And for the time being—probably for a while to come after that too—that was about as much as could be said. The general arrived shortly afterward and went into conference with the Querl deputation. All around, as the morning wore on, the winding down and disbanding commenced of the elaborate orchestration of men and machines that had come together to make a last stand. The group found transport to an air supply base in the rear, where Koyne and Davis bade their farewells and departed to report to Air Force administration. Two hours later, Cade and his remaining companions boarded an airlift flight bound for the Los Angeles area. On the way, they restored contact with the Catacombs via one of the temporary satellite links that the Querl were setting up. Yassem, Vrel, Dee, Luke, and Di Milestro had stories of their own to tell, but they were all fine. Los Angeles was going to need some rebuilding in places. But perhaps that wasn’t such a bad thing, either.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
Cars by the thousands, along with trucks, buses, and planes were pouring back into Washington, D.C., reversing the exodus that had cleared the city of eighty percent of its population. Compared to what had gone on in other places, however, damage in the east was light. Hyadean orbital weapons had dealt effectively with the long-range missiles lobbed from submarines and the easternmost parts of Asia, while conventional interceptors and antiaircraft ground systems had stopped most of the bombers and cruise missiles on their way from Federation territory or from Canada. The ones that got through had not brought the all-out nuclear annihilation of cities that the panic had been about. Now, Ellis’s administration had been toppled by rebellious military chiefs, following the Chrysean pull-out, and what might happen next was anybody’s guess. One sure thing was that the shakeup would be worldwide.
The news going around the Hill didn’t exactly speak of loyal camaraderie and trusty friends staying true to the end. With protectors and patrons tumbling by the hour, and the power holders of yesterday rushing to denounce each other while displaying their own clean hands, distinct risks could attend knowing too much about those with dangerous rivals. Acting as Toddrel’s dirty-work specialist had paid off and brought its benefits; but that same history also meant that Toddrel had much on Drisson that could be bargained or turned around to sanitize his own image. In short, it was time to claim on the insurance.
Drisson pushed a package wrapped in a plastic bag across the table to Laura as they sat in a secluded corner of a cocktail lounge called the Fairway, on the west side of the city toward Georgetown. “Untraceable. All identifying marks removed,” he murmured. He had established long ago that she could use a gun. Making sure of detail was another part of his business. Toddrel was in town, staying at a hotel called the Grantham that he often used, a couple of blocks off Rhode Island Avenue.
Laura took the package and put it in her purse on the chair beside her, zipping the top closed. “You’re really sure you want to trust an amateur with this?” She made it sound mildly playful, as if complimenting his own professionalism.
Drisson smiled. “We both know it has to be this way. You’re sure you have the routine? You call him to say you’re in town and need to talk to him. Turn on the charm once you’re over there. Then do the job after you’ve serviced him. Throw a few things around the room, fingernail scratches on the body. . . . Use your creativity. So when they find him, it’s a simple, open-shut case of Casper getting some relaxation after all the tension, ending up in a fight, and things went too far. Anonymous hooker. No political implications. Clean.”
Laura swirled her drink while she considered, then took a sip. “Isn’t it being a bit overfinicky?” she queried. “From what I hear, political cleanups are likely to be the fashion around here. Is anybody going to be caring about one more, one less?”
“Why risk anything needlessly?” Drisson watched as she thought it through, still looking for the flaws, her gaze darting now across the items on the table, then to the far side of the room. His hand gripped her wrist reassuringly. “Just this one thing, and we’ll be in the clear,” he told her. “Then we break out the stash, make a big transfer to Australia, south of France, Argentina—wherever you want. A year or two of yachts, classy people, sunshine, and beaches while the heat here dies down.”
Laura stared for several seconds at the almost-emptied glass of bourbon in front of him, then raised her eyes to meet his. For a moment, Drisson thought she was about to decline or start debating the issue. But she nodded finally and said, simply, “Okay.”
Drisson smiled, relieved. “I knew you had it in you. Call me immediately to confirm, before you leave. That’s important. I need the timing right to make sure Ibsan isn’t around when you leave. Afterward, I’ll meet you back here at say . . . eleven, unless we agree something different. Any more questions?” Laura shook her head. Drisson raised his glass, emptied it, and brushed his mustache with a knuckle. “Okay. Then we probably shouldn’t walk out together. I’ll see you here later.” He rose and squeezed her shoulder. “Don’t let me down, eh, baby?”
Actually, Drisson had arranged a quiet meeting between Ibsan and a confidential informant from the Pentagon concerning private matters that evening, so Ibsan wouldn’t be anywhere around. But the timing was still important. Drisson had other plans.
