Angelmass

by Timothy Zahn

  There was a receptionist seated at the desk just inside the door, working her way through a neat stack of mail. Hanan stepped to the desk and planted himself squarely in front of it. “I’m Dr. Fowler,” he announced himself, tapping his umbrella tip on the floor for emphasis. As the receptionist looked up, he glanced down at the floor beside her and bent over. With her view blocked by the desk, he let a thick envelope slide out of his sleeve onto the floor and immediately picked it up. “Here—you dropped this,” he added, straightening and tossing the envelope casually beside the stack of mail. “I have an urgent and immediate appointment with Mr. Cimtrask. Kindly direct me to his desk.”

  The receptionist blinked. “Mr. Cimtrask isn’t here,” she said, sounding perplexed. “He understood that he was to meet you in Supervisor Dahmad’s office.”

  “In Supervisor—?” Hanan sputtered under his breath. “That ninny of a receptionist got it wrong. Mr. Cimtrask and Supervisor Dahmad were both supposed to meet me here. Get them back.”

  The receptionist’s face set into hard lines. “Sir—”

  Chandris didn’t wait to hear the rest of the argument, which she was pretty sure Hanan would win anyway. Slipping around behind him, she crossed to a temporarily vacant desk and surreptitiously slid an envelope of her own from her sleeve onto it. She glanced at the nameplate—the man’s name was Bulunga—and passed it by, heading for an older man scowling at his computer a few desks away. His nameplate, she saw, identified him as a Mr. Samak, Agricultural Affairs. “Excuse me?” she said hesitantly.

  He looked up from his work with clear annoyance. “Yes?” he demanded brusquely.

  “I’ve got a letter for you, Mr. Samak,” she said, producing another envelope from the side pocket of her overcoat and handing it to him.

  He shifted his scowl to the envelope. “There’s no return address,” he said. “No official markings Where did it come from?”

  Chandris spread her hands. “Don’t look at me,” she protested. “I’m just a page temp—I don’t know anything. I didn’t even know where to deliver it until he told me.”

  “He gave you my name?”

  “How else would I have known?” Chandris countered patiently. “There’s no address on it, either. He just pointed me to the door, gave me your name, and told me to deliver it.”

  “So it was someone already in the building?” Samak asked, peering suspiciously at the envelope. A man without much humor, Chandris decided, who had likely been on the receiving end of other practical jokes through the years. Her instincts had played her right; she’d picked the perfect target. “What did he look like?”

  “Oh, gee, I don’t know,” Chandris said, shifting around far enough to glance behind her. Mr. Bulunga was back at his desk now, a slight frown on his face as he opened the envelope she’d left for him. “He had short dark hair, dark eyes, and a sort of round face,” she continued, describing Bulunga as accurately as she could without being too obvious about it. “He had on a dark-blue cutback jacket with a gray scarf. Some kind of red pattern on the scarf, I think, but I don’t remember what it was.”

  “Hmm,” Samak rumbled, slitting open the envelope with a paper knife. “Very well. You may go.”

  “Yes, sir,” Chandris said humbly, backing away. Picking up a stack of papers from another unoccupied desk as she passed it, she continued to move away, pretending to study the papers as she waited for the fireworks to begin.

  It didn’t take long. Samak’s scowl grew deeper as he read through the letter Hanan had crafted, and his face was starting to turn an ominous shade of red. Four desks away, Bulunga was undergoing a similar transformation, only in his case it was from harried distraction to open-mouthed astonishment as his contracting grip made crumpled finger marks on the edges of his letter.

  Samak fired the first shot. His darting eyes fixed on Bulunga; and then he was out of his chair, striding over to the other’s desk. “Did you send me this?” he demanded, shoving the letter under Bulunga’s nose.

  To Chandris, Bulunga had the look of someone who was normally fairly easygoing. At the moment, with his own letter half crumpled in front of him, he wasn’t in an easygoing mood. “Get that out of my face,” he growled, glaring up at the other. “What in hell are you talking about?”

  “Gray scarf with a red pattern,” Samak said accusingly, hooking a finger under the edge of Bulunga’s scarf and flipping it out of his jacket. “It was you, all right.”

