The phone keeps ringing. No answer. I start to worry I’ve got a bogus number, or that the only way to put the call through is via some kind of pre-process handshaking.
Argent’s told me Peg had the fragging devil’s own time getting this number, and the odds of reliability—the chance that the number’s right, that it’s still in service, and all that drek—isn’t much more than fifty percent. As the screen keeps flashing Ringing, I get the nasty feeling those odds just haven’t come up. Frag! It might have worked. I reach out for the End key . ..
And that’s when the status bar flashes Connected, and the screen clears to show a face. “Telestrian,” the figure says briskly. The elf-woman’s eyes narrow, and I know she’s looking at a blank screen. “Who is this?”
I flick on the telecom’s vid pickup, and I see Lynne Telestrian’s hard green eyes narrow millimetrically in surprise. Then the same steel edged control I saw in the deserted Fi nes Que t is re-established. “Mr. Larson,” she says slowly. “I must say I find this . . . unexpected.”
Too fragging right, it’s unexpected, is what I don’t say to her. The direct-connect LTG number to Lynne Telestrian’s private office was almost as tough to deck out as nuke launch codes, according to Peg. I just smile, and say, “I figured our conversation wasn’t quite over, Ms. Telestrian. Last time we talked, I didn’t ask the right questions. I decided it was time to rectify that.”
She raises her eyebrows in a mixture of disdain and curiosity. “Oh? And what makes you think I have any intention of answering your questions?”
I shrug. Out the corner of my eye, I see Argent gesture with metal fingers. He’s keeping a timer on the conversation, and I’ve already burned twenty seconds of the two minutes we’ve budgeted as safe. “Maybe the questions themselves would change your mind,” I point out. “Like, ‘How would the stock market and business community react to the revelation that a Telestrian company is testing bio warfare agents in downtown Seattle?”’ I grin. “Sure, there are some mitigating factors, but I don’t think your average eager shadowsnoop’s going to care too much about them. Or the news media either.”
“What? That’s nonsense,” she snaps. “Nobody would believe that.”
“Don’t be so sure,” I say mildly. “The stock market’s notoriously skittish, isn’t it? Even if you proved later that your faction had nothing to do with it, the short-term damage would still be done. The big question is, which faction would get hurt the worst in the short run, yours or Timothy’s? Worth thinking about, isn’t it?”
She doesn’t respond at once. Her gaze is cold and steady, green and unblinking, more like a snake’s than a woman’s. Again Argent gestures—one minute down. The seconds are ticking away, and I start wondering how much safety margin Peg built into her estimate that I could talk for up to two minutes without the risk of being traced.
“You’ve been busy, I can see that,” Lynne Telestrian says at last. “If your aim was to get my attention, consider it all yours.” She sits back, and the telecom automatically refocuses to keep her features crisp. “Now that you have it, what would you like to do with it?”
“Last time we talked, you gave me some advice and I took it to heart,” I tell her, feeling more comfortable now. This part of the conversation, at least, I was able to script out mentally before placing the call. “I’ve looked into Timothy Telestrian’s involvement with Seattle, and I don’t like what I’ve found. I don’t know how much you already know or what you intend to do about it. But let me tell you, Ms. Telestrian, unless we can come to a meeting of the minds, everything I know is going to every shadowsnoop, reporter, muckraker, and news correspondent I can track down .. . with particular attention to the pirates. Do you scan me, Lynne?”
She doesn’t answer with words, but the look in those green eyes is expressive enough. Not for the first time, I’m real glad I’m on the other side of a telecom link.
“Get ready to receive a datafile,” I tell her. “It’s a compilation of everything I’ve found out and everything I can guess. What you do with it is your business, but I suggest you
do
do something with it. Drag your hoop on this one, and like I said, the same report goes straight to the shadowsnoops.
“I also want you to call me back in precisely one hour,” I go on quickly, before she can reply. “The number’s at the end of the datafile. For obvious reasons it’s a multi-node relay, but don’t try tracing it. The relay will only be active for two minutes, starting precisely sixty minutes from my mark, so you’ll be dead-ending yourself. If you don’t call me back within the time-span, the file goes to the snoops. Scan me?” Again I don’t wait for an answer. “Open your capture file, here comes the data. Oh, and ... mark.”
