Wolf and Raven s-32

by Michael A. Stackpole

  "You look tired. You feel okay?" he asked me.

  I shrugged. "Went to the 'Dogs game last night."

  "Extra innings?"

  "Yeah." I smiled. "Oh, wait, you mean the game. No, just eight and a half. Mackelroy caught one on the warning track in center, then threw out the runner from third on a one-hopper to end the game. It was great."

  Bill sipped his soykaf. "Good, good. We'll have to take in a game some time."

  I nodded. "Yeah. Let's do it when we're on some errand for old TAB and we can get them to spring for a 'business lunch.' "

  "I like it." He gave me a conspiratorial wink, then looked up and nodded. "The wicked witch of the paycheck is watching, so I'll get back to my work station. If you need anything, just let me know." "Thanks, Bill."

  Left to my own devices I had to figure out what I was supposed to do. I really had no idea what Kant's duties had been and even Frid had been fairly vague. As nearly as I could make out, Kant was part troubleshooter, part confidential courier. Even when I called up a log of things Kant had done in the past two weeks, it looked like most of his time had been spent sitting on his hands.

  Fully aware that idle hands are the devil's playthings- a concept that I was certain Ms. Terpstra detested-I pulled a blank manila folder from my desk drawer and placed the employment and location policy agreements I'd signed the previous day into it. I labeled the file "Wolverton, Keith" and stuck it behind the Wolcott Trucking file.

  Feeling fairly satisfied with myself, I noted, to my chagrin, that I had another two hours to kill before the lunch wagon arrived outside. I looked at the stack of datachips on the corner of the desk, but all of them dealt with statistics, math, and probability modeling, so I just couldn't bring myself to pop one of them into the computer. Making a mental note to have Valerie get me games that would work on this monster, I started exploring the Interactive Building Directory.

  By the time the telecom beeped and saved me, I'd succeeded in memorizing the names and divisions for all TAB employees A to J in the building. "Keith Wolverton here."

  "I have good news and bad news for you." Dempsey was one of the few people who sounded better on the telecom than in person. "What's your pleasure?"

  Seeing Ms. Terpstra glowering in my direction, I raised my voice a bit so she could hear. "Well, Doctor, will the patient live?"

  "Mr. Kies is in no danger, beyond those expected for a man in his line of work. Whatever symptoms he thought he had, he was mistaken."

  "And the bad news."

  "No one's out to ace Wolf, but there's five thousand nuyen on your head, Mr. Wolverton." Someone wanted Keith Wolverton hit? Why? He didn't exist forty-eight hours ago. "Your source was impeccable as usual, I assume?"

  Dempsey grunted out a laugh. "The grieving widow was spending the five hundred nuyen down payment to blot out the memory of her late squeeze. Closed casket ceremony, you know."

  "At least they could go for a shorter box and save money." I drank some more of the soykaf. "You have a name for the patron of this poor departed soul?"

  "Are you sitting down and alone?"

  I looked at the monitor and saw a message presenting itself to me, letter by letter. "Only my very wonderful supervisor, Ms. Terpstra, reminding me that I should not be taking personal calls via the wonders of binary magic."

  "Probably safe, then. The name William Frid mean anything to you?"

  I suddenly wondered if soykaf could cover the taste of arsenic. I assumed I would find out shortly. "Rings a bell. Thanks. Dempsey."

  "No sweat, chummer. Tell me, is your Ms. Terpstra heavy-set, first name Agnes?"

  I shrugged. "Hit on the first, and an 'A' for a first initial on her nameplate. Why?"

  "No real reason." I could see Dempsey smiling like a fox in some dark telecom booth. "Heard that was the handle she'd adopted. Always wondered where she ended up after the Mitsuhama embezzlement scam. Watch your paycheck."

  "Got it, Dempsey. I owe you big time."

  "You'll be hearing from me."

  "Anytime, bud, anytime."

  I broke the connection and glanced over at Bill's cubicle. Braving the harsh look on Ms. Terpstra's face, I walked over there and crouched down at Bill's side. "Bill, I need some help."

