“Don’t warn her off, Domek,” Salehi said. “She’s right. She isn’t representing the clone, Trey, because she didn’t want to. She didn’t really care that he died.”
“Not fair, Raphael,” Shishani said.
“Fairness and the truth don’t often go together,” said Salehi.
“Neither do fairness and the law,” Schnable said. “But this time, they just might.”
Salehi rolled his eyes. Schnable was so bad at manipulation. But it was still having an impact.
Salehi didn’t care if the firm made millions. He didn’t care if the law firm had prestige.
He cared about making a difference, about doing something right. If he had it to do all over again, he would not go into law. He’d find another profession, one that actually improved lives rather than defended or prosecuted those who costs lives.
Shishani’s argument about changing the lives of millions of clones was rattling around in his head.
“Let me think about it,” Salehi said.
No one spoke.
But they all knew that he had just agreed to take the case.
FIFTEEN
BY THE TIME the group arrived at his office, Luc Deshin had calmed himself. Or, rather, calmed himself as much as he was going to.
He leaned against the front of his desk, legs spread in front of him, crossed at the ankles, his palms resting on the desk’s surface. He was staring at the clear wall with its frozen image, and he hoped that the expression on his face was one of intrigue, not disgust.
The three representatives filed in, followed by two of his security guards. The representatives wore black, which Deshin thought clichéd. The woman had long black hair, an angular face, and large eyes.
The man to her left was muscular in a way not common among the space-raised. Deshin suspected that if he looked closer, he would see evidence of enhancements, not actual strength.
The third man was older, his white hair contrasting against a youthful face. But his small eyes seemed both old and wary, and his mouth was set in a thin line.
The woman glared at Deshin’s guards, then back at Deshin. “We understood this was a private meeting.”
“It is private,” he said.
“No guards,” she said.
“Then no meeting,” he said.
“We agreed—”
“We agreed that I would meet with you privately, nothing more,” he said. “In Deshin Enterprises, privately means protecting the Deshin at all costs. Hence, the guards. If you don’t like it, get out.”
He was taking a risk. The entire meeting could end right now, and he might have to rely on someone else to get the information he wanted.
And honestly, he had no idea who else he could rely on.
Which was why he was doing all of this himself.
The woman studied Deshin as if she were thinking of calling his bluff. Then she looked at the image on the clear wall. She studied the entire office, saw its 360-degree view of the city, and smiled with only half her mouth.
The expression made her seem bitter.
“Well,” she said, “I suppose one of us has to take a leap of faith.”
As if she were making a sacrifice by letting his guards stay. As if she had risked anything at all.
He had let these people into his empire. He was going to risk his reputation—well, not his reputation, really, but his own sense of self-worth—just to talk with these assholes.
The woman took a few steps toward him, then extended her hand. “Hildegard Iban.”
He didn’t want to take her hand, but he did. Her palm was dry, her fingers bony. “Luc Deshin.”
His guards closed the door and then blocked it with their bodies. The men who had accompanied her shifted nervously.
She tilted her head toward the images on the clear wall. “I see you have the most notorious clones in the universe on your screen.”
Deshin smiled slowly, hoping he looked as dangerous as he felt. He let her hand go. “They were the most notorious until last week.”
She shrugged. “I’m assuming you don’t have a need for alien clones.”
He knew how these negotiations went. Probing questions, parried answers, nothing really resolved until the negotiators came to some kind of deal.
If they came to a deal.
“Can you provide alien clones?” he asked, his voice flat.
Her men looked at him sharply, as if they hadn’t expected him to ask that. She hadn’t bothered to introduce them, which made him think they were her guards.
But he wasn’t going to point out that she had guards and she didn’t want him to.
“I can’t provide anything,” she said.
He felt his heart sink. He had reached out to his contacts in the Black Fleet, knowing he was dealing with the devil. Most of Armstrong believed him to be the worst criminal mastermind in the city, even if none of the prosecutors managed to charge him with anything. And, if he were honest with himself, he was a criminal mastermind, just of a different ilk than most people expected of him.
He saw himself as a bit more fair, a bit more humane, than others saw him. He believed in clarity, which there was little of inside of Armstrong. Hell, inside of the Earth Alliance.
And clarity made him see that the Black Fleet did all of those things that people believed he did, and so much worse. The Black Fleet mostly operated outside of the Earth Alliance, in Frontier space and beyond. But they also did business inside the Alliance, usually through proxies.
Iban was unusual; she admitted her Black Fleet connections.
Of course, it was hard for her not to. She was one of the few members of the Black Fleet who had been captured, tried, found guilty, and who had served time in an Earth Alliance prison.
Deshin suspected she had done so because she wanted to work within the Alliance. The Black Fleet, a loosely connected group of pirates (or at least that was how he characterized them to his staff), was more organized than the authorities thought, and a lot more savvy about how to manipulate the system—all of the systems, not just the Earth Alliance’s systems.
He’d done some business with other members of the Black Fleet before, and it had always left him feeling unclean.
