Chapter 13
“My card did have contact information on it. You didn’t have to come in person, you know,” said Patel, leading Lex back into the more hospitable portion of the complex as the pilot struggled come to terms with what was happening.
“Uh, yeah. So, did you make it to that meeting?” Lex said.
“That I most certainly did, thanks entirely to your skill in the chauffeur’s art. If you’d told me you were a freelance courier, I likely would have more aggressively pursued your employment.”
“Who said I was a freelancer?”
“Mr. Alexander, you illustrated an almost supernatural talent behind the controls of a vehicle, then show up at my doorstep in a flight suit and smelling as though you haven’t bathed properly in three weeks. Those are the two hallmarks of the profession.”
“Hey! It’s more like . . . twelve days.”
“Pardon the overestimate. Now, what’s this I hear about you intruding upon the affairs of my clients?”
“Hey, listen, I just need to check those inverters. I didn’t--”
“Stick to piloting. Subterfuge and espionage are not among your skills. If you are checking up on a potential recall, you have violated several dozen corporate and regulatory protocols. Now. My clients, the ones you’ve indicated in particular, expect a degree of discretion, and I do so aim to please. Thus, you are through prying. Are we clear?”
“Crystal.”
“Excellent. Generally, I would be inclined to treat a breach of this sort far more severely, but the meeting you helped me to attend on time was the source of a truly remarkable amount of income, so I am willing to suspend punishment,” he remarked, approaching a panel on the wall and pressing a button. “Preethy? I will be in my office with a guest. Scotch and soda please.”
He turned and raised an eyebrow.
“Oh, uh. Rum and Coke.”
“And a rum and Coke. I rather think a tube of the skin cream would be appreciated as well.”
“Yes, sir,” came the voice of the receptionist.
The trip through the building had taken them from the concrete dungeon, back through a maze of flimsy-walled cubicles, and finally through a frosted glass door to a hallway that would have looked at home in a museum. The walls were paneled with dark-stained hardwood. The floor was polished marble. Lining the hall, each in its own lighted recess, were works of art. There were wood carvings, statues, metal sculptures, and paintings. Lex wasn’t an art buff, but some of them even he recognized. Judging from the quality, there was almost certainly a gifted forger involved. The real question was whether or not it was the museum that had the forgery.
“Open,” Nicholas said.
The door opened quietly into an office triple the size of Lex’s apartment.
“If you don’t mind, take a seat on the wooden chair. The usual guest chair is leather and I would rather not learn what sort of lingering character you might lend to it, judging from the state of your outfit,” the wealthy businessman said, indicating an antique chair at one corner of his desk.
“Don’t stink up the fancy chair. I gotcha,” Lex said, carefully sitting down on the antique. Chances were very good that if he broke it, he would have to sell everything he owned to pay for the replacement.
No sooner had he taken a seat than a second door opened to allow the young woman from the front desk to enter bearing a tray. The pleasing way that her immodest business suit had traced her shape while she was seated had been noticeable. Seeing what it did for her while she was in motion was downright impossible to ignore. At some point, a voice in his head pointed out that it was not nice to stare. A louder voice from further south overruled it. It was downright criminal to give something with a sway like that anything less than his full attention.
It wasn’t until his host spoke that he was jolted out of the decidedly primitive state of mind.
“Thank you, Preethy,” he said. “This is Mr. Trevor Alexander.”
“We met--briefly,” she said simply.
“Just long enough for me to make an ass out of myself,” Lex remarked.
“Yes. He was very efficient in that regard,” she said, her precise, professional tone never wavering. “Will there be anything else, Mr. Patel?”
“Nothing at the moment.”
“Yes, sir.”
She placed the tray down and departed. Lex watched her go. Very intently.
“It may interest you to know that the young lady you are so eagerly observing is my niece,” said a bemused Mr. Patel.
