New Frontiers (11 page)

His estate was vast. In his will he had left generous sums for each of his five children and each of his five former wives. Although they hated one another, Jason knew that the instant he was frozen they would unite in their greed to break his will and grab the rest of his fortune.

“I need that money,” Jason told himself grimly. “I'm not going to wake up penniless a hundred years or so from now.”

His corporate legal staff suggested that they hire a firm of estate specialists. The estate specialists told him they needed the advice of the best constitutional lawyers in Washington.

“This is a matter that will inevitably come up before the Supreme Court,” the top constitutional lawyer told him. “I mean, we're talking about the legal definition of death here.”

“Maybe I shouldn't have myself frozen until the legal definition of death is settled,” Jason told him.

The top constitutional lawyer shrugged his expensively clad shoulders. “Then you'd better be prepared to hang around for another ten years or so. These things take time, you know.”

Jason did not have ten months, let alone ten years. He gritted his teeth and went ahead with his plans for freezing, while telling his lawyers he wanted his last will and testament made iron-clad, foolproof, unbreakable.

They shook their heads in unison, all eight of them, their faces sad as hounds with toothaches.

“There's no such thing as an unbreakable will,” the eldest of the lawyers warned Jason. “If your putative heirs have the time—”

“And the money,” said one of the younger attorneys.

“Or the prospect of money,” added a still younger one.

“Then they stand a good chance of eventually breaking your will.”

Jason growled at them.

Inevitably, the word of his illness and of his plan to freeze himself leaked out beyond the confines of his executive suite. After all, no one could be trusted to keep such momentous news a secret. Rumors began to circulate up and down Wall Street. Reporters began sniffing around.

Jason realized that his secret was out in the open when a delegation of bankers invited him to lunch. They were fat, sleek-headed men, such as sleep of nights, yet they looked clearly worried as Jason sat down with them in the oak-paneled private dining room of their exclusive downtown club.

“Is it true?” blurted the youngest of the group. “Are you dying?”

The others around the circular table all feigned embarrassment but leaned forward eagerly to hear Jason's reply.

He spoke bluntly and truthfully to them.

The oldest of the bankers, a lantern-jawed, white-haired woman of stern visage, was equally blunt. “Your various corporations owe our various banks several billions of dollars, Jason.”

“That's business,” he replied. “Banks loan billions to corporations all the time. Why are you worried?”

“It's the uncertainty of it all!” blurted the youngest one again. “Are you going to be dead or aren't you?”

“I'll be dead for a while,” he answered, “but that will be merely a legal fiction. I'll be back.”

“Yes,” grumbled one of the older bankers. “But when?”

With a shrug, Jason replied, “That, I can't tell you. I don't know.”

“And what happens to your corporations in the meantime?”

“What happens to our outstanding loans?”

Jason saw what was in their eyes. Foreclosure. Demand immediate payment. Take possession of the corporate assets and sell them off. The banks would make a handsome profit and his enemies would gleefully carve up his corporate empire among themselves. His estate—based largely on the value of his holdings in his own corporations—would dwindle to nothing.

Jason went back to his sumptuous office and gulped antacids after his lunch with the bankers. Suddenly a woman burst into his office, her hair hardly mussed from struggling past the cadres of secretaries, executive assistants, and office managers who guarded Jason's privacy.

Jason looked up from his bottle of medicine, bleary-eyed, as she stepped in and shut the big double doors behind her, a smile of victory on her pert young face. He did not have to ask who she was or why she was invading his office. He instantly recognized that Internal Revenue Service look about her: cunning, knowing, ruthless, sure of her power.

“Can't a man even die without being hounded by the IRS?” he moaned.

She was good-looking, in a feline, predatory sort of way. Reminded him of his second wife. She prowled slowly across the thickly sumptuous carpeting of Jason's office and curled herself into the hand-carved Danish rocker in front of his desk.

“We understand that you are going to have yourself frozen, Mr. Manning.” Her voice was a tawny purr.