  His smile slowly died as the seriousness in my voice got to him. "Sure, Keith, what is it?" I shook my head. "Not here. It's personal. I'm new in town and there was this woman last night…"

  He patted me on the shoulder. "You're right, not here. C'mon."

  He led the way past the dragon lady to the men's room. We quickly checked the stalls for lurkers, then flipped the lock. Leaning back against a sink, Bill smiled with mild amusement. "Now, what's the problem?"

  I shrugged. "The problem is that this woman is upset because the man you hired to kill me got dead himself in the attempt." I filled my right hand with Stealth's pistol. "That almost ruined my day. Explain to me why I don't want to ruin yours."

  Bill's eyes grew wider than the bore of the pistol he was staring at. "No, no, no, you have it all wrong."

  "That's correct about one of the two of us." I tore the loop-towel across the back part of the loop and started pulling it down in long lengths.

  His blue pupils rolled around like a chalk-mark on a cue ball. "What's that for?"

  "You're going to wrap it around your head so the brains don't splatter when I shoot you." I let my smile die except for a nervous twitch at the corner that convinced him I meant business. "No need to make the janitor's job any tougher."

  "Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God." Frid dropped to his knees. "I don't want to die."

  "Good, then tell me everything you know about the elves and TAB."

  "What?" He looked at me with absolute terror in his eyes. "What are you talking about?"

  "The Ancients."

  "Who?"

  "Dammit!" He flinched as I swore. "Why'd you want me killed?"

  "I didn't want you killed. I just wanted you, ah, roughed up." His thick lips quivered in a way that told me he had to be telling the truth. "Offering someone five thousand nuyen to rough me up is a bit much."

  He looked crestfallen. "How was I supposed to know? I went down to Damian's and offered a guy five grand to do a job, then I gave him five hundred and the copy of your picture I got from security. I just wanted to have you put out of action for a week or so."

  I frowned. "I'm still waiting for a 'why' here, chummer."

  "Because I wanted your job. Kant gets all sorts of courier jobs and he gets bonuses." He looked down at the floor and clasped his hands in an attitude of prayer. "You have to believe me."

  "No, chummer," I said, tossing him the towel. "You have to convince me. What do you know about Kant's courier actions?"

  "Oh, God, you're from Auditing, aren't you?" Frid wilted and his shoulders slumped forward. "Kant said he dealt with shadow projects."

  Shadow projects. Anything a corp wanted to do without the shareholders or the government knowing about it. Projects that never showed up on the books, but got money funneled to them through fake projects and promotions. Given all the interlocking directorates and vertical integration within the corporate world, tracking down the source of funding for almost anything was impossible. For shadow projects it was that much more so.

  And funding a war against the Ancients definitely sounded like a shadow project to me.

  "Okay, Bill, let's take this slowly. Kant made three courier runs recently. One was on the twenty-third of last month. This month he did one on the seventh and the other on the twelfth. Enlighten me."

  Sweat poured from his forehead and down his face. "I don't know."

  "You'll look good in a turban, you know."

  "Keith, I don't know. Honest, I don't."

  I dropped down onto my haunches and parked the Derringer a centimeter or so from the tip of his nose. "You've got two strikes against you, you weasel. You fig- ured you'd get Kant's job and his bonuses, and you still think you can swing some sort of deal out of this…" I paus
ed to let him consider how much his greed might cost him. "Well, chummer, you can. I only care about that one job. It involves elves and only local travel."

  I tapped his nose with the gun. "What will it be? True Confessions, or die knowing that whatever you had for breakfast was your last meal."

  "Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God. Ah, ah…" He screwed his eyes shut. "I don't know for sure, Keith. All those jobs went through Ms. Terpstra. Please believe me."

  I'd seen enough men crumble in my time to know Frid's marshmallow center was leaking through all the cracks in him. He had to be telling the truth, which meant I had a new nut to crack. I wouldn't have thought Ms. Terpstra capable of running a shadow project, but with Dempsey's cautionary tale about her, anything was possible.

