"Rebreather mask?"
"We've got maybe an hour," Martin said impatiently. He pointed at Wednesday. "You're going to be Anita. You—" he pointed at Steffi—"are going to be Anne—Anne Frank. Rachel, run the kid through the Anita background while I get our stowaway stowed. Steffi? You and I are going to build a false back to the wardrobe, and I'm going to wall you in until we get wherever we're going. The name of this phase of the game is hide-and-
seek, and the goal is to stay out of custody for now. Once we know which way the wind's blowing we'll see about taking back the ship."
"If you can hear me, blink twice."
Blink blink.
"That's good. You're Frank, aren't you? Blink once for yes."
Blink.
"All right. Now listen carefully. You are in big trouble. You have been kidnapped. The people who are holding you have no intention of releasing you. I'm one of them, but I'm different. In a moment, I'm going to give you back control of your vocal cords so you can talk. They're only going to leave me alone with you for a couple of minutes, and we may not be able to talk again, so it's important that you don't scream or give me any trouble.
Otherwise, we're both as good as dead. If you understand, blink once."
Blink.
"Okay … say hello?"
"He—hell—ack."
"Take your time, your throat's probably a bit sore. Here, try to swallow some of this … better?"
"Who'urr ooh?"
"I'm one of your kidnappers. But I'm not entirely happy about it. You're here because you're important to someone we're interested in. A girl called Wednesday. You know her?" Pause. "Come on, I'm not the one who wants to get at the contents of her head." Pause. "All right. Let me explain.
"Wednesday knows … something. I'm not sure what. She's somewhere aboard this ship, don't know where, and the other—kidnappers—are trying to find her before we arrive where we're going. When we get there, they're going to use you as a hostage to try to make her tell us everything she knows. Trouble is, once she gives them the—the information, her usefulness will be at an end. Yours, too. You're both witnesses.
"Now, two or three things could happen. They might just shoot you, but I don't rate that as very likely. More probably, you'll end up in a reprocessing camp. Or they'll just pith you and turn you into a meat puppet. None of these options are very good for you, are they?"
"No fucking way." Pause. "What do you want?"
"I happen not to agree with the others. But if they find out what I really think, they'll kill me—I'm a traitor. So I need to find a way out that, uh, doesn't give them what they want. So they don't get the, the immigration records.
Or the go codes. Or the weapon test reports. In fact, I want them to go out the airlock. And I want to vanish, see? I don't want them to find me, ever again. And I figured you could help me do that. They don't know I'm here, talking to you. Between us we can fool them. They've hijacked this ship, but they haven't done the job properly. If you help me, we can regain control and turn everything over to the surviving ship's officers, and I can disappear and you'll be free."
"What about Wednesday?"
"Her, too."
Pause. "So what do you want me to do?"
"For starters, you can look after this diamond for me."
The clown died with a grin on his face and a warm gun in his hand.
Franz had tracked him down to H deck, where the comms sergeant had said he was working on a "birthday party." Gun in pocket, Franz walked down the stairwell to give himself time to think about how to do the job. It wasn't as if hits were his specialty; on the contrary, you only did wetwork in Septagon if your cover evaporated and you needed to clear out fast.
Sparrowfart surveillance was deliberately absent there, but as soon as the body count began rising it would come down like a suffocating cloud. Franz shuddered slightly, thinking about the risks Hoechst's team had run, and checked the schematics in his inner eye one more time. Radial four, orange ring, second-class dining area—there were four entrances, two accessible from passenger country. Not good, he decided. Even with the ship under the thumb of the ReMastered, a chase and shoot-out could result in a real mess. It wasn't a good idea to underestimate the clown. He was a slippery customer.
At D deck Franz hit the checkpoint. Strasser stared at him coldly as he came down the stairs. "What do you want?" he demanded.
"Check with control," Franz grunted. "Are you free yet?"
"What for?"
"Got a job. Loose end to take care of. I need to cover three exits—"
"Wait." Strasser raised his bulky phone. "Maria? Yeah, it's me. Look, I've got U. Bergman here. He says he's running an errand and he needs backup. Am I—oh. Yes, all right, I'll do that." He pocketed the phone and frowned. "What do you want me to do?"
