I wandered back into the middle of the waiting room and took a good, hard look around. The soap-bubble doors took up much of one wall. In the center of the opposite wall was a single wooden door. (Not mahogany; something even richer-looking, with an even stronger grain pattern. A native Hawai'ian species, maybe?) Again, there was no nameplate on the door. But it didn't need one. I can recognize the office door of the head muckamuck without any outside cues.
Along the other two walls were couches, a delicate coral in color, perfectly coordinated with the pastel carpets and wall-coverings. On the walls were three large paintings.
Yes, I mean paintings. Flat things with no 3-D to them. Paint manually applied to some kind of backing material. Rare, these days, and generally very expensive because of it. Out of curiosity—and because I didn't have much else to do at the moment—I strolled up to the nearest one and gave it the scan.
Strange drek, chummer. It was an undersea scene, complete with coral and brilliantly colored reef fish and happy, smiling dolphins. (Dolphins? I guess that was some indication of the painting's age. Dolphins went out quite a while back when they couldn't adapt to the concentration of toxics we were tossing into their oceans. And you can bet they weren't smiling for quite some time before the end.) So far so good, I guess. Then it started getting weird. There were Grecian-style columns, temples, and other crap—even pyramids, honest to Ghu!—on the bottom of the ocean, and the happy, smiling dolphins were swimming in and out among them. Hmm.
I moved on to the next painting. Much the same thing: same reefs, same ruins, same happy, smiling dolphins. Except this time there was some kind of glow emanating from inside the ruined buildings. And maybe the dolphins looked just a tad happier, I don't know.
Third painting, exactly the same, but more so. And this time, over the glowing door of one of the pyramids, there was some strange symbol carved into the rock. The Eye of Horus crossed with the biohazard trefoil, that's what it looked like, but I know squat about art, so I might have been wrong. Weird drek. Atlantis?
I bent closer for a look at the signature: an incomprehensible scrawl that might have been "Andrew Annen-something", or maybe not. The date was 1996.
"What do you think, Mr. Montgomery?"
The husky contralto voice sounded from close behind me. I tried to keep tight rein on my sphincters, and struggled to keep my movements smooth and urbane as I turned around.
The dark-grained wood door had opened silently, and, just as silently, an elf had emerged. Tall and slender she was, with fine blond hair curled into a coif that seemed to defy gravity. Her eyes were pale—faint blue, maybe, or gray. She was dressed in a broad-shouldered, tab-collared corp skirtsuit that could have been made of liquid gold. On one epaulet was the designer's marque—the stylized Z of Zoe. On the other was the Telestrian Industries Corporation logotype.
The elf smiled at me, and extended her hand. On reflex I took it. Her grip was firm, her skin cool and silk-smooth. "Again I feel like I'm at a disadvantage," I told her as calmly as I could manage. "You know my name ..."
She smiled. "I meant no disrespect, Mr. Montgomery." Under the right circumstances that voice could curl my toes. At the moment, though, I wasn't in the mood. "My name is Chantal Monot." She gave the name a strong French inflection.
I racked my brain for any details I could recall about TIC. "James Telestrian's ... daughter-in-law?" I guessed, naming the CEO of the overall TIC empire.
The elf's smile broadened. "Nepotism isn't that bad in the company," she chided me lightly. "Not every executive is related to James. Many, but not all."
I yielded the point with a nod. "And your position is, Ms. Monot ...?"
"President and chief executive officer of Telestrian Industries Corporation, South Pacific Operations."
I blinked. Ookaay ... It always pays to know what level you're working at. (In this case, the highest.)
Monot inclined her head toward the painting and repeated, "What do you think, Mr. Montgomery?" She chuckled. "And please don't tell me you 'know nothing about art but know what you like.' "
Since that was exactly what I had been about to tell her,
I thought about it for a moment. "Strong colors and pretty good technique," I said finally. "But it's going to overwhelm the wrong decor."
She quirked an eyebrow in what seemed to me genuine amusement. "And the subject matter?"
