Kaspar's Box tk-3

by Jack L. Chalker

  He looked over and saw that the holographic plate was pulsing, indicating that there was some sort of message for him. He went over, sat down, and said, “Communications, replay message for Murphy, Patrick.”

  “Message is nonverbal,” the comm reported.

  “Really? Well, put it up on the screen.”

  It was from his local bank. It showed a massive infusion of real cash into that account. Convertible cash, useful for transfer as well as just sitting there.

  More than enough for passage first class almost anywhere he wanted to go, for buying another junker of a freighter, plus sufficient funds for several weeks of one damned huge and wondrous bender.

  It was more than enough, and it wasn’t nearly anything he particularly wanted right now. It was more than a credit statement, it was a message from the Order of Saint Phineas and those behind it.

  Payment due on acceptance of the delivery of the ordered merchandise.

  Damn their dark souls!

  VII: THE DISLOYAL OPPOSITION

  The street might have been out of some idealized old history film or photo save for some of the exotic trees and flowers that could be seen both in front of the stately line of cleaner-than-nature brick brownstones and in the small flower boxes set outside oversized upper-floor windows. The places were larger than they looked at first glance, but still might have been dismissed as middle-class housing but for the gilding around the windows, doors, and immaculate edgework, and the fact that few middle-class townhouses sported upper-story gargoyles and such intricate wrought-iron works placed almost purely for decoration. More Embassy Row than Accountant’s Row, although there was no sign of any more formal function on any of the houses than as homes. The exception was a single city block stuck almost incongruously in the middle of the double rows of brownstones, a block that contained not houses but something more like a compound.

  High wrought-iron gates, or gates of some material that seemed like it, blocked vehicle-sized entrances at both ends of the block, and between was a long and quite tall brick wall of the same complexion as the facing houses. Looking in through either gate’s lattice work revealed a semicircular driveway around a formal garden leading to a single large brick structure two stories high but fully a third of the block in area. It might have been an old-style mansion house or the headquarters of the local historical society.

  Murphy thought it looked like a funeral home.

  In the dwindling light of dusk it appeared as a remote chunk of near pitch darkness, out of place here or most anywhere in spite of the attempts to blend in using the brick and iron facade. It barely looked inhabited, but the light from two upper-floor windows was bleeding through drawn curtains, and the indirect lighting illuminated the walkway up to the rather imposing pale yellow front door. He had no doubt, though, that there were cameras galore embedded in or perhaps peering over that wall, and all sorts of security monitors covering every square millimeter of the grounds. The mere fact that it wasn’t already victim to hordes of robbers attested to that.

  Murphy really didn’t know why he was there, not exactly. Concern for the girls, certainly, even though they might well be far from the city by now and nowhere near this mausoleum, and possibly curiosity as well. These people had used him many times; now he thought it was about time to stop just counting the money and taking the rest for granted.

  Most of all, he didn’t like the way things had been handled. After all this time, he deserved a bit more than going down to the local monkey house and having his charges snatched right in front of him. There was simply no call to do it, particularly since they knew he knew who the client was and even where in the city they dwelled.

  If they were aware of him at all at this point, then they certainly would recognize him. He didn’t mind that so much, except that they might think he was double-crossing them and now represented some sort of threat. There was always that angle, he reflected. To them, he was a shady agent employed on a need-to-know basis and not needing to know very much, working strictly for money. They had always dealt with him at arm’s length, by electronic messenger and security level calls, never in person, and that alone said to him that they had a very low opinion of his character.

  He took a flask from his back pocket and drank a slug, letting it burn as it went down. How dare they impugn his honor and his motives! Never in his entire life had he ever betrayed his word, nor failed to protect the interest of his paying clients.

  He reached the end of the long block, turned, and began walking down the side street along the now unbroken wall. Definitely sensors all along it. He didn’t dare bring any really good surveillance tools with him, since he assumed that strangers on foot would be observed, but he did have a few things in his clothing that could give him silent readings. The electrical fields were quite clear. The wall was literally riddled with top-of-the line security monitoring systems, that was for sure. Anybody trying to climb over that wall would be known in nothing flat. Anyone using any kind of cloaking to prevent that monitoring would still fail, since the continuous energy field their stuff set up would create a moving silhouette of any intruder that would be just as obvious as someone tripping the alarms. Even the best cloaking would reveal sufficient distortion to draw much attention to the one who was cloaked.

  One thing was certain: the Order of Saint Phineas had money to burn and used it to buy only the best.

  Hell, they’d used it to hire him, hadn’t they?

  There were two small service entrances in the back wall off an urban alley, but neither afforded any view at all of the inside, not even what could be seen through the front gates. The big house was set back, so it was much closer to the alley than the main street, but there was still a fair amount of space to cover if you went in here, and those sensors were everywhere and quite directional.

  So, okay, Murphy. You’re an old fart way past your prime who gets winded going downhill. How the hell would the likes of you get into a place the likes of this one?

  He didn’t have an answer for that. In fact, the only answers for the really tough ones were twofold: local, preferably inside information, which he didn’t have, and whatever money it took to finance what was needed to pull it off once you had that information.