“No, no! I don’t want to talk to them. Just say you couldn’t find me. . . . I said I’d take care of it.” In his room at the Grantham, Toddrel cut off the phone. Everything was closing in. The Hyadeans were looking for blood over what had gone wrong in South America. Police detectives were already rounding up victims for the war-crimes show-trial circus that would be staged eventually to allay the public’s already emerging thirst for revenge and justice. His name would surely be on a dozen lists. He wiped his brow. The clean shirt he had put on after getting back was already sodden. Had to control his nerves. He reached for the printout he had taken of the progress being made in restoring travel services. As he did so, his eye caught the shot being presented on the room’s view screen of Cade, Cade’s former wife, and the two Hyadeans talking to a news reporter on their arrival in California. Cade! . . . Toddrel’s fingers crumpled the paper involuntarily. Ever since their interference in Chattanooga, vanishing and subsequent reappearance in South America, and then the screening of that disastrous TV documentary, it seemed they had been at the center of everything connected with the reversal of Toddrel’s fortune’s. Arcadia, the agent in California, was supposed to settle the score; only, Arcadia turned out to be the one who was blown up instead. Toddrel still hadn’t heard a satisfactory explanation of how that could have happened. Cade hadn’t even been there, in any case. So Cade had to be dead—killed in South America somewhere, Toddrel had been told—until intelligence reported him turning up again, alive and well in Beijing with the Hyadean. And finally bringing the whole house down, Cade and his woman were there in the broadcasts coming back from Chryse itself!—which had resulted in a whole planet erupting in turmoil there and the final ruin of everything here. Now all Toddrel had left was his neck, and that was on the line.
The phone beeped again before his anger boiled over. Even though it was his private channel tone, he kept it on audio. “Yes?”
“Casper, it’s Laura. I was in town. With everything that’s going on I thought you might be here.”
Toddrel keyed the screen on to reveal Laura. “I . . . I am rather busy just now.” He didn’t sound especially pleased.
“Staying low? I hear it’s a witch hunt out there. The long knives are coming out everywhere.”
“That’s friends for you. It’s what you get to expect.”
“Can I come over there?”
“I’m hardly in a mood for romantic distractions right now.”
“Nothing like that. I’m scared, Casper. I need to talk to you. A lot’s going on that I don’t understand.” Her gaze from the screen was insistent.
Toddrel gazed at her sourly, seemed about to refuse, then thought better of it. “Very well,” he said curtly. “I’ll order dinner in the roo
m at, say, eight. We can talk then. Would that suit you?”
“That would suit fine. I’ll be there shortly just. Which room is it? The desk wouldn’t tell me.”
“Six fifty-one. I’ll tell them to give you a key.”
Laura called Drisson immediately afterward. “It’s arranged,” she said. “He’s having dinner in the room. I’ll be arriving there at seven.”
“Don’t forget to call me as soon as it’s done,” Drisson said.
She entered the main door of the Grantham Hotel shortly before seven, walked to the desk, and collected a magnetically coded key to room 651. Then she paused, looking in her purse, until there was a knot of people waiting at the elevators before crossing the lobby to join them. As she did so, she had the strange, prickly sensation of being certain that unseen eyes were watching her. A car arrived. She got in with several others, made sure that the sixth floor button was pressed, but went all the way up to the penthouse bar and found a booth far from the door, where she ordered a coffee. She stayed there almost an hour. Ten minutes before eight, she took the elevator back down to the mezzanine terrace, from where she was able to observe the lobby floor below from behind a screen of ornamental ferns and a rubber-tree plant. She had stopped by earlier, after leaving the Fairway lounge, to check over the hotel layout. Laura believed in getting the details right too.
She called Drisson’s number from there, making her voice shaky and a little breathless. “Okay . . . it’s done. I’m on my way out.”
Drisson appeared from a corner of the lobby below, talking into his phone. “No, don’t. We’ve got an unexpected problem. Ibsan is around in the building. Stay where you are. I’m coming there to get you out a safe way.”
“How long will you be?”
“On my way now. Just a couple of minutes.”
Laura watched him cross to the elevators and push the call button. One of the sets of doors opened. He disappeared inside. She nodded faintly to herself. It was the way she had guessed. She raised the phone again and called Toddrel’s private number. He answered almost at once. “I’m on my way up now,” she told him. “There was a crowd around the desk. I’ll get the key later.” Unzipping the top of her purse, she made her way back across the terrace to the mezzanine-level elevator doors and pressed the “up” button.
Drisson would arrive at the room any moment now. He would knock, thinking Laura was there, waiting. Toddrel would open the door, expecting Laura; or even if he checked through the spyglass first, seeing it was Drisson, he would let him in. Finding Toddrel alone and unharmed, Drisson, being Drisson, would immediately conclude a double cross and have seconds to decide his move. Laura thought she knew what the outcome would be.