Like now.
The Black Fleet was clearly fronting for someone. Or maybe they wanted to find out if Deshin himself had contacts in the designer criminal clone community.
He had been led to believe that the Black Fleet controlled the entire designer criminal clones market. He had been misled before, but he had caught the misunderstanding before the person trying to mislead him had gotten into his empire.
He would have to do even more work than usual as he scrubbed the building and his networks of any attempts the Black Fleet made to steal information from his business.
“I don’t provide anything directly,” she said into his silence, “But I do have contacts.”
His shoulders relaxed slightly, even though he felt a great deal of irritation. Of course she had contacts. Of course that was why she was here.
He was off his game; he let the images of those damn clone assassins influence his very thoughts.
He longed to shut the image down, but knew he couldn’t.
Iban shifted from one foot to the other. Then she glanced around the office, as if she could peer beneath its surface, and didn’t like what she could see.
Her gaze finally met his again. “If you want to take this discussion any further, we’ll need to mutually agree to shut off all recordings, and shut down our links.”
He snorted in derision. He had learned what was behind that trick long ago. The Black Fleet actually recorded the method each business had for link shutdown, so that its operatives could replicate it when they needed to break into the system.
“No,” he said.
She raised her eyebrows, obviously surprised. He wondered how many other people took her up on that offer, how deep the Black Fleet’s penetration was of every single system inside the Earth Alliance.
“Then we won’t talk,” she said.
He shrugged. “If we don’t talk, you lose millions, maybe a billion or more.”
She pouted just a little. “Oh, you play rough.”
But her eyes were twinkling. She couldn’t hide that. Mention money, and people always became reckless. Even people who thought they were experienced at negotiation.
He shrugged. “My office, my rules.”
She made a slight “humph” sound, but he saw that as a victory. She clearly understood, and there was no way she was going stop the negotiation now.
He kept his expression impassive.
“Well,” she said. “You’re willing to invest a lot of money to—what? Cause chaos?”
And the negotiations continued. She had just conceded a point. Maybe several points.
All the tension left his body, even though he hadn’t moved from his position against the desk.
“I didn’t say I was going to invest,” he said.
She blinked, clearly surprised. “But…”
Then she stopped herself. That single word had revealed her surprise. It cost her. Both of them knew it.
So he decided to pretend he was playing nice. He “explained” himself, which he had been planning to do anyway.
“I don’t make money by getting my hands dirty,” he said. “The fact that I’m even meeting with you is a risk for me.”
That last sounded like a revelation, something he would normally keep secret, even though it wasn’t. He wanted her to feel like she had won a point in return.
“Why would this meeting be risky for you?” she asked, taking the bait. “Because we’re the Black Fleet? Everyone knows what you are, Deshin.”
She meant that as an insult, but he didn’t take it that way. Still, he had to be cautious with her. The smile had left her face. Her expression hardened. She finally looked as dangerous as he had heard she was.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I forgot. ‘Everyone’ is always right. Since you know what I am, and you don’t seem to respect that, I see no point in doing business with you. You can leave now.”
She opened her mouth, probably to emit another “but.” She didn’t. She had that much control, at least.
“I’d like to talk with you about this venture that you’re proposing,” she said. “But it’s my policy not to do so with links.”
“Yes, you’ve made that clear.” He kept his voice calm, although he was truly beginning to hate this woman. Maybe part of that was the backdrop. It almost looked like she was superimposed over the twenty assassins.
He shrugged again. “You don’t want to do business my way. That makes things quite simple for me. I don’t need you. You’re convenient. I’ll find another way to get this project done.”
She glanced at the men. One of them—the one with the fake muscles—shrugged. Maybe Deshin had underestimated them. Maybe they were more than body guards. Maybe they were the ones in charge, and she was just the spokesperson.
“I suppose I could make an exception for you,” she said.
Deshin smiled, even though he knew the look didn’t reach his eyes. “Kind of you,” he said. “However, in the course of this conversation, I realized that dealing with you is not worth my time.”
Her gaze shot to the men again. Two spots of color rose in her cheeks. The money meant something to her. Or maybe his business did.
His reputation—his bad reputation—certainly did.
“We entered the building. People know we came here. People will think we dealt,” she said, sounding a bit panicked.
“Yes, I’m sure they will,” Deshin said. “And that will add to my much-vaunted reputation. The one you already told me about. I’m sure everyone will know that we do business now.”
He pushed off the desk, and walked around it, turning his back on her.
“I’m sorry,” she said, the words hitching a little. Apparently she didn’t say them very often. “We got off on the wrong foot.”
He stopped, stared ahead, as if he were thinking about what she had said. Instead, he was feeling a bit surprised that she was as easy to manipulate as she was. These basic negotiation tactics should have been familiar to a weapons’ broker.
Maybe “everyone” was so afraid of the Black Fleet that they gave in to her every request.
Or maybe she was playing him.
“I was prepared to have a good-faith discussion with you,” he said, as he turned toward her. “Apparently, you don’t do business that way. My mistake.”
