Not trusting. Weak.
The cynical side of him seized the moment to hammer again at the message it always held at hand for him.
Weakness. That's what sentimentality brings, it reminded him. Weakness and death. Look around you—at the broken windows and bullet holes and the blood on the ground . . . smell the smoke in the air. That's gunpowder and what's left of your home.
All right, he told himself. Leave it alone.
Certainly, Mr. Ambassador, he thought to himself in a mocking voice. Oh, but of course. You just sit there. Wallow. Have a good time. Don't worry about the men and women who died last night because you're getting soft.
Hawkes squeezed his eyes shut, trying to calm himself. It did not work.
No, no—I mean it, his mind continued. Don't give them a second thought. Or the fact that since you're still alive, whoever did this will probably be back. Don't worry about that, either. Just tell me one thing . . .
His body began to shake as the cynical side of him asked, Shall we have Disraeli buried, or just fed to the hogs?
"Shut up!" Hawkes screamed aloud, his body pulsing with rage. The ambassador slammed his fist against the arm of his chair—once, once again. The third blow shattered it, sending splinters deep into the edge of his palm. Cook came back out and stared as blood began to drip from his hand.
She was a short woman, standing no taller than five feet three. In her flats, her brow was barely higher than Hawkes's, even though he was still seated. Lowering her graying head a fraction to meet his eyes, she said, "That's what happens to men who don't eat. First they starts off by talkin' to themselves. Then they graduate to hurtin' themselves."
"Cookie, please . . ."
"Not you, though. You not one to beat around the bush."
"Cook—"
"Nooooo, sir. Unn-unh. You gettin' it all out of the way in just one shot. That's why you such an important man. 'Cause you know how to get things done."
Hawkes looked up at the old woman. She had fed him, as well as most of his staff and workers, for the last seventeen years. Ed Keller said once that she hadn't actually been born—that she had been cut from raw pig iron and brought to life by a lightning storm. She had taken it as a compliment.
Walking across the porch, hard and stiff, her tight face seeming more forged than human, she said, "Now I'm tellin' you, you've had enough time in that chair, playin' old man. You get up and get in that house and start figurin' out what happened here and start doin' somethin' about it."
"Why?"
"Damn you! Damn you for askin' and damn you for even needin' to ask. Who you think you are you can just go and give up like some nobody?"
"I am nobody."
"I believe you," she snorted, mad and indignant. Standing her ground, she reminded him, "But it's a big world out there. A lot of folks you still got conned. A lot of people in this world are stupid—they still think you care about doing the right thing."
Hawkes's head snapped around. His eyes crackling, he snarled, "I'm nobody special. I've never been any more than just another guy doing his job. I didn't ask for people to turn me into some kind of folk hero."
"Too bad," she answered him. "Everybody's got somethin' to live with. That's part of yours." Turning on her heel, the short woman marched back to the kitchen door. Holding it open, she turned her head enough to see Hawkes.
"Now, you goin' get in here . . . let me see to that hand of yours and feed you, or should I just find Ed and tell him to dig another hole so you can crawl in it?''
Hawkes held his place for a long moment. He was so tired. All he had wanted was to be left alone. He had done his duty all his life. When was it supposed to end?
He had done his job in the service, in the corps . . .
Always. All it had earned him was a collection of enemies. He had done the right thing in Australia and effectively ended his career. He had done the right thing and gone to Washington to take his medicine, and now they sought to punish him by sending him to Mars.
Mars, he thought. You could send a dozen other people there, Mick—people who really know and care about the issues—who could do the job ten times better than I could. The only reason you want to send me is because you know how much I'd hate being there.
Benton Hawkes loved his world, his father's ranch and all the forests and fields and streams it contained. He had never even been to the Skyhook site, let alone the Moon or beyond. He had no desire to see any of it. Cruising in spaceships, charting asteroids, surveying unknown worlds—for him, none of it could compare to the simple pleasure of saddling up and riding out for a day in the woods.
