by Eric Brown
* * * *
Cosmopath
[Bengal Station 03]
By Eric Brown
Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU
* * * *
ONE
THE KORTH ASSASSIN
Vaughan was three days into a routine murder investigation when the assassin came after him with a pulse-gun.
The monsoon rains were late this year and it was another sultry day on Bengal Station. Soon the seasonal downpour would drop unannounced from the heavens, deluging the top level and sluicing away the accumulated filth of months. Until then the heat would remain intolerable and the mood of the citizens increasingly fraught. The humidity incubated anger, and hair-trigger tempers tripped at the slightest provocation. Vaughan had been working for the Kapinsky Agency long enough to know that the crime rate spiked in the weeks leading up to the first rains. It was never his favourite time of year.
He sat at a table on the terrace of the Kit-Kat Bar overlooking Silom Road, a glass of ice-cold Blue Mountain beer before him. He tapped the keys of the handset on his left wrist, enabling his tele-ability, and instantly the minds of those around him flared into life.
Four days ago a high-class prostitute had been stabbed to death in an alley off Silom Road. The death of another working girl would have passed unnoticed, and uninvestigated, had she not been the favourite of someone high up in the government. The Kapinsky Agency had been called in to bring the killer to justice, and Lin had dropped the case in Vaughan’s lap.
The other telepaths in the agency had ragged him about the job, but Lin had known what she was doing. Six years ago Vaughan’s wife Sukara had left Thailand, where she had been a working girl in a Bangkok brothel, and now she taught English to the girls who worked the escort agencies around Silom Road. She had known the murdered woman, and put Vaughan into contact with the woman’s friends who might otherwise have been suspicious of an official investigator.
He’d talked to the women, and scanned them, but come up with nothing.
Now he scanned at random, on the off chance that he might happen upon some stray thought, conscious or subconscious, that might lead him in the right direction. He flitted through minds close by, dipping for memories of the dead woman. She was known in the bar, but no one working or drinking here today knew anything about her death. The escort agency had its base next door, in the poly-carbon high-rise that soared like a scimitar into the cloudless blue sky. Vaughan moved through the minds of the women there, quickly, not wanting to mire himself in the short-term memories of working prostitutes: some had known the murder victim, and many were grieving. In the penthouse suite, Vaughan came across the pulsing collective signature of an orgy: four respected Indian politicians and a dozen Thai and Indian women were working up a sweat in the air-conditioned, mattress-lined room reserved for gold-chip customers. One of the men had been the dead girl’s patron, now sublimating his grief with the energetic assistance of his next favourite.
Vaughan withdrew his probe, despite the first stirrings of arousal - or perhaps because of them. These situations were common in his line of work, and he felt like a voyeur.
He touched a control on his handset and mind-silence sealed over him. He wondered if it were guilt that moved him to dial Sukara’s code.
“Jeff!” She beamed up from his metacarpal screen. “How’s it going?”
“Slowly. Are you at the hospital yet?”
“Daddy!” Li’s round face pushed Sukara from the frame and giggled at him. She looked better than she had for days, the waxy pallor gone from her cheeks. “We going to see doctor!”
Sukara appeared again. “I’m just in the grounds. I’ll call you when we’ve seen Dr Chang.” She peered past him. “Are you in a bar, Mr Vaughan?”
He smiled. “All in the line of work.”
She laughed. “Love you, Jeff. Bye.”
It’s nothing, he told himself for the hundredth time that day. Li had been sick for a week, listless and lacking appetite. He’d put it down to the time of year, but Sukara had taken Li to see their local medic who’d recommended a specialist, just to be on the safe side. Vaughan wished he’d been present at the examination, in order to discern the truth behind the medic’s bland platitudes.
He’d reassured Sukara that there was nothing to worry about, and wished he could convince himself.
“Mr Vaughan?”
He looked up. A gamin Thai street-kid, about fourteen, bandy-legged and flat-chested, squinted at him in the blazing sun.
Vaughan was taken back years, to the time he’d first met Sukara’s sister, Tiger. This kid was her double.
He smiled. “How can I help?”
The girl made a nervous knot of her fingers. “Ah, you Sukara’s husband, no?”
“That’s right.”
“You investigate murder of Kia, no?”
Vaughan sat up. “Right again. Why don’t you sit down and I’ll get you a drink?”
The kid winced as a flier screamed overhead, violating airspace. She slipped into the seat opposite and Vaughan ordered a mango lassi from a passing waiter. Her face was slick with sweat.
If the girl knew Sukara, then that meant she was a prostitute. Surreptitiously, below the level of the table, he enabled his tele-ability. The girl’s psyche swamped him. He fielded the emanation, damped it down, and was surprised to learn that the kid was eighteen.
