Chapter Six
Vaughn pressed the buzzer outside D14 and stepped back, fully expecting those same bulging intelligent eyes, that same desperate, determined face to poke out at him and glance up the corridor to make sure no one had followed the Omicron agent. Don’t worry, doc. They can’t touch me anyway. But to be on the safe side, Vaughn had ditched Spielman at the cafe, getting her to dispose of their recyclables while he’d bolted for the exit. For now, he and Mbowe were alone.
But the doctor didn’t answer. Vaughn checked the room number again. Definitely D14. He tried the buzzer twice more, then knocked on the thin polymer panel.
Nothing.
An upsurge of conspiracy theories in the back of his mind worried him because he knew from experience how plausible most of them were in situations like this. An autonomous corporation like Iolchis Core, with its back against the wall, would take no prisoners. Any employee threatening its integrity was living on borrowed time. And Dr. Otter Mbowe, he figured, was a dead man unless Vaughn could get to him first. But even then...with the jurisdictional minefield under their feet here...
In the ten minutes since Mbowe had made contact, Vaughn had only had time to glance over the doctor’s ISPA file, using the Hopper’s database personnel records, and had concluded two things. One, Mbowe knew his way around sensitive research; for years he’d worked in high-security facilities ripe for plucking by espionage agents, especially at Kuiper Wells, that military-industrial behemoth famously honeycombed and brought down by ISPA informants. Yes, he’d probably been an insider, a spy long before he joined Iolchis Core. And two, for him to risk his life like this, at such a politically explosive time, he had to have something absolutely dynamite.
Vaughn waved his hand over the door’s entry pad on a whim. To his surprise the door whooshed open.
“Doctor?” he whispered.
No answer. No lights on save a message in purple neon letters over the bedside table that said, Take whatever you want. And another, in blue letters, arching around a smiley-face camera mounted on the wall below it, I dare you.
He stepped in and said, “Light.” The command didn’t work, so he felt along the wall for a sensor or a switch. No luck. The door closed behind him. It was unusually warm inside, verging on claustrophobic. There didn’t seem to be any air circulating. He could see a single bed, impeccably made, a utilitarian closet along the far wall, a sideboard full of framed liquigraphs (Vaughn had gotten rid of all his on the day his family had been sentenced), a bookcase, slippers on the carpet under the bed, the invitingly half-open sliding door to the shower and water closet, and best of all, a lifesized liquigraph poster of Allegra Mondebay, the famous cosmetics model from a couple of decades ago, strutting her stuff in a silver one-piece swimsuit, on an endless, seamless loop, her hair blowing in the wind as she walked and walked on a fluid catwalk, with stars showering overhead.
Vaughn loosened his collar, threw her a wink.
His eyes now slightly accustomed to the dark, he spotted a blank envelope on the bedside table.
For me?
His instinct told him not to touch it. That it was some kind of set-up. Mbowe was late and the room’s lighting and aircon didn’t work and the timing of this tryst—just after his meeting with Malesseur and Lewartow, just before he was about to leave for the Hesp—felt too perfect, too easy. Hmm, the doctor wanted to come forward now?
And yet, it could all be plausible. Mbowe had glimpsed an Omicron agent and, fearing for his own life—maybe the Administration was onto him—had made his move while he could, the only chance he got. Witnesses who risked so much deserved the benefit of the doubt. Deserved his help, his protection. Or was that what his enemies knew he’d think?
Vaughn went for the envelope, stopped. He looked down and jabbed in a breath. Held it. He froze his posture with one foot in the air.
Sons of bitches.
On the carpet at his feet, a stripper, a transparent pressure-sensitive strip less than a tenth of a millimeter thick, had just activated. He’d seen the barely perceptible, reflected neon gleam as his previous step had disturbed the carpet just enough to wrinkle the strip. Lucky...
But it was on, and it was waiting for him to make any sort of move. A twitch, a shift of balance, one more tiny change in the air density over the strip or a movement or vibration on the floor anywhere near it, and he’d be dead. Like their pole-dancing namesakes, these strippers worked a no-touch policy. You violated their boundary once, you’d best enjoy it while it lasted, ’cause you’d never leave the stage alive.
But how would it finish him?
Okay, work through this. It’s only a mechanism. You can outsmart a mechanism.
He went to wipe the sweat from his temples, checked himself just in time. Idiot. It’s waiting for you to move. He shut his eyes in order to focus. To use his methodical Omicron brain Saul DeSanto had often said must be sharper than any quantum super-computer if an agent wanted to reach fifty. Fifty? No sweat. Well, not much...yet.
You can outsmart a mechanism.
