The Goliath Stone (6 page)

AIDS DOCTOR MURDERED!

The picture below was from his original passport photo, so there was no chance anyone would recognize him.

The vendor was willing to accept Swiss francs, though the sucre was worth more.

Tragedy struck the world last night when nanotechnology wizard Tobias Glyer, MD, PhD, believed responsible for this year’s sudden halt in deaths from HIV infection, was assassinated with poison gas by agents of the United States government at his apartment in Bern, Switzerland, where he had fled to escape from the persecution of socialist elements at home.

Bern police were only able to identify Dr. Glyer from dental records, as the chlorine gas used made it impossible to distinguish his body from those of his four assailants, who seem to have been killed through their own carelessness. No other persons were killed, though a passerby, Frances Hill, was taken to the Bern Charity Clinic, where she was treated for trace gas exposure and released.

Dr. Glyer’s work in nanotechnology dated back before the launch of the Briareus probe in 2027 …

“I wonder who the extra body was,” Toby said, alarmed.

“I take it the AIDS business wasn’t you?” May said.

“Didn’t even hear about it. I would have expected it to cause a huge fuss.”

“It did. Don’t you watch the news?”

“Ha-ha.” Toby got out the papers he’d been given at customs and checked the name. “Ambrose Hawking,” he said. “Okay, he’s lost me again.”

“Merlin Ambrosius,” said May. “A merlin is a kind of hawk.”

Toby closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and said, “He did this all the time, you know. Threw obscure references into the conversation for no reason. It was like he was holding auditions to see who was smart enough to be worth talking to.”

“I gather you passed.”

“Huh? Oh, because I talked with him often enough to notice?”

“Well done,” she said.

Toby looked at her suspiciously. After a moment she couldn’t keep a straight face any longer. Toby just shook his head and said, “Let’s find our driver.”

A petite woman in a chauffeur’s outfit, who looked like an Indian, and had breasts large enough to be funny (bordering on alarming), was holding up a card that read
TRIFFID
.

May’s face might have been carved from stone. “That’s us.”

“I know. You don’t get used to it.”

“I really, really hate that book.” She had had to listen to jokes about John Wyndham’s best-known work all her life.

“Welcome to The Connors Experience.”

The woman greeted them with, “Cristina Gomez. Shall I take you directly to the Village?”

Toby leapt off the ground when May suddenly shouted,
“When will it end?”
She returned his wide-eyed stare with a glare and added, “Be seeing you,” she said.

“Oh, good grief,” he said, and hove a great sigh. “Ms. Gomez, I take it our cottage is in the Olympic Village?”

“Just outside, sir,” she said, watching May unobtrusively.

“Fine, please take us there.”

“Is the man who gave you that card to hold up going to be there?” May said.

“I don’t know, miss. I got the assignment on the phone.”

May grumbled and followed her to the car.

The car cheered her up. It was an Andes Motors Condor, with most of the rear seats cleared out and a divider added to turn it into a limo. A lot of Lockheed ex-employees had worked for Wyndham for a while, then had time on their hands. Until somebody finally finished the century-long trip “just around the corner” and got fusion to work, it was the cleanest, most efficient car that it was possible to build. Since a small car couldn’t hold the three turbines needed to make it work, it was also large, and that was the reason given for its being banned in the EU and north of the Rio Grande. The additional details that it was stainless steel, never rusting out, and built almost entirely by automation, with no closed-shop unions involved, were never mentioned … and if you did a Web search in those regions, neither was Andes Motors, unless you had an unlicensed satellite link and connected to Lilith.

May settled in, relaxed, and tapped the intercom as the car moved out toward the Olympic Highway. “Sorry I startled you,” she said. “Been a weird day.” As they turned to leave the airport, they passed a streetlight—not sodium, it was possible to see what was going on under it. This proved to be two sign-carrying men, both dressed as Jesus, pointing in the air and shouting at each other before a growing pack of onlookers. A couple of alert cart-pushing vendors were already dibbling to the crowd. “More than usual,” May added.