She came out of the elevator and followed the corridor to 651, holding the key in one gloved hand, the other resting lightly inside the top of her purse. She looked quickly left, then right. The corridor was empty. Producing the gun, she slid the key softly into the slot until she heard the lock disengage, then pushed the door open and stepped quickly inside. Toddrel’s body was crumpled on the floor, crimson spreading across his shirt and oozing onto the carpet. Drisson was between it and the door, already turning at the sound of its opening, the gun still in his hand. Laura shot him before his mouth had framed the first word. Then she eased the door shut and stood motionless with her back pressed against it, feeling her chest pounding while she listened for any reaction to the shot. Everything outside seemed quiet. She looked apprehensively at Drisson, dreading that he might make some sound or move, and if so, wondering if she would be able to bring herself to finish the thing. But he remained inert. Laura could detect no sign of breathing. She forced herself to be calm.
The line about making it look like a hooker had been for Laura’s benefit. She was supposed to have been next. Drisson’s real intent had been to set up a scene that would look like a fatal quarrel between Toddrel and his high-class mistress. Being the only other person who would have known about Drisson’s insurance to protect himself hadn’t seemed like the surest way of getting to see much sunshine or many beaches.
Laura walked past Drisson to where Toddrel was lying, stooped to press his hand around the gun that she had used, and then tossed it on the floor in the middle of the room. Then she dug deeper into her purse, took out a plastic bag stuffed with napkins, and from them carefully extracted the glass Drisson had been drinking from in the Fairway lounge earlier. She looked around, and after a moment set it on the countertop above the room’s mini refrigerator, along with a half bottle of bourbon which she had partly emptied. She had no idea, really, what the police would make of it; but she had every confidence in their ability to come up with something ingenious and satisfying.
The final thing that caught her eye as she checked over the room was a picture frozen on the viewscreen of two people facing the camera in front of a background of planes releasing missiles at targets on what looked like the outskirts of a city. It was the man called Cade, from California, who seemed to have been involved wherever trouble broke out during the past few weeks. The woman with him was his former wife, who had been with the CounterAction terrorists. Casper had developed some kind of an obsession about them.
As Laura walked away along the corridor, she reflected that curiously it was those same two who, in a way, had been instrumental in bringing about the events that had just transpired in Room 651. Ever since the first documentary they had appeared in, which a few renegade Hyadeans made in South America, Laura had found herself seized by a growing feeling of revulsion at the pictures of burning villages, maimed children, pain, suffering, terror on the faces of defenseless people—the real price that had been paid to make possible the life she had enjoyed. Now, somehow, she felt cleansed of it, as if, to some degree at least, she had atoned.
Had Toddrel had some kind of premonition that they would be a cause of this? she wondered as she waited for the elevator. She had never really had much time for things like that. By some accounts that she’d read, Hyadeans found such possibilities intriguing. And they seemed pretty smart. Maybe it would be something to look into.
A feeling of relief enveloped her as she came out into the night air without incident. Getting away from Washington and the East Coast in general for a while seemed like a wise move in any case, she decided. As she walked away along the street, the thought occurred to her that maybe the kind of work she heard was going on in California could use some help: putting the U.S.A. back together again along the lines that had been intended—or maybe along new lines that were even better; learning to work with the Hyadeans in ways that would benefit everybody; discovering the other sides to life there were besides just making money. Maybe she would even get a chance there to meet this mysterious Mr. Cade and his ex—Marie, was it?—in person there. Now that sounded interesting and different.
She came to an intersection, managed to stop one of the few cabs that were back on the streets, and gave the address of the hotel across town that Drisson had checked her into.
Something challenging, creative, and useful to people. A way, maybe, to make up to some degree for a life that so far hadn’t had a lot going for it that she felt particularly good about or proud of. Yes, Laura decided as she settled herself back in the rear seat of the cab. That was the kind of change she wanted.
EPILOGUE
Cade had seen pictures of the Hyadean launch complex at Xuchimbo in western Brazil, which gave him a general idea of what to expect. But none of them had quite prepared him for the scale of the engineering—even “grandeur” would not have been an inappropriate word, despite the characteristically dull and utilitarian flavor of all things Hyadean. The optimists and visionaries on both worlds were saying that would all change very quickly now in the years ahead.
He stared out at it from a medium-size Hyadean passenger transport completing its flight from Denver. The pointed gray, white, and silver spires of the landers stood amid immense service gantries towering above the pad and associated constructions like a me
tallic castle from some giants’ fairyland dominating the surrounding landscape of forested hills and steep-sided valleys. On the near side, several miles from the launch complex, was the landing area for conventional craft toward which they were descending, attended by a conglomeration of base facilities, roadways, bridges, pipe systems, and conveyor lines. One of the Querl officers in the party picked out a tall shape of pale gray, flaring at the tail into cruciform deltas set between a booster cluster. Cade studied it, intrigued. That was the ferry that would carry them up tomorrow morning to join the orbiting Querl mother ship due to depart for Chryse.
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