“I'm dying,” he said.

“You still have to pay your back taxes, dead or alive,” she said.

“Take it up with my attorneys. That's what I pay them for.”

“This is an unusual situation, Mr. Manning. We've never had to deal with a taxpayer who is planning to have himself frozen.” She arched a nicely curved brow at him. “This wouldn't be some elaborate scheme to avoid paying your back taxes, would it?”

“Do you think I gave myself cancer just to avoid paying taxes?”

“We'll have to impound all your holdings as soon as you're frozen.”

“What?”

“Impound your holdings. Until we can get a court to rule on whether or not you're deliberately trying to evade your tax responsibilities.”

“But that would ruin my corporations!” Jason yelled. “It would drive them into the ground.”

“Can't be helped,” the IRS agent said, blinking lovely golden-brown eyes at him.

“Why don't you just take out a gun and kill me, right here and now?”

She actually smiled. “It's funny, you know. They used to say that the only two certainties in the world are death and taxes. Well, you may be taking the certainty out of death.” Her smile vanished and she finished coldly, “But taxes will always be with us, Mr. Manning. Always!”

And with that, she got up from the chair and swept imperiously out of his office.

Jason grabbed the phone and called his insurance agent.

The man was actually the president of Amalgamated Life Assurance Society, Inc., the largest insurance company in Hartford, a city that still styled itself as the Insurance Capital of the World. He and Jason had been friends—well, acquaintances, actually—for decades. Like Jason, the insurance executive had fought his way to the top of his profession, starting out with practically nothing except his father's modest chain of loan offices and his mother's holdings in AT&T.

“It's the best move you can make,” the insurance executive assured Jason. “Life insurance is the safest investment in the world. And the benefits, when we pay off, are not taxable.”

That warmed Jason's heart. He smiled at the executive's image in his phone's display screen. The man was handsome, his hair silver, his face tanned, his skin taut from the best cosmetic surgery money could buy.

“The premiums,” he added, “will be kind of steep, Jace. After all, you've only got a few months to go.”

“But I want my estate protected,” Jason said. “What if I dump all my possessions into an insurance policy?”

For just a flash of a moment the executive looked as if an angel had given him personal assurance of eternal bliss.

“Your entire estate?” he breathed.

“All my worldly goods.”

The man smiled broadly, too broadly, Jason thought. “That would be fine,” he said, struggling to control himself. “Just fine. We would take excellent care of your estate. No one would be able to lay a finger on it, believe me.”

Jason felt the old warning tingle and heard his father's voice whispering to him.

“My estate will be safe in your hands?”

“Perfectly safe,” his erstwhile friend assured him.

“We're talking a long time here,” Jason said. “I may stay frozen for years and years. A century or more.”

“The insurance industry has been around for centuries, Jace. We're the most stable institution in western civilization.”

Just then the phone screen flickered and went gray. Jason thought that they had been cut off. But before he could do anything about it, a young Asian gentleman's face came on the screen, smiling at him.

“I am the new CEO of Amalgamated Life,” he said, in perfectly good American English. “How may I help you?”

“What happened to—”

“Amalgamated has been acquired by Lucky Sun Corporation, a division of Bali Entertainment and Gambling, Limited. We are diversifying into the insurance business. Our new corporate headquarters will be in Las Vegas, Nevada. Now then, how can I be of assistance to you?”

Jason screamed and cut the connection.

Who can I trust? he asked himself, over and over again, as his chauffeur drove him to his palatial home, far out in the countryside. How can I stash my money away where none of the lawyers or tax people can steal it away from me?

He thought of Snow White sleeping peacefully while the seven dwarfs faithfully watched over her. I don't have seven dwarfs, Jason thought, almost in tears. I don't have anybody. No one at all.

The assassination attempt nearly solved his problem for him.