He checked the surrounding carpet. No explosive charges that he could see. Maybe under the bed, though. Or in the bedside table. His gut told him no. This was a stealth assassination: the aircon and the lights and the doctor’s clever lure and the bruisable political climate—blowing up an Omicron agent would call down the full fury of ISPA on Iolchis—told him he was about to be either gassed—unlikely, too hit-and-miss—or shot by some kind of poisoned dart.
Yes, that made sense. An untraceable toxin delivered into the bloodstream to stop his heart. No external fanfare. No political backlash. Today, an Omicron agent died of natural causes; shit happens.
But where would the projectile be fired from? Given how small the room was, it could be from anywhere. Any direction. Any height. He tried to think like an assassin. Hell, he’d butted heads with some of the best, their scientific methods, so maybe some of it had rubbed off on him.
Okay, what was I supposed to do when I came in?
First, notice the envelope. It was pretty much the only conspicuous thing lit by the neon lettering, and could plausibly have been left for him by Mbowe. Then he’d walk straight to it. And the most efficient shot at a moving target was from the front or rear. But by the time he’d activated the stripper, he’d have maybe half a step at most before he reached the bedside table, so he could conceivably be sitting down on the bed at the same time as the projectile was fired. All assumptions. Not really helping him at this juncture.
But he had to make a move sometime. His balance was good but it wasn’t interminable. In his mind he shook his head. Right now ducking made the most sense. Ducking to his right. It would take him out of the front-or-back firing line, it would put him on the floor, so the bed would protect him from an across-the-room kill shot. The downside was he was balanced on one freaking leg. He had no poise. No sideways agility below the waist. He could duck alright, but without the ability to throw himself sideways immediately—that was how quick stripper triggers worked—he’d still be in the front-or-back firing line, and he would likely be hit on the way down.
There again, even if he could throw himself sideways, he might be shoving his face into a shot from the right, from the poorly-lit bookshelf. Or onto the explosive he’d assured himself wasn’t there.
Goddamn it.
He had to make a choice. Now. His right leg was starting to wobble. The more he concentrated on keeping steady, the more he wanted to thrust his arms out for balance, the more it made him sweat. Right now he was the time bomb.
He realised this was why the aircon had been switched off. A hiccup in the airflow, an unexpected jab of wind over the sensor could set the thing off. So a one-legged man pouring with sweat was pretty much...yeah.
He sucked in a slow, stifling breath. It only exacerbated his fear. He’d just have to do the best he could. Dive to ground while thrusting his head and upper body to the right. It was simple, it was his best guess, it was Russian roulette. The shot m
ight come from anywhere, but it couldn’t come from everywhere.
The explosion might.
On three. I’m going on three.
You’re going out on three.
I’m going to dodge this thing and then pour myself a nice, stiff McCormick’s.
You’ll be the stiff.
Shut the hell up. What else can I do?
No answer came. So he steadied himself as best he could on what felt like frayed rubber joints and a new-born calf muscle, then held his breath. Imagined himself on the border of No Man’s Land. To his right, a friendly trench he could dive into. To his left, an enemy firing squad waiting for an imminent command to execute.
One.
He should never have arrested his family like that, he should have got someone else to do it.
Two.
Drinking with Jan was worth surviving this for.
Two and a half.
Any drink would do. As long as it was iced.
Two and three quarters.
Shit. He was missing an easy and obvious solution that this boneheaded dive would only ruin. It had been there all along, only he hadn’t seen it. He wasn’t thinking objectively. Christ. He exhaled, wrung his eyes shut, tried to blank everything from his mind in order to start over.
Was he being thick about this thing? Maybe he wasn’t the intended target of this assassination after all. Maybe, if he’d stopped to think as an Omicron agent and not as a doe-in-the-headlights victim, he’d have seen it right away.
The assassins hadn’t known he was going to be here at all. This was a set-up, but it wasn’t for him. The meeting had been genuine, the invitation...genuine. The assassination...a purely Iolchian affair? They wanted to kill Mbowe.
Did it alter his predicament? Not really. He was still a one-legged galaxy-hopper a step away from one step too far. Time to start the countdown again, and to stick to it, chickenshit.
He realised he hated the neon lighting. He didn’t want those to be the last colors he’d ever see. They were tacky. Seedy. He’d witnessed a triple sunset once, a three-sixty vista of the most extraordinary pinks and reds and purples ever created by Nature. He kept his eyes closed and pictured that—about as near to heaven as he could imagine.
On three this time.
One.
He heard the door whoosh open behind him. Angry voices bullied in.
