F Paul Wilson - Sims 03 (10 page)

 
          
Luca Portero went directly from the
CEO’s office to the parking lot where he picked up one of the SimGen Jeeps. He
grinned as he drove out the gate.

 
          
A million-dollar reward—and Sinclair
thinks it was his idea.
Doesn’t have a clue that I steered
him into the whole thing.

 
          
The meeting had been a thing of
beauty, he had to admit. Knowing Sinclair-1’s obsession with SimGen’s public
image, Luca had simply parceled out the information—first playing dumb about
the xenografts, then mentioning an unaccounted-for sim, then hinting that she
might be a witness—letting Sinclair pounce from one to the next like a mouse following
a trail of cheese bits, until he’d ended up right where Luca wanted him.

 
          
A reward! Put SimGen in the news: The
corporation
with a heart as big as its market cap
value!

 
          
Putty in my hands, Luca thought.

 
          
His grin faded as he thought about what
lay ahead.
Another meeting.
This one
with Darryl Lister.
He and his old CO hadn’t had a face-to-face in
almost a year, which could only mean that the subject was as delicate as it was
important.

 
          
That made him uneasy. Worse yet, they
were meeting at Luca’s house.

 
          
He pulled up the long drive to the
rented two-bedroom cabin in the center of five acres of dense woods. He liked
the isolation. This was his retreat from SimGen and lost
sims
.

 
          
Lister wasn’t due for another half
hour. Still plenty of time to get Maria out of the way and—

 
          
He hit the brakes when he saw the
black Mercedes SUV parked in front of the house.

 
          
Lister?
Shit!

 
          
He still had time to salvage this.
Was Lister alone? With the late morning sun glinting off the SUV’s windshield,
Luca couldn’t tell how many were in the car.

 
          
When he pulled up next to it he was
startled to see that it was empty. He hurried through his front door and found
Darryl Lister sitting on the couch, sipping a beer. Maria stood behind him,
rubbing her hands together, her dark eyes wide with anxiety.

 
          
Luca stared at Lister. This plump
country squire type was miles away from the hardbodied CO who’d parachuted with
him onto the Shahi Kot
mountains
. He was a pogue now,
in his late forties, and the brown corduroys and bulky white Irish wool sweater
he wore couldn’t hide the inches he’d been adding to his waist. And judging
from the new gelled-up style of his light brown hair, it looked like he’d
started going to a fag barber. The man was becoming a stranger.

 
          
“Luca.”
He
rose and smiled as he extended his hand. “I was going to wait in the car, but
then this sweet young thing surprised the hell out of me by opening the front
door. I invited myself in.” As they shook hands, his smile faded. “Who is she,
Portero? I know you don’t have any kids.
A niece?”

 
          
“No one you have to worry about.”

 
          
“You know the rules.”

 
          
Luca held up the car keys
.“Maria, esperame en el auto.”

 
          
She scurried around the couch. Her
jeans and bulky flannel shirt couldn’t hide her ripe young figure as she
grabbed the keys and ran out the door. Luca noticed Lister’s eyes following her
all the way.

 
          
“Nice,” he said. “What is she?
Sixteen?”

 
          
Luca felt invaded. He wanted to tell
Lister it was none of his fucking business, but bit it back. To a very real
extent, it was Lister’s business.

 
          
“She’s old enough,” Luca said.

 
          
Maria had told him she was eighteen,
but she might be even younger. He’d seen her begging on an
East
Village
sidewalk last summer. Maybe
it was her flat peasant face, or the desperation in her black eyes…something
about her spurred an impulse from a nameless place to shove a couple of singles
into her hand. He heard her soft, “Gracias, señor,” saw the sudden faraway look
in her eyes as she clutched the bills between her breasts like a family
heirloom, and he had to speak to her. Good thing he knew Spanish because she
didn’t know anything else.

 
          
He bought her lunch, took her to a
Spanish film at the Angelika, bought her dinner,
then
brought her home. She’d been living here ever since. She cleaned his house,
cooked his food, kept his bed warm at night, and thought she’d found heaven.

 
          
“She’s an illegal who’s young enough
to be your daughter, right?”

 
          
True on both
counts, but so what?
“Don’t worry. She doesn’t know anything.
Can’t speak a word of English.”

 
          
“But I am worried. It’s against the
rules. You’re supposed to be a model citizen.
A clean nose,
no legal hassles.
That’s the deal when you come in. You agreed, now look
at you: shacking up with a barely legal illegal.”

 
          
“No one’s going to know. Not way out
here.”

 
          
“But our people will know. Sooner or
later you know they’ll find out. And they won’t like it. And since I sponsored
you, that
will reflect on me.”

 
          
“Look—”

 
          
“They’ve already got questions about
you. Like why you don’t seem to own anything. You rent this place and…” He
looked around with distaste. “And it looks like you furnish it from secondhand
stores.”

 
          
“It came with the territory. It’s a
furnished rental.”

