The temperature dropped about twenty degrees. Melanie's grip tightened on my arm, and her smile froze.
I didn't move. Over by the nearest door, two of the peacemakers in their formal uniforms turned toward us, hands resting near the butts of their wireguns. Just as my swords are part of my dress uniform, so are their guns.
I smiled at the general. If it happens, you're first. Then the aide.
For a moment, I honestly didn't know which way it would go, but then Holtenbrenner threw back his head and laughed. It sounded hollow to me, but it was enough for the claque of listeners around him. They joined in, one of the women with a nervous titter that earned her a glare from the watery-eyed blond aide.
"A strong joke, my dear Inspector-General. We're all fortunate that I prize myself on my sense of humor, and my open-mindedness. Besides, your lovely companion is a redhead—of a different branch of our Aryan race entirely."
For a few moments we made polite conversation, words passing lips almost mechanically, until I could find a way to leave.
I turned and walked away, Melanie on my arm. Damn me, but it had felt good to taunt the German.
Freiheimer, Freiheimer.
"What now?" she said, a trace of a quaver in her voice.
"Now you earn your money."
I led her toward the doors that led to the lifts. The first car that came was empty.
"Can I ask what that was all about?" she said, after the lift doors closed and I thumbed for my rooms in the penthouse.
As the car accelerated, I stooped to retrieve a pair of tabsticks from my sock, thumbed them both to life, and passed her one. "Just a guilty pleasure," I said.
The door hissed open in my rooms.
As she took the tabstick away from her lips, I put my free arm around her and pulled her close. With a practiced one-handed gesture, she reached a slim hand up to the back of her neck. Her dress dropped to the floor. Beneath it, she was naked and lovely.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Night Moves
Theilonee, New Britain
New Portsmouth Port Facility
01/10/44, 2327 local time
"Wha' is i?" Melanie said, her voice muffled by the pillow.
"Just me," I said, as I came out of the bathroom with the hypo loaded and ready. I thought she was going to stay face down on the pillow, but she turned over and her eyes widened. She was too slow; I whipped the sheets away and batted her hands aside as I pressed its snout to her shoulder. It hissed briefly.
I let her go, backed away and watched her eyes glaze over before they sagged shut. I picked up her wrist and timed her pulse with my thumbnail watch. Fifty beats per minute.
I allowed myself a smile as I let her arm drop. I retrieved a bottle of the local vodka from the top of the dresser, carefully rinsing her mouth out with about an ounce of the stuff, letting it slosh onto the pillow; I didn't want her inhaling it.
Not only would the drug keep her unconscious until morning, but it wiped out short-term memory, the same way a just-this-side-of-lethal overdose of alcohol does. She'd wake up with a horrible hangover and a bruise on her arm. Not really unusual for a whore.
She was a question mark, and while that hadn't deterred me from bedding her, I wasn't going to push my luck. A few centiliters of clear liquid and she was an ellipsis. She was probably just what she seemed to be, but so what? Whatever she was wouldn't be a problem for at least eight hours. I would, I hoped, be back at the hotel well before then, and actually sleeping with strange women isn't one of my guilty pleasures.
Well, one of us has to move, and it might as well be me, I thought. I pulled on a robe, packed up my gear and moved it into one of the penthouse's empty bedrooms, then registered the change with the hotel's computer.
On my last trip, I looked at her lying on the bed, hair spilling over the pillow. She looked kind of sweet and kind of vulnerable there, and I caught myself wondering about what kind of life she lived, and what kind of life she was going to live, until I decided that it really wasn't any of my business, and closed the door behind me.
I never saw her again.
Closing the door behind me in my new room, I dropped the robe to the floor and shrugged into my clothes, a gray gripsuit and a brown trailcoat, then sat to pull on my jump boots. There's a lot to be said for the traditional slippers, but one of the nice things about jump boots is that they give great support to your ankles, handy if you're going to fall any distance.
I was about to leave when the light began flashing on the message board by the door.