  “I don’t know what in stux you’re talking about,” Bulunga snapped, snatching his scarf back out of Samak’s hand and standing up so abruptly that the movement sent his chair rolling back to crash into the desk behind him. “But while we’re on the subject of letters, what is this?” he snarled, waving his paper at Samak.

  “What in the name of holiness is going on?” a man in a neat gray suit muttered from a nearby desk.

  Chandris glanced at his nameplate: Wojohowitz. “I was afraid this would happen,” she said to him, letting her voice tremble a little. “That man—Mr. Samak—is an escaped lunatic.”

  “Samak?” Wojohowitz gasped disbelievingly. “But he’s worked here for—well, nearly five years.”

  “That’s his pattern,” Chandris said, raising her voice just enough for Wojohowitz to hear her over the rising volume of the argument. Samak and Bulunga were close to blows now, from the looks of them, and the whole office had stopped dead in its tracks as they watched the show in stunned fascination. “He hides out somewhere for awhile, looking perfectly normal. And then, quite suddenly, he goes berserk.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Wojohowitz glance toward the two guards. “Somebody ought to do something,” he said. “Why doesn’t somebody do something?”

  “We’re waiting for the proper authorities,” Chandris told him. Across the room, she could see Hanan whispering conspiratorily to another of the belligerents’ shocked officemates. Weaving a similar story; only in his version, it would be Bulunga, not Samak, who was the escaped madman. Hanan glanced up, caught her eye— “Unless,” Chandris added. “—yes. You go talk to them.”

  “Me?” Wojohowitz looked like she had just suggested he go swimming with crocodiles. “You must be joking.”

  “I’m a psychiatrist, Mr. Wojohowitz,” she reminded him severely. “I never joke. You’re one of his colleagues, one of the few people he trusts and looks up to. You’re someone he’ll listen to.”

  “No, no,” Wojohowitz protested. “Not me. I mean, he hardly ever even talks to me.”

  “Don’t argue,” Chandris said sternly. “I know this man; and whether you realize it or not, he respects you. Go on— talk to him. He’ll yell at you—he yells at everyone when he’s like this. But trust me, he’ll be listening.”

  “But—”

  “Either you go—right now—or we have to wait for the authorities,” Chandris told him. “He won’t listen to them like he would to you, and they’ll probably have to use physical force or even gas to subdue him. You want that to happen just because you’re not willing to be a hero?”

  She wasn’t sure whether it was the thought of gas in his nice neat office or the magic word hero that had gotten to him. But one of them clearly had. Squaring his shoulders, Wojohowitz pushed back his chair and got to his feet. “Okay,” he said. “You’re the psychiatrist.”

  He strode toward the argument. At the same time, from the other side of the room, Hanan’s chosen pigeon nodded his head in sudden decision and also started into the fray.

  “What’s going on here?” a voice boomed, loud enough to be heard even over the screaming from the middle of the room. There, standing just inside the door, was a white-haired man with the look of authority pasted all over him. Office Manager Cimtrask, undoubtedly, returned from his wild-snipe chase at Supervisor Dahmad’s office.

  Hanan was ready, stepping to Cimtrask’s side even as the other started forward, taking his arm and starting to talk urgently to him in an undertone. Meanwhile, the argument in center stage, now expan
ded to a foursome, carried on without any of the participants paying Cimtrask the slightest notice.

  And things were starting to come to a boil. Backing up all the way to the wall, Chandris sidled along to a position near the two guards still standing outside Forsythe’s office door. Like everyone else in the room, they were watching the gathering storm with growing apprehension. One more good nudge …

  At the doorway, Cimtrask angrily threw off Hanan’s arm and stomped toward the fight. Hanan slapped him encouragingly on the back as he waded in, then caught Chandris’s eye again and nodded.

  Chandris took a long step to the nearest of the guards and clutched at his arm. “Watch out,” she hissed. “That man in the gray suit—Wojohowitz—he said he has a knife! He said if they didn’t shut up he was going to use it”

  And right on cue, Cimtrask reached the argument and grabbed Samak’s arm, half turning around as he did so.

