The Man Who Never Missed (17 page)

Emile Khadaji was more than a little nervous as he sat in the womb-foam of the morning shuttle to Ago’s Moon. The attendant offered him a soporific, but he declined. He would have to relax, he thought. If his mental state was apparent, he would be caught for certain.

The ship landed uneventfully and Khadaji proceeded to the luggage claim area. He watched as the bags were ejected through a slot, sometimes fired completely over the conveyer by the robot dins assigned to transport them. Finally, he saw the bag containing the contraband. He was sweating as he reached for the case, expecting at any moment to feel someone clamping hands upon him.

Nothing happened, no one seemed to be watching him, so Khadaji moved to the line waiting to have tags checked against bags. The old woman matching numbers looked bored. The reader she used was not equipped with automatic memory Khadaji knew. That was an important part of his plan. If the device had been so fitted, he would never have tried the caper.

The woman glanced at the readout on the fake tag, saw the numbers matched, and waved Khadaji through, pointing with her nose. She didn’t look at him, but immediately began to check the next man through.

Khadaji released a deep breath. So far, so good. Step two.

The corridor led to customs and there were no exits between the luggage area and the inspection tables. There were, however, small disposal tubes lining the corridor. As inconspicuously as he could, Khadaji approached one of these disposals. He attached a thumbnail-sized sticker of phosphoreme to the fake tag, squeezed it, and dropped it into the wall tube. There was a small whoosh! as the tube sucked the plastic tag away, and Khadaji imagined he heard the phosphoreme as it ignited and flashed the ID. Reachardo Hollee no long existed. Step three.

The customs inspectors looked as bored as the woman who checked the claim tags, but Khadaji knew they weren’t. This was the most dangerous part. If they opened his bag, if they found the chem hidden inside the reader, then the caper was aborted. He was, he figured, protected as much as he could be, considering he was guilty of smuggling. He had played the scenario inside his head dozens of times.

“Well, what have we here? Look, Johann, a drug smuggler!”

Khadaji would look astounded. “What? I never saw that before.” He would look at the contents of the bag for a moment and the realization would dawn on him. “Hey, wait a minute! That’s not my bag!”

“Sure it isn’t, chickie. Come over here into my office. Let me see your tag. And move very slowly and carefully when you reach for it, Johann zaps things when he gets nervous.”

He would produce his tag, very carefully, trying to look innocent. They would check it.

“Yeah, it’s the wrong number, all right. How did you get it past Marlerra? Giver her a call, Johann. And check to see if there’s another bag matching this number, too.”

After what would seem like a thousand years, the second bag would show up, probably in the company of the old woman. It would be very thoroughly checked, but would be clear of anything illegal. And the number would match. And Khadaji’s tag would show he’d only checked one bag through. And they would let him go, though they might be suspicious, and begin looking for Hollee the drug smuggler…

“Your tag,” the customs man said, interrupting Khadaji’s mental scenario.

“Oh, sorry.” He handed the tag over and the man shoved it into a reader.

“Purpose of your visit?”

“Vacation. I’m going to Giant Falls, to do some swimming. Maybe some diving.”

“Um. Anything to declare?”

“No sir.”

The man pulled Khadaji’s tag from the reader and handed it back. He looked at the case Khadaji carried. “That all you’re bringing in?”

“Yes sir.” Khadaji made as if to put the case onto the inspection table.

The customs man glanced at Khadaji, then at the bag. “Never mind. Have a pleasant time on Ago’s Moon.” He waved at the next man.

Khadaji forced himself to walk slowly as he moved away from the customs inspector. He was through! Step four.

He had a contact lined up, someone he’d met in the pub on Bocca. Before he went to meet him, Khadaji took his legal permit, went to a weapons supplier and bought a spetsdod and four magazines of shocktox darts. Just in case.

There was no trouble. Ten minutes after he arrived in a respectable clothing producer’s office, Khadaji traded fifty standards worth of mescabyn for twenty-five thousand stads. He saw the money credited to his account, and he and his customer parted on the best of terms. The man would take all Khadaji could supply, he said.