  "Okay, Bill, this is the way things go down. You're going home sick, right now." The man nodded like a child promising Santa he'd be good. "If I find you've been lying to me you can consider our little talk here as the opening scene of the worst nightmare you've ever had." I slipped the gun back into my pocket. "Get out of here."

  Back in the office, I leaned forward on Ms. Terpstra's desk. "Agnes, I really need to know who asked you to give courier jobs concerning the demise of the Ancients to Mike Kant."

  Ms. Terpstra's head jerked around as if I'd gaffed her in a gill and yanked her from the Sound. "Mr. Wolver-ton, I have no idea what you are talking about. How dare you address me in such a familiar manner?"

  I gave her my best I-know-lots-you-don't-want-to-have-known smiles. "Is it that Tucker and Bors has a better retirement policy, or did you just tire of the Mit-suhama corporate grind? Audits after an embezzlement can be so tedious, don't you think, Aggie?" From the sour look that answered my question, I realized who- ever had her running a shadow project was using the same or similar blackmail evidence to keep her in line.

  "You play well, Mr. Wolverton, but you will meet your match." She gave me a cold smile. "Benbrook, Sidney M."

  "Benbrook?" I frowned as I tried to remember his entry from the directory. "Benbrook is in Marketing! Why would Marketing have a shadow project?"

  "Mine is not to wonder why…"

  "Yeah, what you do is steal and fly." I shook my head. "Thank you for your help, Ms. Terpstra. You make me proud to be a TABbie."

  Sidney Benbrook looked exactly the way you'd expect someone with that name would. The Interactive Building Directory showed me a tall, cadaverously slender man with dark hair so thin that when he combed it from right to left over his scalp it could have been deciphered by a barcode reader. His deeply set eyes remained hidden in shadow and, along with his corpse-like pallor, accentuated the impression that he had died late in the last century.

  As I entered the darkened sanctuary of his office, I knew, almost immediately, that no matter how benign or un-salesperson-like he looked, he was at the core of the problem with the Ancients.

  Benbrook sat in a big padded chair centered on a raised dais at the end of a narrow canyon formed by walls of computers and other electronic equipment. Little amber and red lights flashed off and on across the faces of the machines, enclosing him in a star field with constantly shifting constellations. Cables crisscrossed the area behind him and one snaked out from the tangle to jack into his skull behind his left ear.

  Like a spider aware of a fly's careless tread upon its web, Benbrook swiveled his chair around toward me as I entered the room. I had not tried to be particularly quiet, but his reaction unnerved me. His head came up and his torso came around instantly, but his eyes took their time in focusing down on me.

  "You're Sidney Benbrook?" "I know that. Who are you?" His voice came out as a harsh croak, as if he was entirely unused to speaking to another person. "I did not send for you."

  I'd seen other wireheads who were tied even tighter to their machines, but never in a corporate setting like this. I held my hands up in the universal sign of surrender. "I am Keith Wolverton. I'm taking Kant's place. Thought we should be acquainted in case you need anything done."

  "Done?"

  I gave him my best hey-we're-all-in-the-know-here smile. "Aggie told me Kant did courier jobs for you, all vapor, no flash. She says there's bonus money in it and she turned me on to the deal for a rounding error. She told me it could be dangerous, but I told her I wasn't afraid of any dandelion-chewers."

  "Dande… yes, elves." Benbrook froze-the only motion from his end of the room coming from the computer light show. "I find it disturbing, Mr. Wolverton, that your computer records appear never to have been tampered with. How do you explain that?"

  My smile broadened. "You can figure I've made a career of keeping my nose very clean, or you can assume that I came across Kant's action independently and I decided I would like to milk the cash cow myself for a while."

  "Tucker and Bors takes a dim view of extortion, Mr. Wolverton."

  "I said 'milk' not 'slaughter.' You've been devoting significant resources to destroying a population of elves. If you happen to know someone who's paying for elven scalps, I might know people who would be willing to create a supply to satisfy that demand."

