“I can’t really tell you what it is that we need to have thought of. If I could tell you, we’d already know. In a little while—a few minutes, an hour, a day, a year—I’ll tell you some things that clarify what you will be working on. Till then, well, I won’t, and you’ll have to make up your own mind whether it is because I wouldn’t or couldn’t—or just didn’t.” Now he flopped into a couch and scratched his leg fiercely. “I’m afraid I’ll never be really comfortable in my body. I think it’s so remarkable of you to be comfortable in your mind.”
I wasn’t sure what to say about that, but before the silence got awkward, the small elevator door opened, and the same security man came in. “We have an identification on that note, sir. The handwriting matches Billie Beard.”
“Damn,” Iphwin said, making a face. “We should have known. It sounds like she’s operating in New Zealand now.”
“One way or another, even if she isn’t there physically.”
“May I ask—” I began.
Iphwin nodded. “You may, and we can give you a partial answer. As you probably know, I’m a subject of the British Reich. Nominally my hometown is Edinburgh. And I’m an American expat. I know that very nearly all other American expats find that combination strange, since so many of them won’t even think of living in the Reichs, but that’s the way it goes—I have my reasons. My biggest single operation is right here in the Big Sapphire, here in the Dutch East Indies, and the Dutch Reich is consequently the biggest thorn in my side. I do my best to be the biggest thorn in theirs. They spy on me, I spy on them. They send their Gestapo into my offices and shops all the time, and I sue them constantly. Sort of an ugly tension of power, because frankly they couldn’t run my operations without me but they could easily take them away—which would bankrupt both me and Surabaya District, for which I am the tax base.
“Now, some of the Dutchmen are pretty reasonable about all that, and they understand that it’s just business and politics in their usual forms, and they play the game to win but they don’t make it personal. Billie Beard, on the other hand, is a white-sheet American from way back, like her parents and her parents’ parents, and she hates expats in general and me in particular, and unfortunately she has found the perfect job for her miserable self—she works for the Dutch Gestapo and her beat is hassling ConTech. The only good thing to say for this is that if you let us use this as evidence, we can probably get an injunction to keep her out of New Zealand, and since our plan is to base you out of our Auckland offices, that should mean this is about the last you’ll hear of her. How the hell she found out you were in line to be employed at ConTech, I can’t begin to guess. You didn’t tell anyone, did you?”
“My boss and my girlfriend. Neither of them would blab it around much. Maybe she just picked it up by sheer luck, overheard it or something.” I was catching some of the feel of Iphwin’s urgency; he seemed genuinely afraid, angry, and hassled by the whole business. I suppose that was the moment when I realized that my sympathies were all with Iphwin—I hated white-sheeters, always have, always will. If they really think Hitler’s conquest, and Goebbels’s proconsulate, were the best things that ever happened to America, why don’t they move back? Anyway, if Billie Beard was a fair sampling of what Iphwin’s opponents were—an American expat working for the Gestapo, for the love of god—then I was positively delighted to be on his side. “I am sorry if it leaked from my side, but at least now that I know where that note came from, I’m not going to worry about it much anymore. Maybe she just found out by sheer luck.”
“When it comes to psychotic Nazi bitches like Billie, I don’t believe in luck,” Iphwin said. “And we should worry about that note, a little bit, anyway. If you’ve come to her attention I don’t know how far she may go.” He turned to his security man, who had been standing there quietly during our whole conversation. “Mort, how fast can we get a shadow on Lyle, here? He’s going back to Surabaya in a couple of hours, and then—back to Auckland?”
I shook my head. “Uh, my girlfriend and I were going to celebrate, or whatever reaction was appropriate, this weekend in Saigon. I was going to jump there to meet her.”
“That’s great, Dr. Peripart,” Mort said. “If Beard is after you, that’ll help shake her for a while. I don’t have an op I can put on it right now, Mr. Iphwin, but, Dr. Peripart, I can have a team of bodyguards meet you in Saigon, and if you’re not going back to Auckland till Sunday, then I should have no problem getting you covered from then on. I think we ought to be okay, but let me give you a crisis code to hit in case anything happens between now and your takeoff.” He gave me a little plastic chip; if I stuck it into the data import slot in any phone, it would call his office and get help dispatched to that location.
“Probably I’m being paranoid,” Iphwin said, “but you can learn a lot from paranoids. Such as how to behave when you’ve got way too many enemies, and you’re very important to them and there can easily be more of them around, ready to strike anytime. I feel I really have to ask you—do you still want to sign on?”
“More than ever,” I said.
I was amazed at how much I meant it. Maybe it was that I liked Iphwin’s choice of enemies, or maybe the chance to work on such an interesting class of problems. Perhaps it was only my fear of always wondering what might have happened.
“Good, then,” Iphwin said. He turned to Mort and said, “Get security following Lyle just as soon as you can, and keep it on him until you’re dead certain he’s no longer threatened.”
“Yes, sir.” Mort turned and left through the small elevator again.
“Now,” Iphwin said, “as you must have guessed, my sources and research were good enough so that I knew already that you would produce the satisfactory results we wanted. The whole purpose of this meeting was mostly to determine that we could stand each other’s company, because at first you’ll be seeing me almost daily, and my habit of flitting around the room drives some people crazy, whereas my habit of flitting around a subject drives almost all people crazy. The bottom line is, you’re hired, Lyle, and you may start on Tuesday so that you can enjoy your weekend as planned without worrying about having to be back early. After a few weeks here, Monday morning through Saturday noon, we won’t need so much constant contact, and we’ll set you up in our Auckland offices. Meanwhile, I own nine hotels in Surabaya, so I imagine we can find a decent room for you. I suppose you could bargain for salary and benefits, but it will go faster if you just accept our offer.” He handed me a piece of paper. “We made sure it was a far better package than Whitman College gave you.”
I looked down, saw a preposterous number, looked again to confirm it was a starting salary. “That will work fine,” I said. Vac had just begun, and Utterword had told me that since my two astronomy classes weren’t particularly popular and he could always get someone else to teach freshman physics, I wouldn’t need to give the customary notice if I got the job.
Iphwin had apparently jumped across the room while I had been thinking. “I do have just a few more questions for you if you don’t mind, but they have no relevance to whether or not you get the job. You might think of them as the first questions of your job.”
“Fire away,” I said, grinning now, as it sank in that I had just accepted a job for two and a half times my present salary and a better benefits package. I would finally have enough to be able to go shopping for a larger house, something with room for kids and two clutter-equipped adults, and therefore be in a position to propose to Helen. I could propose to her within a few hours ... even this evening—