Tek Money (20 page)

After a few seconds a man called, “What are you talking about?”

“A fit, she's had a fit and has fallen to the floor. Please, I fear she's dying.”

“I'm coming down,” he said. “Don't try anything.”

“Oh, no,” she promised.

36

T
HUNDER RUMBLED THROUGH
the dark mountains that rose up outside the windows of Session Room #5. The lanky black man raised his hand. “I'm Leon,” he said in a low nervous voice, “and I'm a Tek addict.”

“Hello, Leon,” said the other five people in the stonewalled room. They were seated in straightback metal chairs around a small holo stage.

Leon rubbed his left hand along his left side a few times before standing up. “I'm a little uneasy, Dr. Ortega.”

Ortega was a large, wide man of fifty. He occupied the chair nearest the white bench at the edge of the platform. “You're doing fine, Leon. This is, afterall, only your second visit to our Monasterio Tek Clinic.”

The black man walked, slowly, around the platform, stopping at the bench.

A chromeplated robot came over from where he'd been standing near the windows. “Just get comfortable, Leon,” he suggested in his rumbling metallic voice.

As Leon sat on the bench, lightning crackled suddenly out in the night. The black man jumped up.

The robot put a hand on his shoulder and guided him back down. “Only the storm, Leon.” He attached a headset that looked like a piece of modified Tek headgear to the man's head. “Not too tight, is it?”

Reaching up, Leon tapped at the headpiece. “No, it feels fine.”

“Tell him if it hurts, Leon,” said a plump blonde woman from the other side of the platform.

“No, it's okay, Georgine.”

The robot backed off. “All ready, doctor.”

Dr. Ortega said, “You've seen the others go through this, Leon. It isn't, really, difficult.”

“I know. I do want to try it.” He touched the headpiece again. “The topic tonight—people that you've hurt and how you feel about it now—that's something that I still have problems with. I want to talk about my wife—my former wife.”

“Concentrate on her, Leon,” instructed the doctor.

“Her name is Anne.”

Very dimly on the holostage appeared the image of a slim blonde woman of thirty. When Leon looked up and saw her, he inhaled sharply.

The woman faded away.

“Relax, Leon.” Dr. Ortega patted him on the shoulder. “You're doing very well. Bring her back now, concentrate on that.”

Leon leaned forward, resting his palms on his knees and breathing in and out through his mouth.

Anne returned, her image sharper and clearer. Anger showed in her face and sounded in her voice. “I don't want to hear any more of this shit from you,” she said. “You keep accusing me of things I haven't done, Leon.”

An image of Leon joined her on the stage, but a Leon at least ten years younger and twenty pounds heavier. “Jesus, Annie, I followed you there this time,” he shouted. “I saw you with that bastard.”

“Who the hell gave you the right to trail around after me?”

Dr. Ortega left his chair, patting Leon on the shoulder again. “I've just been summoned,” he said, touching at his wristband. “You go right on, Leon. I'll be back very soon. You're doing fine.”

The younger Leon said, “You're my wife. That gives me …”

Out in the stonewalled corridor Dr. Ortega hurried through the old monastery. His office was on the next level down.

When he entered, he found Gardner Munsey seated behind his desk and consulting his desk computer. “It seems,” said the OCO agent, “that I arrived none too soon, doctor.”

Saying nothing, the large Dr. Ortega moved around behind his desk and took hold of the lean, tanned man by the armpits. He pulled him clean out of the chair and deposited him a few feet from his desk. Taking possession of his desk chair, he said, “I don't allow anyone to use my desk in my absence, Gardner.”

“That's an odd quirk,” said Munsey, smiling thinly. “Perhaps some group therapy is called for.”

“Why are you here?”

“I'm looking after, as always, my country's best interests, old man.” Munsey seated himself in the visitor's chair.

Ortega chuckled. “Looking after Munsey's best interests.” He frowned at the monitor screen. “I don't like anyone to go over my appointment schedule, Gardner.”

