The League of Spies (3 page)

“We’re working for idiots,” Mapper said. “And you promised to do everything they said.” He was in control of the airspeeder, maneuvering it at legal rates along well-posted sky-routes above Nehass.

Joram shook his head. “I promised to obey Cherek’s orders and the dictates of their horrible committee. I didn’t promise to do anything else they said. I didn’t promise not to figure out how to get them to do what I want... which I have. And I didn’t promise not to do things on my own.

Speaking of which...” He opened up his datapad. “I’m bringing up a map. I want you to drop me off there.”

“Beam it to the nav computer. What is it?”

“Edbit Teeks’ home. I’m going to give it a close look while you make Renkel comfortable. That trio of irredeemables thinks that Teeks had no local resources, which is an impossibility I need to disprove. When you’re done, come back for me,”

Mapper smiled. “Now I feel better.”

Mapper dropped Joram off a short distance from the housing tower that had been Edbit Teeks’

public address. Mapper returned to the air as soon as Joram sealed the door. It wouldn’t do to remain on the ground long enough for a pedestrian to see the woman-shaped disposal bag stretched across the back seat. Renkel, under the influence of the sedatives from the medical bag, would remain asleep for hours, perhaps the better part of a day. Mapper would find a place to conceal her where she was likely to remain undiscovered until hours past the Intelligence team’s departure from Tarhassan. Joram would ensure that the team would leave before tomorrow was very old.

Teeks’ building was shorter and broader than Renkel’s. Its duracrete face, stippled and dyed to resemble natural stone, was dark from age. The north face, thick with balconies, overlooked a park.

No one walked in the park, and guardsmen, dressed in the fluttery orange-and-gold livery of Tarhassan’s armed forces, stood watchfully in the northeast and southwest corners. The west face, which was where the primary building entrance was located, had no balconies, but many broad viewports gave its residents a fine look down at the landspeeder lane below.

The building lobby was unguarded, wall sensors permitting access to its turbolifts. Renkel’s pockets had yielded up a transparisteel cylinder containing many of the planet’s coin-shaped magnetic access disks, and when Joram held the cylinder up to a sensor, the turbolift doors opened.

Teeks’ quarters were on the sixth floor. His door, a powered slider, was sealed by a magnetic coupler marked “Planetary Security.” Joram took a moment to assure himself that no one was moving down the floor’s hallway, then went to work disengaging the coupler. This was one of many skills he’d acquired since joining Republic Intelligence, and the coupler, designed to keep the mildly curious out or alert security forces if the very curious forced their way through, soon disengaged. Then Renkel’s cylinder of disks gave him access to the darkened interior.

The quarters were lightly furnished. The fact that there wasn’t much furniture meant that there was not much wreckage to clean up; someone had put the place through an amateurish and destructive search. The two sofa-chairs in the main room, one a single and the other a double-wide, had been slashed open, their stuffing pulled free; no longer restrained by the chair coverings, the stuffing had swelled to three times or more its normal volume, making portions of the room look like an artificial fungus forest. The thick green foam-carpet on the floor contributed to the impression.

The table between the exterior viewport and the narrower sofa-chair had been knocked down. A table lamp with a distinctive swing-out glowrod arm was on the floor, toppled but intact. In the bedchamber, the plush, freestanding mattress had been shredded, and its swollen contents made the chamber appear to be full of the primordial ancestors of the main chamber’s fungal growths.

The wreckage held little interest for Joram. It would have been thoroughly sifted through by PlanSec. It was not likely there would be anything for him to find. In fact, he was looking for one crucial thing the security forces were less likely to detect, and he’d already seen it.

From the bedchamber, he recovered an intact low table. He positioned this beside the front viewport, put the lamp atop it, swung the arm out so that the glowrod was directly in front of the transparisteel, and switched the lamp on. The glowrod was still intact, and suddenly the main chamber was illuminated.

The light was risky. There might still be security personnel on duty watching this place.

The lamp was a signaling device, used in a standard procedure to signal an agent’s local resources. It was plausibly a reading lamp; Teeks could sit in the sofa-chair beside the viewport, keep the lamp arm near him, and read. But when circumstances called for it, he’d swing the arm out so that it shone in the viewport, as Joram had just done.