Khadaji grinned as he walked toward his rented cube. He had just made more money in a few hours than in the last two years. He laughed aloud. He was tempted to spend a few days and a chunk of the money on Ago’s Moon, enjoying some of the pleasures which could be had by someone well-off. But he shook the thought. No, this was only a beginning. He would have to devise other ways to make this seed grow. The switched bag caper had worked, but he wouldn’t try that again. According to his research, most law benders were caught when they tried to milk too much from a good thing. He didn’t plan to repeat himself and run that risk.

The term “victimless crimes” might be a misnomer, but it was one Khadaji used as his basis of operation. Smuggling seemed to him to be the best way to go. He didn’t deal in killing weapons; if he smuggled drugs, they were non-addictive; he tended to buy something where it was legal and sell it where it was not. The risks he took justified his profits, in his mind, at least.

“—thing to declare, brother?”

“I bought this camera on Muta Kato,” Khadaji said. “It’s a gift for an old friend here.”

“Looks expensive. Value, brother?”

“Four hundred standards, I’m afraid.” Not counting the flame opals hidden inside the drive motor. “Will I have to pay an import duty?”

“That’s so, sorry, brother. Fifty percent.”

Khadaji pretended to wince. “Well. There goes my mother’s souvenir statue of His Eminence.” He reached for his credit tab.

“I’d hate to deprive somone’s mother of such a gift. What say we value this at… three hundred stads?”

Khadaji smiled. “You are a true saint, brother.”

Khadaji kept smiling as he walked through customs. He was glad he’d had a chance to study history; he owed an easy twelve thousand stads to the writer of an old file called The Purloined Letter.

When the Directorate of Simba Numa declared rec chem An Abomination and shut down all public pubs, Khadaji was not one of the chemrunners who sold a shipload of common sops and liquids to eager buyers waving credit tags at passing traffic. The Directorate was expecting that kind of business and was prepared for it. Dozens of ships were impounded and their owners and pilots arrested. Khadaji, drawing upon his knowledge gained as a pubtender, approached a legal market selling products which could be easily converted into various popular rec-chems and sold them instructions on how to make those conversions. Bathtub psychedelics and gin became best-sellers and Khadaji left the planet long before the authorities began looking for him.

To cover his travel and illicit activities, Khadaji bought a business, a firm which specialized in sending consultants to help small businesses streamline their operations. He did so through a series of dummy corporations and fronts, then hired himself as a kind of free-cycle investigator, who answered only to the CEO of the company. The same CEO, hired by Khadaji, was allowed to run the legal end of the business as long as he vouched for Khadaji and didn’t ask him any questions.

As he made more money, Khadaji invested it in other legal operations, in stocks and banks and high-profit ventures. He wanted wealth, but it had to be useable wealth. He paid taxes on his legal earnings, hired a team of accountants to shift and juggle and obscure the input made from illegal activities, and poured the money through. The filter of respectability changed dirty stads to clean; Khadaji became solidly middle-class, then well-off, then moderately wealthy.

He put all of his energy into making money. It became a game, exciting at first because of the risks. Later, Khadaji became cautious and began paying others to take his risks for him. He worked through circular dummies, dead-end computer orders and back-check fail-safes; tracing him would be almost impossible, should his people be caught. And, on the rare occasions when one of his employees was detained, a legal fund swung into effect, along with a considerable chunk of tax-paid cash for the arrestee. Few ever willingly talked and those who did could give little away.

After almost five years, Khadaji had accomplished two things: he became known in the smuggling trade as No-Face, because no one knew who he was; and he became rich. In a galaxy where a man who was worth five million stads was someone of importance, Khadaji was as important as a dozen men. Only, nobody knew it—or him. When he met anybody not connected to his legal work, he went skin-masked; the computer worm he constructed was of such complexity that it was highly unlikely anybody could ever follow its tortuous convolutions to him from any part of his enterprises. His profile was so low as to be nearly flat, he was obsessive about keeping his identity secret. Nobody even suspected he existed, save as a well-paid flunky for a nondescript corporation; a faceless member of the business community. He had contacts of a certain kind, however, enough money to be powerful, and he had the beginnings of a plan.

