There was one obvious conclusion. No matter that her message service said she was home, she was actually away and she planned to be away for some time. For some odd reason she had chosen to turn off the air circulators. He must look for her elsewhere. However, in her absence the opportunity for a thorough search of the living complex was too good to pass up.
Bryce began to prowl. It seemed completely natural to pause at the entrance of each new room and run a survey for possible traps. His subconscious mind apparently knew exactly what to look for. He identified five problems as he penetrated deeper into the complex. Two of them were nothing but hidden monitors, designed to provide an alarm to some central control room. Both of them were turned on and apparently working. The other three were more dangerous. They could be used to kill any unwanted visitor. After he negotiated the third one unscathed, he should have been breathing easier—except that something else was raising the hair on the back of his neck.
It was a smell. In the still air, another odor was diffusing through to add itself to the ozone. This one was more acrid, a lung-burning mixture of ionized atoms.
He followed his nose. He was approaching the master living room, a great chamber furnished in an old-fashioned style. The furniture, screens, and murals presumably reflected Alicia Rios's own tastes—Earth fashions that had been popular forty years ago.
The unpleasant smell was coming from this room. He halted at the threshold. At the far end stood a long, low table, with six wing-backed chairs around it. They would have been a matched set, with covers of pale blue—except that one of them had been burned to a black skeleton of metal. The thick carpet beneath it had vanished, to reveal seared metal floor panels. A wall screen, five meters behind the chair, was charred and ruined.
Bryce stepped forward carefully. From the pattern of burns on the wall and floor he could deduce the geometry of the event. The beam of heat that destroyed chair, carpet, and screen had propagated in straight lines so that the chair had partly protected the wall screen and the carpet behind it, and the screen in turn had partly protected the wall. Following the line of the beam back to its source, Bryce placed its origin at a chest-high point just in front of a chair at the other end of the table. The table itself was untouched, except for a charred few centimeters at the end closest to the chair.
That chair was not completely burned to a skeleton. He walked over and inspected it, and felt his pulse speed up. A broad region along the center line had been protected from the heat. It formed the silhouette of a human figure, seated and with one arm by its side. The other hand's outline was on a control board, whose remnant was fused into the chair's frame.
Bryce sat down on an untouched pale-blue chair facing the entrance of the room. The images were clear within his mind. A visitor had come to the apartment (and a familiar visitor, because the apartment defenses had not been called upon and the two people had sat down together); there had been a meeting, Alicia Rios in the chair where she could command the apartment controls; the visitor seated across from her. And then, with no more than a split-second of warning, a portable triggered laser had been produced and fired, its beam focused on Alicia.
She must have died instantly, within the first fraction of a second. But for some reason her killer had not stopped there. He (or she) had pulsed the laser again and again, until Alicia Rios was not merely dead, but her flesh, blood, and bones had been dispersed to their individual ionized atoms. It made Bryce feel sick to know that the smell that filled his nostrils, as he wandered through the apartment, came from Alicia Rios's cremation. The murder must have taken place no more than an hour ago. If Bryce had not paused to brood over his own situation, he might have arrived while Alicia Rios was still alive—and shared her fate.
But why burn her after she was dead, again and again? There must have been a terrible, deep-seated hatred to want such total destruction; or could there be another motive, some reason why the body of Alicia Rios had to be utterly destroyed, without a hair or a fingernail remaining?
Bryce could not imagine one, but he could think of a good reason for the death itself. Someone was covering his tracks. Over on the other side of the room stood the burned and melted remnant of a records center. Alicia Rios was gone, and so were her private files. This gave Bryce additional evidence that he was on the right lines. Someone knew that Jinx Barker had failed. And they were afraid that Jinx Barker, captured and willing to talk, might lead to Alicia Rios. So Alicia had to go, too, along with anything that might point to someone else in the chain. Bryce had seen that sort of thing often enough in the past to be convinced that he was right.