“You knew Kia, right?” he asked.
Her grief leapt at him. Images of Kia and the kid - her name was Lula - strolling through in the park were uppermost in her mind; deeper, and Vaughan saw the images of her everyday work, the abuse she had suffered recently. He shut them out.
“Kia and me, we good friends. Like sisters. She knew man, regular customer. He frightened her, said he was going to kill her...”
He probed. The first thing he came across was the fact that she knew he was a telepath; she had debated coming to him with this information, at once not wanting him reading her secrets, but compelled to tell him what she knew.
And what pitiful secrets... She’d stolen a necklace from the market last week, when she had no money; she’d enjoyed sex with a young man who treated her well... Vaughan felt a sudden up welling of emotion and incipient tears stung his eyes.
She also knew what Sukara had told her: that she, Sukara, had once been a working girl, and now she was married to the finest man in the world. The kid thought it a fairy story, hardly believed it could be true, and Vaughan read in her juvenile mind the doubt that any relationship between a man and a woman could be as good as Sukara claimed.
“This man...?” he prompted.
He captured the image of the guy as it surfaced in her mind: a well-dressed Indian businessman.
“His name is Mr Narayan...” she began, but Vaughan had already read that, and more.
Narayan owned a bar off Silom Road, a plush sex club catering for the half a dozen alien races which stopped off at the Station spaceport. Narayan had hired Kia’s services once a week, then tried to lure her into working for him. When she’d refused, saying she didn’t want to work with Ee-tees, he’d beaten her and threatened her life.
The kid recounted all this to Vaughan between sips of lassi, and he nodded and let her go on. Whether Narayan was her killer remained to be seen, but it was his first lead in three days.
She faltered, then said, “Mr Vaughan...?”
He reached across the table and laid a hand on hers. “Kia wasn’t in pain. It happened so quickly. She didn’t even know she’d been attacked.”
The girl’s wide eyes leaked big tears and she bit her lip, nodding.
He was aware of her next question forming, and pre-empted it, “Of course I love Sukara. She’s a very specia
l person. We... we went through a lot together.”
“Sukara, she say, you saved her life.”
He smiled. In reality, Sukara had saved his life. He said, “We saved each other, Lula.”
She said, “Maybe I’ll find someone, one day, no?”
Vaughan nodded. “I think the boy you know, Ajay - he’s a good person.”
She beamed. “You think so? So do I!”
He read her joy as she stood up, making to go. Vaughan stopped her. He took out his wallet and offered her a hundred baht note.
She stared at the money, then murmured, “I don’t want paying for telling you about Mr Narayan. I did it for Kia—”
“I think Kia would like you to buy the dress you were looking at the other day. Didn’t she always say you suited red?”
Lula smiled and took the note, then waved and slipped from the terrace. Seconds later she was lost in the crowd surging along the street.
He sipped his drink, leaving his tele-ability enabled. He was aware that the orgy next door had played itself out; the politicians returning to the senate while the girls took showers or counted their earnings.
He spoke into his handset and got through to a female-voiced computer program at the agency. “What can you tell me about a Mr Narayan, the owner of the Blue World Bar, Silom Road?”
“One moment, please.”
The reply came a second later. “Rajeesh Narayan, forty-five, Indian national, resident of Bengal Station. Criminal record for illegal transference of cash, illicit narcotic substances. Address: Penthouse suit, Blue World Bar, Silom Road, Trat Mai sector.”
“Anything else?” he asked.
“Negative.”
He cut the link and looked along the street. The crowd surged down the thoroughfare like some multiheaded Chinese dragon, accompanied by a miasma of conflicting emotions. He was about to deactivate when he sensed something: a hundred metres to his left, he came across an area of mind-static, which indicated a citizen wearing a mind-shield. He glanced up and caught a quick glimpse of someone staring at him. Seconds later the fluid movement of the crowd concealed the watcher.
He’d seen enough, though, to recognise the alien: a tall, jade-green humanoid from Tau Ceti III. What did they call themselves? The Korth.
He wondered at an Ee-tee wearing a mind-shield. The fact was that the workings of alien minds were so abstruse as to be unreadable by human telepaths. He wondered if this one was taking no chances - or if he, Vaughan, was being paranoid. Had the alien actually been looking at him?
He scanned, but found no evidence of the mind-static, and told himself not to be so uptight. The alien had evidently moved off, out of range.
He deactivated, relaxed into the resultant silence, and finished his drink.
Two minutes later he quit the terrace and slipped into the crowded street, making for the alley and Narayan’s sex club.