Please call me at your earliest convenience at PREFECT-2, the message said. Nigel Dunfey, AsstPrefect, New Portsmouth Constabulary.
I didn't like it. Doctrine is to stay away from local police. What did this one want? It couldn't be related to Zev and Dov; he had apparently been looking for me at the party, before they left. Odds were he wanted to warn me off of something, and the longer I could operate without confronting the local authorities, the better.
The Sergeant was waiting for me in the living room, the others having gone to bed. Like me, he was dressed for the outside, except that his gripsuit was almost comically tight across his middle. "You're not going alone," he said.
"Sure I am," I said. "I don't need you yet. Not for this."
He couldn't leave it at that. "What's the real reason?"
I lit a tabstick and returned his look. "Because you can't jog ten klicks anymore, much less run for ten, and because I don't want to play Samson-in-the-temple. We don't walk through trouble, not yet. We run away. You can't do that, old man."
He looked at me, thinking it over.
There are worlds where a sergeant, no matter how experienced and salty, when told to do something by his commanding general, just goes ahead does it. Give me an army of men like the Sergeant and I'll leave any of those worlds aflame from pole to pole.
"Four hours," he said. "And you'll stay out of trouble."
"Four hours," I said.
I slipped out a side door and into the rain, walking briskly down the side of the road for the Preserve gate, a little more than a klick away.
Traffic was light at that hour; only a pair of lorries hissed by me, heading outward, the spray from their skirts sending me huddling in my trailcoat.
I nodded at the camera as the fence clanked aside, then stepped out into the street. Security is only tight when entering the Preserve, not leaving it.
The nearest mono station was just a block away. When I climbed the rickety wooden steps to the more solid concrete platform, Zev and Dov were already there, as was an old couple who huddled with their packages in the far corner of the filthy shack, clearly terrified of us, equally terrified that any demonstration of their fear would only set us off. The unblinking red eye of the shack's security camera didn't seem to reassure them.
I wondered what they were doing out this late, but couldn't think of a good reason to ask.
The mono's flat rail curved off into the distance, hanging above most of the city, dividing it horizontally as well as vertically. Above, in the high-rising buildings toward the core of the city, life was safe and warm. Below, the day belonged to the workers, protected, sometimes, if they were lucky, by the prowl cars of the Constabulary.
In the distance a light flickered on the rail; a train of three sleek cars, their sides glistening with wetness, slowed and then stopped. The elderly couple got on.
"This ours?" I asked.
Zev shook his head. "We need an odd-numbered train." As the door hissed shut and the train pulled away from the station, he turned his back to the camera.
"Not a lot to report," he said. "There's crime, but it's hard to get anyone to talk about who's doing what to who, and for how much. Some drug trade from the west—all flavors of alkaloids, mainly. Around the core towers, you can find a whole assortment of sex partners, but I don't see anything useful there. Gang action in the core city and out in Somerset, some of the young turks are taking territory away from the old-line New Ports
mouth transportee types, but mainly from each other. Political corruption all over the place; the new mayor is promising to clean up the Constabulary, once and for all."
That didn't mean much to me.
"Anything to add to the G2 briefing?" I lit a tabstick and considered the coal's glow.
He shrugged. "Give me two years, and I'll give you a full report. You're expecting this to be too easy, I think."
Maybe I was. Maybe not. "I know Shimon Bar-El. If he wants to be found, he'll be findable."
Dov hadn't said a word, but at this he nodded.
"So what? If we do find him, is it worth it?" Zev shrugged. "What's he going to do for us that's so important?"
I didn't answer; I didn't know. But the Intelligence reports said that Shimon was involved somehow with local criminal activity. Since we didn't have forever to try to find him, the only thing to do was to make contact with as many different criminal individuals and organizations as we could, and hope to find something that would lead us to him. The young hoodlums weren't the most promising place to start, but they were easy—we could approach them directly tonight, and then see what we could do with drug dealers and pimps tomorrow.