“Yes, miss. I honestly don’t get why people haven’t thought this asteroid thing through. Obviously someone’s moving it deliberately, and if they just wanted to drop rocks on our heads it would have been a lot cheaper to land on the back of the Moon and shoot them from there. The only danger I see when it gets here is massive currency deflation.” Gomez glanced in the mirror, saw their open mouths, and said, “Did I say something wrong?”

Toby recovered first. “You know William Connors?”

“I had him in my car once.”

May’s eyes went wide, and she put her hand over her mouth. Toby got it a moment later. He couldn’t see the driver’s mouth in the mirror, but her eyes looked like she was grinning. “I used to work with him,” Toby said, having decided that
He used to work for me
probably wasn’t all that accurate in the light of new information.

“Oh, that must have been fun!”

Toby forgot whatever he’d been about to say as he thought about that. “It was,” he realized.

The highway was huge, and even at this hour very busy. Toby turned off the intercom in case the driver wasn’t too distracted by traffic, and said, “You do get that he’s had four federal agents and a stranger killed for me.”

“Oh yes.”

“You also realize that the only people who
don’t
think I’m dead are the ones who are after me.”

“And the ones on your side,” May said. As Toby absorbed that, she added, “And the ones on your side know who their opposition is.”

Toby nodded, thinking, and said, “I wonder what he’s trying to do.”

“‘Show them all,’ maybe? Or just rule the world?”

“Probably not, and definitely not. He didn’t respect most people enough to care what their reaction was. And he had a position piece on ruling the world—well, he had one on damn near everything—but the idea was that anyone who was willing to spend all his time telling everyone how to live well didn’t know how to do it himself.”

“Don’t science fiction writers do that?”

“No, he covered that. They just tell people who are smart enough to pay to listen.”

May blinked a few times, then said, “I’m surprised he didn’t write any himself.”

“Didn’t have the stamina. And if he’d had the energy, he’d have done something … more like he’s doing. Something complex, and significant, that makes lots of money.”

“Like establishing a nation populated entirely by people who have good reason to regard Mob buttonmen as lightweights?”

Toby hadn’t thought that through. “Holy cow. You’re right. Every Indian today is descended from people who survived … hell, everything! If you threw all the invasions Sicily’s been through, from the Punic Wars to Patton, at, say, the Seminoles, they’d call it ‘a bad year.’”

May nodded. “I wonder if—oh, of
course
they have an Olympic team. That’s why we’re here.”

“It’s nice when I can figure something out before you do. Not used to that.”

“So how come you didn’t mention it?”

“Never occurred to me you didn’t know. Not used to that either.”

There were datacards in the magazine pouch, and May rummaged through them and found one on the 2052 Summer Olympics. She plugged it into the screen and tapped menu choices until she got through the ads.

In recent years the International Olympic Committee had remembered what the original purpose of the Games had been: letting everyone see what everyone else could do in battle, without killing each other. Removing the team sports that had been added over past decades had lost them sponsors, but they had gained new ones by adding realistic modern contests. The torch would be lit in four days … which meant Toby and May had avoided most of the rush; which, considering the amount of traffic they were seeing in the middle of the night, was appalling to consider.

The first event would follow the torch immediately: precision skydiving. There had been some injuries in ’48, when it was introduced at Amsterdam, but Quito had less of a wind problem, and had put netting over the stands as well. Other events included silent night swimming and a thousand-meter belly crawl with fifty-kilo pack, the latter judged both by speed and the ability to stay low enough to avoid paintballs.

“Still no bread, I see,” said May.

“I can’t figure out what he’s
doing,
” Toby said.

“Oh, that’s not the interesting question. What bothers me is why he waited twenty-five years to do it,” May said. “What’s he
been
doing?”

Toby stared at her for a moment, then got out his new phone and Lilithed “William Connors, age 90+, U.S., advertising expert.”

He followed the results.

“One year in advertising. Dropped out of sight for the next year. He spent most of the rest in prison,” he said.

“What for?”