Fragging squirrely didn't seem to be a politic thing to say, so I settled for, "Interesting."
"Yes," she agreed with an arch smile. "Isn't it?"
Frag, that's one of the reasons I hate dealing with elves. No, correct that—with some elves. It's that pervasive "I know something you don't, nyah nyah" attitude so many of them have. Irritating, big-time.
Chantal Monot gestured to the open door. "Please," she said. "There are some things I'd like to discuss with you." Of course there were. I shrugged, and I preceded her through the door into her office.
I was familiar with the way Diamond Head looked from the west—from the Honolulu side. Now I got to see it from the other side, and I had to admit it was just as striking. The TIC building was only three stories tall, but it seemed to be built on some kind of ridge or bluff, so there was nothing to block the president's view of the old, eroded crater.
While I was still staring, Monot took a seat behind the large desk. She gestured to one of the comfortable-looking guest chairs, and I sat down. "Tea?" she asked. Before I could either refuse or accept, she'd turned to a silver samovar on the credenza beside her and prepared two cups. Glasses, actually, in the Russian style. She handed one over to me. I sniffed, then sipped appreciatively. Never tried real Oolong tea? Your loss.
"I was serious about the subject of the paintings outside," Monot said at length. "Have you ever realized quite how pervasive the legend of a sunken continent, a lost world, actually is?"
I shrugged. "It's never really kept me up nights," I had to admit.
"It is interesting, though. What do you know about Lemuria?"
Again I shrugged. "It's where lemurs come from?"
I'd meant it as a smart-hooped comeback line, but she nodded approvingly. "In a way, yes. Did you know that, before geologists understood about continental drift, scientists were puzzled by the fact that fossilized lemur bones were found on two distinct continents, separated by thousands of kilometers of ocean? How had the lemurs crossed from one continent to another ... if there hadn't once been a land bridge, a midoceanic continent, connecting the two? Since there was no land bridge in existence, the only logical conclusion was that it had sunk centuries or millennia before." I decided to stick with my response to the paintings. "Interesting." (Actually, I could hardly have cared less, but I figured it's best to be polite about the crank beliefs of the president and chief executive officer of Telestrian Industries Corporation, South Pacific Operations.)
"Isn't it?" she agreed. "What I find even more interesting is that the legends of Lemuria indirectly involve the islands of Hawai'i. Do you know who originally colonized the islands, Mr. Montgomery?" I shook my head, and she answered her own question. "Polynesians from Tahiti. According to some beliefs, they crossed the ocean, looking for their own sunken continent. There are even some who claim that this sunken continent will one day re-emerge from the water, with the volcano of Haleakala as its highest mountain peak."
She smiled enigmatically. "It's interesting how different, seemingly unrelated factors are actually connected, if you look below the surface." She paused, and I knew she was getting down to biz; all this drek about lemurs and sinking continents was just preamble.
"Like you, Mr. Montgomery," Monot continued after a moment. " You seem to be one of those unrelated factors. Yet you're not unrelated, are you? You're actually connected, directly or indirectly, with many different . . . well, let's call them threads."
I snorted. A tight feeling had been building in my chest throughout her lemur prattle. Now I realized what that feeling was—anger. "Look," I said sharply, "I've had e
nough of all this vague, oblique and veiled-reference crap, you scan? Everybody's talking at me like I know a lot more about what's going down than I do, and it's torquing me off. Barnard did it, Ho did it, fragging Ryumyo did it, Harlech did it, and now you're doing it . . ."
I stopped in midpurge as Monot raised a slender hand. Her brows knotted in a frown. "Who?" she asked.
It took me a moment to get my derailed train of thought back on track. I ticked them off on my fingers. "Barnard, Ho, Ryumyo, Harlech—"
"Harlech," she repeated, interrupting again. "Who was that?"
I hesitated. There was something strange in Monot's expression—something that made me suspect she knew all too well, and didn't like it one bit. "Quentin Harlech," I told her. "He said to call him Quinn."