And Mick Carri knows it.
But he also knew that Cook was right. Whoever had tried to kill him would try again. He stood slowly, pushing himself up out of his chair as if it were a grave. He looked around him as he did so. His keen eye took in the charred buildings, noted the smoke hanging in the air, the broken ground and trees and windows showing the lines of fire both sides had hurled at each other. The dusty outlines that marked where his people had fallen after they had been shot down.
And it'll happen again, he thought. The anger he had been denying, keeping capped off, finally broke through. As he walked toward Cook, a voice hissed in his head. Someone wants us to do or not do something. This all is just their way of saying "please."
As he reached the short woman holding open the kitchen door, Hawkes walked past her, saying, "Well, you want to get this hand looked at . . . stop standing around."
"What. . .?"
"You gone deaf on me, old woman? Get in here and fix me up. Get Ed in here, too. And whoever's in charge of the official investigation."
"Now?"
"Yes, now. And get that stove going. I want a steak. Pan fried. Medium rare—in burnt grease gravy with mushrooms and onions."
"I know how to cook for you," answered the woman with a trace of indignation.
Hawkes continued on into the kitchen as if he had not heard her. Cook followed along, her pocket communicator already in hand. Keller and the local sheriff were in the kitchen before she had finished breaking out the first-aid kit. While she used the tweezers on the ambassador's hand, he told his foreman, "We're going to need some meat for tonight. I want you to get the boys over to the pen, pick out a good-sized hog, and get the spit ready."
"Don't need to, boss. We got three freezers full ri—" Keller stopped in mid-word. The look in Hawkes's eye reminded him that the ambassador knew what he wanted—at all times. Chastened, he said, "Um, ah, I mean . . . what, what time did you want it ready? To eat, I mean."
"Sundown."
"That's cuttin' it close, boss."
"Then get started."
Keller flashed Cook a look, wondering if the fire he sensed raging through Hawkes signified what he thought— hoped—it did. She continued to dig at the wood embedded in the ambassador's hand, pulling out one broken sliver after another. However, she took the split second necessary to fill her eyes with the message that Hawkes was indeed sending, and that Keller had better get about doing what their boss wanted done.
The foreman's face broke out in a nervous smile. As he headed out the back door, shouting orders, Cook smiled as well.
"So, Sheriff," Hawkes asked, trying to ignore the pain tearing through his hand, "what do you know so far?"
Sheriff Bob Morgan was a middle-aged man with thinning, salt-and-pepper hair. Pulling at his neatly trimmed beard, he answered, "Mr. Ambassador, we got some facts, and we got some hunches, and we got some stuff we've turned upside down and brought back right side up that we can't make heads or tails of." Uncrossing his arms from off his chest, he hooked his thumbs in his pants pockets and then asked, "What order you want it in?"
"However it comes to mind." Hawkes winced as the last splinter was pulled free from his hand. Cook poured more antiseptic into the wound. Stinging white foam bubbled to the surface. As she began to wrap it, the ambassador asked, "Sheriff, have you eaten?"
"I could share a plat
e, thank you."
"Cook, make that two steaks. And clear this table and get us a couple of work screens. And bring the ranch layout file."
"Yes, sir," she answered. She pulled the last loop of bandage extra tight. A little pressure to keep his hand throbbing, to give him a bit of pain to chew on.
Gathering up the first-aid kit, she removed it from the table and headed off to start filling the ambassador's other requests. As she left the kitchen, her smile grew thin and mean. Hawkes was eating and giving orders again. Someone was going to get their ass kicked.
"And, Cook, put on some more coffee when you get back."
"I only got two hands," she snarled over her shoulder. Her eyes twinkled as she headed back for the kitchen with the electronic work screens. She looked at Hawkes and Morgan, bent over the sheriff's hand recorder, studying his notes. She could see the heat coming off the ambassador—the tension in his shoulders, the hate growing in his eyes.