Another car hissed its way into the station. This one had a flashing green "3" on its side. Above the door, under the flaking painted letters that said next stop, the sign changed from preserve to 39th and 4th.
New Portsmouth is well designed. I've been in cities where they name streets—and not alphabetically, just give them whatever name is handy.
"Here we go," Zev said, pulling a flimsy from his pocket as we stepped aboard. The car was empty. "Any three, five, or nine will bring you back, eventually—but take the express, if possible." The doors hissed shut behind us. Smoothly, the train pulled away from the station.
"We going anywhere in particular?"
"Yes, but . . . no promises any good'll come of it." Zev shrugged. "There may be some action over in Somerset, by the Common. I have a meeting set up at a bar called The Dangling Prussian."
"Oh?" I smiled; that sounded like the kind of place that Shimon would be involved with.
Zev had picked up on that. "I doubt it, but I guess it's possible. The name isn't new; it was here last time I was. We're arms smugglers—we've gotten or are about to get a shipload of slugthrowers past Customs. I wasn't too explicit."
A reasonable cover. In places where the manufacture or import of guns are forbidden or strictly controlled, you can always get a lot of interest from people on the other side of the law in illicit weapons. "Why not wireguns, instead?"
He snickered. "We didn't have a demo wiregun."
Dov patted at his chest.
Very nice, indeed. "How long to Somerset?"
He glanced down at his thumbnail. "Twenty minutes. And then a short walk. The bar's near the station. It's under the rail."
They were younger than I'd expected. The youngest was maybe thirteen, the oldest perhaps seventeen. There were six of them, dressed in brown trousers and white pullover shirts, with few places bare of grease or filth. Three of them crammed into the bench opposite Zev and me, while the other three took up an almost-military at-rest position near Dov, who was leaning against the flaking wall.
Dov didn't say anything. He's fluent in several languages, but he can't drop the Metzadan burr from his voice. It takes practice, and that's not something he practices. Shimon never told him to.
"Names first," the leader said. "I'm Davy. This is Ilene, and Arthur. The three fellows standing opposite your boy are Kurt, Bradley, and Eric. You are?"
Why I'm Tetsuo Havani, inspector-general, Metzada. Have you seen my uncle recently? "I'm Mr. Brown. He's Mr. Black," I said, indicating Zev.
Davy snickered. "And the ox?"
"He's Mr. Large," I said.
He spent a solid second deciding how to handle it, and then chose a laugh. Good choice.
"Names don't matter," I said. "I wouldn't give you a real one, or tell you anything you could go to the Constabulary with, so why bother with names? All you care about is my merchandise, so Mr. Black tells me. All I care about is what kind of money you have."
"Let's see it," said the fat boy, Arthur. "I want to see it."
His nose had been broken in too many fights, and his left ear looked like somebody had once let his dog teethe on it, if there were dogs on Thellonee.
"Patience," Zev said. "Wait for the drinks."
It had been a neighborhood bar, once. Long ago, Somerset had been the outskirts of New Portsmouth, but as the inner part of the city had decayed, business had moved east, to Somerset.
You don't cure a disease by moving away from it. Now Somerset was the inner-city itself: hard-bitten, filthy. Out on the street, past the dirty glasses stacked at the far end of the bar, past the dirty glass of the window, there were more of them waiting for us. Just in case things didn't work out in here.
Guns might be at a premium in New Portsmouth, but wherever there's steel, there are knives.
The bartender, a round-shouldered man of about fifty, arrived with our tray of beer in unopened brown glass bottles. He set the tray down, and debated with himself for a moment whether or not to try to collect now.
"On me," I said, slowly bringing my hands out of my coat with a five in my left hand, three ones in my right. It's not a good idea to flash a roll; much better to keep all your fives in one pocket, your ones in another. That way, you can produce what you need—without letting anyone know what you have.
The bartender scampered away with his money. But he kept eyeing the phone behind the bar, although he was too smart to pick it up. It might have taken less than a minute for the Prefecture to get a floater to the bar, but—assuming that the young lads wouldn't cut him to ribbons in that minute—he still had to live in this neighborhood.
