The Scarab (19 page)

Steve agreed heartily with mild
profanity.

We were interrupted again by a
knock at the door. I answered to find Josie Valencia in a purple harem outfit
which competed for attention with her orange hair. She carried herself like she
wore these outfits every day. Maybe on stage, she did. The air she had about
her today was more aggressive and extroverted than at the party. “As promised,
I brought the costumes,” the singer said, indicating a bellhop and a loaded
cart behind her.

“Miss Valencia,” I said,
introducing her. “You out-did yourself.”

She stepped in to meet everyone. I
noticed the purple eye-shadow she had on to compliment the outfit. Her overall
effect was not cheap, but gave one the impression that she was a kind of
fashion commando who took no prisoners. “I got extras in case something didn’t
fit.” It must be some kind of radar women have because as soon as she got in
the room, she was sucked to Mare’s ring. She fussed appropriately over it.
Although they had only met, the ladies seemed to be getting along famously.

“This is my co-pilot and fiancée,
Mary Ann,” I said.

“
The
Josie Valencia?” Steve
drooled and stared.

“You’re cute,” she said to him. “You
are...?”

“Our team physician,” I improvised.
Because of increased security, he couldn’t attend the press conference unless
he had a legitimate team function. I had the perfect excuse. It would also help
dispel the rumors that I kept an all-female staff. “Mary’s brother, Steve.”

“Ooo, a doctor,” she cooed. She was
good at that. Steve still wasn’t talking. Josie didn’t seem to mind. “I have
just the costume for you.”

“A paramedic, actually. What
happened to Antonio?” I asked.

Both of them glared at me with a “get
lost” expression. Then, Josie remembered there were other people in the room. “He
was fun, but not what I’m looking for. You, on the other hand, have an awfully
interesting chin. You can tell a lot about a man from his chin.” Her Louisiana accent leaked through again, and Steve was putty.

Mare made a show of looking at her
watch. “We have to eat. You’re welcome to come with us if you’d like.”

Steve nodded vigorously.

“Afterwards, Steve, you help her
unpack the costumes in the kitchen while we get ready for the race,” I
suggested.

“Sure,” Josie agreed. “He looks
strong enough.”

Steve’s mouth was working, but no
sounds came out yet.

“By the way,” she remembered. “Who
are all those guys in the hallway?”

Mare looked at me for the answer. “Guards.
Some people are kind of trying to kill me.” That snapped Steve Anselm out of
his star-struck puppy stupor.

“Why?” Josie asked.

I decided to tell Steve now instead
of later. “Some folks were cheating at the game. I found them out, and they
kidnapped Mare to keep me quiet. I...”

“He rescued me, hospitalizing all
but one of the ring members. One is going to need therapy to stand unassisted.
The FBI is afraid the ring-leader, Kali, may be out for revenge,” Mare finished
for me.

“Fu...” Steve began, and then caught
himself before he offended Josie. “Fantastic. And Junior thought you were a
wimp.”

Mare’s oldest brother thought every
guy who didn’t play tackle basketball was a wimp. He was pushing forty and his
favorite expression was “What foul?”

I shrugged, and Steve slugged me in
my good shoulder. Josie had a puzzled expression on her face. Evidently, she
was short enough to see something we had all missed. “I thought Kali was your
friend. After all, she signed your sling.”

Whitaker called his boss immediately on the head set. “In
light of recent developments, sir, I’m afraid we cannot allow you to go to the
hotel restaurant. There are too many people there and too much risk,” he told
me.

I sulked. “I wanted to celebrate.”

Mare was already removing my sling
carefully for the FBI labs to analyze for evidence. She pulled a plastic bag
from her new purse and labeled it with a black marker that one of the suits
from the hall handed her. “Not till we find this witch.”

Steve agreed with my shadow. “Hey,
man, she’s right. The Scarab is the one who comes back to life again, not you.
Miss Valencia and I can go out and get something for everybody.”