“He killed a couple of employees of the National Firearm Registry. He said they’d been finding women who lived alone, who were on record as owning no guns and opposed to private firearms, therefore unarmed—”

“Don’t go on,” she said.

“Right. Anyway, he shot both agents with their own issue pistols.”

“Federal agents? I’m surprised he wasn’t executed.”

He checked details. “My God, he was. There’s an interview with the warden who was with the witnesses. His case was the reason the Feds switched from lethal injection to nitrogen asphyxiation. They ended up giving him sixteen times the normal dose of potassium chloride, but he just kept screaming. Massive coronary spasms. Says here they gave him five grains of Demerol, supposedly for the pain but it’s a huge lethal overdose. He slept for a day and drank about a gallon of water when he woke up. An appellate judge commuted his sentence to life without parole. He was one of the people Ross pardoned on her last day in office. Disappeared immediately, never seen since. —A lot of people were thinking the NFR had him killed.”

“What with?”

“I would think beheading ought to work. Of course, potassium shuts off your heart, and opiates shut off your
brain,
so just separating the two might not be that much more effective. He must have been saturated with nanos by then. It’s a good question.” He noticed something on the phone GPS, and turned the intercom on. “Ms. Gomez, aren’t we headed south of Quito?”

“Yes, sir, to the Olympic Village. It’s the same one used in ’50, at Cotopaxi, except of course the new arena is downhill, not up. We were very proud to have won both bids.”

“… Thanks.” He shut it off again. “They’re holding the Olympics on a
volcano
?” Toby said.

“Hell of a home team advantage,” May said.

“Howzat?”

“They’ll be the only athletes who don’t throw themselves on the ground when the starter’s pistol goes off.” After he’d watched her for a while, she said, “What?”

“I’m lucky you two never met. You’d have gotten along really well.”

“I think that’s the most left-handed compliment I’ve ever gotten. Are you saying we’re an item?”

“I hope so. I’d hate for you to think you’re just an accomplice.”

May laughed and kissed him.

After a few minutes Toby happened to notice that Cristina had opaqued the connecting window.

*   *   *

The “cottage” was just outside the Village proper, and was about three thousand square feet, not including the attached two-car garage. Cristina held the door, as they got out and stared at it. “If this is a cottage, I wonder what they call a mansion around here,” May said.

Cristina pointed up the mountainside.

“… Wow.”

“There are still some comsat launches being done,” Cristina said. “Ecuador is a prosperous nation, miss.”

“Do you take Swiss francs?” May said.

“Oh, there’s no need to tip, I’m a salaried professional.”

“I just appreciate you not calling me ‘ma’am.’”

Cristina frowned slightly, then got out a lighter, flicked it on, and moved it toward May, who blew it out. Cristina looked pleased and said, “A genuine human. Did you know William Connors too?”

“Never met him.”

“It’s just you don’t look like a ‘ma’am.’”

“With the gray hairs?”

“I thought it was ash blond streaks.”

“No tipping at
all
?”

Cristina smiled. Perfect teeth. “Please call if you don’t feel like driving. I’m on retainer for the next two months.” The IOC had also finally gotten the idea that people didn’t want to watch nothing but the Olympics for a week.

“Well, we don’t have cars—”

“Oh!” Cristina slapped herself on the forehead and dug out Condor keys. “They’re in the garage. I’m so sorry, my mind just jumps all over the place these days.” She handed a set to each of them. “The tanks are full, so you won’t need petrol for a while unless you decide to visit Tierra del Fuego or something. The papers are in the strongboxes, just fill them out and file online.” She sketched out a salute, started to turn toward the house, rolled her eyes, and handed them house keys. She made a show of patting herself down, then said, “Yes, that’s everything. House has a phased-array satlink. You’ve got good neighbors if you need a little help, and of course there’s the girls downtown if you need a lot of help.”

“Why ‘of course’?” Toby said.

She stared at him. “You really don’t know,” she said. “You can get a secure link inside. For now, just think about what happens to prostitutes who get old.”

Neither of them could figure out what to say as she saw them to the door.

They went in and still didn’t talk for a while, looking at high ceilings and spacious rooms.