“Now, correlate filtered attacks with past ten year pattern for bandits Markham, McAllistaire, Finbogesson, Cheung, Latimer, Wu. Sequencing.”
“Scheisse,” he whispered. Markham, without a doubt, the man did everything by the book and you could rewrite the manuscript by watching him. Now equipped with something whose general capacities were equivalent to a kzin Stalker, and proceeding in a methodical amplification of the sort of thing he had been doing before… Markham was the sort for the Protracted Struggle, all right. He'd read his Mao and Styrikawsi and Laugidis, even if he gave Clausewitz all the credit.
“Code, Till Eulenspiegel. Lock previous analysis, non-redo, simulate other pattern if requested. Stop.”
“Stop and locked,” the desk said.
Montserrat relaxed. The Eulenspiegel file was supposedly secure. Certainly none of his subordinates had it, or they would have gone to the ratcats with it long ago; there had been more than enough in there to make him prime monkeymeat. He swallowed convulsively; as Police Chief of München, he was obliged to screen the kzin hunts far too frequently. Straightening, he adjusted the lapels of his uniform and walked to the picture window that formed one wall of the office. Behind him stretched the sleek expanse of feathery downdropper-pelt rugs over marble tile, the settees and loungers of pebbled but butter-soft okkaran hide. A Matisse and two Vorenagles on the walls, and a priceless Pierneef… He stopped at the long oak bar and poured himself the single glass of Maivin that was permissible.
Interviews with the kzin Supervisor-of-Animals were always rather stressful. Montferrat sipped, looking down over the low-pitched tile roofs of Old München. None of the sprawling shanty-suburbs and shoddy gimcrack factories of recent years, this ten-story view was almost as he had known it as a student: The curving tree-lined streets that curled through the hills beside the broad blue waters of the Donau, banked flowers beside the pedestrian ways, cafes, the honeygold quadrangles of the University, courtyarded homes built around expanses of greenery and fountains. Softly blooming frangipani and palms and gumblossom in the parks along the river; the Gothic flamboyance of the Ritterhaus, where the Landholders had met in council before the kzin came. And the bronze grouping in the great square before it; the Nineteen Founders.
Memory rose before him, turning the hard daylight of afternoon to a soft summer's night; he was young again, arm in arm with Ingrid and Harold and a dozen of their friends, the new student's caps on their head. They had come from the beercellar and hours of swaying song, the traditional graduation night feast, and they were all a little merry. Not drunk, but happy and in love with all the world, a universe and a lifetime opening out before them. The three of them had lead the scrambling mob up the granite steps of the plinth, to put their white-and-gold caps on the three highest sculpted heads, and they had ridden the bronze shoulders and waved to the sea of dancing, laughing young faces below. Fireworks had burst overhead, yellow and green… shut up, he told himself. The present was what mattered. The UN raid had not been the simple smash-on-the wing affair it seemed, not at all.
“I knew it,” he muttered. “It wasn't logical, they didn't do as much damage as they could have.” The kzin had thought otherwise, but then, they had predator's reflexes. They just did not think in terms of mass destruction; their approach to warfare was too pragmatic for that. Which was why their armament was lacking in planet-busting weapons: the thought of destroying valuable real estate did not occur to them. Montferrat had run his own projections, and with weapons like that ramship you could destabilize stars. “And humans do think that way.”
So there must have been some other point to the raid, and not merely to get an effective ship to the Free Wunderlanders. Nothing overt, which left something clandestine. Intelligence work. Perhaps elsewhere in the system, pray God elsewhere in the system, not in his backyard. But it would be just as well…
He crossed to the desk. “Axelrod-Bauergartner,” he said.
A holo of his second-in-command formed, seated at her desk. The meter-high image put down its coffee-cup and straightened. “Yes, Chief?”
“I want redoubled surveillance on all entry-exit movements in the Greater München area. Everything, top priority. Activate all our contacts, call in favors, lean on everybody we can lean on. I'll be sending you some data on deep-hook threads I've been developing among the hardcore ferals.” He saw her look of surprise; that was one of the hole-cards he used to keep his subordinates in order. Poor Axelrod-Bauergartner, he thought. You want this job so much, and would do it so badly. I've held it for twenty years because I've got a sense of proportion; you'd be monkeymeat inside six months.
“Zum befehl, Chief.”
“Our esteemed superiors also wish evidence of our zeal. Get them some monkeymeat for the next hunt, nobody too crucial.”
“I'll round up the usual suspects, Chief— ”
The door retracted, and a white-coated steward came in with a covered wheeled tray. Montferrat looked up, checking… yes, the chilled Bloemvin 2337, the heart-of-palm salad, the pâté…
“And for now, send in the exit-visa applicant, the one who was having the problems with the paperwork.”
The projected figure grinned wickedly. “Oh, her. Right away, Chief.” Montferrat flicked the transmission out of existence and rose, smoothing down his uniform jacket and flicking his mustache into shape with a deft forefinger. This job isn't all grief, he mused happily.
“Recode Till Eulenspiegel,” Yarthkin said, leaning back. “Interesting speculation, Claude, old kamerat,” he mused. The bucket chair creaked as he leaned back, putting his feet up on the cluttered desk. The remains of a cheese-and-mustard sandwich perched waveringly on a stack of printout at his elbow. The office around him was a similar clutter, bookcases and safe and a single glowlight, a narrow cubicle at the alley-wall of the bar. Shabby and rundown and smelling of beer and old socks, except for the extremely up-to-date infosystem built into the archaic wooden desk; one of the reasons the office was so shabby was that nobody but Yarthkin was allowed in, and he was an indifferent housekeeper at best.
He lit a cigarette and blew a smoke-ring at the ceiling. Have to crank up my contacts, he thought. Activity's going to heat up system-wide, and there's no reason I shouldn't take advantage of it. Safety's sake, too: arse to the wall, ratcats overall. This wasn't all to get our heroic Herrenmann in the Swarm a new toy; that was just a side effect, somehow.
“Sam,” he said, keying an old-fashioned manual toggle. “Get me Suuomalisen.”
“Finagle,” Jonah muttered under his breath. The transfer booths were shut down at Munchenport as well, and the shuttle station had been moved out into open country. The station was a series of square extruded buildings and open spaces for the gravitic shuttles; mostly for freight, the passenger traffic was a sideline. “Security's tight.”
Ingrid smiled at the guard and handed over their identi-cards, The man smiled back and fed them into the reader, waiting a few seconds while the machine read the data, scanned the two Belters for congruence and consulted the central files.