He was alone in his big rambling house, except for the servants. As he often did, Jason stood out on the glassed-in back porch, overlooking the beautifully wooded ravine that gave him a clear view of the sunset. Industrial pollution from the distant city made the sky blaze with brilliant reds and oranges. Jason swirled a badly needed whisky in a heavy crystal glass, trying to overcome his feelings of dread as he watched the sun go down.

He knew that there would be precious few sunsets left for him to see. Okay, so I won't really be dead, he told himself. I'll just be frozen for a while. Like going to sleep. I'll wake up later.

Oh yeah? a voice in his head challenged. Who's going to wake you up? What makes you think they'll take care of your frozen body for years, for centuries? What's to stop them from pulling the plug on you? Or selling your body to some medical research lab? Or maybe for meat!

Jason shuddered. He turned abruptly and headed for the door to the house just as a bullet smashed the curving glass where he had been standing an instant earlier.

Pellets of glass showered him. Jason dropped his glass and staggered through the door into the library.

“A sniper?” he yelped out loud. “Out here?”

No, he thought, with a shake of his head. Snipers do their sniping in the inner city or on college campuses or interstate highways. Not out among the homes of the rich and powerful. He called for his butler.

No answer.

He yelled for any one of his servants.

No reply.

Jason yanked the cell phone out of his pocket. NO SIGNAL, said its screen.

He dashed to the phone on the sherry table by the wing chairs tastefully arranged around the fireplace. The phone was dead. He banged on it, but it remained dead. The fireplace burst into cheery flames, startling him so badly that he nearly fell over the sherry table.

Glancing at his wristwatch, Jason saw that it was precisely seven-thirty. The house's computer was still working, he realized. It turned on the gas-fed fireplace on time. But the phones are out and the servants aren't answering me. And there's a sniper lurking out in the ravine, taking shots at me.

The door to the library opened slowly. Jason's heart crawled up his throat.

“Wixon, it's you!”

Jason's butler was carrying a silver tray in his gloved hands. “Yes sir,” he replied in his usual self-effacing whisper.

“Why didn't you answer me when I called for you? Somebody took a shot at me and—”

“Yes sir, I know. I had to go out to the ravine and deal with the man.”

“Deal with him?”

“Yes sir,” whispered the butler. “He was a professional assassin, hired by your third wife.”

“By Jessica?”

“I believe your former wife wanted you killed before your new will is finalized,” said the butler.

“Ohhh.” Jason sagged into the wing chair. All the strength seemed to evaporate from him.

“I thought you might like a whisky, sir.” The butler bent over him and proffered the silver tray. The crystal of the glass caught the firelight like glittering diamonds. Ice cubes tinkled in the glass reassuringly.

“No thanks,” said Jason. “I fixed one for myself when I came in.”

“Wouldn't you like another, sir?”

“You know I never have more than one.” Jason looked up at the butler's face. Wixon had always looked like a wax dummy, his face expressionless. But at the moment, with the firelight playing across his features, he seemed … intent.

“Shouldn't we phone the police?” Jason asked. “I mean, the man tried to kill me.”

“That's all taken care of, sir.” Wixon edged the tray closer to Jason. “Your drink, sir.”

“I don't want another drink, dammit!”

The butler looked disappointed. “I merely thought, with all the excitement…”

Jason dismissed the butler, who left the drink on the table beside him. Alone in the library, Jason stared into the flames of the gas-fed fireplace. The crystal glass glittered and winked at him alluringly. Maybe another drink is what I need, Jason told himself. It's been a hard day.

He brought the glass to his lips, then stopped. Wixon knows I never have more than one drink. Why would he…?

Poison! Jason threw the glass into the fireplace, leaped up from the chair, and dashed for the garage. They're all out to get me! Five wives, five children, ten sets of lawyers, bankers, the IRS—I'm a hunted man!

Once down in the dimly lit garage, he hesitated only for a moment. They might have rigged a bomb in the Ferrari, he told himself. So, instead, he took the gardener's pickup truck.

As he crunched down the long gravel driveway to the main road, all the library windows blew out in a spectacular gas-fed explosion.