  "You small-minded bigot. Elves and scalps and bounties are not important." Benbrook's eyes reflected the flashing computer lights around him. "Do you think these people might be able to get rid of the Ancients?"

  I frowned. "You have me confused. You said scalps aren't important, but you want someone to 'get rid' of the Ancients?"

  "That is correct."

  "But you do not mean 'get rid of as synonymous with kill?"

  He frowned, which was rather scary given the gangrenous pallor of his skin. "I mean it as in move, dispense with, create a decreased population concentration of."

  I shrugged. "That says kill to me."

  "Whatever!" Fingers clicked and clacked across an illusory keyboard. "I need to affect a ten percent reduction in the elven population of the Denny Park zone by the end of the fiscal year. Is that possible?"

  Denny Park marked the southwest edge of the territory the Ancients claimed as their own. Their recent battle with the Meat Junkies was over a piece of turf to the west of that area. That zone was one of the least habitable areas in the Seattle elven enclave, but it was the Ancients' stronghold.

  "Possible, yes, but that will be a very tough block of ice to salt." Something was not adding up because I wasn't hearing Humanis Policlub rhetoric coming at me. In fact, Benbrook had accused me of being anti-elf. "If you don't care how I get rid of the elves, why do you want that particular piece of real estate?"

  His right hand rose from the arm of the chair and, with index finger pointing down, rotated slowly to indicate I should turn around. As I did so, a huge display screen slid down from the false ceiling, flickered to life and shared computer graphics of Seattle with me. As I watched, the image swooped lower, like a helicopter sailing down through vector-graphic canyons. As it headed north from downtown it hit a block of solid green: the Ancients' turf.

  The image dissolved into a series of numbers. They scrolled past fairly quickly, but I caught bits and pieces of things. It looked to be a cost comparison between two programs, and then it shifted over into a point by point comparison of population. Outlined in red, and pulsing in time with my heartbeat, I saw the approximate number of elves living in the Denny Park area of Seattle.

  I turned back. "I still don't get it. Why are you paying to have elves scragged?"

  "It's obvious." Benbrook stared at me as if I was an idiot. "Demographics."

  I remembered the datachips in Kant's workplace, then stared at Benbrook unbelieving. "You're killing them because of numbers?"

  The red pulsing light burned off and on in his eyes. "Those are not just numbers, Mr. Wolverton. They are the very lifeblood of this company. Those numbers affect our bottom line. That means those numbers determine how much we can pay you and how much you get in your pension plan and what your profit sharing statement will look like. Those numbers are the most important numbers in the world."

  Though to look at him I'd n
ot have thought it possible, Benbrook rose from his chair and pointed a scarecrow finger at me. "You will forever be doomed to be nothing but a slave chip in the engines of industry if you fail to understand how important those numbers are. On the right you have the demographics and psychographics of the group the North American Testing Agency uses to test market our products."

  His shoulders hunched and his hands rubbed together like those of a miser aching to fondle credsticks. "They determine what we produce, when we produce it, what it tastes like, what it looks like, what it smells and feels like and how much we can charge for it. The shift of a percentage point or two in the approval rating for a product can cause us to retool a factory or to scrap a line altogether. NATA's test group is a fickle mistress whom we labor to please, yet pay whether our results satisfy or anger."

  His eyes went to the screen. "I will free us of our dependence on NATA and their group. The Denny Park District is identical to their area except for one thing. We have too many elves. Once I can eliminate enough of them, we'll have our own captive market here. I can create a division that will perform like NATA and we will wrest the dataflow away from them. Our costs will be a fraction of what they were for research, and we can charge others for using our group, which will reverse a negative cash flow in my division."

  I shook myself to clear my head of his missionary message. "You want to kill elves so you can taste-test chocolate bars in the sprawl?"

  "Crudely put, but I believe you have a grasp on reality."

  "Oh, I've got more than a grasp on reality, chummer." I pointed back toward the flashing red numbers. "You're trying to lower the river when what you need to do is raise the bridge!"

  He shook his head. "I tried that. I paid the Ancients to take more territory outside Denny Park. It would have created a more even distribution, but they failed."