Out-voted, I sighed and then
started delegating. “I suppose we could make it a working lunch. Bring back
breakfast for five, plus anything Whitaker’s men want. I need some Dr. Pepper,
and Mary Ann’s favorite type of muffin is banana nut. We can order pizza from
the shop across the street once they open in another hour. Nigel, can you get a
detailed map of today’s course to put on the wall? The route is Munich—Nuremberg—Leipzig—Berlin. Pay special attention to any area which doesn’t show up
on satellite coverage; military bases, prisons, tunnels, or any other dead
zones.”

Foxworthy relished the chance to
use the enlarge function on his copier, and got right to work. I still felt
like I was using him, though, and wanted to give him some reward for all the
effort he was putting in. “When you come with the map, bring your laptop and
anything you’ll need to feel comfortable on a long drive.” Foxworthy raised an
eyebrow. “We’re going to need someone to look after the base unit while we make
the mercy run. I’ve got a bad wing and you’re the only other registered pilot
we have.”

At least Foxworthy was having a
good day by the time we left. I still felt we could win, but it was kind of
like a volleyball game now. I wanted everyone to have a chance to participate
and we had to work as a team for any of us to succeed. He’d be telling these
war stories to his grandkids.

Mare passed off the evidence bag
before I could get a look at it. Soon, we were being escorted back to our
suite. My elbow and forearm started to hurt without the sling, so I put my
right hand behind my neck to help elevate it until I could get a replacement.

“You could have warned me about
Josie’s dye job,” Mare whispered, changing the subject.

“I thought the adjectives amiable
and shocking would have adequately prepared you.” When we could talk about the
case without alarming any innocent bystanders, I asked, “What did it say?”

“It was a phone number,” she told
me, loud enough for our guards to hear. “Yours in Hawaii.”

“But I’m unlisted,” I said, walking
faster.

“She probably found the number on
your workstation or the SimCon paperwork. It doesn’t matter. She’s just sending
you a message. Now, it’s personal.”

“Should I call in to see if she
left me any voice-mail?” I offered.

“You’ll do no such thing. You’ll
stay safe in our room and concentrate on winning this race. Leave everything
else to the professionals. We can’t let her get away.”

“Maybe we have to call it from the
hotel. I know she still has her own programs running on the hotel’s computer
switching system. She’s sent me messages that way before. You know, she might
have worked for the phone company or specialized in communications theory in
school.”

Whitaker faded into the foreground
once again. “We can start checking that out. There are probably only about ten
women a year who graduate with that specialty. We’ll get a list of everybody fitting
the revised profile by this afternoon. If we’re lucky, we’ll catch her before
she strikes again.”

When we reached the room, Mare told
him, “You’re right. We’ve got to stop reacting to her threats after the fact
and start outthinking her. We outnumber her now.”

“Is that why she’s going to
parties, and we both need ice packs?” I said, raiding the freezer for a fresh
gel pack for each of us.

Mare started organizing the command
center for us again. “It doesn’t add up. What she has already should be enough.
Kali has the data from over eighty vehicles. Why should she risk capture for
another thirteen? The others might have gone to jail for something that
penny-ante, but not her. There’s something bigger at stake.”

I arranged seating for everyone and
found an extra phone line and joystick for the laptop. “We’re on to her, but we
can’t stop her. Unless we can physically capture her, she can try again any
time she wants.”

“But nobody with her obvious
intelligence would risk exposure for no profit. I need to know why.” She
connected cables for me while I warmed up the interface.

“Revenge. Even the smartest person
can have a blind spot. You said it yourself. It’s personal now.” I put the
rattler virus the Feds had isolated on my workstation immediately after I powered
up. Uncle Sam says, practice safe death.

Mare shook her head. “No, she could
do that at any time. She could wait till you no longer had protection and weren’t
watching. It’s what I’d do.” I made a mental note never to piss off my future
wife. “There’s something here, today, that she still wants.”