She went slightly pale, and she whispered something then, under her breath. It could have been a repetition of the name I'd given her, but in the order you'd find it in a 'puter database, last name first. Or it could have been something else. ("Big worm"/"bakeware" time again . . .)
"That's the slag," I confirmed. Even though I didn't know jack about what was going down, I kept a good dose of bluster in my voice. If something had knocked Monot off-stride, maybe I could use it to my advantage. "But what's the big deal?" I asked. "He's an elf, too."
Chantal Monot's pale eyes flashed with momentary anger. Then her professional control took over, and I watched as she forced herself to calmness. "He may be an elf," she said at last, "but elves don't speak with one voice. Particularly on an issue as important as this." (Important, neh? I filed that gem away for future reference.)
I shrugged. "From what I've read, TIC is in like this"—I held up crossed fingers—"with the Tir government. Sometimes, your corp's an instrument of policy for the Tir nation. And if that isn't speaking with one voice—"
She broke in again. "We may be an instrument of policy for the Tir's leadership she corrected coldly, "not for the nation." (And I filed that one away, too. It didn't make any sense at the moment, but maybe later .. .)
Monot gazed out the window at Diamond Head. The rock face was washed with the ruddy light of early morning.
After almost a minute she turned back to me. "You spoke with .. . Quinn Harlech, didn't you, Mr. Montgomery? What did he tell you?"
"It didn't make much sense," I told her truthfully. "He said he was going to blow the lid off something. Let him do it, for all I care—it's no skin off my hoop."
Monot nodded slowly. "Did he say how?"
"Not as far as I could tell." Then I hesitated. "Now I think about it, he implied he'd already done it."
"And I assume he knew of your association with Gordon Ho."
I nodded at that one. "He knew, all right." He'd seen my deputy's badge—gone, now—and certainly seemed to know what it meant.
Apparently that wasn't good news. Chantai Monot looked like one troubled elf. After a few more moments of thought she sighed. "Thank you for coming in, Mr. Montgomery. I appreciate your candor."
I snorted. "If it's candor you wanted, you could have gotten it without the narcodart," I pointed out.
Monot at least had the grace to look a little embarrassed. "I apologize for that, Mr. Montgomery, but our operative"—she must have meant the biff with the bracers—"evaluated your mental condition as being dangerous, to her and to yourself." (Translation: scared to the point of drekking myself. Granted.) "She made the field decision to incapacitate you rather than risking something a lot more unpleasant for all concerned."
Okay, I could understand that. If my job was to arrange a meeting with some wild-eyed spacecase who'd just burst out of an alley brandishing a gun, I'd probably have narked him in his tracks, too. That didn't mean I had to like it, though.
Monot pressed a key on the sophisticated telecom built into the desk. "A driver will take you anywhere you wish to go," she told me.
"Hold the phone," I said. "Is that it? You track me and dart me and bag me . . . and that's it? No more questions?"
Monot looked at me bleakly. "The questions I had are no longer relevant."
I think I blinked in surprise . .. and then again in understanding. "Aren't you even going to warn me to keep my nose out of things that are too big for me?"
The elf looked genuinely sad as she said, "I think it's far too late for that, Mr. Montgomery."
18
And so, yet again, I got to ride in a fragging Rolls Phaeton. !t was almost too much deja fragging vu for me to handle. If the driver had run down the bullet-proof partition, turned round to me, and grinned with Scott's face, I'd have taken it in stride and offered him a fragging drink.
Once we were off the TIC facility grounds—the corp building looked just as wiz from outside as it did from in—the driver wanted to know where to take me. That took some deep thought. All the places I'd already flopped were blown, one way or another, and my invitation to a meet with Chantal Monot had interrupted my search for another. I chewed on it for a few minutes while the driver "orbited" Kapiolani Park. Finally, I gave up, and did what I probably should have done from the outset. I asked the driver.
Frag, it's not that illogical, is it? Cab drivers know all the best bars, the best restaurants, the best flops, and the best places to get into deep trouble. And when you get right down to it, a corp chauffeur's not that much different from a hack driver, is he?