 
          
“I know we pay you enough to afford
to buy.”

 
          
Of course they did. But Luca saw no
point in tying up money in real estate. He wanted no anchors. When the time
came to move on, as it inevitably would, he wanted to be able to pick up and go
without a second’s hesitation, without a single look back.

 
          
“It’s the way I’ve always lived.”

 
          
“I know. I’ve tried to explain that
to them. They don’t care. They want you settled in. I went out on a limb to get
you this cushy assignment, but if you don’t put down some roots, they’ll
transfer you out to
Idaho
. And
I’ll have egg on my face.”

 
          
Luca had spent a few months at the
Idaho
facility and had no desire to go back.

 
          
He held up his hands in surrender.
“Message received. I’ll see what I can do about buying this place.”

 
          
“Luca,” Lister said, smiling as he
put a hand on his shoulder. He rarely called him by his first name. “You’re
making good money. And you’ll be making better and better money. Enjoy it, for
Christ’s sake. That’s what it’s for. You can’t take it with you.”

 
          
Luca nodded. “I guess you’re right.”

 
          
But he was thinking,
You
can take it with you—if you’ve got it squirreled away in
a secret offshore account.

 
          
Luca believed in being prepared. He’d
learned that from his mother. She might have been a whore, but she was no
dummy. She always kept a roll of cash hidden away for what she called “the
rainy days,” when the cops periodically would raid her place and roust her out.
The cash had always kept her out of jail.

 
          
The same held true here. Who knew
when the weather would change? He could handle the proverbial rainy day, but
SIRG played rough, and if a shitstorm struck, he believed in having a safe
harbor to hole up in. His was in
Hamilton
,
Bermuda
.

 
          
He repressed a shudder.
If SIRG ever found out about that account…

 
          
“But that’s only half the reason for
this face-to-face,” Lister said.

 
          
“If it’s about the missing sim,”
Lucas blurted, relieved to be moving away from his personal life, “I just
enlisted Mercer Sinclair’s help—a million-dollar reward.”

 
          
Lister was looking at him. “So you
told him?”

 
          
“Not yet. Not till I find the sim.
I’ve got people combing the city, visiting any place that uses sim labor. This
reward will flush out anyone who’s seen her. Once I have her, the Sinclairs can
take over.”

 
          
Lister frowned. “You might have had
this sewn up by now if they’d been on board from the start.”

 
          
“They’d have added nothing but
panic.” Bad enough to have Lister calling twice a day, he didn’t need the
Sinclairs yammering in his ear every free minute too. “And don’t forget, it
took days for the fire department to sift through all the rubble. Until they
reported no sim remains, we didn’t know for sure she was missing.”

 
          
“Still, if this million-dollar reward
had been announced days ago…”

 
          
“You know my problem with telling
SimGen too much.”

 
          
“This ‘leak’ you suspect?”

 
          
Luca nodded.

 
          
Lister shoved his hands in his
pockets and looked around. “I thought you were way off base with that at first.
Now I’m not so sure.”

 
          
“Why? What’s happened?”

 
          
“The
Manassas
attorneys met with the Cadman woman and Sullivan. What a farce. She could have
walked away with millions but she’s asking for billions in damages.”

 
          
Luca wanted to laugh. He’d known they
couldn’t buy off Romy Cadman.

 
          
Just hearing her name set off reactions
within him, part anger,
part
lust. Sometimes when he
was with Maria, moving inside her, he thought of Romy Cadman. Young stuff like
Maria pushed his buttons, all his buttons, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have
anything left over for a prime piece of mature tail like Cadman.

 
          
“Did you agree to pay it?”

 
          
Lister stared at him. “You’re not
serious.”

           
“You should
have called their bluff, just to see what they’d do. Because we all know
they’re not after money. But what does this have to do with a leak?”

 
          
“The Cadman woman said she’d come to
the
Manassas
office because she
wanted to know why a truck leased in
Idaho
by
Manassas
was driving around the
SimGen campus.”

 
          
“But…” Luca’s heart stalled,
then
picked up again. “But there’s no connection. Those
leases are paid through Golden’s credit card.”

 
          
Hal Golden was dead, but no one knew
that. His body lay six feet deep in a field in
Thailand
,
but his credit record, active and pristine, lived on in the computers of the
finance world. Golden had never even heard of Manassas Ventures while he lived,
so how had Cadman and Sullivan linked him to the company?

 
          
“I know that. But at one time
Manassas
leased them directly. Somehow she made the connection. And I’m beginning to
wonder if she might have been tipped.”

 
          
“But that doesn’t make sense. If
someone’s leaking her information about Manassas Ventures, wouldn’t they tell
her everything?”

 
          
“You’d think so, wouldn’t
you.
But whatever her source, somehow this woman has
identified
Manassas
as the tie
between SimGen and our
Idaho
facility.”

 
          
“So then, why not just abandon
Manassas
?
It served its purpose.”