The Return of Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future (31 page)

      
The Bandit waited until one of the teller's window was open, and then approached it.

      
"Yes, sir?" said the clerk, a middle-aged man. "What can I do for you?"

      
"You can start by emptying out the drawer in front of you," said the Bandit calmly.

      
"I beg your pardon?"

      
"This is a hold-up. Give me all the money you can reach without moving your feet. Then we'll go to work on the rest."

      
"I know who you are," said the clerk nervously. "You work
for
Men, not against us. This is some kind of joke, right?"

      
Disable him now,
thought Dante.
Your ten seconds are almost up!

      
"Give me your money," repeated the Bandit. "I won't ask again."

      
Suddenly lights started flashing and alarms began ringing. Metal bars appeared where open doors and windows had been. Two screechers suddenly appeared in the robot teller's hands. The clerk whose adrenaline readings had precipitated all this ducked down behind the counter, completely out of sight.

      
The Bandit whirled and sent a laser burst into the robot teller. It knocked the robot back against the wall, melting one of its arms, but didn't totally disable it. Another burst took the robot's head off its body, and it collapsed to the floor.

      
The Bandit then fired through the barrier where the clerk was hiding, and the man's body fell over with an audible thud. Next came two holo cameras and the third teller. A laser blast just missed him, and the Bandit turned and pointed a deadly finger at the executive.

      
"You'll never get away with—" yelled the executive, but the Bandit's lethal arm fired again and his sentence ended with a moist gurgle.

      
The Bandit looked at the carnage. No one was left alive except two customers, a man and a woman.

      
"Get in that corner," he ordered, indicating where he wanted them to go. Finally he turned to his confederates. "All right," he said. "Start collecting the money—fast! Concentrate on Far London pounds, Maria Theresa dollars, New Stalin ruples, and other Frontier currencies. Only take credits that haven't been bundled; there are too many ways for the bank to have marked the others."

      
Dante and the others quickly went to the tellers' windows, removing large wads of cash from them.

      
Two police officers burst into the bank. The Bandit fired at one, killing him instantly. Virgil straightened up and shot the other with a screecher, firing through the teller's window.

      
"Where the hell's the safe?" asked Matilda, staring at the blank wall behind the windows.

      
Dante looked around. "It's got to be in the office." He raced into the room and couldn't spot it.

      
"It's a bank—it
has
to have a vault!" said Matilda.

      
"Of course it does," sand Dante. "Let me think." He examined the office. "Something's wrong here. No one has two coat closets, not on Heliopolis II." He opened the first. Nothing but a fresh white shirt. Then he tried the second—and hit paydirt.

      
"Santiago!" he called out.

      
"What is it?" answered the Bandit.

      
"Got a helluva complex lock here," said Dante. "It'll take me the better part of twenty minutes to break the code."

      
"Step back," said the Bandit, entering the office.

      
Dante stepped away from the safe. The Bandit made a swift adjustment to his arm, and then he fired—and the door to the vault simply vanished amid a cloud of acrid smoke.

      
"Get to work!" said Dante, racing into the safe just ahead of Matilda and Blossom.

      
Dante found a pair of cloth bags and tossed them to the woman. Then he quickly rummaged through the office until he found a briefcase and began filling it with cash. After about two minutes they'd emptied the vault of all its cash.

      
"Where are the safety deposit boxes?" asked Matilda.

      
"Don't bother with them," said the Bandit.

      
"We need all the money we can get!" she objected.

      
"There's a Democracy garrison four miles east of town. It's almost certainly tied in to the alarm. They figure to be here any second. It's time to leave."

      
Matilda ceased her objections instantly, and raced to the door.

      
"No vehicle," she announced.

      
"I put in a call for one," said the Bandit.

      
"Let's hope it arrives ahead of the soldiers," said Matilda.

      
Dante took a quick look out the door. "No such luck."

      
"They're here already?" asked the Bandit, more surprised than alarmed. "They were faster than I thought."

      
"What are we going to do?" asked Blossom.

      
"Stay calm," said the Bandit. "I'll handle this."

      
He waited until the two military vehicles that were approaching the bank pulled to within 50 yards, then made another quick adjustment to his arm and pointed it at them—but just as he was about to fire, the male customer launched himself at the Bandit's legs, knocking him to the floor. The Bandit brought his real hand down on the back of the man's neck, a killing blow that resulted in a loud
crack!
Then he got to his feet, stood in the doorway, pointed at each vehicle in turn, and calmly blew both of them away.

      
"That should discourage anyone from playing the hero before our transportation arrives," he announced.

      
"How will they know what happened or who to blame?" asked Blossom.

      
"We'll tell them," answered the Bandit. He pointed at the wall behind the cashiers and carved out the name SANTIAGO with a laser beam.

      
"That should do the trick," agreed Dante.

      
The old woman spoke up for the first time. "That will fool no one," said Gloria Mundi. "I know who you are."

      
"I'm Santiago," said the Bandit.

      
"You're the One-Armed Bandit," she replied, "and I'll tell everyone I know who are. Santiago's been dead for more than a hundred years."

      
"I'm sorry you feel so strongly about that, ma'am," said the Bandit regretfully. He turned to her and pointed his finger between her eyes.