Franz told him.
"Okay. I think that'll work." Strasser looked thoughtful. "We're spread thin.
Can we get this out of the way fast?"
'Yes, but I'll need two more pairs of hands. Who do you suggest?"
"We can collect Colette and Byrne on the way down. I'll send them round the back while I cover the red ring entrance. I'll message you when we're in position. Sure you want to do it this way?"
Franz took a deep breath. "I don't want to alarm him. If we scare him, he'll lash out, and there's no way of knowing what he's carrying. Remember, this guy has carried out more hits than we've had hot meals."
"I doubt it. I'll make sure we're in position in not less than six minutes and not more than fifteen. If he leaves, you want us to abort to Plan B and take him in his berth. That right?"
"Right." Franz headed for the stairwell. "Get Colette and Byrne in the loop, and I'll brief them on the way there."
Eight minutes later Franz was walking through the orange ring corridor, past smoothly curving walls and doors opening onto recreational facilities, public bathrooms, corridors leading to shared dormitories. Second class was sparsely furnished, thin carpet barely damping out the noise of footsteps, none of the hand-carved paneling and sculpture that featured in first and Sybarite.
"Coming up on the entrance now," Franz murmured. "I'll blip when I'm ready." He rang off and held his phone loosely in his left hand. There was a racket coming from up ahead, round the curve, high-pitched voices shouting. What's going on, some kind of riot? he wondered as he headed for the door.
Turning the corner he witnessed a scene he'd never imagined. It was a riot, but none of the rioters were much taller than waist height, and they all seemed to be enjoying themselves hugely: either that or they were souls in torment, judging by the shrieking and squalling. It vaguely resembled a creche from back home, but no conditioner would have tolerated this sort of indiscipline for an instant. About thirty small children were racing around the room, some of them naked, others wearing elaborate costumes. The lights were flashing through different color combinations, and the walls were flicking up one fantasy scene after another—flaming grottoes, desert sands, rain forests. A gaggle of silvery balloons buzzed overhead, ducking almost within fingertip reach, then dodging aside as fast as overloaded motors could shift them. The music was deafening, some kind of rhythmic pounding bass line with voices singing a nonsense refrain.
Franz ducked down and caught the nearest rioter by the hand. "What's going on?" he demanded. The little girl stared at him wide-eyed, then pulled her hand away and ran off. "Shit," he muttered. Then a little savage in a loincloth sported him and ambled over, shyly, one hand behind his back. "Hello."
"Hello!" Whack. "Heeheehee—"
Franz managed to restrain himself from shooting the kid—it might alert the target. "Fuck!" His head hurt. What had the boy used? A club? He shook his head again.
"Hello. Who are you?"
"I'm—" He paused. The girl leaning over him looked taller—no, that wasn't it. She looked older, in some indefinable way. She was no bigger than the other children, but there was something assured and poised about her despite the seven-year-old body, all elbows and knees. "I'm Franz. Who are you?"
"I'm Jennifer," the girl said casually. "This is Bamabas's birthday party, you know. You shouldn't just come barging in here. People will talk. They'll get the wrong idea."
"Well." Franz thought for a moment. "I came here to talk, so that's not a problem. Is Sven the clown about?"
"Yes." She smirked at him unhelpfully.
"Are you going to tell me where he is?"
"No." He stood up, ready to loom over her, but she didn't show any sign of intimidation. "I really don't think you've got his best interests in mind."
Best interests in mind? What the hell kind of infant is this? "Isn't he going to be a better judge of that than you?"
To his surprise, she acted as if she was seriously considering the idea.
"Possibly," she admitted. "If you stay right there, I'll ask him." Pause. "Hey, Sven! What you say?"
"I say," said a voice right behind Franz's ear, "he's right. Don't move, what-what?" Franz froze, feeling a hard prod in the small of his back. "That's right. Sound screen on. Jen, if you'd be so good as to keep the party running? I'm going to take a little walk with my friend here. Friend, when I stop talking you're going to turn around slowly and start walking. Or I'll have to shoot your balls off. I'm told it hurts."