“Come now, doctor. The fees we pay you allow me all sorts of rude and intrusive perks.” He fluttered his right hand in the direction of the monitor. “You have an appointment tomorrow morning with a young woman named Natalie Dent.”

“That has nothing to do with anything that you and I—”

“Ah, but it does, doctor. She's a reporter with Newz, Inc. And a very inquisitive little bitch.”

“I know she's a reporter, Gardner,” said Dr. Ortega, scowling at him. “She's going to interview me for that Science Celebrities segment of the nightly—”

“Natalie Dent is working on only
one
story at the moment,” cut in the Office of Clandestine Operations agent. “It has to do with the whereabouts of some hijacked Devlin Guns.”

Ortega leaned back in his chair. “You're certain?”

Munsey allowed a very fleeting smile to touch his deeply tanned face. “I rarely make mistakes,” he reminded. “And I certainly haven't in this instance, doctor. When the young lady calls on you, see that something nasty happens to her.”

After a few seconds, the doctor nodded. “Yes, I'll have to.”

When the lightning flashed, the domed living room of the mountainside villa was fleetingly illuminated. He saw her then in the intense blue glare, sitting straight and stiff in a black armchair, legs pressed together and arms folded.

From the wide arched doorway he said, “I'll turn on the lights.”

“Don't, Rafe.”

Darkness had taken over the room again, hiding her from him.

“Since you came back, Janine,” said Rafe Santos, “you've been a pain in the ass to get along with.”

“I'm always a pain in the ass, dear heart; you just never noticed before.”

Lightning flashed again.

Janine was sitting exactly as she had been.

“Everything worked out in Greater Los Angeles,” Santos reminded her.

“Not everything.”

Santos, very carefully, came farther into the big dark living room. “Don't tell me you're mourning Dennis Barragray?”

“He wasn't supposed to be killed.”

“Don't blame me. I didn't make that decision.”

“Oh, I know, darling, it was an OCO decision,” Janine said. “One they never bothered to tell me about.”

“Barragray helped set up the gun transfer. He suggested that Peter Traynor be taken care of because he was getting too close to what was going on,” said Santos, moving farther into the darkness. “He siphoned off a couple million dollars for himself and turned it into antique currency. The
hombre
wasn't what you'd call a pillar of virtue, Janine.”

“They didn't have to kill him.”

“Listen, all you had to do was hang around him and make sure the gun deal went through smoothly,” he told her. “And once that was set up for certain, you were through with your job.” He laughed. “Taking that two million in collectible currency was a bonus for us, something the OCO didn't know about. We came out ahead, and that money will help Martinez and the revolution.”

“It had better.”

“What do you mean?”

When the lightning came again, Janine was no longer in the armchair.

“Janine?” He whirled, trying to spot her before the blackness came back.

“Would you mind leaving me alone for a while longer, Rafe?” Her voice came from the far side of the room.

“I would mind, damn you. You sound like you're accusing me of something.”

“Nothing,” she said. “I'm not accusing you of a damn thing, Rafe, not yet.”

“We both believe in Martinez and what he's doing. Everything I do is for that.”

“What he and the Teklords are doing.”

“A little more Tek on the market is better than more weeks and months of President Garcia,” said Santos into the darkness. “I've been his trusted lieutenant for over three years now, working diligently for the day that is almost here. I don't like to hear you hint that—”

“I never noticed it before, Rafe dear, but there's a vidpreacher note that slips into your voice when you talk about Martinez and the cause.”

Angry, he went stalking across the black room to where he figured she was. “Now
I'm
a fraud?” he slapped out with his hands, trying to locate her. “You pretend to be all kinds of different women, you sleep with anybody they order you to, and then you come and tell me that I'm the one who's a fake.”

“Nobody ordered me to sleep with you.”

His right hand found her and he grabbed hold of her arm. “Didn't they? How do I know it wasn't Munsey or one of those other OCO bastards who put you into my life in the first place?”

“Let go,” she asked quietly.