  He had the money, but it would take far too much to pull something like this off, and to what end? To see the inside? To say goodbye to the Three Ditzy Colleens? Hardly.

  Nope. You’d have to go in by air somehow, and silently at that, then land quiet as a mouse on one of them attic dormers, then find one that you could neutralize the alarms for and then open and squeeze in undetected. You’d need night vision, a couple of good ferrets to scout ahead, and personal shielding just in case you stepped on the wrong floorboard and they came looking just to check.

  Magnetic field levitators would be out, they’d surely be detected by this setup. Parachute, then, from someplace a few blocks away and at night. The good old ways. In fact, except for the night vision and the ferrets, the best way to do it at all would be with as little technology as possible. Folks who could afford this kind of super protection paid to guard against every damned piece of potential burglary in all creation, but often forgot that folks often could do things without all those machines. A bit of diversion—say, a runaway elephant or somesuch charging at the gate—and it wouldn’t be that impossible to get in.

  Getting out would be a different and more complex matter.

  What are you thinking about this for, you old fool? he scolded himself. You said yourself that there’s no rhyme or reason to doin’ it, no profit, only the gravest danger. And he was certainly in poor physical shape for such an operation.

  Damn it! That’s what made the damned challenge so appealing!

  And when you’re caught, Murphy, what do you tell ’em then? They’d put your brain through a wringer with one of them stones of theirs, find out what an old idiot you were, then scrub your brain clean as a whistle and you’d wake up in a trash dumpster someplace not even reme
mberin’ that you ever done it.

  Idly he wondered just how many of those gems they had, and whether or not all of them were in use or stuck in boxes someplace. Just a few dozen of them wouldn’t depress the collector’s market but would set him up nice for life.

  He couldn’t forget the effect on that young sergeant, though, looking into just that one. But it showed that you had to basically touch one, or be very close to it, and look into it in order for it to work its voodoo. No getting around touching, but you sure as hell didn’t need to look into the damn thing’s cursed eyes.

  It seemed so strange, standing here in the middle of genteel civilization, thinking of those girls and such things as those gem necklaces. It wasn’t the idea of losing his soul to the devil—if he had one, the devil long ago owned it outright. But he preferred not to meet the old bastard until he had to.

  So what the hell are you doin’ here, you blasted idiot?

  At just that moment he sensed that he was not alone in the alleylike back lane. It wasn’t anything he could see or hear or smell, but there was some old survival sense that told him that he was being observed, and not through some remote camera or sensor. Someone, something, was right here with him, watching, waiting, and, somehow too, he felt that it knew him.

  He tried to seem natural, looking eventually up one direction and then back the other. Nothing. Nothing but some of the inevitable big bugs and other creepy crawlies that were too much a part of this world to even be banished from these sorts of neighborhoods.

  He knew, though, that he wasn’t imagining it. Life and death more than once had depended on him accepting these feelings, and more than one promising young scoundrel he’d known had died by dismissing them.

  The back doors and windows? Maybe, but the feeling didn’t seem that remote, nor did the stone walls lining both sides of the alley lane make for good, consistent angles from which to observe an intruder. Robotic systems would be used for security by folks with this kind of money and status; maybe some suspicious, noisy pet with big teeth as well. This wasn’t that. It was more like the sense you got in a jungle when you knew that the snake was just two meters from your neck and ready to pounce. And since nothing that large and intelligent and dangerous would be allowed outside private grounds and certainly would never get this far into the city without tripping all sorts of animal control sensors, that meant a mind.

  But where? The brickwork seemed unbroken, the tops of the walls and fences were high but not high enough to conceal somebody like that, and certainly there was nobody in the middle of the road.

  Suddenly a male voice whispered to him, so close that he jumped.

  “Captain, go down the street to the end, make a left. Someone will meet you at the end of the block.”

  He went from jumping to freezing solid, and then he turned and slowly, warily, looked closely again. Nobody. Nothing.

  He started walking down to the end of the block, casually, but rather obviously in a hurry, taking out his hip flask as he did so and going a wee bit faster with each step. He got to the end, took a hard swallow, looked around, saw nobody yet, took another, and then began walking down the street as directed. At this point, he was too committed to run, and too curious and involved to want to.

  Near the end of the block was a lamppost and an ornamental tropical tree. As he approached the tree, a figure seemed to ooze right out of it.

  “Captain Murphy, what in the world are you doing here?”

  He stared at the small figure for a moment. “Why, it’s Lieutenant Chung, isn’t it? I could ask the same of you.”

  “I can’t believe you’d miss them or worry about them at this point,” she said, shaking her head. “Not you.”

  He looked a bit sheepish and shrugged. “I know, I know. But there was just somethin’ about them, somethin’ that was wrong, if you know what I mean. Volunteers is one thing, even young girls, but them devil jewels—they was runnin’ the show. I don’t like that sort of thing. Never held with it. Besides, somethin’ in the whole stinkin’ mess just got me Irish up. Hundreds of years the damned Limeys run our old land, worked us on our own home soil like slaves, treated us like no better than animals. We threw ’em out finally. Got fed up with it. I’ll be damned if I see some other group doin’ the same damned thing again.”

