."

"Be careful, Cayuga. This whole thing could have been set up as a Barker-Rios trap."

"I am always careful. Now I will call the other Club members. If they feel as I suspect they will feel, you must be ready to head for Alicia Rios's apartment within the hour."

"You think it is that urgent?"

"I don't know. I dare not assume that it is not. One other thing: It is imperative that no trace of Alicia Rios remain for analysis."

"I know that as well as you do."

"My apologies. But we can never be too careful." Cayuga gave the signal to transmit the file image of Lola Belman to Costas. "This is the haldane whom Barker failed to eliminate. If I succeed with Barker but do not myself survive the event, there will be an item of unfinished business. You will need to dispose of her. And if you do, let me return to you the warning that you offered me: Be careful, Costas."

18

An accidental call from another person meant nothing. Such things happened all the time. Lola had certainly made calls like that often enough herself.

But suppose that the call came when you had been the victim of a murder attempt only fourteen hours ago. Suppose that you had not slept since then, or since the previous morning, that the would-be killer was even now stretched out, unconscious at your side; and that practically all you knew about him was that he was working for someone you had never met. Did a short and aborted call still mean nothing?

Not if you were Lola Belman. Not when the unseen other person terminated the call at once, with no word of explanation or apology.

Within a few seconds of the phone signaling its disconnect her forehead was cold and clammy, and her stomach churned with tension. She glanced over at Jinx Barker, suddenly afraid that he might be awake and trying to free himself. He was still lying there, peaceful and sedated.

Had the caller, whoever it was, expected to see him and been shocked to see Lola? Worse than that, the person at the other end now knew that Lola was alive. She had even spoken to the person—only one word, but maybe one word too many.

Her old fear came rushing back. She had omitted to ask Jinx Barker a crucial question, and now that he was heavily sedated it could not be asked: Who else had he been ordered to kill? Her and Bryce, she knew that, but what about Spook? He had been involved with the Sonnenberg case. Barker had actually met Spook several times. She might even have told him that Spook was helping her.

The internal door leading from the office to her apartment was locked. All thumbs, she fumbled at the setting, until at last she managed to engage the wards and the multiple bolts slid free. She hurried along the little hallway that led to Spook's rooms.

He wouldn't be there, surely; it was early afternoon. The study was empty, but she gasped with relief when she barged into his bedroom and saw a hump in the untidy heap of the bedclothes.

"Spook!" She went across and grabbed his shoulder. "Get up. Right now."

He grunted and tried to turn his back to her. She took his arm and neck and shook as hard as she could. "Wake up!"

"Quit that." He raised a tangled head and scowled at her. "I need sleep. I was up all night."

She dragged him, bedclothes and all, onto the hard floor. "I'm not joking. Get up, or I'll pour cold water on you."

He was finally awake enough to register her tone of voice. He sat upright. "What's wrong with you? What happened?"

"You have to get dressed and out of here this minute. This place isn't safe."

He stared around him, as though expecting cracks to open in the walls or poison gas to come flooding from the ventilators. "It sure looks safe." But he was already over at the closet, grabbing at a bundle on the floor. "Get out and go where? We live here, remember?"

Where? Somewhere safe, somewhere unknown to Jinx Barker and to everyone connected with him.

"Your friend Bat. Did he or you ever tell Conner Preston where he lives?"

"Are you kidding?" Spook didn't believe in wasting time on things like folding clothes. The bundle he had grabbed was a crumpled shirt and slacks, and he was already into them and grabbing his shoes. "The Bat Cave? Bat would kill me if I even hinted at where it is. He's a real privacy freak."

"Great. You're going over to Bat's place, and you're going to stay there for a while."

"Get real, sister. You think I can just wander over to the Bat Cave, and drop myself off there as a house guest?"

"You have to." Lola made a decision. Jinx Barker would be out completely for at least a couple more hours, and his ankles and wrists were still bound by heavy tape. It would surely be safe to leave him. "I'll come with you and explain to Bat why it's really important."