(The bewildering thought came: In which past? He had never in his whole life met anything like this, and yet he was sure. In that moment came the realization of who he was. He knew his life history, together with the series of accidents and designs that had brought him here. But he was in too much immediate danger to dwell on it now.)
With self-knowledge came another conviction: The people who had done this to Alicia Rios were thorough and totally ruthless. They would not stop with her. They would go back to the source and eliminate Jinx Barker, and then Lola Belman, and then Bryce Sonnenberg, and then anyone else whom they saw as a possible problem. Lola was in peril—terrible and immediate. So was he. But Bryce still did not know why they were in danger.
He examined the melted remains of the control panel on the arm of the ruined chair. It could no longer function, but there were half a dozen other control centers scattered through the apartment. He recalled one in the foyer through which he had entered. It might not be the closest, but it was the one that he could reach most quickly.
He retraced his steps at maximum speed, convinced now that the security systems were not a source of danger. Alicia Rios had turned them off for the sake of her visitor—and been rewarded with sudden and violent death.
Thanks to frequent haldane appointments, he knew Lola's access code by heart. He called her from the apartment foyer, as anxious for her to answer as he was to leave.
The call signal went on and on. After three endless minutes, Bryce gave up. Why didn't her fax cut in and answer for her? She must be there, but she wouldn't answer. She was scared. She was sitting and waiting for Bryce to return. She might not suspect what he now knew for sure: that Jinx Barker was not the only source of danger.
He left the apartment and ran back along the corridor. In Lola Belman's office he had decided that the trip to Alicia Rios's apartment could be done in an hour. On the return journey he had to shave that by at least ten minutes.
19
On the long journey down from the surface level, Cayuga's anger had been steadily growing—at Alicia Rios, but even more at himself. He had made a big mistake six years ago, and now he was paying for it. He should never have allowed Barker to get rid of the busybody media reporter, Conner Preston. Alicia had pressed hard, but Cayuga should have realized that when it came to Jinx, her judgment disappeared.
Cayuga could see the terrible irony. In order to make himself and the Ganymede Club completely safe, he had approved an action that was now leading him into a situation of supreme danger—he was on his way to tackle a killer for whom murder and survival from attack were a way of life.
As he neared the region of Ganymede where Barker had set up his office, Cayuga became more and more alert to his surroundings. The only way to make a successful hit on a professional assassin was to come at him from an unexpected direction. That ruled out a direct entry to Barker's office. He could expect a dozen defenses there, ranging from passive observation to instant counterattack. It would be just as bad to try to disable the air-supply system for the whole section, or to introduce poison into it. The living areas had smart sensors built into each room, and a dozen maintenance machines would be bustling onto the scene with neutralizing agents at the first lethal microgram.
The good news was that Jinx Barker had never met Cayuga. A walk along the corridor beyond Barker's office, as though he were a patient callin
g on Lola Belman, ought to arouse little suspicion.
Maybe a better idea was actually to go into Belman's office. Barker had been instructed to dispose of her. He had failed to do so, but he was likely to try again. The best time to eliminate an assassin might be when Jinx Barker was focused on killing someone else.
Cayuga could stake out Belman's office. He might have to get rid of her before he could do so, but that was on the agenda, anyway.
He studied the door as he was pressing the buzzer. It was a simple lock in a light frame door, easy enough to burn through if he did not mind leaving evidence. There would be a little noise, but it was a quiet time of day for business and the corridor was deserted.
There was no answer. She was apparently not in. Cayuga glanced in both directions along the corridor and then bent to his task. The tight, high-intensity beam could be focused until it was less than a millimeter wide. At that setting there was no problem with the materials of the lock, and the burn would be invisible from a couple of feet away. He cut through the bolt, slipped inside, and closed the door behind him.
The inner office was not even locked. Either Lola Belman considered the outer lock sufficient, or there was nothing in the place really worth stealing. Jinx Barker was probably the only person who had ever tried to pry into patient records, and even for those he had found no more than nominal protection.