Chapter Seventeen

THERE WERE six human-occupied worlds in the Shin System and Renault was the least developed of the six. It was the fifth planet out from the primary G called Shin, one of the many worlds which fit the narrow slot that allowed humans to walk about and free-breathe. The gravity was a hair greater than standard single-gee, and the air a bit richer in oxygen. There were three continents, a decent axial-tilt, and something under nine million people and assorted mues living there. The main local industries were forestry and farming; primary exports to the galactic markets consisted of refined metals, although in no great amount.

Renault was another of the sidestream worlds, of little importance to the Confederation and its machinations. There was a small military outpost of a hundred troops; assignment to it was considered a form of punishment for any soldier with ambition.

Simplex-by-the-Sea was a village on the southwestern coast of the smallest continent. The summers were hot, the winters mild and the primary industries were fishing and tourism. Civilization had brushed its technology-carrying hand past the village, but only a few seeds had fallen upon the small town. The fishing fleet had full bio-gear for locating the schools, but they still used nets; the library was nailed into the off world cast, but the scanners were antiques and subject to local weather and breakdowns. It was a place as far from Confed interest as any, and therefore perfect for Khadaji’s plan.

He spent a month in the summer sunshine of Simplex-by-the-Sea and when he left, Khadaji owned a building which had once been a school for the children of the town. The last students to use the building were old enough to be grandparents; there were few children left in the village and those who were were linked to edcom at home.

Of course, the residents of Simplex-by-the-Sea, if asked, would have denied knowledge of anyone named Emile Antoon Khadaji; nor would they be able to identify the face of the man who bought the old school; for they had not seen it, in truth. But his money was good and there seemed to be plenty of it. In this town, everybody knew what everybody else did and talk was as common as the smell of fish and gulls, but one did not offend an outsider willing to spend money and maybe create jobs. The Man Who Bought the School was a hot topic after he left, but only in town. Best not to spread things too far and maybe wipe the transact, eh?

Four teams of Khadaji’s agents were sent to Renault. Supplies were brought, licenses obtained—sometimes with bribes, sometimes not—and workers hired. When possible, local people were given jobs and paid much higher rates than were the union standard. The Man Who Bought the School was very popular in Simplex-by-the-sea.

Khadaji sat in his office on Bocca. He was surrounded by hand waxed persimmon wood paneling, and the most sophisticated holoproj/comp terminal available sat on a desk of carved giant briar. A free agent didn’t deserve such an office, so Khadaji had arranged to be “promoted” to a vice presidential job. He had circulated the rumor in the company that he was being kicked uplevels for inefficiency in the field, which made him someone to avoid in company political circles. Once he had the image of a loser, the other workers let him alone, just as he intended. He was getting better at manipulating people, he realized. Sometimes that bothered him, his ability to do that.

Khadaji said, “Juete,” and the holoproj screen flashed the file before he could lean back in the form-chair. He smiled. She had claimed her last month’s funding on Vishnu, the pleasure moon orbiting Shiva, in the Tau System. Five thousand stads were made available for her to draw each month, and the trust would last until she died. Juete would never have to work or worry about taking care of herself again. He had never actually said it was from him, but he had given Juete what—in his mind—was a strong clue as to who sent her five kay stads each month. On the original deposit, he had appended a closing salutation which read: “I understand better, now. Love, Older.”

It was from a conversation they’d had early in their relationship, when she’d tried to warn him, in her own way, that she did what was necessary to take care of herself. He hadn’t really understood then when she told him that with age came experience, more important than wisdom. Now he did.

Juete was never stupid; she realized immediately where the stads came from. Early on, a taped message arrived at the office of the bank administering the trust and was eventually forwarded to Khadaji’s attention. It was simple enough: “Thank you, Emile. It is you, isn’t it? I see that you really did love me. If you should feel the need, I would enjoy seeing you again, to show my gratitude.”