Vaughn’s eyes opened wide. He instinctively ducked and threw himself to his right, onto the carpet. From the letters I and u in the neon I dare you, umpteen tiny dark projectiles shot out and missed him by millimeters. He heard them hiss by his left ear, felt the wake of displaced air on his cheek. A million imagined pinpricks hit him all at once. He feverishly brushed himself off on the floor.
Dr. Otter Mbowe staggered in, pulling out a handful of tiny darts from the top of his chest. He was a short man, not more than five-four. The projectiles had hit him higher than they would have hit an unsuspecting Vaughn.
Or Spielman.
Jesus.
She plucked out one of the darts embedded in her stomach—poor woman was well over six feet tall—and straightaway shot Vaughn a wounded, terrified look he would never forget. She tasted the tip of one of the darts on her tongue. Threw it away angrily. Then with a jittery shake of her head she fell to her knees, mouthed something he couldn’t lip-read, maybe in the original Iolchian dialect. Before he could say anything she jerked her sidearm out of its holster and blew her brains out in the doorway.
Vaughn pressed his back against the bookshelf, gasping for air. The shelf supporting him creaked, then broke, spilling hardback medical tomes and fluid lithographs all over him. On his hands and knees, he looked up...
Doc.
He scrabbled low across the carpet to Mbowe, caught the doctor’s slump off the edge of the bed. “I’ve got you, doc. Just sit still here. I’m calling for the medics.”
Mbowe gripped him by the wrist, a helluva grip that cracked the screen on Vaughn’s wrist-com. “No. D-don’t go anyw—anyw...anywhere.” He was punching out words and breaths quicker than they could form. “I need to give you this.”
The doctor reached into his mouth and snapped out his lower teeth and half the jaw with them. They were on a hinge, the seams of which were well-hidden under his silver beard. He then clicked a latch either side of the hanging jaw and proceeded to fold it out, so that the teeth were on the underside and a series of ridged prosthetic compartments were exposed. It was ingenious, and didn’t appear at all painful to the otherwise dying doctor.
He retrieved a chip about half the size of a thumbnail from the largest compartment. It was protected by some kind of transparent, membranous skin. Mbowe placed it in Vaughn’s palm and closed the agent’s fingers around it. Then he reassembled his jaw without care, wincing as he snapped it back into place.
The doctor’s face was the color of a plum drained of all its juice. He was perspiring the last of it. “Let them know what’s happening here...Vaughn. Let them all know. Marianne and I...we hacked...”
“Is that what you’ve given me? The Core’s secrets?”
“All...secrets. And Vaughn?”
“I’m here, doctor.”
“Find the Fleece. Keep it safe. Keep it away from...”
“Keep it away from who? The Iolchians?”
“Yes. No. Keep it...away from...those who would keep it for themselves.”
“Who? Malesseur? ISPA?”
“Find it, Vaughn. Find it. We’ve given you all its secrets...Marianne and...”
“Doc?”
Vaughn felt his pulse. As slow and faint as the promise of youth to a beaten old-timer. Then it spiked a few defiant jabs, fluttered, and disappeared.
After propping him up respectfully, Vaughn decided to wait a few moments at the other side of the room, in the shadows, to see who showed up next. For the invisible assassination to work as intended, the assassin himself would have to remove the darts after the deed.
Who would it be?
But a small armed security force arrived on the scene first, having no doubt reacted to Spielman’s gunshot. The same gunshot that, Vaughn now realised, had to have warned the assassin off.
The following hours passed without further incident, but he couldn’t wait to escape Iolchis. The temporary grounding of all craft didn’t exactly help matters; just more Iolchian bureaucracy to compound the workers’ woes. He gave his statement, omitting everything about the doctor’s secret and his own personal suspicions and pretty much anything of value to a real investigator. Who knew why Mbowe had wanted to see him, or why anyone would want to kill the good doctor? People under extraordinary duress did unexpected things. Just ask Marianne, Mbowe’s closest colleague, who’d “overdosed on sedatives while everyone was at lunch”. Yeah. Whatever.
By any chance did Agent Vaughn want to stay behind to help with the murder investigation, to lend his expertise? He would be provided with comfortable quarters, and would be assigned a personal escort/bodyguard for the duration of his stay.
Already tried that. See how well it turned out.
At last he was heading into the warp gate in the Pitch Hopper, with Iolchis a dull brown marble in the rearview. He hoped he’d never have to visit that doomed installation ever again. Its stench of decay and death would not leave him any time soon. But at least he had what he came for—answers; paid for with the lives of two brave scientists, whatever Mbowe’s chip contained had to be politically, scientifically, and perhaps ethically the most sensitive item he’d ever had in his possession.
A chip he daren’t access alone. Not without someone who knew how to decipher its secrets. Someone who spoke its language. Someone he could trust.
If she could sober up in time.