  Giving the guards a perfect profile view of the knife hilt Hanan had stuck to the back of his jacket.

  The guard beside Chandris swore. Throwing off her hand, he charged forward. The other guard already had his phone out and had punched the emergency number. “Medical emergency—Suite 501,” he barked. The first guard reached Cimtrask, spun him around—

  And with a muffled crack, the smoke bomb inside the envelope Hanan had set on the receptionist’s desk went off, blowing a pillar of dense white smoke toward the ceiling.

  Someone screamed. The room’s fire-suppression system had a more practical reaction: as the smoke cloud flattened out along the ceiling, the sprinklers went on.

  The room dissolved into a chaos of shouts and screams and a panic-driven stampede for the door. The second guard started forward, shouting for everyone to remain calm. “Quickly,” Hanan shouted, barely audible over the noise as he thrust his umbrella into the receptionist’s hands. “Here— protect your desk!”

  Automatically, she took it. Automatically, she pointed it toward the misty rain falling onto her precious papers and pushed the release button.

  And let out a scream that momentarily drowned out the entire room as four small, brightly colored lizards fell out of the umbrella and scampered in different directions across the floor.

  Chandris didn’t wait to see any more. Stepping to Forsythe’s office door, she opened it and slipped inside.

  She nearly ran over Kosta in the process. He was standing just to the side of the door, listening to the noise outside his prison with bewildered nervousness. “Chandris!” he exclaimed as she closed the door to a crack behind her and wedged it into place with the tip of her shoe. “What’s going on?”

  “We’re breaking you out,” she told him, pulling off her overcoat. “You have anything you need to grab?”

  “No,” he said, his eyes widening in surprise at the medic’s tunic she was wearing underneath. “What in—?”

  “We’ve got medics coming, and rumors of a knife fight out there,” she said. She turned the coat inside out, displaying the bright red bloodstain on the other side. “You’re one of the victims. Put it on.”

  “I don’t believe this,” he said, shaking his head as he slipped on the coat. “How in the name of the laughing fates did you manage this?”

  “I signed aboard a ship with a lunatic practical joker for captain,” she said, running a quick eye over him and then pulling the door open. “Remember, you’ve been knifed.”

  They left the office, Chandris with a supporting arm around his waist, Kosta clutching at his side over the bloodstain as he shuffled along like someone halfway into shock. The pandemonium in the outer area hadn’t diminished in the slightest; in fact, now that a couple more security men and three medics had arrived, it was that much worse. Chandris led the way around the back of the room toward the door, keeping them as far out of the swirling turmoil as she could.

  They were nearly there when one of the medics glanced over and saw them. “I’ve got this one,” Chandris shouted to him. “The rest are in the office back there. Hurry!”

  He nodded, the movement shaking water off his forehead. Grabbing one of his fellow medics, he started bulling his way through the crowd. Chandris and Kosta reached the door and slipped out.

  In the stairway they ditched Kosta’s bloody coat and her medic’s tunic. A minute later, they were out in the street.

  Hanan was waiting for them around the corner in a line car. “Now, that was a masterpiece,” he said with a grin as the two of them piled into the line car with him. “You know, Chandris, you have the makings of one of the all-time greats.”

  “I’ll stick with the quiet life, thanks,” she said. “What did you write in those letters, anyway?”

  ‘Trade secret,” he said. The grin was still in place, but as Chandris looked closely at him she could see the weariness setting in as the adrenaline-driven thrill of the morning’s events faded away. The weariness, and the pain he’d been trying so hard to hide. “So, Jereko. Where should we drop you off?”

  “The Gazelle,” Kosta told him. “It should be ready to fly by now, right?”

  “Right,” Hanan said, frowning. “You realize, of course, that’s the obvious place for them to start once they sort out the mess upstairs.”

  “Let’s hope they think it’s too obvious,” Kosta said firmly. “But either way, the Gazelle it is.”

  He looked at Chandris. “I’ve got some experiments to run.”

