by Bill Adams
“This is really Class-A,” Van Damm said. “Almost too good to be true. But it explains that mystery shooting on the Jade Canal. Crime is uncommon here, except for crimes of passion.”
“And you wouldn’t use anything but a knife for that,” I pointed out. “Not if you wanted to keep people’s respect.”
“Uh, just so,” he said. “Fortunately, the bodies drifted some blocks past the Foyle woman’s place, and your mask problems have created a straw man for the local authorities to chase.”
“Nor was that the most fortunate thing about it,” I said. “But next time I might not be so lucky. Any idea who’s out to nobble me?”
“Well, if Larkspur is just a blank label, out of the decision loop, and the Doge thought you were a bad influence on him…”
“But I’m not a bad influence on him.”
“True. Too bad, in a way—if Larkspur could publicly disgrace himself with his disgusting excesses…But I can’t argue with the position you’ve reached by trying to clean him up. So it wouldn’t be the Doge unless he suspected your connection to us, and you had no connection until now.”
“Doesn’t that leave Malatesta and the Hard Men? Or are they yours?”
He shook his head. “Not mine. Typical mercenaries. Paramilitary potential high, but covert tradecraft nil. It sounds like they’re good suspects for this Arturo’s termination. And if they were jealous of his influence, why not yours?”
“That’s how I see it, mate. And wouldn’t it be a good move for us to discredit them anyway—strip away the Boss’s bodyguard?”
“I’ll give it serious consideration,” he said, though his face said no spy for hire was going to call the shots in his op. “But I think your optimum route to extraction transects the end phase, don’t you?”
“Provided no homoiousian immanentizes the eschaton,” I said. “Speak Interlingua for pity’s sake, there’s a good lad.”
“I’m talking about the p-space barrier—the ‘Shy Lock.’ ” He paused to check the antisurveillance screen, perhaps for dramatic emphasis, then went on. “Is it true that the top floor of the guest block in the Doge’s wing of the palace is guarded around the clock by Hard Men?”
“Yes.” And the more I saw of that guard detail, generally assigned by Malatesta as a punishment for public drunkenness, the more it looked like a charade—a diversion, perhaps a trap for spies. But I didn’t say so now.
“Have you seen any sign that visitors from offplanet are taken there?”
“None. I don’t believe the technology is being exported yet.”
“I wish I could be sure,” he said. “There’s a merchant named Sforza, in the eastern parishes of the city.” That would be nearly a thousand kilometers away. “Many of the Doge’s offworld visitors seem to find their way to Sforza’s palazzo, for ‘parties’ that last for several days. Not a bad strategy, to have one Lock operating in a semipublic place, and the demo model far away. I think it’s time we learned just what the Shy Lock looks like, and how hard it would be to smuggle one out or build it from scratch.”
“You want me to burgle the most highly guarded rooms on the bleeding planet?” I asked incredulously.
“I’m not asking for a suicide. But there must be some way to acquire visual—”
I cut the jargon short. “Fine. I’ll do it tonight.”
◆◆◆
It’s a principle of improvisational theater: Never reject anything a fellow actor throws at you, but immediately take that idea further.
It left me the initiative. Van Damm had clearly been braced to wheedle and threaten me into taking his assignment, micromanaging it with suggestion after suggestion, but now the task was mine to accomplish any way I chose. I told him I needed to leave immediately in order to prepare, and was free of him in minutes.
After stopping by a toy shop and reviewing some of my skeleton-coder research into the Venezia commnet, I started looking for the Pretender—my only entrée into the palace. I found him and Ivan talking shop at the Gay Deceiver. That was a bit of luck: The last few days had taught me that the Pretender took great pleasure in drinking Ivan under the table; I only had to get them started.