Silom Road stretched from one corner of the Station to the other, a main arterial through-way connecting the rich Thai suburbs of the north-eastern sector to the spaceport. The raised railway ran parallel, along which white trains strobed like torpedoes; overhead, the din of the crowd was frequently drowned out by the scream of fliers crisscrossing the Station at five times the speed of sound.
He reckoned he had another half-kilometre to walk when his handset chimed. He accessed the call, assuming it was Sukara.
Instead, Lin Kapinsky’s thin face stared up from the screen. “Jeff, where are you?”
“Checking a lead on the Kia murder case. What’s wrong?” He paused beneath the awning of a body-sculpting parlour, aware of the stench of cauterised flesh that seeped from the entrance.
“Maybe nothing. It’s just that... You know Patel, the telepath you worked with years back at the ‘port?”
“Sure. What about him?”
“He was found dead earlier today. His throat cut. Police suspect a professional assassin.”
Vaughan nodded, feeling suddenly numb. He’d liked Patel, a cheery Bengali who’d never let the stress of the job sour his amiability.
Something clicked. He said, “You’re linking it with the other deaths, right?”
“Look at it this way, that’s the third telepath murdered this week. I could put them down to coincidence, but then I got the police report on Connors-”
“And?”
“The work of a professional. Shot through the head at close range. The first was Travers, and he was taken out by a car-bomb, again the work of a pro. And now Patel.”
He nodded. “Any thoughts?”
“I’ve got no goddamned idea at all, Vaughan.”
He grunted, “You don’t know how reassuring that sounds.”
“Okay, wise-guy, what do you think?”
He glanced across the street, at a snake charmer using an electric oboe to coax a Lyran silver eel from its basket. “They all worked for different agencies, right?”
“Go on.”
“So chances are they weren’t working on the same case. Therefore, the killer, or killers, aren’t trying to protect themselves, or whoever.”
“There is one link,” Kapinsky said. “Travers, Connors, and Patel, they were each the very best telepath working for their respective agency.”
Vaughan shrugged. “Coincidence?”
“Might be, but I’m taking no chances. I’ve always thought you were up there in the top four...”
“What are you trying to say, Lin?” he asked, knowing full well what she was about to lay on him.
“You’re the best I’ve got, Vaughan-”
“And you want to protect your investment, right?”
“Shades of the cynical Vaughan of old.”
He smiled. “No. I just know the way your mind works. So... what do you suggest?”
“Take a week off, hole up in some expensive hotel. Lay low and we’ll take it from there.”
“A week off on full pay? You’re turning into an altruist, Lin.”
“Like you said, just trying to protect my investment.”
“Okay, I’ll just get something out of the way. Five o’clock tonight I’ll take off with Su and the girls.”
“I’d rather you quit now and get the hell out. The Kia case can wait.”
“Lin, I’ve just got the first real lead in three days. I’ll be through in an hour.”
She hesitated, then nodded. “Okay, but by five tonight you’re out of here, okay? I’ll keep you posted.”
He cut the connection. Three telepaths killed within a week looked like more than just coincidence. And if Kapinsky was spooked enough to subsidise a short vacation, he wasn’t about to complain.
He left the reek of singed flesh behind and elbowed his way through the crowd. He was tall, even for a Westerner, and therefore a good head and shoulders taller than the Indians and Thais around him. He could see over the heads of the milling crowd to the near horizon, where skyscrapers and towerpiles bristled like the brandished weapons of a charging army. In the distance a dozen voidliners, great bulging behemoths painted in the various liveries of their lines, moved with gargantuan grace over the spaceport, coming in to land after long voyages across the Expansion or setting forth on trips to the many far-flung colony worlds.
He came to the alley and pushed his way through the crowd, then instinctively pressed himself against the crumbling wall and enabled his tele-ability.
He scanned, searching for the distinctive signature of mind-shield static. He thought he caught a brief signal - then it was gone, swept away in the surging pedestrian flow. He peered around the corner, looking for the tall jade-green Tau Cetian: all he saw were the smiling faces of Thais and Indians going about their endless daily business. Reassured, but still wary enough to keep his program enabled, he moved off down the alley.
The Blue World Bar was a discreet two-storey establishment - one floor on the top level of the Station, and the lower one on the level below - which fronted for an expensive and exclusive brothel.
As he flashed his ID at t
he surly doorman and pushed his way inside, Vaughan couldn’t help being aware of the hundred or so minds within the bar. Half of them were human, and in less than ten seconds he read everything from revulsion at the acts some of them were required to perform, to vicarious ecstasy at being made love to by the supernumerary phalluses of a Capellan amphibian.
Then there were the alien minds, which communicated themselves to Vaughan as great abstract swirls of emotion, fragmented images he had no hope of decoding. He guessed it was something like being blind and having to make sense of an oil painting by dint of touch alone.