She nodded, then glanced at the men. They started to leave.
Deshin had sounded harsh. He hadn’t meant to sound that harsh, but his dislike was showing. Now, he had to pretend to give in. A shudder ran through him that he hoped her partners hadn’t seen.
“However,” he said, “if you’re ready to start over, so am I. Shall we pretend that the first few minutes hadn’t happened?”
“They’ve been recorded,” the muscular man said. “We can’t pretend anything.”
Deshin gave him a withering look. “Is this one of your partners? Because we haven’t been introduced. I thought I was dealing with you, Hildegard, and that these were your body guards. Correct me if I’m wrong.”
He kept his gaze on the other man. That man watched him in return. No body guard, then. Someone important. So important, in fact, that they didn’t want to introduce him.
Deshin had heard about this with the Black Fleet, that they had nameless negotiators, people who were all the more terrifying because they were impossible to read and know.
Iban glanced at the other man. Her expression hardened, her eyes glazed, telling Deshin that she was concentrating more on communicating through her links than on what was going on around her.
If Deshin had been a slightly different man, he would have smiled. He had gotten her to forget that she was in someone else’s office, around someone else’s technology.
Technology that was as sophisticated, if not more sophisticated, than the technology of the Black Fleet.
“Ms. Iban?” Deshin said, deciding he had let her lose focus long enough. “Does this man speak for you?”
Her eyes focused on Deshin.
“He’s part of my team,” she said. “He’s—”
“If you’re going to make an introduction,” Deshin said, “I really don’t care. Did you want to talk business or not?”
She gave the man a sideways glance, probably accompanied by yet another chastising link comment, and said, “I thought you weren’t interested in working with us.”
“You told me that you can get clones,” Deshin said, ignoring her challenge. “I’m assuming you mean designer criminal clones.”
“Anyone can get designer criminal clones,” she said. “You can get them without us, and you have, at least according to the records I saw.”
He didn’t smile, even though he wanted to. His people had planted that information over a week ago, just for this moment. Before the second attacks on Armstrong, which had given him a bit of concern. He hadn’t wanted to be accused of working with clones, at least not from the Armstrong side of things.
So far, the law enforcement community had its hands full, with the attempted bombings. He hoped that by the time they got to a search of the records of people who had asked for designer criminal clones, his name would be scrubbed from the list as if he had never put it there.
“These twenty men,” she said, waving a hand at the image, “aren’t designer criminal clones, and you know it. I don’t appreciate being played, Mr. Deshin.”
Oh, he had just begun to play with her. He smiled, just a little.
“I’m not playing you,” he lied. “I’m waiting for you to talk with me.”
She raised her head, as if he had surprised her. Then she again swept her hand toward the images on that clear wall.
“Those men weren’t just grown,” she said. “They weren’t just ‘designed.’ They were trained, honed, tested, and ultimately chosen to do t
hat job. They were picked based not just on their physical traits, but also on their willingness to complete the job no matter what.”
“A few didn’t finish,” Deshin said, trying to keep his tone neutral. He was grateful that several were unsuccessful with at least part of their mission; it saved a few lives, albeit not enough.
“A few didn’t,” she said. “In the field, you never know what a man will do.”
“Sounds like an excuse to me,” he said.
She raised her chin. He had offended her.
“It’s not an excuse. If you want predictable behavior, get an android. See if it can infiltrate the places that these clones infiltrated. Or, for that matter, the Peyti clones. Good Lord, they were embedded in the system for years, and no one suspected a thing. That’s useful. The fact that there’s a bit of a failure rate is to be expected, not criticized.”
She had a point. A chilling point, but a good one.
“You’re sensitive,” he said.
“You’re critical,” she said.
“I’m trying to buy a product,” he said, mentally wincing. “Of course I’m going to be critical.”
She started to glance at the men again, then stopped herself. She kept her gaze focused on Deshin. “What kind of job is this for?”
“Something similar to the Anniversary Day attacks,” he said.
“With humans?” she asked.
“With humans,” he said.
“How similar?” she asked.
“I’m not telling you that,” he said.
She sighed. “Then I can’t help you. Because I need specifics. Otherwise, I can’t place an order.”
He put his hands on the chair behind his desk, as if he were going to sit down. Instead, he used the desk to shield himself from the view of the three Black Fleet members. He didn’t want an involuntary twitch to give anything away.
He didn’t say anything. He was beginning to learn that was the best way to handle this woman, because she would keep talking.
And she did.
“I ask for a couple of reasons,” she said. “The first is pretty simple. With last week’s failed attack, the Moon’s authorities are going to monitor clones heavily. There’s already legislation being proposed by the Earth Alliance that would make use of multiple clones of the same individual illegal and subject to huge penalties. The legislation would also allow for what most of us would consider a huge invasion of privacy if those same actions were directed at us.”
The Peyti Crisis: A Retrieval Artist Novel: Book Five of the Anniversary Day Saga (Retrieval Artist series 12) Page 9