Not long afterward, we settled down in the Pretender’s palace suite for a protracted bull session on the Manfred-Theodore “backstory.” I’d convinced the great man that I thought this was a serious performance problem, and had managed to keep us from picking up any camp followers. For the next few hours, we were undisturbed; the Pretender once gestured at the three of us in the big mirror over the mantel, hunched over our scripts, three ponytails, three huge white shirts—“ ‘Three little maids from school,’ ” he said sourly. But he stayed focused until I said I’d cleared up my “motivation problem,” then ordered some bottles up and swapped acting stories with me and the kid. This went on until Ivan passed into his usual stonelike stupor; honor thus satisfied, the Pretender was willing to knock off soon after a bodyguard made a room check, shortly after eleven. The dock-level entry door was guarded, so the occasional room checks were just busywork for the Hard Men, and I didn’t expect any more.
Ten minutes to midnight. Ivan lay unmoving on the parlor couch; a snore came from the Pretender’s bedroom. I passed through the foyer, went halfway down the corridor, and stepped into an empty guest suite. Closing the door behind me, I passed through its parlor and master bedroom to the glass door looking out on the Grand Canal.
Step one: I plugged my skeleton coder into one of the room jacks and activated a program I’d written that afternoon. First it confirmed that the top floor and roof were spiderwebbed with intruder alarms, as usual. The building’s computer defense system was too good for the coder to slip much past it. But I didn’t need much. What the master computer now received—its jack of origin disguised—was what appeared to be a request from the sort of portable room-security device Summerisle had installed this afternoon, as though Summerisle were returning to his suite on the floor below this one. “Summerisle” informed the house defense that he was hooking a break-in sensor to his balcony door for the night and wanted the house to monitor it. If I’d tried to have any alarms removed, the system would have asked too many questions, but the plea to add one was immediately accepted.
Step two: I waited until two minutes before midnight, then slid the glass door open as quietly as I could and stepped out onto the ugly wrought-iron balcony provided for viewing the city’s frequent water festivals. The bedroom balconies were close enough together for a commando to climb, but naturally they’d been removed from the top floor where the Shy Lock was. Good—they would only have been in my way. From my pocket I took three high-compression rubber balls I’d bought at the toy store that afternoon. As I did so, the skeleton coder sent a false break-in alarm from Summerisle’s former suite on the floor below—right on schedule. Now I chucked the three balls as high as I could, with enough of a slant to bring them back down on the roof. The roof alarms were not designed to make exterior noise, but I could hear the balls pogoing around up there and knew that the defense system would now kick into full alert.
I ducked back into the suite, unplugged the coder, and made for the door. That should start enough of a panic for Rezakhan to hear about through his own sources tomorrow—and if it didn’t, step three at midnight would be too public to miss. I merely had to decide which way to play it in the morning: give a fake description of a Shy Lock or say that I’d failed and could never try again. But for now, all I had to do was get back to the Pretender’s suite before the whole entryway was swarming with—
Shit! I had my hand on the doorknob when I heard a voice from the corridor on the other side, close by:
“Repeat, Control, I did a room check two minutes ago—the Boss and one buddy. Corridor is secure. Do you want me to check the other rooms?”
A bodyguard. And now his wristcomp was crackling a reply:
“Negative, stay in sight of both stairways, I’m on my way.”
A moment of fury and f
ear. But the next moment was midnight.
And everything went pitch dark as the entire palace lost its power: step three.
As I silently opened the door, the now-invisible guard in the corridor was shouting the latest development into his wristcomp, unaware that the blackout was building-wide. His voice gave me his position in the darkness; by flattening against the wall I was able to sidle past him, and by counting doors I was able to find my way back into the Pretender’s suite.
And not a second later the lights came back on, much sooner than I would have thought possible. Ivan lay unconscious in exactly the same position as when I’d left, face to the couch; snores still issued from behind the Pretender’s door.
Of course, the skeleton coder could never have tricked the palace system into cutting its own power, and the computer defenses for every node leading back to the power company had been similarly secure since the Pretender’s arrival on Venezia. The palace’s power supply was guaranteed uncuttable, and its utility bills were paid one year in advance in an account that was also cyber-secure.