With that, I kill the vid pickup and execute the preprogrammed utility to spew my report on everything I know and can guess about the Telestrian-NVC-Star connection down the phone line. Transferring the compressed file takes five seconds. The instant the telecom beeps completion, I break the connection. The screen goes blank, but again the speaker beeps and clicks to itself as Peg disassembles the seven nodes of the relay.
I sit back in my chair and look a question at Argent.
“Hundred and twenty-one seconds total connect time,” he announces. A rather feral grin splits his face. “I think a one-second overrun’s acceptable performance on this one.” He’s silent for a moment, but I know he’s got something more to say. I wait.
“Nice moves,” he says at last. “You glide well, Wolf. You’re too good for Lone Star.” And then, like he’s embarrassed because his praise is too effusive, he pulls out his own cel phone to coordinate the next step with Peg, leaving me effectively alone to chew on what I’ve heard.
Waiting has always been intolerable for me, and this time is no exception. Before I placed the first call, Argent and I hashed through how much time to give Lynne for the callback, and we settled on an hour. Long enough to read through and digest my “report,” and long enough to at least begin to corroborate anything she didn’t already know. Not long enough—or so we hoped—to stage some kind of counter-op. (The fact that we couldn’t come up with any convincing ideas about what counter-op she might stage didn’t make us breathe any easier on that score.) So we settled on an hour, for all the nice, sensible, logical reasons.
What we didn’t take into account was what it would feel like for us to wait out that hour. I was pacing the floor within the first fifteen minutes, cranky enough to bite someone’s head off for so much as speaking too loud. Argent just sprawled on the bed, lost in his own thoughts. At first I thought he was totally unaffected by the waiting, and hated him for it. But then, somewhere around fifty minutes into the span, Jean Trudel waltzed in the door with a plate of sandwiches and a couple of cold beers—and the chromed runner had leaped halfway off the bed before he could stop himself. A little jumpy, Argent? I wanted to say, but kept a tight rein on my yap.
At T-minus-two I settle myself down at the telecom, with Argent in the same spot as before, out of the field of view. I run the self-diagnostics on the telecom twice—growling. “Frag off’ at Argent when he chuckles—and then I’ve got nothing to do during that last, endless minute. The timers on both our watches go off within a second of each other, and I can imagine that, somewhere in SanFran, Peg the decker’s busy patching together another seven-node relay, this one to handle an incoming call. The telecom’s flatscreen lights up with a calibration grid, the signal that we’re hot and tracking, waiting for Lynne Telestrian to place her call . . . assuming she
does
place the call.
In a trideo show, we’d have to sweat out fragging near the whole specified time before the call comes in, just to artificially crank up the tension. I guess, deep down, I expect reality to work the same way, so I almost go through the roof when the trid beeps with an incoming call less than five seconds after going online. I take a deep breath, and hit the Standby/Talk key.
Lynne Telestrian’s ice-maiden face fills the screen. “I commend you on your diligence, Mr. Larson,” she begins, her voice cool, detached. “When I suggested you investigate Timothy’s activities, I really didn’t expect this kind of result.”
I can't help asking. “What did you expect?”
She shrugs thin shoulders. “Honestly? I expected you to provide a minor irritant, a minor diversion, to Timothy— something to distract him momentarily, before he killed you.”
I nod. That’s basically the way I’d figured it—send the Star bonehead crusading into the fray, and then learn something from the circumstances and manner of his geekage. “Sorry to disappoint you,
leal,
” I grate, using a very indelicate Elvish word indicating extremely close acquaintance. (No, I don’t speak Sperethiel, but I long ago discovered the utility of being able to insuit people in as many native tongues as possible.)
If I’d been hoping to get a rise out of Lynne Telestrian, I’m not getting it . .. although I’m fragging sure she’s filing my rudeness away in some ice-cold corner of her brain. She just watches me steadily for a few moments, and then says, “Message delivered, Mr. Larson. If that’s all . . .” An arm enters the frame, and I know she’s reaching for the End key.