While calibrating the new Sansui
station for Mare, I said, “Maybe she wants to keep her promises to her clients.”

“Honor among thieves, hardly,” she
scoffed. The ring suited her. I tried to picture her hair with a spray of baby’s
breath in it.

“Maybe the mob guys will hunt her
down if she doesn’t.”

Mare seemed unconvinced. “If no one
has seen her and the Feds can’t find her, I think she’s safe. What if there’s
more to the Charon program? What if her design is like yours? What if the
grave-robbing feature is just part of the loophole she found? For some reason,
she’s afraid of you. Kali believes you’re a lot like her in many ways. If you
were running this ring, what would you be after?”

“That’s the sixty million dollar
question,” I said. “I’ll let you know if I think of something in my spare time.
Right now, we’ve got a race to plan.”

Remembering my promise to the Feds
last night, I phoned Andiron Enterprises to arrange an unpleasant surprise for
Exotech. Everything was ready for sign-on in another twenty minutes when Steve
and Josie arrived with the food. Josie had the same attitude about food as she
did about costumes, better too much than too little. More and more I saw that
as a cornerstone of her character. They brought back deli platters piled with
several types of meat and cheese. Josie wanted to pay for it all, but I
insisted on reimbursing her. After all, she was our guest.

Once I had my caffeine, I tried
some of the big tortilla chips they had on the side. When I told them I hadn’t
had them in years, Josie insisted on taking us out to an authentic local
Mexican restaurant for dinner. “You just can’t visit New Mexico without eating
there. Wars have started for less.”

“Sorry. We’ll be tied up the whole
day till about eight or nine with the convention,” I said.

She pouted till Steve said he’d be
free. Then the two of them disappeared into the kitchen to unpack costumes. The
Cinderella effect was contagious.

After we pinned all the map pieces
up on the wall, I explained the plan. “Before the race, we repair what we can,
and I’ll show Nigel the ropes. Those trees put a few dents in our sides and
trashed the top of the left-handed sled. I also want to patch and detox the
windshield. Once the race starts, we decouple the right-handed sled from the
main body. I’ll slave the main unit to the laptop and the Sansui to the sled
making the run. We’ll need all the processing power we can get; that sled has
an empty speed of over 300 kilometers per hour. The first half should be an
easy trip on autopilot. Coming back will be the hard part.”

I traced the route the sled would
be taking in blue highlighter. I switched colors to orange for the main unit. “Meanwhile,
Nigel will control the main unit. I’ll supervise both of you till we rejoin,
but I don’t want to pilot unless we get into a fight. With any luck, I aim to
prevent that. Nigel, GEDM is sending a heavy after us within the first hour. He’s
probably going to be coming up this road behind us, looking for a sitting duck.
Our batteries were pretty drained by a trick I played on the North Korean tank,
so we’re going to need to recharge soon. We’re also not allowed to go any
farther up the Autobahn toward Munich. If we were the predictable sort, he’d
have us.”

I felt like a general giving his
battle plan to the troops. I drew an orange arrow on the map. “But, the river
is not covered by satellite. They’ll be blind. We hover over to the river, and
take a barge north to this little town. The sled will rendezvous with us there.
Only then will we reappear on the tactical displays. They’ll never find us, and
we’ll be closer to Munich. Questions?”

Nigel went first. “What if we don’t
find a barge?”

“Then we float downstream while
recharging and end up in this town here. We won’t be as close to Munich, but we’ll gain a little ground, and still be set up for the next phase of the
operation,” I announced.

“Which is?” Mare asked,
impatiently.

I was rather proud of this part. “Both
towns have excellent high-speed rail links to North Munich. We hop on after we
rejoin and ride the rail all the way. By the time they figure out what we’re
doing, we’ll be ahead of the pack again. We’ll miss all the traffic and
obstacles that they’ll have to plow through the hard way.”

“How does this help us with GEDM,”
wondered Nigel.