I laid out my requirements to the chauffeur—low profile, no questions asked—and let him think on it. Not so much as a minute later he nodded his head, and we took off in the direction of Waikiki.
(Hold the phone: Wasn't getting the chauffeur involved a major breach of security? Well, yeah, talking solely in terms of fieldcraft, it was a drek-headed move. Speaking practically, though? If Monot and her colleagues at TIC wanted me dead, I'd be dead. If they wanted to know where I went, they'd had several hours to plant a tracer-inside some body cavity, if they wanted to make it secure—that I'd never be able to find. The way I had it figured, getting the chauffeur to help me out didn't increase my exposure any. In fact, it decreased it, by saving me from blundering into something unwelcome as I'd done the night before.)
The Phaeton rolled west on Monsarrat, then turned right onto Kalakaua Avenue. Into the gleaming heart of Waikiki we drove, then the chauffeur cut right and cruised down a ramp into an underground parking lot. The security guard in his little booth flipped my driver a quick salute and raised the blast-proof barrier. Without slowing, the limo rolled on into the parking concourse.
We pulled up right in front of a bank of elevators. A big crest identified the place as New Foster Tower.
I rapped on the transpex partition and gave the driver a "what the frag now?" look.
"Ms. Monot always has a number of rooms reserved here in TIC's name," the chauffeur replied via the intercom, "to handle unexpected visitors." (I reckoned I certainly fit that categorization ...) "Room nineteen-oh-five is yours for as long as you need it."
I raised an eyebrow at that. Once he'd figured out where he was going, it wouldn't have taken the driver much effort to link the car's computer system with the hotel's and check me in, but ... "What about the key?" I asked.
"It's already programmed for your thumbprint," the driver answered.
Oh, really? That meant Monot had scanned my thumbprint into the TIC computer system while I was sleeping off the narcodart, and my records were accessible from a mobile computer system, i.e., the limo. The driver had obviously contacted the TIC central system, and had it download my print data to the security system at New Foster Tower. Efficient as all hell.
But I didn't like it, not one bit. Throughout my career, I've gone to great lengths to keep personal data flags like prints out of corporate records. I can think of too many ways to frag with someone's life once you've got access to flags like that. Of course, there wasn't squat I could do about it at the moment. When I had some time—and some cred—to spare, I'd have to make arrangements for new fingerprints.
I pushed the limo door open and climbed ou
t, heading for the elevator. I turned at the soft whine of a power window behind me.
"Here, I was told to give you these back." The driver tossed me two objects, which I caught a little clumsily. My deputy's badge from King Kamehameha V. And, more important, my Manhunter. I drew breath to thank him, but he'd already powered the window back up and was pulling away. Just as well—I didn't have any cash to tip him anyway.
* * *
Room 1905 at New Foster Tower wasn't anywhere near as luxurious as my room at the Diamond Head corporate hostelry. That still left it one giant step above anywhere else I'd stayed in my life, though. The entire convenience suite at the Ilima Joy would have fit into the bathroom—fragging near, at least—and while the bed wasn't quite big enough for a Roman-style orgy, I couldn't imagine that I'd have any opportunity to be disappointed by the fact.
The view was nice, too—a southwestern exposure, looking out over Mamala Bay. The hotels on the other side of Kalakaua Avenue—the ones that actually lined the waterfront—were too tall to give me a view of Waikiki Beach itself. They were "terraced," though; the buildings between me and the ocean were lower than New Foster Tower ... as, presumably, the ones behind the Tower were taller. (Good civic planning there, now that I thought about it.) That meant that, even if I couldn't see the beach, I could still see the ocean, in its impossible blue. As I watched, a huge ocean-going trimaran—forty-five meters along the waterline, if it was a millimeter—was outbound under full sail, its garishly colored spinnaker seeming to burn with its own internal light. For the first time in a long time, I actually saw Hawai'i through the eyes of a tourist rather than as a shadow-slag running for his life.
It didn't last, though. Biz was pressing. Doss at New Foster Tower or no, my nuts were still in a very tight vise. It was time to do something about that.
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