  The sprinklers had been shut down and the more hysterical participants hustled out, but the scene was still one of chaos when Forsythe arrived.

  “What happened here?” he demanded.

  In that first flurry of responses he got five different answers, all of them mutually contradictory, none of them making much sense. But through it all, one fact became clear as a winter morning.

  Kosta was gone.

  Slowly, crunching through scattered papers and desktop equipment, he crossed the room toward his open office door, his feet making unpleasant noises as they squished through the waterlogged carpet. “When did this happen?” he asked the soaked office manager.

  “Not fifteen minutes ago, High Senator,” the manager said. He looked remorseful, embarrassed, and furious all at the same time. “This man called claiming to be—”

  “Thank you, I heard,” Forsythe said, dismissing the man with a curt wave of his hand. Stepping into his office, he gazed at the empty room, the weight of the gun hidden beneath his jacket tugging at his soul like a lump of frozen guilt.

  The gun he had brought to use on Kosta. A gun with which he’d planned to kill a man in cold blood.

  What in the world had he been thinking of?

  He shook his head, wondering what had happened to him. His private refusal to accept an angel in the first place had been on purely moral and ethical grounds. Or so he had thought. And now, to conceal that decision, he’d been prepared to commit murder.

  Could everyone else have been right all along? Was there something about the angels that politicians genuinely did need?

  Could his father have been wrong?

  There was a rapid crunching of wet papers from behind him. “High Senator,” Pirbazari puffed, coming up beside him. “I just heard. He’s gone?”

  Forsythe nodded. “He’s gone.”

  Pirbazari swore under his breath. “I’ll get an all-grid alert out immediately. We’ll get him back. Him, and the rest of his Pax team.”

  He spun around. “Don’t bother,” Forsythe said, catching his arm. “It wasn’t any Pax commando team that did this.”

  Pirbazari frowned at him. “What do you mean?”

  “Look around you,” Forsythe said, waving at the office workers cleaning up the mess. “No one hurt, no real threats made, no weapons drawn except for a silly fake knife hilt. Not the sort of subtlety you would expect from people who would build a ship like the Komitadji.”

  “Then who?”

  “Who else?” Forsythe said. “Our young liner stowaway and professional con artist, Chandris Lalasha.”
r />   Pirbazari’s forehead wrinkled. “She could have been the girl,” he conceded slowly. “But someone said there was a man involved, too.”

  Forsythe hesitated. It was obvious from the description that the man had to have been Hanan Daviee, fresh from his stint at the hospital. But Pirbazari apparently hadn’t gotten the full story yet. “Probably one of her friends,” he said. “She’s been here for months now. Plenty of time to build up contacts.”

  “So where do we start looking?” Pirbazari asked. “Standard underworld hideaways?”

  “As I said, don’t bother,” Forsythe told him. “We’ve got enough trouble as it is without having to worry about a minor Pax spy and his criminal friends. Do we have an ETA on the Komitadji yet?”

  Pirbazari took a deep breath. “It should reach us about two this afternoon,” he said, his voice heavy with reluctance. “Sir, I strongly urge you to reconsider. Kosta may indeed be only a minor spy, but he could still cause a great deal of damage. Particularly if he’s hooked up with criminals. At least let me send someone to the Gazelle—they might stop by there to get some of the girl’s things or clean out the Daviees’ cash supply.”

  “No,” Forsythe said firmly. “You don’t think they would have planned this better than that? Wherever they’re running, they’re well on their way by now.”

  “Yes, sir,” Pirbazari said, clearly still not happy but knowing an order when he heard it. ‘There have been some more developments with Angelmass, too.”

  Forsythe grimaced. “More trouble we don’t need,” he said. “Come on. You can brief me on the way to EmDef HQ.”

  All right, Kosta, he thought as they again passed through the lingering chaos Chandris and Hanan had left behind. If you really want to go out to Angelmass and take a look, you’ve got a clear shot at it. I suppose I owe you that much.

  And if all that had been simply a ruse? If what Kosta had been doing was playing on Forsythe’s sympathies and fears so as to break free and engage in the kind of sabotage Pirbazari obviously expected from him?