  His answer surprised her. She hadn’t thought him even that deep. “My people had a similar experience with the Japanese so I can sympathize. Still, what were you going to do?” she asked him. “Be a new hero of your people? Rush in, blow open the iron gates, find them and steal them back?”

  He seemed to sag a bit, and sighed. “Somethin’ like that, I guess. Or maybe not. I dunno, really, what I was thinkin’ of doin’, or what I might be able to do. But I had to see if there weren’t somethin’, y’see. And,” he added, needling a bit, “it didn’t look like there was anybody else that cared.”

  “We’ve been here ever since they were brought in,” the lieutenant told him. “That’s why we couldn’t stay with you. That way, we were an obvious and public danger to whoever went to so much trouble to get them.”

  “You saw who took ’em, then?”

  She nodded. “We know a fair amount at this point, although not nearly enough. We didn’t have to put a one-on-one tail on them, you see. There was enough chemical tracer in the bath wash in the courier ship that I could probably eventually trace them down within a couple of parsecs of this planet if need be.”

  Murphy glanced back up the street towards the compound. “So what do they look like, these devil folks?”

  “Ordinary. I don’t think they’re behind this at all. Just tools, like the girls and many others. Rich folks playing at being naughty. Their kind’s always been with us. Some can be quite dangerous, fanatics who have become lost in their own fantasy world, but they can be dealt with. Oddly, they are usually intellectuals with good contacts and influence. We would rather not have to harm them if we can avoid it, but they must be dealt with.”

  “You’re sure the girls are still in there?”

  She nodded. “As of now, yes. But people and vehicles come and go around here, and we sincerely doubt if this is their final destination. They’re going to want those babies born outside the city, outside of authorities and monitors and records. We’re scouting the place now as minutely as possible to see if there is a good, easy way in. The problem is, the girls are only a part of our problem. We need to know who is behind all this. We need to know just precisely what this is really all about.”

  “Hmph! Well, I wish I was, but I ain’t much of a burglar. Not at my age,” the old captain told her.

  “That’s all right,” she responded almost instantly. “We are.”

  * * *

  The next big shock Murphy got was the discovery that there were eight commandos in the team, not just the two. The other six apparently spent the trip in a lower compartment of the courier in some sort of quick-acting suspended animation. The girls, and the powers they had thanks to the gems, apparently never sensed their presence for just that reason. When the enemy’s got hold of your computer, it seems, don’t tell your computer anything you don’t want everyone to know.

  Of the group—four men, four women—only a five-person team were the kind of commandos, all marines, who went in and engaged in the action; the other three were naval technicians who backed them up and oversaw an arsenal of high-tech spy devices and systems. Although Chung was the nominal officer in charge, she was Navy; the man in operational charge was Maslovic, or, as the others chuckled, whatever he was calling himself that mission. They generally referred to him as “Sarge” or sometimes “Chief,” but he clearly outranked the only identified commissioned officer in the group. Murphy suspected that not even these men and women who trained and worked with him regularly knew who he really was or what true rank he might hold, but he took his orders from Intelligence and possibly reported directly to the cybernetic Admiralty. To Maslovic, it didn’t matter, either. Only missions mattered.

/>   They were set up in an upstairs apartment a block down and on the opposite side of the street from the Order of Saint Phineas. It was as close as they could get and have a back entrance that couldn’t be observed from the street and which therefore allowed for unhindered comings and goings by the team. The owners of the place were away on business; they were not expected back for more than a month, which was weeks longer than the Navy would need the place. All wore stock nondescript clothing and hairpieces when going in or out and drew no particular attention from the other neighbors. People in the neighborhood tended not to socialize with one another and to keep their lives pretty much to themselves.

  Maslovic stood in back of a small bank of monitors the techs had set up in the back room. He nodded at Murphy and pointed.

  “Well, can’t say I’m glad to see you on this, since you’re not part of the team, but since you’re here you might as well get comfortable and watch the show.”

  Murphy pretended to be hurt. “And here I thought you was just pinin’ for me company.”

  “I had enough of that on the courier. Seriously, Captain, everybody here has worked and trained with everybody else so long that we almost know what the other is thinking. That’s why things generally go right when they send us in and why we don’t suffer many losses. I’d feel the same way if you were Lieutenant Commander Mohr or even higher up. We need you to keep out of the way no matter what happens. You can watch, but it’s not your show. Understand?”

  Murphy nodded.

  “We’ve hesitated up to now to send some ferrets in there because we don’t know what their alarm systems are like. It’s entirely possible we could tip the whole show by doing it, but I don’t see any other way. We’re going to send two in late tonight and see what we can see anyway, but we’ll have a small team ready to go in if things go bad. You’ve already had a run-in with our Sunday suits, as we call them. Turns you into the spirit in a hurry. If I don’t move, that thing’ll make me look just like whatever I’m against. We’ve got the same kind of AI camouflage on the ferrets, small as they are. They’re quiet, fast, and efficient, but the fact is that ferrets still make noise and they still put out electrical fields. There’s no such thing as a perfect ferret any more than there’s a perfect disguise for anybody, but we are damned close. Morrie? You got them tuned up?”