Oh yeah, she thought, satisfied. Somebody goin' get their ass kicked, all right. Real good.
Turning to her stove, she pulled out her biggest black-bottom skillet. Turning the heat up high, she threw a large margarine cube into it. Then she pulled out two steaks and started trimming the fat from them. As she spread the pieces out in the skillet, their juice began to merge with the margarine, all of it burning into a black grease.
Watching the pieces of fat shrivel into hard, brittle nuggets, she smiled again. Yeah. Real damn good.
9
THE SECOND HALF OF THE DAY PASSED QUICKLY FOR Hawkes. He and the sheriff coordinated all the information found by both their teams. Unfortunately, none of it added up to anything that gave them either a solid conclusion or course of action.
Not yet, anyway, thought Hawkes, keeping himself under control. It will, though. It will.
So far, they had discovered a lot. Stine had managed to sabotage their home defenses by concentrating his efforts in only one area. Just thinking of the nearly fatal mistake he had made—harboring the traitor in his own home—made Hawkes's blood boil, but he contained himself. The sheriff had listed the aide's death as just a part of the slaughter, turning a blind eye to whose hand had been responsible for that part of the slaughter.
The damage Stine had done to their defenses had been purposely minimal. He had opened only a thin-line breach in the radar and motion-detection fields, but it was all the invaders had needed. They had hard-marched in, carrying with them everything they needed.
No vehicles had been discovered left behind at their entry point, indicating that the invaders had been dropped off. The ambassador's defense network had also registered entry into the ranch's airspace during the attack period. Most likely a pickup craft coming for the attackers. When it received no landing signal from any of the invaders it must have simply left.
That bit of information alone clued Hawkes to the fact that his enemies had known all their people were eliminated as early as the night before. The discovery of Morte chips built into the armor of the dead showed him that not only had their unseen foes known their troops were captured, they had known that they all were dead—even at what moment they had died. The chip signals had all been sent in the general direction of the intruding aircraft.
His people had tried to get a fix on the craft after it had exited Hawkes's airspace, but its pilot had looped out of the mountains to the south, into a several-hundred-square-mile area where no one had any tracking devices in operation. They could have gone off in any direction. Another dead end.
Tracing weapons, ammunition, body armor, uniforms: they discovered a great deal of information, none of which did them any good. All of the recovered equipment and uniforms were standard gear—nothing specialized, all of it bought on the black market. No matter what their sources were, they all traced back to stolen or smuggled points of origin.
Someone out there is pretty good at covering his tracks, thought Hawkes. Too good. There has to be something they missed, though. And we'll find it.
Body identification searches did not do them any good, either. Every one of the intruders turned up as having been officially listed dead years earlier.
The sheriff joked that time had finally caught up with them, but the discovery kept them from getting any further. Although they were able to identify all of the invaders, they could find no common thread to any three of them. Some pairs had known each other in the past, but not in a way that pointed any definite fingers toward a possible organization point for the attack.
The invaders had been of all sorts: Common labor pool, mostly ex-military from more than one country. Two electricians, several with bio-growth backgrounds. All skilled workers, but no geniuses. No one who would ever be missed.
Nor had they been for almost three years. One by one, each of them had disappeared from all the official records Hawkes's reach could access. The Earth records for more than 150 nations, those from Skyhook, Lunar Colony, and from Mars showed no mention of the men and women who had tried to kill him the night before after their "termination" dates.
They had also focused on Stine, but had no greater luck there. Stine was not cut from the same fold. He had still been officially alive the day before. But once investigated, his background showed no sinister connections, either: no hidden bank accounts, no large withdrawals that might show a pattern of blackmail—nothing.
All they discovered was that he was a loyal junior member of the nation's diplomatic corps. He was effectively clean—had no trails leading from him to anyone he should not have known. Nothing hooked him to Deutcher, to the Martian unions, or to their managers, either. Not to Senator Carri or Clean Mountain Enterprises . . . not to anyone.