Joram sat in the ruined chair. He drew his blaster and waited.

A knock, light and tentative, awoke Joram. He reached over to turn the glowrod off, then called,

“It’s not sealed.”

The hallway door opened. A diminutive male stood there, his silhouetted features indistinct. He moved in quickly, letting the door slide shut behind him. “Greetings,” the man said, his voice deep, out of proportion to his small stature. “I’m not sure I have the correct building. I’ve come about the rental quarters?”

“No need for a cover story,” Joram said. “The lamp signal was deliberate. You’re a local working with Teeks. What do I call you?”

The silhouette sagged just a little, perhaps in relief. “Tharb.”

“I don’t think I’ve run into that name before.”

“It’s not a name. It’s a code name. It’s a bug. A Tarhassan bug.”

“Ah. How long has it been since you’ve been compensated?”

“Since Teeks was taken.”

With his free hand, Joram fished around in a pocket and brought up some credchips, generic ones he’d exchanged for gold at the spaceport, not traceable to him. He calculated their value against what he knew were standard rates for local informer services and put two of them on the table with the lamp. “You can have these when I’m gone.”

“Thank you.”

“Why was Teeks taken?”

Tharb shrugged. “PlanSec investigators showed up at the restaurant, Corgan’s Gustatorium, where I usually make exchanges with him. I happened to be there.”

You work there, Joram decided. Now Icon find you again.

“They asked very specific questions about his visits to the restaurant, about anyone he might have met there regularly.”

But no one could remember any patron he met regularly. And since you’re free, no one remembered that you were his regular server.

“I raced over here as soon as I could get free, but I was delayed by circumstances.”

You have to wait until your shift was over.

“And I saw them take him.”

Joram considered. “By any chance, did you follow them when they took him away?”

“Yes, I did.”

Joram added another two credchips to the little pile on the table. Either you sold him out and risked nothing by following them, or you’re a daring resource and we badly want to keep you.

“Where did they take him?”

“The main office of Planetary Security, downtown.”

Joram managed to keep an expression of dismay off his face-an irrelevant effort, since his visitor couldn’t see his features in the dark. Cherek, for all the wrong reasons, had been right about where Teeks was. It was going to hurt like hell to admit that. “Is there anything you can tell me about that building?”

“I can give you partial plans. Main entrance, interrogation areas, holding areas. Nothing about the vehicle bays, computer areas, anything like that.”

You’re an ex-convict who’s been there as a prisoner, and are now working as a food server, Joram thought. “Good. On your data pad?”

“On my data pad.”

Joram brought out his own datapad. “Beam it over.”

Joram and Mapper reentered Cherek’s quarters some three hours after they’d left. Mapper, coached in the role he was now to play, kept his features cold and still. Cherek, Tinian, and Livintius regarded the two of them with expressions mixing admiration with dread. Tinian’s manner was weighted more toward horror as she watched Mapper. Joram smiled. Their expressions would really become alarmed if they knew that the supposed victim lay wrapped in blankets m the utilities shed of an abandoned construction site, sleeping off her drug-induced stupor

“It’s done,” Joram said.

“About time. I hope Joram didn’t slow you down too much, Mapper.” Cherek gestured at the chamber’s table, which now was only half-covered with snack food. The other half was littered with sheets of flimsi covered in hand- scrawled notes. “We do have a plan for the next stage of the investigation. Voted on, sealed, and approved.”

“Sorry we didn’t wait for you,” Livintius said. “But we were all in agreement...”

“And with three voting in unison, our votes weren’t needed,” Joram said. “But I have some news. I hope it doesn’t interfere with your operational plans.”

Cherek looked offended by the possibility. “What news?”

“The Renkel woman confessed all before the poison took hold.” Joram offered up a shudder at the pretended memory. “She admitted that she’d turned in her lover to PlanSec. He’s being interrogated at the main facility. You were right all along, Cherek.”

“I knew that.”

“So what’s our plan?” Mapper asked.

“Well, there are holes in it,” Cherek said There was weary admission in his voice. “And until we plug them, we can’t launch our rescue. For instance, we need to know the layout of the building.”