But just because a company’s billing number is on the paid-up list, and that data file is protected, doesn’t mean the number can’t also be added to unprotected data files that pertain only to commercial accounts—such as the past-due, three-times-warned, cut-off-at-midnight list. I’d been proud of this scam when I’d implemented it late that afternoon, and would have been impressed at how quickly the defense computer had counteracted it—if I weren’t stone terrified.
How could I guess a guard would wander by and do a room check in the lousy ten minutes I was gone? And now—
A second voice from the corridor. Lew Malatesta—it would be. “…Definitely came from the third floor down. I happened to look up from the dock as I came in. And two guests checked in with the Boss tonight, not one.”
A plot-construction problem, Bedroom Farce division. Think substitution, sleight-of-hand. Pull your shirt out, Evan, muss up your hair—
The voice was closer this time; two sets of boots clicked louder against the hall tiles. “Which one was missing? It was Sly boy, wasn’t it?”
“Dunno, but he could have sneaked back while it was dark.”
—roll Ivan’s face toward you—the boy is virtually comatose—thumb the pressure points at your temples, peel the gyal-wa mask off your head and place it on his—
The corridor door opened and Malatesta came through the foyer with a thin, nervous-looking Hard Man behind him.
Eyes screwed up as if I’d just been sleeping, voice and movements nearly as drunk as the Pretender I now resembled, I said, “What’s up?”
Malatesta stopped short, his broad face swiveling at the sound of snoring from the Pretender’s bedroom. “Uh, we’ve detected an intruder, Boss. Are both your guests…okay?”
“Chris shouldn’t have had that last half bottle,” I said, blinking down at Ivan. “Looks like shit.” Despite his different underlying features and the unsettled mask, he still made a passable me-as-Sly—after all, who else could he be?
“That one hasn’t moved since the room check,” the thin guard told Malatesta sotto voce.
“Ivan’s okay, too,” I said, flailing vaguely in the direction of the snoring. “Passed out in my bedroom. Don’t get any ideas, we were playing cards.”
Malatesta gave the thin guard a hard look. The guard shrugged. “Well, of course, I didn’t turn on a light in there. Thought it was the Boss snoring.”
“Okay, it wasn’t a guest,” Malatesta said. “A climber, maybe. But unless he was very fast on the stairs, he’s still on this floor.” One second of triumph and relief, and then—
In the next room, with a loud pfnork, the snoring stopped.
I could hear the Pretender’s bedclothes rustling. I headed for the hall door, saying, “Well, let’s find him, then, God damn it.” Malatesta and his underling had to follow me, the latter mercifully shutting the door behind him.
“Why don’t you stay safe in your room, Boss?” Malatesta urged.
“Never!” I said. “We’ll start at the end and move this way.”
“Should one of us stay in the hall?” the thin guard asked as we reached the farthest suites.
“What, aren’t the stairs secure now?” I asked Malatesta angrily—blink, blink, refocus eyes.
“They are,” Malatesta said. He looked fed up with his Boss, but went into one of the end suites. “Follow me, Gregor.”
I stayed behind. “Going back to get one of my pistols.”
Malatesta’s voice came sourly from inside the suite: “You do that. Boss.”
Okay, don’t panic, Evan. Return to the Pretender’s suite, he’ll be half blind even if he’s reached the parlor, just drag Ivan to the bathroom and take the mask back, and you’ll be—
Screwed. I was only halfway down the corridor when the Pretender stumbled out the door of his suite. Before he was quite facing me, I opened the nearest door and ducked inside.
It was the suite whose balcony I’d used. Bad choice.
I could hear the Pretender in the corridor, saying, “Hello?”
A moment later, Malatesta answered. “He’s not in there, Boss.”
“Who isn’t?”
You could almost hear Malatesta’s teeth grind before he replied. “The intruder. The intruder isn’t in there.”
“Intruder, hunh.” There was a long, long pause, and then he said, with a nightmarish inevitability, “What about the guy who just ducked in there? That middle suite.”
Shit, shit, shit. Top speed on tiptoe through the parlor, into the master bedroom. Hear the door rattle; they’re coming in. Nowhere to go but the balcony. Slide the glass door open, now pull the curtains behind you, maybe they’ll forget this door is here—
Malatesta’s voice in the parlor already: “Are you sure you saw someone, Boss?”