“Yes . . . yes, that is very useful information,” Lex said, picking up his drink and downing half of it in order to muster up the courage to make eye contact again.
“I thought it might be. Now then. Before we begin, let me --”
A tone drew Patel’s attention to the pad on his desk.
“One moment,” he said, snatching up the pad and thumbing a command. “William, my boy, been waiting ages to hear from you!” He covered the device with is hand and spoke aside to Lex. “Oh, I’m terribly sorry, this is a rather important call. Won’t be a moment. Make yourself at home, but don’t try anything foolish.”
He stood and marched briskly out of the room, oozing charisma as he went. “Yes, yes. All is ready. No problems whatsoever. Looking forward to meeting your man . . .”
Lex’s instincts once again offered up the highly complex “run for your life” plan that they were so fond of, but he slapped it down. Best to stay calm. Of the alarmingly long list of dangerous sociopaths that Lex had run into in the past few days, Patel was by far the most reasonable and stable. And at least the office was air-conditioned. As his sunbaked mind tried to piece together a plan of action, he stood and looked over the walls.
Just as Patel was not the first man he'd picture as the head of a crime syndicate, his office didn’t seem to suit the role either. Granted, Lex didn’t tend to spend much time envisioning the lairs of racketeers, but if he did, family vacation photos probably would have been fairly far down the list of expected decor. Nonetheless, dozens of frames were skillfully arranged, proudly showcasing images of a very large and very happy family. What little space that was not used to display snapshots was used instead to show off his other accomplishments.
There were degrees--several of them. He had evidently won a “Small Businessman of the Year” award when he was younger, probably before he turned to a life of crime. There were news clippings regarding IPOs, plaques commemorating the ground breaking for new facilities, and a dozen other things that a CEO with a long and successful career would gladly show off. As a matter of fact, the only remotely criminal-looking thing was a clip depicting a courtroom scene and the headline “Over six hundred collared in cross planet crackdown.” Lex was glancing over the small print of the image when Patel returned.
“ . . . Yes, yes, well, I’ll certainly be keeping my eyes open. . . . Yes, and my mouth shut. You know me, William. I am nothing if not discrete. . . . Thank you. Goodbye.” He closed the message before muttering something unseemly under his breath. He then turned to his guest once more. “Sorry again, that man is a nightmare to get a hold of. Must leap at every opportunity. Find anything interesting? Ah, the crackdown! Yes, yes. That was quite a day for me.”
“How so?”
“Mine is a competitive business, Mr. Alexander. Openings in the upper ranks are rare. That court case stirred things up quite a bit. Enough for a certain young upstart to get his foot in the door. Just look at those names. Francis Green, Malcolm Vincenzo, Little Carl Rodrigo . . .”
Lex’s ears perked up.
“Little Carl. Carlito? Carlito Rodrigo?”
“Indeed. Heard of him, have you?”
“The name came up recently.”
“Mmm. Small time gun runner. In your neighborhood, as I recall. Shame what happened to him.”
“What happened?”
“They locked him up on some obscure regional law tucked away in the constitution of one of the third world nations he
helped sell weapons to. It allowed them to charge him with the murders of anyone who was killed using weapons he was involved in delivering. Even after plea bargaining and helping the prosecution, the sentence was measured in centuries. Gun running tends to cause one to accumulate enemies, as does turning informant, and that case locked him in the same facility with more than a few of them. The witness protection kept him away from the new enemies. It didn’t do anything for the old. He died after a few months. Sharpened screw driver, which in that jail may as well be listed as natural causes. He left a wife and children behind, I believe.”
“What happened to them?” Lex asked, though he suspected he knew the answer.
“Relocated, I suspect. New home, new identity.”
Lex looked at the dateline and quickly did the math, though the alcohol slowed it down a bit. Rodrigo would have been testifying just about eleven years ago . . . The same year that Michella moved to his school . . .
“Enough reminiscing, though, back to business,” proclaimed his host, clapping his hands and rubbing them vigorously together, “Take a seat.”