      
"Wait!"
shouted Dante,

      
"What is it?" asked the Bandit.

      
"Santiago doesn't go around killing old ladies!"

      
"Santiago doesn't leave witnesses who can identify him."

      
"She's a crazy old woman who thinks she saw God once," persisted Dante. "No one will listen to her!"

      
"She's a threat to our continued existence," said the Bandit. "She's got to go."

      
"I agree," said Matilda.

      
"Is that how you want it to begin?" demanded Dante. "With Santiago killing a half-crazed beggar woman?"

      
"How do
you
want it to begin?" she shot back as the empty airport transport pulled up, avoiding the smoking shells of the two Democracy vehicles. "With a description of each of us on file with every soldier and bounty hunter on the Inner Frontier? We need the Democracy to be searching for clues
here
while we're setting up shop in the Albion Cluster."

      
"This isn't the way we're supposed to start," said Dante bitterly.

      
"We're in the revolution business," replied Matilda. "This is a war. There are always civilian casualties."

      
"What war?" croaked Gloria Mundi. "You're a bunch of bank robbers, working for the One-Armed Bandit!"

      
"That's it," said Matilda. "We have no choice. She has to die."

      
"What if she promises not to tell the authorities what she saw?" asked Dante.

      
"Would you believe her if she
did
promise it?" asked Matilda, staring at Gloria Mundi.

      
"No," admitted Dante, his shoulders slumping. "No, I wouldn't."

      
"Well, then?"

      
"Damn it, Santiago doesn't kill helpless old ladies!" repeated Dante.

      
"I hope you don't think I
want
to do this," interjected the Bandit. "But it was you yourself who pointed out all the unpleasant choices Santiago would have to make and all the unsavory things he would have to do."

      
"I didn't mean
this
."

      
"We both know Santiago will have to do far worse things before he's done," said the Bandit.

      
Suddenly they heard a humming sound and turned to see the source of it. Virgil Soaring Hawk had just aimed a burst of solid light between Gloria Mundi's eyes and left a smoking hole in the middle of her forehead.

      
"Enough talk," said the Injun. "Let's get the hell out of here."

      
Not an auspicious debut,
thought Dante as he stepped over the old woman's corpse and carried his briefcase out to the vehicle.
Not a promising start at all.

20.

      
      
Candy for the billfold, candy for the nose,

      
      
Candy for the client, as the business grows.

      
      
Candy by the bushel, candy by the ton;

      
      
The Candy Man supplies it, come and share the fun!

      
If he had a name, no one knew it. If he had fingerprints, they had long since been burned off. If he had a retinagram on file, it was rendered meaningless when he replaced his natural eyes with a pair of artificial ones, which had the added advantage of being able to see far into the infra-red.

      
They say he began his career out on the Rim, and later moved to the Spiral Arm. No one knew how many addicts he had created, and no one knew how much money he had made, but estimates of both were astronomical.

      
He began with cocaine and heroin, both grown on his own farms on the Rim, then moved to more and more exotic designer drugs and hallucinogens. He finally stopped when he got to alphanella seeds, but only because there was nothing more addictive—and expensive—in the entire galaxy.

      
There were warrants for the Candy Man all across the Outer Frontier, up and down the Spiral Arm, and throughout the Democracy, so it made sense that he eventually turned up on the Inner Frontier, the one place where there was no price on his head.

      
That lasted about three Standard months. By then he'd taken over a rival drug lord's territory, and had killed three of the enemy and a pair of the Democracy's undercover agents. There was no place left to run to, so instead of running he surrounded himself with a quasi-military operation. Only the very best, the very wealthiest clients ever got to see the Candy Man face-to- face. He rarely did his own selling, and even more rarely did his own killing. (He
did
do his own accounting, and no one in his employ ever got to see his data files.)

      
He divided his time among half a dozen worlds, and even his most trusted underlings never knew when and where he'd show up next. He owned an impregnable mansion on each world, and three meals a day were prepared for him at each of them, just to confound any potential assassins, As an ambitious young man on the way up, he'd taken all kinds of chances; now that he was no longer poor and no longer in such a hurry, he saw no percentage in taking any chances at all.

      
The Bandit and his party had never heard of the Candy Man when they touched down on Beta Cordero II. They had spent a leisurely month getting there, approaching it by a wildly circuitous route to give the crews Matilda had hired time to build what appeared to be a large, luxurious private hunting lodge. There was no way the casual, or even the acute, observer could spot the three subspace antennae, or the generator that not only supplied light and power for the lodge but for its underground computer complex. There were three guest houses; two were what they seemed, the third was an arsenal, currently four-fifths empty but soon, they hoped, to be filled with whatever weaponry Santiago needed to accomplish his goals.

      
The Bandit walked quickly through the lodge, ignoring the huge living room with the four-way fireplace crafted out of shining alien stone, checked his sleeping quarters, and declared it acceptable. He then summoned Dante and Matilda to cozy paneled room he had claimed as his private office.

      
"I don't see any reason to waste time," he announced. "We might as well get to work."

      
"Have you something in mind?" asked Dante.

      
"There's no sense building an organization when we can simply take one over," answered the Bandit. "Find the biggest drug and smuggling rings in the sector."

      
"They might not be anxious to join us," said Dante.