Where was the best place for Cayuga to position himself? It would be a spot from which he would have an advantage over anyone entering the office. He also had to recognize the possibility that Lola Belman was hiding inside, afraid to respond to the buzzer.
Cayuga changed the heat-beam setting to broad-band antipersonnel and pushed at the inner door. He took a couple of steps back as it was opening.
No one was at the desk, no one was sitting at the dark table. But over there—Cayuga lifted his weapon and felt an overwhelming urge to fire. It was only at the last moment, as he saw the bonds at wrists and ankles, that he was able to hold back.
Of all the sights that he might have imagined, this one was the least plausible—it was Jinx Barker, stretched out horizontal and apparently helpless on an adjustable seat. Conceivably it was a trap, but it did not look like it. Cayuga held his weapon aimed straight at Barker and slowly walked forward until he was no more than a couple of feet away. Sure enough, it was Jinx. He was bound with strong tape, and he seemed unconscious. Cayuga saw empty drug vials on a metal table alongside the chair.
Here was another irony, another circumstance that defied belief. On the way here Cayuga had wondered how he was going to deal with a wily and infinitely dangerous professional. Now the man was being served up to him, trussed and sedated and ready for the kill.
It was no time for musing on the strangeness of events. Cayuga stepped forward. At the last moment, staring down at Barker's unconscious face, he paused. Jinx Barker was not a member of the Ganymede Club. It was not necessary in his case, as with Alicia Rios, to ensure that no body became available for postmortem examination. And Lola Belman remained to be disposed of. If Cayuga was to handle that, he did not want her alerted on her return to the office by the smell and smoke of a human body flash-flamed to ionized gas.
There was a simpler way. An old-fashioned, neat and quiet way. Cayuga moved across to the couch in the corner of the office and picked up one of the soft, plastic-covered cushions. He placed it over Jinx Barker's nose and mouth and pressed down firmly.
After half a minute the chest began to shudder, but there were no signs of returning consciousness. Cayuga waited, cutting off all air as the limbs heaved against their tape bindings. Soon they strained less hard, twitched, spasmed once or twice in reflex, and finally subsided. Still he waited, another two full minutes. At last he removed the cushion, leaned over, and tested Barker's pulse.
Nothing. Not a trace.
Cayuga permitted himself a long, shivering breath and stood staring down at the body. It was a frightening reminder of how quickly and easily such a change could arrive. Five minutes ago a living, breathing human, now a lifeless lump of useless flesh. If that could happen to Jinx Barker, it could happen just as easily to Joss Cayuga—and he had so much more to lose. Eternal vigilance, swift action, and no time for sentimental softness—those had to be the rules.
The buzz of the communications center in the corner of the office brought him out of his reverie and made his heart pound.
It could not be for him, since no one had any idea that he was in Lola Belman's office. Most likely it was a call from one of Belman's patients. He had no interest in them, but it reminded him of something else. He needed to speak with Lenny Costas. He had to tell Lenny that Jinx Barker was no longer a threat, and he had to learn how Costas had managed his mission with Alicia Rios. If Barker and Rios were both out of the way, the hardest part of the job was already over.
He walked across to the office communications center; but there he hesitated.
What were the chances that Lola Belman, as a matter of routine, recorded every ingoing and outgoing call?
All too likely. Haldanes were legendary for their insistence on maintaining and reviewing complete records on patient activities. With Ganymede Security sure to be called in to investigate the death of Jinx Barker, Cayuga could not afford to be associated in any way with this office. That would be even more important when he had taken care of Lola Belman.
The same problem applied to Jinx Barker's office, along the corridor. He dared not make a call to Lenny Costas from there, because that would be another focal point for investigation as soon as Barker's death became known.
It had to be some anonymous public call station, and the conversation with Lenny Costas must sound totally innocent and dull. That should not be too hard—they certainly had enough experience—but making a public call meant leaving Jinx Barker alone while he did it.
