“Yes,” she said, and there was suddenly no doubt in her voice. “That has to be it.”
“But what can we do?” the Elder asked. “If the system is as empty as you say, the Bellidos’ approach won’t work.”
“Which is precisely why the Modhri moved there,” I agreed. “Unfortunately for him, I have an idea.”
The Elder eyed me. “And the cost for this will be?”
Right on cue, my stomach growled. “Right now, all it will cost is dinner,” I said. “After that… we’ll need to talk.”
TWENTY-FOUR:
“This is certainly a pleasant surprise,” Larry Hardin commented as McMicking and I walked between the palm trees flanking the doorway that led into the formal solarium of his New Pallas Towers apartment. “When the news about that missing Quadrail hit the net I assumed you were both lost. Does this mean the Spiders have found it, after all?”
“I don’t think so,” I told him. In actual fact, they had gone into the Tube and retrieved the derelict train. But since the Modhri had already killed everyone aboard, I doubted that would ever be announced. “Fortunately, we’d switched trains.”
“Lucky indeed,” Hardin agreed, gesturing toward a bench across from him set between a pair of lilac bushes. “As McMicking may have mentioned, I’ve had some second thoughts about your employment.”
“Yes, he did,” I confirmed, sitting down on the bench and sniffing appreciatively at the delicate scent of the lilacs. McMicking, for his part, went and stood at the back corner of Hardin’s bench, watching me closely. “Unfortunately, I’m afraid that you were right the first time.”
Hardin’s eyebrows lifted. “Excuse me?” he asked ominously. “I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to deliver, after all,” I told him.
“You’re giving up?”
“I give up when a job is finished or I’m convinced it’s not possible,” I said. “In this case, it’s the latter.”
“I see.” Hardin leaned back against his bench. “Speaking of unfinished jobs, I’ve been having my people do a little investigating of your, shall we say, unaccounted-for funding. Oddly enough, it’s also been impossible to track.”
“And what do you conclude from that?”
“Possibly that some governmental agency is involved,” he said. “I understand that a UN deputy director, who was also supposed to have been aboard that vanished Quadrail, has also returned alive and well. I further understand that you and he came back on the same torchliner and that you spent a great deal of the trip in his cabin.”
“You’re very well informed,” I said.
“I try to be,” he said. “You realize, of course, that our agreement has an exclusivity clause in it.”
“I haven’t told Director Losutu anything about this that I haven’t told you,” I assured him. “Our discussion was on other topics.”
“In that case, the only other possibility is that you were suborned by the Spiders themselves.” Hardin’s already cool gaze went a few degrees chillier. “And that wouldn’t be simply an exclusivity violation. It would be contract malfeasance and fraud, both of which are felonies.”
“You could certainly file charges and launch an official investigation,” I agreed. “Of course, that would mean letting the rest of the world know what you were planning to do. You really want that?”
“Not particularly,” he said. “But one way or another, I think we can agree that your actions have voided our contract. As such, according to Paragraph Ten, you owe me all the monies you spent over the past two months.”
“I understand,” I said. “Actually, as long as we’re on the subject anyway, money is the main reason I came here today. I’m afraid I’m going to need a little more of it.”
An amused smile touched Hardin’s lips. “You have chutzpah, Compton, I’ll give you that. Fine, I’ll bite. How much?”
“A trillion dollars ought to do it.”
His smile vanished. “You are joking.”
“Maybe a little less,” I added. “We’ll have to see how it all shakes out.”
“How it shakes out is that you’ve outstayed your welcome,” he said tartly, signaling for the guards standing in the shade of the door palms. “My accountant will contact you when he’s finished totaling up what you owe me.”
“I’m sure he will,” I said, making no move to stand up. “Interesting thing about that young man who died outside the New Pallas the night I left New York. You do remember him, don’t you?”
Hardin’s forehead creased slightly. “What about him?”
“He’d been shot six times,” I said. “Three of those shots being snoozers. Yet apparently he was still able to made it from my apartment all the way here to the New Pallas Towers.”
“Must have had a very strong constitution.”
“Indeed,” I said, lifting my eyebrows. “You don’t seem surprised to hear that he’d come here from my apartment.”
The guards had arrived at my bench now. “Yes, sir?” one of them asked.
Hardin hesitated, then shook his head. “Never mind.”
“Yes, sir,” the guard said. He gestured to his companion, and the two of them headed back through the foliage toward their posts.
“You see, I got to thinking about him during the trip back to Earth,” I continued when they were out of earshot again. “There are really only three possibilities as to who might have killed him.” I held up three fingers and started ticking them off. “It wasn’t your average mugger, because your average mugger carries snoozers or thudwumpers but usually not both. It also wasn’t the man’s enemies— never mind who they are—because his presence here would have alerted them to my relationship with you and they would certainly have moved to exploit that. Which leaves only the third possibility.”
I ticked off the third finger. “You.”
I saw the muscles in his throat tighten briefly. “I was in here with you when it happened,” he reminded me.
“Oh, I don’t mean you personally,” I said. “But you were certainly involved. The way I read it, your people reported there was someone hanging around my apartment, which got you wondering if our deal maybe wasn’t as secret as you’d hoped. You told them to bring him in for a chat, but they weren’t able to do that. So you told them to get rid of him.”
Hardin snorted. But it was a desperate, blustering sort of snort. “This is nonsense,” he insisted.
“Only he wasn’t as easy to kill as they thought,” I continued. “So when they hopped into their car and headed back here to report, he pulled himself up off the pavement, grabbed an autocab, and followed them. That’s the only way he could have been waiting for me when I came out that night.”
I gestured toward McMicking. “And it’s the only way to explain how McMicking was on the scene so fast. He’d gotten the frantic report that the target was not only alive, but was standing on your doorstep, and had gone down to finish the job. Unfortunately for you, I got there first.”
“Ridiculous,” Hardin murmured. But the denial was pure reflex, without any real emotion behind it.
“That was the real reason you made a point of coming to see me at Jurskala, wasn’t it?” I asked. “You’d figured out that the dead man and I were connected, and you needed to find out if I knew you’d been involved.”
Hardin took a deep breath; and with that, he was on balance again. “Interesting theory,” he said. “Completely unprovable, of course.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “We could subpoena all the personnel who were on duty in Manhattan that night. Unless the messenger gave someone time to change clips, the presence of both snoozers and thudwumpers implies two shooters. I’d bet at least one of them would be willing to skid on you to save his own skin.”