Lex found his way to the antique chair and carefully sat down.
“I’m a very busy man, so I will lay it all out for you. VectorCorp has sent word out that you are under suspicion of industrial espionage, and that you are to be apprehended immediately. As I understand it, I was one of the few individuals to be given your name along with the description.”
“Hey, now, I--” Lex objected, standing suddenly, then panicking to prevent the chair from falling. Patel cut him off.
“This will all go much more smoothly if you let me finish,” he said sternly, “Now, take a seat.”
“No way! You’re going to turn me in!”
“I consider myself a reasonable man, Mr. Alexander, and I prefer to DEAL with reasonable men. You are in my complex, surrounded by my people. You don’t really think you can run away, do you?”
“I’m re-e-e-a-ally good at running away.”
“No doubt. However, have a seat, and we shall see if an escape is called for.”
Lex glanced at the door. It was a long way away . . . and the hall on the other side was long, too. They’d taken a twisty path through and awful lot of floor space to get here, and in all likelihood there were a handful of big angry men with guns . . . and two miles of desert between him and the ship. He looked back to his host/captor. The businessman smiled and gave a little nod, gesturing toward the seat. Defeated, Lex sat down and finished his drink.
“Another?” asked Patel.
“Several,” he said.
The well-dressed man leaned forward to tap at a pad built into the desk.
“Sorry to bother you again so soon, Preethy, but would you please bring in the bottle of rum and a bottle of coke?” he asked.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Patel,” the voice replied quickly.
“Now, while we wait, might I suggest you apply some of that cream to your face. Otherwise, you are likely to find the top few layers of your face sitting on your pillow tomorrow like a pile of corn flakes,” he advised.
“If you say so,” Lex said, squirting the ointment from a prescription tube and making ready to swab it on his face, “You know, I appreciate the whole concerned fatherly figure routine, but can we just skip to the threats? I’m used to threats. I get threats from--holy crap, this stuff works!”
Lex had managed to become used to the constant burning sensation in his exposed skin. It wasn’t until it suddenly and completely vanished when he smeared the cream on did he remember that the surface of his body wasn’t supposed to feel like it was being spritzed with boiling water. He quickly slathered his hands, face, and the back of his neck with the cream. Predictably, he’d just managed to get every square inch of exposed skin coated with the stuff when the attractive young Miss Misra entered with the requested drink ingredients. This time, she didn’t quite fail to suppress an amused smirk as she placed down a tray containing a bottle of very expensive rum, a tall, slender glass bottle of cola with the words “cane sugar” etched into the glass, and a bucket of ice with tongs.
“Well, as long as I don’t have any dignity left to lose, did I miss a spot?” Lex asked, offering up the tube.
The receptionist took the tube gingerly with two fingers, dabbed a bit on her index finger, and ran it across the top of one of his ears. The smirk lingered for a moment longer before she straightened and restored the carefully cultivated business expression to her face.
“Will there be anything else?” she asked.
“Not at the moment. Thank you,” Patel said.
Her heels clicked quickly to the door and down the hall. Lex turned to his host.
“Now, I believe you were interested in threats.”
“Well, not interested, but I figure they are on the way, and I’d rather just get them over with,” Lex said, wiping himself off with the towel that had been underneath the tube of ointment, and then pouring himself glass of rum with a drop or two of Coke in it.
“Let us analyze the facts and see what sort of conclusion they lead us to, shall we?” he suggested. “VectorCorp claims you have stolen proprietary information with the intent to sell. Now, VC is with little doubt the best-secured company in the galaxy. It would take someone of considerable skill to liberate anything of value from them. To be perfectly blunt, if what we’ve witnessed here is any example, your own talents in the ways of espionage are woefully inadequate.”
“Can’t argue with that.”