Cayuga glanced again at the body. Jinx would not be going anywhere, now or ever, but Cayuga wished that he knew who had sedated him and bound him to that chair. Chances were it was Lola Belman—she certainly had easiest access to the drugs, and this was her office.
How would she react on her return, when she discovered that Barker was dead? Suffocation left no marks. She would probably assume that Barker had died as a result of the drugs that she had administered.
As Cayuga opened the outer office door, it occurred to him that Barker's death might also be the key to the Lola Belman problem. What could be more natural than a haldane overcome with grief for the accidental death of a patient by a psychotropic drug overdose? Who would question it if she, living on the brink of insanity as the profession was obliged to do, was unable to handle that death?
With a little help from her drug supplies, Lola Belman's "suicide" would make perfect sense.
* * *
Spook always exaggerated. He had been doing it as a matter of principle since he was three years old, and Lola felt sure that he was doing it now. All the way to the place where Bat lived, along labyrinthine tunnels and across grungy fields of moth-eaten plants of a type that Lola had never seen before, Spook mumbled and muttered about how nobody just dropped in at the Bat Cave.
"But you've been there before," Lola objected. "When you came back, you talked my ear off about it."
"Maybe I have, and maybe I did." Spook glanced around to make sure that no one was watching them—a pretty sure thing, in Lola's opinion, since no one who could avoid it would go anywhere near a hemispherical chamber that reeked of ammonia and untreated sewage. He led them down a broad ramp to yet another agricultural level. At least this one was hydroponic, and the produce looked clean and edible.
"You should have let me call him before we left," Spook grumbled, "or while we're on the way. He'll fry us."
"We had to get out of there—and I have to get back as soon as I can. All I want to do is drop you off, explain to Bat what's been happening, and leave."
Spook's silence was itself an answer. She had already explained to him about Jinx Barker and his attempt on h
er life, and what he had told her about Alicia Rios. It had not been well received. "And for this nonsense, you dragged me out of bed," Spook said when she finished. "Good luck when you try it on Bat."
Lola stared around her as the ramp they were walking on doubled back on itself in another three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn. She added an item to her list of worries: She had to get back while Jinx Barker was still fully sedated, but it wasn't going to be easy to find her way. Bat apparently chose to make his home in the middle of a maze.
"For God's sake, Spook, how much farther?"
"Hey, it was your idea to come, not mine. But we're nearly there—see the door, right at the end of this corridor?"
Bat's idea of reasonable illumination did not match Lola's. As they left the bright lights of the corridor, she stumbled along behind Spook into a long and dim-lit room littered with what seemed to be random pieces of old junk. Apparently this was the fabulous Bat Cave that had so impressed Spook. She might have known. She saw no sign of Bat, and it would have been easy to believe that the whole place was empty, had it not been for the tantalizing smell of cooking that came wafting down the room to greet them. At the far end she saw a tall, black partition that ran across almost the whole width of the room. Spook made his way toward it, with Lola close behind. He peeked uneasily around the edge.
"Bat? It's me, Spook. My sister is with me."
Lola heard a grampus snort of outrage or disbelief, and then an irate voice: "This is quite inexcusable. You have violated my trust and my private sanctum. Do you wonder why I am so reluctant to divulge its location to others?"
Bat was not amused. But apparently he was at least wearing clothes, because Spook with the hand on Lola's side of the partition was beckoning her forward.
"Don't blame him," she said. "Blame me. I made him bring me." Lola, rounding the partition, saw a black apparition rising from a great padded seat. It was Bat, swathed in black robes and swollen with indignation to what seemed like twice his usual size. Or had he always been that big? Behind him a complete kitchen covered the whole of the end wall, its orderly layout in contrast to the chaos that filled the rest of the Bat Cave. Beside Bat's chair stood the most complicated communications center that Lola had ever seen, with whole panels labeled "Outer System Transport," "Local Travel," "Belt Travel," and "Inner System Connections."
The Ganymede Club Page 23