“To quote a famous tactician, the
best defense is not to be where your opponent strikes,” I said. “I know I said
I’d kill him, but I’m hoping this will work. If it doesn’t, someone leaked the
information to them, and we’ll be able to prove conspiracy.” I had a good card
up my sleeve, but wanted to keep it a secret for now. While checking some of
the corporate structures to find who bought Mark Waters, I noticed that Miss
Valencia’s record label was owned by Muramatsu Multimedia, a subsidiary of
Muramatsu International, our Japanese competitors. Maybe I was just being
paranoid, but like Playfair said, the fewer people who know, the safer the
secret stays.

“Won’t this cost extra time?” asked
Mare.

“Actually, the longer we spend on
the mission, the better off we’ll be. We’ll need every minute of mercy bonus we
can get,” I explained. “Nigel, you ever driven a high performance floater
before?”

He grinned sheepishly. “Only every
November for the past twenty years. I always test drive the newest Porsche, but
Celeste makes me keep the Volvo.”

At exactly noon, our interfaces
tied into the game for a scouting and repair session. When I connected with the
laptop, I noticed that the set up on the screen was exactly the same as I had
when my last session was cut short. I was still logged through Minos, the judge’s
super-user account. I told nobody. Nigel wouldn’t know any better and Mare had
her own account at the Sansui. According to the strictest interpretation of the
rules, if they started me this way, I could keep the login till they caught the
mistake. Mare would make us waste valuable time reporting this to the judges. I
didn’t plan to use this to cheat; I just wanted more options available if
someone else bent the rules.

Pretending everything was normal, I
put the laptop interface into practice mode and reviewed the basics with
Foxworthy. “Steer it with the joystick. As a rule of thumb, to turn 40 degrees,
you bank twenty. Nose up to slow, and down when accelerating. As you go faster,
you’ll tend to get closer to the ground just like any other floater. The power
output of the grids will increase to maintain a good buffer, but watch out for
things like rocks, stumps, and fireplugs.” I also went over some of the special
features of the Ghedra.

In a matter of minutes, Nigel had
the hang of it. “This is easy. A child could pilot this. My boy’s video games
were more complicated.”

I shrugged. “I’m a lazy mechanic.
More complicated means it’s harder to fix.”

Just then Mare, who had been in
charge of damage control on the Sansui, called for my attention. “Ethan, we
have a problem.”

I ran to look over her shoulder. If
I interpreted the error code correctly, it was a new one. Because we had no
pilot, we also had no mechanic. With no mechanic, we couldn’t do the repairs.
Someone was trying to screw us. I was tempted to jump immediately to the Minos
account to eliminate this hurdle, but I wanted to exhaust mundane avenues
first.

“Call up LAS. See if they can send
over a pair of hands. They’re about fifty meters away,” I told her.

The LAS crew was polite, but
Antonio turned us down. “I could lose my job and the race. The repairs to our
own grid are so severe, it will take us at least an hour. Frankly, I don’t
think we have the budget.”

“What’s the big deal, you never field-stripped
a grid before?” I asked over my headset, tying into Mare’s channel.

“We’re on the phone with the engineers
now, but they keep telling us they’ve never tried it with this design before,”
Antonio whined.

“A floater is a floater,” I stated.
“If I can get you under way in under an hour, will you give me a mechanic for
the time remaining?”

When he vacillated, I threw in, “I’ll
split the salvage on the North Korean vehicle with you.” He had to realize that
I could take whatever I wanted from the dead tank and scrap the rest. But if he
played ball, I would share the loot. That did the trick; Antonio agreed. Thank
God Josie didn’t say hi to him over the channel. I motioned Nigel to keep
everyone in the suite quiet while I dealt with the crisis.

“Show me your schematics,” I
ordered the LAS pilot. “I’m not going to steal them.” Even with my assurances,
it took two minutes before the detailed drawings arrived. Evidently, the
engineers didn’t have a better idea.