“Now, certainly, as a freelance courier, you could easily obtain information by simply opening the packages you deliver, but there is simply no reason for VC to ever entrust you or any other freelancer with sensitive data, as they run the largest and fastest distribution network in the galaxy, by a large margin.”
“That they do. So where does that leave us?”
“Their story is highly suspect, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Pff, yeah!”
“Yet you managed to get your hands on this,” Patel remarked, sliding the manila envelope containing the manifest onto the table. “Care to explain how you managed it?”
“My clients expect discretion, too.”
“I’m sure they do, but at the moment you aren’t in an ideal position to provide it.”
“That’s true,” he said, draining his glass, and adding with a shrug, “She’s dead, anyway.”
“Your client?”
“Yeah,” he said, filling the glass again, this time skipping the Coke completely. “Okay, here’s how it went. I’m going to leave out names and such to protect the innocent and all that. I need money, so I take a job. The usual sort of thing, get this from point A to point B, don’t look inside the briefcase. Done it a thousand times. I was having kind of a hard time in my life at the time, though it was frickin’ sunshine and daffodils compared to the past few weeks. I had a lot on my mind, slipped up, wound up with a VC enforcer on my tail. He takes some shots at me. I try to shake him. I fail. He shoots me down!
“At this point, I’m nervous, but I figure, hey, get my ass to point B, get my money, and try to forget any of this ever happened. So I get down there and the goddamn cops are waiting for me. Normally I’d just give up, but the lady who gave me the job is dead, and I’m pretty sure VC did it, and VC are the ones that want me, so giving up would probably be the last decision I’d ever make. Since I don’t really have any options, I pop the case, find your address, and here I am, stinking of skin balm, BO, and some of the best rum I’ve ever had.”
“Quite a story,” Patel said, sounding sincere.
“Damn straight.”
Copious amounts of alcohol poured onto an empty stomach had begun to remove some of the mental checkpoints on the way from Lex’s brain to his mouth, it should at this point be clear.
“I’m inclined to believe that your involvement in this is an unfortunate coincidence.”
“Oh, so you believe my story, then.”
“Veracity of your story notwithstandi
ng, I sincerely doubt that anyone who would select rum as the drink of choice to steady his nerves would attempt something like this voluntarily.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You drink like a teenager. Rum and Coke? You are one step away from putting an umbrella in your drink.”
“Well, I’m sorry my panic drinking doesn’t meet with your strict specifications.”
“Now, unfortunately, your probable innocence doesn’t change the fact that VC wants you, I have you, and I desire their good favor.”
“I don’t like where this is going . . .”
“This is what is going to happen, Mr. Alexander. You will remain here as our guest. You will give us all of the materials your late client had asked for you to deliver. Tomorrow, some security personnel will be arriving to audit our security. At that time, I will turn over the materials, but I will recommend that you be remanded to my custody.”
“If they don’t go for it?”
“Then I hand you over.”
“And if they do?”
“Then you will repay me by offering your freelancing services exclusively to me until such time as I consider your debt repaid.”
“Uh. No offense, but that doesn’t sound like I’ve got much of a chance. And even if I did, I’ve been under the thumb of the mob before and it ruined my life. I don’t want to go through that again.”
“No offense taken, Mr. Alexander. Your reluctance is entirely understandable. Fortunately for me, you have no choice in the matter. Miss Misra will show you to the showers. I suggest you take advantage of them. In the meantime my men will remove any sensitive material from your vessel.”
“Oh, man, you’re going to tear the ship apart? Can’t I just go get the stuff for you?”
“Trustworthy though I’m sure you are, I think I would prefer a more thorough search.”
“Come on, man. It’s a loaner!”
Mr. Patel smiled.
“Your priorities are amusingly out of order, Mr. Alexander,” Patel said, leaning forward to tap the pad on his desk again. “Miss Misra, fetch Mr. Hendricks and show Mr. Alexander to a private section of the employee dormitory. Provide him with any reasonable requests, and keep him under surveillance.”