“Oh, I have that,” Mapper said. “It was on Renkel’s datapad. Just the section of the building she was familiar with. The cells and interrogation areas, mostly.”

Cherek came half up out of his chair. “You still have that?”

“Of course. I took all her personal effects to dispose of separately. They’re still in the speeder.”

Cherek’s smile suggested that he was ready to adopt Mapper and make him his heir. “Good work. Livintius, fill him in.”

The academic Falleen preened, happy to be the center of attention. “Item One, Sub-Item A, Summary: Rescue Edbit Teeks from Planetary Security Building. Sub-Item B, Resources, The five of us, one rental air-speeder, this set of rented quarters, personal weapons and gear. Mapper, do you have explosives?”

“I do. We have only half a dozen shaped charges, though, all I could smuggle in.”

“That might do.... Sub-Item C, Procedures. Dress one of us in simulated PlanSec uniform. That one accomplishes entry into PlanSec building, makes his way to an unobserved exterior portal, and admits the others. Seize PlanSec personnel and force them to lead the way to Teeks’ cell. Force open Teeks’ cell, Exit building; necessary improvisation here. Exit vicinity. Make immediate trip to spaceport for extraction.”

“And now that we have a real, not simulated, PlanSec uniform,” Cherek said, “we know who’s going to perform the initial intrusion. If you’re up to it, Tinian. You’re the only one even close to Renkel’s size.”

Tinian considered, then nodded. “I’ll do it. That woman gave her life so that Teeks could be rescued. I’m not going 10 let that be a waste.”

Her tone surprised Joram. Renkel’s supposed death had obviously shattered her naivete. There may be some hope for you after all, he decided.

But he had to find some way to accompany her into the PlanSec buildings. Otherwise, she was not likely to get out alive.

In what elsewhere was the quietest hour before the golden-orange Tarhassan dawn, the landspeeder lane in front of the Planetary Security building was busy with a shift change.

Tinian gulped, exited the airspeeder, and mingled with the crowd. She marched up the green duracrete stair? to the building’s arched entrance. Closely following Mapper’s instructions, she walked fast but not conspicuously so, her attention apparently on the datapad in her hand, As she neared the main entryway, she held up Renkel’s identity disk, waving it with simulated unconcern in front of the sensor, and passed into the lobby.

There was no alarm, no outcry, no sudden surge of officers toward the lobby. Joram, in the back seat, realized that he was holding his breath. Finally he let it out.

“No matter how many times you do this, it’s never easy, huh?” asked Cherek. His tone suggested that he was one weary veteran talking to another.

Joram gestured toward the entrance. “Let’s stay here to see if any-thing bad happens.”

“No, let’s get to our waiting point.” Cherek put the airspeeder in motion, moving a block down the landspeeder lane, pulling it to the streetside around the first corner.

Cherek’s comlink beeped, indicating an incoming signal. He pulled it from its clip on his lapel.

This is Grimtaash-One, go.”

Tinian’s voice, hushed, came across the comlink’s tiny speaker: “I’m in the basement.”

“That was fast. Basement? You’re supposed to be headed toward the cell block.”

“I found out my identity disk doesn’t get me into the secure hall to the building’s interior. But I saw a worker coming out of a door to the basement near the hall access. I kept the door from closing and he didn’t notice. There’s no one clown here. I can move around without being seen.”

“Tinian,” Cherek’s voice was a pained whine. “That... wasn’t... the plan. “

“I know, I’m sorry. That was all I could do.”

Cherek’s lips moved silently, and Joram recognized that the man was counting to ten again.

This time Cherek got to fifteen before he said, “What about accesses?”

“I’ve found one door frame already, but it’s blocked with a duracrete slab. It’s hard to move around down here. It’s all caged areas filled with boxes of what 1 think is old evidence and files.”

They heard a quiet, high- pitched sneeze over the comlink. “Sorry. Dusty, too.”

“Let me know when you’ve got something we can use. Grimtaash-One, out.” Cherek replaced the comlink on his lapel, then looked confused. “Did I call her Grimtaash-Two, or by her name, the first time?”

Mapper said, “Her name.”

Cherek began counting again.

“I have a door,” Cherek’s lapel whispered. “It’s heavy metal and it has all sorts of monitoring devices on it.”