He caught hold of her other arm and yanked her up off the sofa she'd been sitting on. “Maybe the only one you loved was Barragray. That's why you've been so damned—”

“I never loved any of them,” Janine told him evenly. “Not even you, dear heart. I'm only interested in seeing regimes like Garcia's knocked down. If that means sleeping with Barragray, then it has to be done.”

He let go of her, took two steps back. Santos hadn't calculated on the coffee table and he tripped over it.

He fell to the floor, sharp pains knifing through his right side.

Janine didn't say anything.

After a moment Santos got to his feet. “In two days Garcia will be gone,” he said. “Then I suppose you'll be happy.”

“Then,” she told him, “I'll move on to someplace else.”

37

T
HE DEAD WAGON
rolled slowly along the misty midnight street that Gomez was walking along. A large open landtruck, it had the words
Los Muertos
scrawled on its side in white glopaint.

Rattling, coughing, it halted a few yards ahead of the detective.

From the passenger side of the cab a thickset man in a heavy overcoat dropped to the rutted paving. A body, that of a thin boy of about eleven, lay facedown on the wet, cracked sidewalk. The big man made the sign of the cross, then bent and grabbed up the dead boy by the back of the shirt and the seat of the trousers.

The boy had been killed by a lazrifle blast that had cut across his middle. When the man gathered him up, part of his insides spilled out and splashed onto the street.

Ignoring that, the man from the dead wagon carried the corpse over and tossed it into the open back of the truck. There were at least ten bodies piled there already. Climbing back into the truck cab, the man said, “
Andamos
.”

The dead wagon rolled on into the night.

Gomez shook his head and resumed walking, avoiding the place on the sidewalk where the boy had been sprawled.

Less than ten minutes later he arrived at the old two-story schoolhouse that he'd been trying to reach since he entered Recinto #3.

Sister Eliz was a small, thin woman in her middle fifties, wearing a dark sweater and trousers. “Where did she go?” she was asking Gomez.

He made a vague gesture. “I don't know—elsewhere.” He'd been telling her about the girl who'd taken him to the ruined church and helped him overcome the two Cazadores who'd come hunting them. “After the raid seemed over and we left the church, I invited her to come here to your mission with me.”

They were standing in a hallway just outside what had once been the school cafeteria. It was a makeshift infirmary now with twenty beds, all of them occupied, and two robot nurses in attendance.

Sister Feliz nodded. “Many people are afraid to come here.”

“Isn't this a sanctuary?”

“Not completely, although the hunters and most of the gangs don't bother us.”

“Soon as we saw those three kids safely home, the girl took off,” continued Gomez. “She kissed me on the cheek, then went running off into the mist. I don't even know her name.”

“Too bad you're not a Christian, Gomez.”

“I'm a splendid fellow in spite of my heathen status.”

“
Sí
, to be sure. If you had faith, though, you'd be able to accept everything that befell you tonight as God's will. Something that was meant to be exactly as it was.”

Shrugging, Gomez said, “No, I'm going to keep worrying about her.”

The small, thin woman told him, “I've been able to gather some of the information you wanted.” Beckoning him to follow, she moved along the hall.

“How does the Lord feel about your sideline profession, Sister?”

As they moved toward the rear of the building, she answered, “He's of the opinion that the ends justify the means.”

A small onetime storeroom had been converted into an office and was crowded with data-gathering equipment and gadgets.

Gomez sat on the edge of the lopsided wicker chair she motioned at. “When I checked in with my partner a little while ago,” he said, “he mentioned a gent calling himself Rafe Santos. Can you dig up anything about—”

“I already know about him.” She settled in front of a small desk that contained several monitors and some unorthodox attachments. “Santos is a close associate of Janeiro Martinez. Second or third in command, depending on the mood Martinez is in.”

“What kind of lad is he?”

She made a sour face. “
Muy guapo
, very handsome,” she answered. “Very deft at using his charm to further the cause.”

“Reliable?”

“At the center, I believe, loyal only to himself. Why?”

“Would he be capable of, say, appropriating money—a lot of money—intended for Martinez and the rebels?”