I relaxed. Second big hurdle crossed. “When?”
“As soon as possible,” he told me. “Ordinarily I’d take this up at the semiannual meeting of the Lords of the Diamond, which is the day after tomorrow, but with Kreegan gone I can no longer afford the luxury of committee decisions. He usually made them, anyway. I will, however, bring the matter up at the time.” He rose, as if to dismiss me.
“My wife,” I reminded him. “The down payment.”
He hesitated, then sighed. “Very well. Call Dumonia when you get back to shore. I’ll arrange things through him. Get it done quickly. But the psych commands and network remain. You understand that? And the credit dependency. If she tries to get out of the motherhood again, I’ll fix it so she’ll beg for mercy—and you, too. Also, her life as well as yours is in your hands as of now. One cross, one little slip by either of you, one thing going even slightly off—even if it’s something beyond your doing or control—and both of you won’t be dead, but you’ll wish you were. You understand?”
I nodded seriously, noting the vicious undertone in his voice. It was an edge, a very slight chilling undertone, that had been absent before. I realized suddenly that I was facing the real Wagant Laroo, although I hadn’t the first time, and I felt the odds tilt very slightly back to me. I could recognize him if I was careful. Could pick him out in his room full of doubles. Those others, that first one, were damned good actors, but the kind of emotional undertone here had to be, I felt, unique to the real one.
Bogen suddenly paled as a worthy opponent’ in my eyes. I could see him shrink into insignificance in my mind, a minor-league security chief. Wagant Laroo was the most chillingly dangerous human being I had ever met. I never doubted for a second his threat, or his ability to make good on it.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Creative Psych and Proposition Time
“I still can’t believe you managed it,” Dylan told me on the way over to Dumonia’s. “My God, Qwin! In one year you’ve come here, framed a big shot, become a company president, wormed your way into a high-level security project, and now you’ve even managed to get a judgment reversed—a judgment not too many months old!”
I nodded and smiled, but that dark edge that came in when things were underway and out of control was irrepressible, “Still, we’re only halfway home. The trickiest parts are yet to come, and this guy Laroo really bothers me. Dylan, I looked at him and I knew real fear, real danger. These Four Lords are the best of their kind, an ultimate evolutionary type. The whole Warden Diamond concept was the dumbest thing the Confederacy ever accomplished. I see that now. They put the absolute best, most brilliant criminal psychopaths together on one spot. The survivor of such struggles has to be the perfection of their kind—thoroughly brilliant, totally amoral, totally ruthless. He thought of every way to screw me up just while I was sitting there, and I think he knows, or at least suspects, what I’m up to.”
“But you talked yourself out of his traps,” she pointed out, “and he went along with you. If he’s that good, why did he?”
“I think I know. Consider his position. His biggest weakness is his fear that at any moment his enormous and growing power may be snuffed out. It was already a fear before, but now that one of the Four Lords is gone, it has become an obsession. He has the best minds on Cerberus working on his ultimate solution—including Merton, who may be one of the best minds in that area, period. And they can’t crack it. He needs Project Phoenix. So even figuring on a double-cross of some kind, he’s willing to let me go ahead anyway. He has no choice. The only thing he can do is let me go all the way, using Merton and the others to uncover my tricks, in the hopes that I’ll still solve the problem for him. It’s the ultimate challenge, Dylan. He’s betting his ego against mine that he can outfox me before I can outfox him.”
“You’re sure he knows you’re planning something?”
I nodded. “He knows. Like Bogen said, you get a gut feeling, pro to pro. Like the gut feelings you relied on most heavily in the bork hunts. He knows simply because of the bottom line. Once I deliver, he has everything to fear from me and nothing to gain by keeping me around. We both understand that. He knows I’ll have to pull something, and he is betting he can figure it out. That’s why the free leash right now, the giving in to my conditions. It doesn’t matter—as long as I deliver the goods.”
She looked at me. “Can you deliver?”
I shrugged. “I haven’t the slightest idea. That’ll be up to Otah and my brother and Krega and those above him. In the end, I have to bet on their being able to come up with the solution to the problem.”
She just nodded and turned and looked back out the window of the helicab.
Soon we arrived at Dumonia’s offices and were quickly ushered in. Laroo had wasted no time in setting all this up, since he saw assassins in every corner. He was probably right.
Dumonia, too, seemed impressed. While Dylan was off with the thirteen judges assembled on Laroo’s orders just for this purpose, we sat, relaxed, and talked. I liked Dumonia, although I didn’t trust him.
“Well, so you blew the lid off your cover,” he noted casually.
I nodded. “Why not? It was always shaky anyway. And frankly, if you knew, it’d eventually get out in any event.”
He winced. “Am I that disreputable?”
“For all I know, you’re exactly what you seem to be. Or you could be Wagant Laroo himself. On this world, who can tell?”
He found the idea amusing. “That’s the most common problem we face, you know, here on Cerberus. Paranoia. Fear of who’s who. It’s the thing that keeps the people in line. We have a really nasty element in our population, courtesy of the Confederacy, but it takes something like that to keep us as peaceful and relatively crime-free as we are. That and the threat of a judgment, or death, if caught. I suspect that that’s why I love this place so much. Think of the business!”
I had thought a lot about Svarc Dumonia over the past several weeks, and had been extra careful even in choosing him. The man was a total contradiction—a totally amoral, cynical person with criminal tendencies in the mass and abstract sense, yet totally devoted to helping and curing his individual patients.
“Just your idea that I might be Laroo is a good example,” he said. “Total paranoia reigns. But I’m not Laroo. I couldn’t ever be Laroo, for the very simple reason that I hate governments. I hate all institutions, from the Confederacy to the Cerberan government to the local medical society. Organized anthills, all of ’em. Designed to stifle and straitjacket the individual human spirit, and doing a damned good job as well. Religions are just as bad, maybe worse. Dogma. You have to believe this; you have to behave like that. Run around wasting time in silly rituals instead of being productive. You know we have a hundred and seventy different faiths in Medlam alone? Everything from the Catholic Church and Orthodox Judaism—consider the problems with sex changing, circumcision, and the rest they face in our changeable world—to local nut cults that believe the gods are sleeping inside Cerberus and will awaken to take us to the Millennium someday.”
“You’re an anarchist, then.”
“Oh, I suppose. A comfortable, upper-class anarchist, a sort, wearing tailored suits and having a seaside resort home I can get to in my private flier. That’s where the old philosophers went wrong, you know. Anarchism isn’t the way for the masses. Hell, they want to be led, or they wouldn’t keep tolerating and creating all these new bureaucratic institutions to tell them what to think. It’s an individual philosophy. You compromise, becoming as much of an anarchist as you can without worrying about man in the collective. The only thing you can do in the collective sense is to shake them up periodically, give ’em a revolutionary kick in the pants. It never lasts—it creates its own dogmas and bureaucracies. But theshake-up is healthy. When the Confederacy got so institutionalized that even a little revolt here and there was impossible, that’s when dry rot set in.”