“Just watch out, that’s all. He could be armed.”
Step out onto the balcony, quiet the curtains, slide the door shut again, hear it lock behind you, you fucking idiot—
Malatesta was in the bedroom. “Gregor, check the bathroom.”
And it’s no good, of course they won’t forget the balcony, you’ve got to keep moving—Evan Larkspur the cosmic shuttlecock. Jumping into the canal isn’t even an option, there’s a dock below. Hang out of sight, maybe. Throw one leg over the rail, change your grip, get your toe through so you can stand on it and bring the other leg over—
Faster, faster, it’s suicide so why think about it? I was facing the building, everything but my toes outside the balcony. I hunched and jackknifed to run my hands down the rail posts almost as far as my feet, bent my knees further to bring my body nearer parallel to the building, and finally, desperately, slipped my feet free. There was a terrible wrench to my wrists, and then I was hanging by my hands alone. Maybe if he just glanced out quickly, he wouldn’t see these fists at the end of the balcony floor. Of course he will, it’s all for nothing, you’re going to die and be buried as an impostor, fuck history and fuck destiny—
But now something brushed my toes: the rail of the next balcony down, had to be. God, it would be tricky, though. I’d have to fall on the inside or at least catch hold of the rail, and I’d be bound to make a noise, couldn’t wait until—
Someone was forcing the balcony door open without unlocking it properly; the loud scraping sound was the best cover I’d get. I let go with one hand, found an edge on the underside of the balcony and pulled on it as I let go with the other hand and ducked my head, one boot secure on the rail, the other in space somewhere, hop, and—spang!—I’d touched down, quickly bending my knees to kill the impact, one of them hurting like hell, and the hardest part turned out to be holding my breath for the next few seconds—
As Malatesta said, “Not out here, either, Boss. If you’d just go back to your room, we won’t disturb you again tonight.”
The Pretender’s answer was a confused and irritated mutter. The door slid noisi
ly closed behind them and I gasped for air, trying not to swear. Too much, too much, they’ll push you off the edge of the world. I stood, my knees shaking, part of my mind spinning its wheels over the next problem: how to get back to Ivan before he woke up with Christopher Sly’s face. I faced the building and tried the new door. It, too, was locked.
And I felt used up, burned out. It had been less than forty-eight hours since the man with no eyebrows had been shooting at me, and now—
Now a lamp went on in the bedroom I faced, and I was lit from head to toe by the brightness that burst through the glass door.
I froze. Next balcony down—could I do it again? Or—
No. All over. The glass door was opening.
And the thoughts of defeat are childish thoughts. It isn’t fair, I tried so hard, I couldn’t get a break, every hand against me…
She stood in the doorway in something white and sheer, and the light was behind her. She was still half asleep, but only for a moment; those great dark eyes grew larger and larger.
“Domina,” I said.
“Evan?”
She thinks it’s—but I am, I am and he’s not. “I am Evan.”
She looked up at the balcony above us. “How did you…you jumped? Are you drunk?”
“I’m sorry. I’ll go. Let me in, and I’ll go.”
She stepped aside, and the weak knee gave as I crossed the sill. She caught me as I started to fall and propped me back up, the scent of her the same as it was a century ago.
“You could have killed yourself out there,” she whispered, tears on those long black lashes.
“Don’t know what I’m doing. Running out of space.” I was babbling, I couldn’t seem to stop it, looking into her eyes as she raised one hand to my naked face.
“I can’t fight you anymore,” she whispered. “You’ve got to care if you live or die, you’ve got to.”
“Out of space, out of time. Just give me a moment, please, Domina. A moment.” My hands were on her waist, and they knew that waist so well, the narrowness of it—after all these years they remembered where to go next and I couldn’t stop them, one slipping behind her and down, the other riding the curves upward, as she rose on tiptoe and arched her back in the still familiar way, offering her white throat and the dark-tipped splendor of her breasts.