“Hey, wait!” This isn’t going the way I wanted or expected it to. “What are you going to do about it?”
She shrugs. “I don’t see why that’s any concern of yours.”
“It’s my fragging concern because I say it is,” I snarl. The rage is twisting in my gut again, and I’m starting to realize how much I hate Ms. Lynne fragging Telestrian. Not only for who and what she is, but for what she represents. “What the frag are you going to do about Timothy and his fragging killer bug, huh, Lynne? What?”
For the first time a smile—thin and nasty—appears on her face. “That’s none of your business, Mr. Larson.”
“Well, I’m making it my business.” In my peripheral vision, I see Argent indicating fifty seconds gone. I flip him the bird, and focus back on the Telestrian slitch.
“Oh? How?” Her tone’s amused, which only further feeds my rage.
“The file, you fragging bat! The file I sent you. You tell me what you’re going to do about it—right fragging now—or the instant you’re off the phone, I’m going to spread this little gem around to all the news media, and let the blue chips fall where they may. Maybe it’ll distract you from your little proxy fight, having to prop up your own stock prices. And who knows, maybe you’ll have fun dodging legal response as well. I’m sure the metroplex government will be just thrilled to learn that the Telestrian clan’s using Ravenna as a bioweapons lab. Maybe the federal government would be interested too. And how about the Salish-Shidhe Council? Tribal lands are downwind of Ravenna, aren’t they? And does the Tir government know what’s going down? Using bioweapons on another nation’s territory might be considered an act of war."
I pause to take a breath, and she jumps in. “All right, you’ve made your point . . .”
“I’m not done,” I roar. “You tell me what you’re going to do, and we’re steady for the moment. But if it turns out you don’t do what you say you’re going to—like, if you just back off on the whole thing—you can bet that shapely little hoop of yours that NewsNet, ABS, NABS, and the rest of the boys are going to be getting a package that should kinda pique their curiosity ... If you scan me.”
She doesn’t reply at once, nor does her expression shift in the slightest. But I can feel the anger and the hatred, like palpable waves, coming off her image. Well, frag her too. Eventually she asks quietly, “Is this intense interest only because of the death of that ganger, Paco?”
“That’s part of it,” I snarl back, “but only part.”
“And the rest is because Timothy’s actions transgress some moral code you hold particularly dear?”
“Timothy’s, and Lone Star’s, and that’s still only part of it, and it’s none of your fragging business!”
In person, my blast would have blown her hair back. On the flatscreen, her only reaction is another ironic smile. “To paraphrase you,” she says calmly, “perhaps I’m making it my business.”
“Why?”
She shrugs. “Because it’s a way of gauging your level of outrage,” she replies, “your level of commitment.”
Argent’s signaling again—I flip him off again. “Commitment to what?” I ask.
“To . ..”—she pauses in thought— . . to ‘seeing justice done’ might be the best way of putting it.”
I start getting a real nasty feeling about this. “What are you talking about?” I ask suspiciously.
She smiles again, and real fear starts to twist with the rage in my gut. “It just occurs to me we could help each other,” she says. “We both want some action taken concerning Timothy’s bioweapons. You can trust me on this,” she adds. “Our reasons aren’t that different, in all probability.
“You want confirmation that action is taken,” she goes on. “You also have some other needs, but you probably haven’t connected them to this issue.”
“Like what?” I demand.
“Like clearing your name with Lone Star,” the elf-slitch says quietly. “An order’s still out for your execution, by the way. I’ve checked. Officially issued by one”—she glances to the side—“Marcus Drummond, but actually instigated by Gerard Schrage, of the Military Liaison Division.” She gives me an executioner’s smile. “Apparently Mr. Schrage has tight ties with certain other executives within Seattle Lone Star. Ties of which the rest of the Lone Star establishment is unaware.”
No drek, Sherlock. Like Sarah Layton and Vince McMartin, for starters. One nice, cozy, happy little fragging family. “You’ve got proof of that, I suppose,” I sneer.