Franz turned round slowly. The clown barely came up to his chin. His face was a bizarre plastic mask: gigantic grinning lips, bulbous nose, green spikes of hair. He wore a pink tutu, elaborate mountaineering boots, and held something resembling a makeup compact in his right hand as if it was a gun.
"What's that?" he asked.
"Start walking." The clown nodded toward the door.
"If I do that, you'll die," Franz said calmly.
"I will, will I? Then so shall you." The face behind the plastic grin wasn't smiling, and the makeup compact wasn't wavering. It was probably some kind of low-caliber pistol. "Who sent you?"
"Your client." Franz leaned back against the wall and laced his fingers together in front of him to stop his hands shaking.
"My client. Can you describe this mysterious client?"
"You were approached on Earth by a man who identified himself as Gordon Black. He contacted you in the usual way and offered you a fee of twenty thousand per target plus expenses and soft money, installments payable with each successive hit, zero for a miss. Black was about my height, dark hair, his cover was an export agent from—"
"Stop. All right. What do you want? Seeking me out like this, I assume the deal's off, what-what?"
"That's right." Franz tried to make himself relax, pretend this was just another informer and cat's-paw like the idiots he'd had to deal with on Magna. It wasn't easy with a bunch of raucous children running around outside their cone of silence and a gun pointing at his guts. He knew Svengali's record; U. Scott hadn't stinted on the expenses when it came to covering his own trail of errors. "The business in Sarajevo with the trap suggests that the arrangement has no future. Someone's identified the sequence."
"Yes, well, this wouldn't have happened if you'd taken my original advice about changing ships at Turku," Svengali said waspishly. "Traffic analysis is always a problem. Like attempts to sever connections and evade obligations on the part of employers. Did you think I worked alone?"
"No," Franz said evenly, "but my boss may take some convincing. 'Bring me the head of Svengali the clown,' she said. I think you'll agree that's pretty fucking stupid on the face of it, which is why I decided to interpret her orders creatively and have a little chat with you first. Then maybe you can carry your head in to see her while it's still attached to your body."
"Hmm." Svengali looked thoughtful, insofar as Franz could see any expression at all under the layers of pseudoflesh. "Yes, well I think I'll take you up on the offer, and thank you for making it. The sooner this is sorted out, the better."
"I'm glad you agree." Franz straightened up. "We walk out of here together after I signal my backup. I take it your backup is aboard the ship?"
"Believe whatever you want." Svengali shrugged. "Send your signal, pretty boy."
"Sure." Franz held up his mobile and squeezed the speed button. Idiot, he thought disgustedly. Svengali had screwed up, making the fatal assumption that having a friend aboard to keep watch would be sufficient unto the day.
It hadn't occurred to him that they might be unable to deliver any damning evidence for rather a long time if the entire ship disappeared. Or that the ReMastered might not want a professional assassin running around while they were trying to sort everything out. Then he gestured at the door. "After you?"
"You first."
"All right." Franz walked through the door back into the corridor. "Who was the kid?" he asked curiously.
"Who, Jen? Oh, she's just a Lolita from childcare. Helping out with the party."
"Party? What ideology are they?" Franz added, sounding puzzled.
"Not ideology, birthday. Don't you have any idea—"
One moment the clown was two paces behind Franz, the small box held loosely in his right hand. The next instant he was flattened against the wall and bringing the gun up to bear on Franz, his lips pulled back with a rictus of hate. Then he twitched violently, a shudder rippling all the way through him from head to toes. He collapsed like a discarded glove puppet.
Franz turned round slowly. "Took your time," he said.
"Not really. I had to get into position without alerting him." Strasser bent over the clown and put his weapon away. "Come and help me move this before it bleeds out and makes a mess on the carpet."
Franz joined him. Together they lifted the body. Whatever Strasser had shot him with had turned Svengali's eyes ruby red from burst blood vessels.
He felt like a warm sack of meat.
"Let's get him into one of the lifts," Franz volunteered. "The boss wants to see his head. I reckon we ought to oblige her."
Martin was still piling the contents of the walk-in closet up against the newly fitted partition when the passenger liaison net came back up. It made its presence known in several ways—with a flood of ultrawideband radiation, a loud chime, and a human voice broadcast throughout the ship.