Which, of course, is why whoever did this picked him.
Hawkes pushed his chair away from the table with a weary gesture. Sheriff Morgan did the same. As the sheriff got up and crossed the room to the stove, the ambassador thought, You've been set up real good this time. Somebody wants us out of the way—someone we can't identify, someone we can't even assign a reason to.
Morgan turned back from the stove. He held the coffeepot up in the air, holding it at an angle and tilting his head to ask Hawkes if he wanted another cup. The ambassador shook his head. After the sheriff had filled his own mug, he said, "That's about it. We've drug this thing around the yard about as many times as it's going to go."
"I know."
"And . . . I hate to mention it, but pretty soon I'm going to have to tell some more people about this. You being the target—that makes it federal all by itself. World court's going to want a piece of things, too. Media— they'll be trying to fry me for sitting on top of things." He took a long sip of his coffee, more to give Hawkes time to think than anything else.
"You're still an important enough guy that I can excuse a delay for a while," Morgan offered. "They can't lean on me too much, seeing that I've got your privacy request. Can't hold them off much longer, though. Especially the feds."
Hawkes rubbed at his eyes, breaking up the tightness pulling at them. He stared at the table for a moment, then looked up, sticking his hands into his vest's side pockets as he asked,
"How long until we get the autopsy reports?"
"Those should start coming in anytime. Why? You got some sort of hunch going?"
"No," Hawkes admitted wearily. "Just grasping at straws." The ambassador paused for a moment, then admitted to at least temporary defeat. "You go ahead and send out what word you have to. Try and tight-band it, though. I don't want the board flooding with reporters any sooner than it has to."
The sheriff moved off to broadcast the report items he had instructed one of his deputies to prepare hours earlier. After he was gone, Hawkes stood up as well. He moved around the kitchen, stretching his arms out, breaking apart the knots in his back. Finally, he stopped at the sink, splashed some water on his face, and went outside.
The sun had started to disappear almost an hour earlier. Heading for the barbecue pit, Hawkes played the night before over in hi
s mind as he had a hundred times already. Nothing he could remember offered him any more clues.
He could see that his people had done a good job throughout the day. Much of the damage from the attack had been minimized, covered up in one way or another. The sight did not cheer him, however. As the hours dragged on, whenever he had come across anything that might have brightened his mood, he remembered Disraeli. The faithful hound's final moments, his last cry, all of it came rushing back to the ambassador with a frightening clarity.
Walking up toward the barbecue pit, he joined his workers who were not on guard duty. It seemed like a thin handful. Too many had died the night before. Too many people had perished, all of them innocent of any crime except for being employees of Benton Hawkes. The thought stirred rage within him. Bad memories slid to the surface, but he violently shoved them back down.
No, he told himself. No. These deaths aren't my fault. Not these. Don't lay this at my feet. I backed off. I left the world and drew my line in the sand..But that wasn't good enough for somebody.
Hawkes moved up to the edge of the fire pit, where nearly two hundred pounds of pork stood by the automatic spit, which had already been set up. The four-yard circle of hot coals sent out a searing wall of heat, keeping everyone back. All of the extra fat had long since bubbled to the surface and dripped away from the freshly slaughtered hog. The roast was as ready as it was going to get, filling the air with the thick aroma of juicy, heavy meat.
"Nice job," Hawkes told his foreman. Then he turned around to the crowd. He held himself rigid for just a moment, then said quietly, "Everyone here knows what happened. We lived and our friends died. Pure and simple. Is that where it ends? No. I don't think so. Not anymore."
The ambassador wiped at his brow. Even several yards from the fire, the heat was still intense enough to be felt.
"I thought I was out of things. That I was just going to retire and take it easy. Somebody else seems to think differently, though. Somebody else didn't want that. Why? I don't know. What they hoped to accomplish— well, I don't know that, either. But I'm going to find out. And we're going to have justice, one way or the other. You mark my words."
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