"True," he said.
"You've got a stolen car outside, right?" I said. He nodded. So I went on. "We call a truce. You help me and then we go. You have my word on the swap." That seemed to soothe him.
I dug around in the colonel's corpse to get the blade out. Messy. Then I flopped the driver over and dug the blade out of his throat. Very messy. Then I got the one out of Spurk's throat. Very, very messy.
"You look like a butcher!" Raza Torr said. "You're getting blood all over your hands and clothes." Listen to who was talking about blood, the chief of the Provocation Section!
It took me two full minutes to find the blade that had missed the driver. It had embedded itself in the back doorjamb with just a tiny sliver showing. I used some electronic pliers to pull it out.
I opened a cash drawer. There were only a few tokens in it but I put those in my pocket. I left the drawer upside down on the floor.
Then I got a box from the shelf and with loving care put the two complete sets and directions in it and lashed it closed and marked it with a big X.With Raza Torr escorting me, I carefully put it in his stolen car.
I went back and found some more big boxes and ransacked the vault. I didn't know what the stuff was and I certainly didn't stop to read the directions. Who cared what assortment of sophisticated gear I was taking. It had to look like a massive burglary.
I even made Raza Torr carry some of the filled boxes to the stolen car. The back was getting pretty full.
I then really put Raza Torr to work. We lugged the colonel's body out and put it in the back seat of his car. We lugged the driver out and put him in the driving seat.
Then I grabbed a blastick and took the safety off so any jar would fire it and put it in the colonel's cooling hand.
I fumbled a bit with the automatic pilot, finally got it set. I started the car. I engaged it and away it flew, higher and higher in the sky, probably heading for Slum City.
In an hour or so it would probably run out of fuel or crash into another aircar in the traffic lanes.
I found a can of cleaning spirits and poured it over the counter and around Spurk's body. I dropped an igniter in it and the flame exploded up.
"Let's get out of here!" said Torr. He was clutching the camera.
We got into the stolen car.
"I take it back," he said, putting the camera down. "You sure are thorough!"
"I sure am," I said, and I put ten inches of the Knife Section knife into his back.
Flames were leaping up in the store. Far out I heard a fire-alert siren start.
I pushed Raza's body aside and slid under the wheelstick. The aircar soared into the night sky and was quickly mingled with the flow of traffic.
I flew out over the River Wiel. I put the aircar on hover. I pulled the knife out and cleaned it.
Almost over his Provocation Section area, I dumped Raza Torr's body out. Too bad not to have the use of the section anymore but I would soon be gone anyway. Tomorrow, if I thought of it, I would mail those pictures of him murdering the mistress to the Commander of the Death Battalion. A poetic touch. No, maybe to the newssheets. No, better not. Let sleeping corpses lie. One can get too artistic.
I flew to my office area. Nothing and nobody there at this time of night. My airbus was parked and locked. I carried my loot into a basement under my office.
I spent an hour eradicating all trace of Eyes and Ears and pasting labels of Zanco on the boxes. Then I put some I didn't want into the stolen car, set it on automatic and let it fly off to crash somewhere. Help the police is my motto.
Then I put every scrap of clothes that had any blood on it or that led back to the Provocation Section into the permanent disintegrator, washed any remaining blood off myself in the toilet and dressed in my own uniform.
Just to put finishing touches on it all, I wrapped Prahd Bittlestiffender's old coat, his identoplate and suicide note in a package and addressed it to the police. Found by the River Wiel,the note said. I put it beside my desk to be mailed in ten days.
It was all neatening up. I opened my secret blackmail cache under a loose floorboard and took out the originals of Raza Torr's murder. I removed all the strips from his camera, verified them, and put the lot in the disintegrator.
The (bleeped) fool. Had I brought him here, he would have spotted my whole cache and I doubted he would have kept his word. He might even have tried to kill me once he had his hands on these pictures. The (bleeped) fool. As to his own pictures, they were worthless. Every one of me had been in disguise. Nobody could have identified me from them. Still, he had been a witness. And there is an old Apparatus motto that even he should have remembered: the careless die young. I yawned. I locked up. I walked down to my room to get some sleep.
All in all, it had been a pretty active day! But not too unusual in the life of an Apparatus officer. Frankly, it's hard to see how a government could run at all without clever and dedicated people such as us in their employ. The whole structure might come tumbling down!
Chapter 7
The day began a bit sourly. My driver was in a foul mood. When he brought the airbus by to pick me up, I had quite pleasantly asked him if he had had a good time on his night off and all the way to my office I had been treated to "How could somebody with no money have a good time?" and "One would starve if he went long enough without eating" and some distempered tale about some officer that had crashed because his driver was so worried about being a pauper. I was in too good a mood. I ignored it.
At the office, I set him to carrying the "Zanco" marked cartons from the basement to the back of the car and he kept throwing them in so forcefully with comments like "I work myself to death cleaning up this car and here we go again" and "This ain't no truck" that I got out of the back – there would be no room anyway when it was loaded – and bought a sweetbun and hot jolt from a passing vendor. I was pleased to have remembered to take the tokens out of the cash drawer of that shop – I had plenty even for a lunch and supper.
I sat in front eating and when he got behind the wheelstick, a bit hot and sweaty, he went into a new tirade about starving. I told him gently that the sweetbun and hot jolt were all gone and even tipped the canister to show him it was empty, but it didn't help. He actually picked a newssheet off the floor and threw it at me, excusing it with the remark, "I been all through it and can't find a (bleep) thing you were doing! You weren't working last night, you were loafing! It was you that had the night off, not me!" I calmly directed him to fly to the Widow Tayl's in the Pausch Hills suburb and sat there reading the Morning Oh! No!,the dawn newssheet favored by the riffraff. How wrong he was: I had made the front page!
SORROWING SUPPLY COLONEL SUICIDES EX-WIFE IN HYSTERICS OF LAUGHTER Late last night, according to informed sources in the Domestic Police, Colonel Rajabah Stinkins, Supply, Voltar Raiders, took the last firm act to end his tragic life. At eighteen thousand feet over the Great Desert, he blew up himself, his driver and his aircar with a megavolt blastick.
His ex-wife has been hospitalized after hours of uncontrollable laughter. Associates at the Ground Forces Play Club say that even the last minute intervention of firm and lifelong friends failed.
The Voltar Raiders will bury what can be found with military courtesy on Saturday. The public is invited to the feast.
Colonel Stinkins is survived by five lovely children, the older two of whom could not be reached as they are in reform school.
It was followed by a service record biography that seemed to make it clear he had spent a long life at a desk. I looked further. Ah, here was the next: FIRE RAVAGES INDUSTRIAL CITY Last night, a wall of all-devouring flame tore through the night-shrouded electronics district. Fifteen people are missing, mostly watchmen.