He stood and extended a hand to Lex, who stood as well.
“A pleasure meeting you again, Mr. Alexander. I do hope I can come to an arrangement with VectorCorp. I feel that, with a bit of instruction, you could be a valuable part of my organization.”
“I have no idea what to say to you,” he said, shaking hands.
A moment later, the door opened and Hendricks and Miss Misra entered.
“This way, Mr. Alexander,” she said primly.
The trio proceeded down the hall, Miss Misra leading the way and Hendricks following like an incredibly hostile shadow. It turned out that the confusing network of hallways had evidently been thanks entirely to the trip to the “waiting” room, as the office was right down the hall from the receptionist’s desk.
“I trust your meeting went well,” she remarked.
“Oh, yeah. It went great. Evidently I have the choice of indentured servitude or death,” Lex replied.
“Well, at least you get a choice.”
“Too bad I’m not the one who gets to make it. Your uncle isn’t exactly a teddy bear.”
“One does not achieve his status through sentimentality and leniency.”
“You seem to think very highly of him.”
“As well I should. Operlo is the dross of the galaxy, Mr. Alexander. We are under no delusions to the contrary. Mr. Patel was born and bred here, and he has, through his own skill and determination, managed to attain no small level of success and influence, on the planet as well as off. He did so not through being a brute, as so many in his line of work have, but through cleverness and perspicacity. His methods may not be the most scrupulous, but he managed to wrestle power from men far worse, and his business dealings, legitimate and otherwise, are the only reason this planet hasn’t collapsed into total chaos and financial ruin. Since he ascended to power, this planet has become more than what it was, and though I cannot speak in specifics, the impending completion of Gemini will bring us to new heights.”
“Okay, then . . .” he replied when the unexpected testimonial came to an end. “I’ll tell you this. There must be a killer school around here, because you two have got one hell of a vocabulary. Or two hells of vocabularies. Whatever the appropriate plural is.”
The smirk returned to her face and she released a breath that was almost a laugh.
“Nicholas was educated off-world, as were my five sisters and I. Thank you, though.”
“Five sisters. Wow. Did the whole clan go to the same school?”
“Indeed. Weston University, Tessera V.”
“Hey, I was just on Tessera! I jumped off of the roof of the train station into traffic,” he said.
“That was you!?” she asked, surprise the first genuine emotion to show even briefly on her face. She squinted at him for a moment. “Good heavens, it was you, wasn’t it!?”
“Why do you know about that?” he asked warily.
“It was all over the news feed. ‘The Jumper at Lon Djinn.’ They’ve been referring to you as an unknown perpetrator. None of the video got a clear shot of your face.”
“I was on the news? Kinda cool . . .” he said, before his common sense cut through the thickening haze of drunkenness, “and very bad. I had a brush with notoriety before. It didn’t treat me well.”
“Notoriety seldom does.”
“Wait . . . how could they have missed my face? There are cameras everywhere! I jumped into traffic--there are probably shots of me on the stoplight feeds from three intersections.”
“Likely VectorCorp is suppressing media coverage,” she suggested.
“Why would they do that?”
“The State of the Company press conference is next week. Any perceived weakness shown so near to the event would be disastrous for the stock prices. You could probably kill the CEO’s son and the news wouldn’t find out until after the closing remarks.”
They finally approached a doorway leading to a tiled hall.
“Here are the showers. What size are you?”
“What?”
“Clothes. We’ve got uniforms. I can provide you with one.”
“Oh, 1X. For both.”
“You’ll have a fresh outfit waiting on the opposite side of the showers, and the next door on your right will be a sleeping hall. It should be empty. The workers are double-shifting.”
“Right. Okay. Thanks.”
He began to shuffle into the shower.
“And, Mr. Alexander?” she called from behind him.
“Yeah?”
“I hope that it is indentured servitude, not death.”
“You and me both.”