Davy was maybe fifteen. Not the oldest one in the group, but he seemed to have the cleverest eyes. "How many can you supply? And when? Tonight?"
"No." I shook my head. "It'll be a few days, maybe a week." If we couldn't find Shimon Bar-El in a week, we couldn't find him at all. Besides, the negotiating team was only going to be here for a week. "And the question isn't how many we can supply—it's how many you can afford. Guns are expensive. Only a few this trip. More next." That would appeal to him; if we were able to supply him with enough weaponry to give his gang an ascendancy over the other ones, he'd be able to recruit even more members.
"At least twenty, I need at least twenty," he said, flatly. "I can give you a thousand each, for twenty."
I snickered. "A thousand? Local pounds or TW chits?"
"Local money. Where are we going to get tweeks?"
"Your problem." I made as though to rise. "If you can't come up with better than that, we won't do business here at all—I can have the stuff come in at another port." I eyed him steadily. "If we can't do business, I'll be out of the city tomorrow, and I won't be back."
He nodded his appreciation that I had worked that one out, saving him the trouble of explaining that if I wasn't going to deal with the Storm, I wasn't going to deal with any of the other gangs in New Portsmouth. One way or the other, I wasn't going to deal with the competition. Possibly a price would go on my head the instant negotiations fell through; more likely they'd just pull out their knives.
"I'll make it fifteen hundred," he said. "We need some weapons."
So I understood. The gang wars were heating up throughout New Portsmouth. The high scores seemed to be being run up by a gang called the Vators.
Sitting next to him was a greasy-haired girl of perhaps sixteen. She eyed me unblinkingly, her expression blank, then turned to look out the window.
"Constabs," she said.
"Shit," the leader said. "Nige, scramble—and watch it. Move out in groups. Shaveteeth prolly called in the 'stabs; could be waiting to jump solos."
The tall boy ran for the front door and started calling out orders.
"I don't hear—" Zev began.
"Listen. Five nights from now,"
he said, looking at me. "Seventh and Twenty-Ninth, near the port." They were already crowding out of the booth; so was Zev.
By the time we were all on our feet, a constabulary floater, red lights flashing and siren moaning, had tilted itself to a stop in front of the bar, and uniformed proctors in riot gear were sending sparks off into the night as their wands slashed at the retreating young gangsters.
Davy headed for the back door, his companions in full pursuit. We followed them. It occurred to me that if the local police were really interested in rounding up the gangs, they'd watch all the doors, possibly with the main force at the rear door, the floater acting as a beater.
We ducked out the back door and into a cobblestoned alley that was empty of everything except dirt and garbage. A hundred feet above our heads, a train hummed by, shaking water from its sides in a momentary torrent as it banked into a turn.
Davy and his five young toughs scrambled up the fire escape.
"Do we follow them?"
I shook my head. We could better explain being found in a back alley than creeping around rooftops.
Me in the lead, the three of us went to the end of the alley and peered out. Nothing. Behind us, we could hear the distant moan of the police siren and the shrill screams of the young toughs touched by the police wands, but there was nothing here.
We slipped off into the night and worked our way back to the next mono stop, and took the train back to the hotel.
Corporal Menachem Yabotinsky was waiting in the living room when the three of us came in, dripping water on the rug. Without being asked, he poured three glasses of whiskey and passed them around, then sat down and rubbed tired hands across his face. He looked at least ten years older than his fifty-or-so.
I took a long pull on the drink. "Long night?"
"Nah." He shrugged it off, then scratched at his almost hairless head. "I just got on. The ham is good, but the chicken is horrible, just like mother used to make." He gestured to the tray of coffee and sandwiches on the dining table. "I've stood watch under worse conditions, although usually with a bit more armament." He had a makeshift spear leaning against the wall: a Fairbairn knife duct-taped tightly to a two-meter length of aluminum pipe.
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