"You have come all this way, by dint of considerable effort on the part of your employer, simply to remonstrate with me, Mr. Mandel?"
"No. All I came for was Fielder. Just telling you this deal isn't all cosy advantage trading, that's all. Maybe you don't know how valuable this Fielder girl is."
"I believe I have a fair idea of her financial status, or more precisely, the price of the information stored in that pretty little head of hers. Dear Charlotte is unique. And like all monopolies, she does not come cheap."
"How much?"
"One hundred million Eurofrancs."
"Bollocks," Suzi snorted.
Greg had seen it coming, watching Jason Whitehurst nerve himself up. There was determination, but he was also testing, interested to see how important Fielder really was. It fitted Greg's initial impression. Jason Whitehurst knew he had something, he just wasn't sure exactly what.
Greg increased his neurohormone secretion. "Did you know first contact has been made?" he asked.
Shadows of doubt flittered across Jason Whitehurst's mind. "Whatever are you talking about, Mr. Mandel?"
"First contact, with aliens."
Jason Whitehurst's face registered impatience. Suspicion rose, his thought currents racing, then a slow dawn of comprehension which brought cold fright. "That is the source of atomic structuring technology? Aliens?"
"Yeah," said Greg.
"My God, of course, her holiday." Jason did his best to recover his composure, physically he managed it, mentally his mind surged with phobic dread. "Is Julia Evans really sure she knows what she is doing dabbling in this affair?"
"She's sure."
"Very well. Then as I said before, if you are unwilling to pay the reserve price, dear Charlotte will be placed on the open market, available to the highest bidder."
"Wrong," said Greg. "We will pay you sixty-five million for her."
"Greg!" Suzi protested.
"Julia has been most foolish sending you," Jason Whitehurst said. "All you have done is simply confirmed dear Charlotte's worth to me. The reserve price stands. I must say, it's most unlike Julia to make this sort of mistake."
"I told you about the aliens as a favour," Greg said. "That's the second one today. I'm trying to make you realize that you're in way over your head. This whole deal frightens me very badly, and I'm ex-Mindstar. Charlotte Fielder will be removed from the Colonel Maitland today; either by us paying for her, or by one of the tekmerc squads the kombinates have employed to hunt her down. And they're not far behind us, a few hours at most. if she comes with us, you will receive your sixty-five million. Wait until they arrive, and you can kiss goodbye to a lot more than money. That's the bottom line, Whitehurst. No third favour."
Sparkling blue eyes fixed on Greg. "The Mindstar Brigade?" Jason Whitehurst said it with reluctant admiration.
"Yeah. You want my advice, then leg it out of here as soon as we take Fielder. Head back to Monaco, where it's safe, and where you're visible, in a crowd. Tell the other bidders that Fielder's gone. Best I can offer."
"I was in the King's Own Hussars, myself."
"I know, I've read your profile. Good troops, the King's Own; they were in Turkey."
"After my day. Mexico was my last campaign." Jason Whitehurst sighed, dropping the Parker on the desk. "Didn't know you were a brother officer. Sorry if I sounded off."
"I really would like you to leave the Colonel Maitland after us."
"Yes, quite. Good idea. Sixty-five million, you say?"
"Yeah, sixty-five."
Suzi let out a disgusted hiss of breath, rolling her eyes.
"Very well, Mr. Mandel. We have a deal."
Greg fished around in his jacket pocket, and produced the ident card Julia had given him: pure white, except for the LCD display and a small triangle and flying-V logo filling the top right corner.
"You have the authority for the transfer itself?" Jason Whitehurst asked.
Greg scaled the card over the desk to him. "No messing. Julia and I go back a long way. I help her out now and then."
Jason Whitehurst picked up the card, glancing at it briefly. "Event Horizon's central account, no less. You sound like a chap it would be a good idea to know."
Greg stood up. "Charlotte Fielder, is she on board?"
"Indeed she is, yes." Jason Whitehurst's fingers sketched hieroglyphic symbols on the smooth surface of the desk.
Greg still couldn't make out the graphics, but they were changing below his hand.
"You really gonna?" Suzi asked. She had risen to stand beside him. Her mind appalled and fascinated. "Sixty-five million?"
Greg imagined his own thoughts must be similar. Sixty-five million. He knew there was a tingle of magic in his relationship with Julia, but this kind of money wasn't chicken feed, even for her. He wondered who he would trust with that much, not many. There were levels of trust; Suzi would be utterly dependable in a scrap, but hand her sixty-five million for safekeeping and it would be a goodbye that would last beyond the end of the world.
"I have set up the credit transfer order," Jason Whitehurst said.
The desk let out a piercing whistle. Greg saw a whole section of the incomprehensible graphics turn red and scurry into frantic motion. His cybofax bleeped, and he reached for it automatically.
There was the unmistakable crump of an explosion, distant and muted. The hazy blue world outside the study's broad windows remained unchanged.
Julia's face filled the cybofax screen, there was no background behind her, as if she was starless space. "Greg!" she called. "I'm registering an electronic warfare alert."
Suzi was sprinting to the nearest window. The distinctive double thunderclap of a sonic boom rocked the Colonel Maitland. Greg could feel the vibration through his feet.
"Nothing here," Suzi shouted. She was pressed up against the window, Browning in her hand. "Shit, it must be above us."
An alarm was shrilling in the corridor outside. The two hardliners burst into the study, weapons drawn.
"Put them down," Jason Whitehurst said sharply.
They lowered the handguns reluctantly. Racal IR laser carbines, Greg noted absently, restricted to military sales only.
"What's happening?" he asked.
"Someone's thrown a jamming field around the airship," Julia's image said. "It's fluctuating, as if the source is moving. I can't get a message out."
The desk stopped whistling. "The plane that flew over," Jason Whitehurst said; both his hands were pressed against the glass surface, almost as though he was communing with it. "It attacked your Pegasus." One of the homolographic maps on a wall-mounted flatscreen flicked off, replaced by a view from a camera on the Colonel Maitland's tail fin, looking down the fuselage towards the prow.
Greg stared in horror at the ruined landing pad. The Pegasus had been ripped almost in two along the length of its cabin. It had collapsed on to the landing pad, spewing black oily smoke from its rear quarter. Intense flares of blue-white light writhed continually inside the buckled fuselage, the giga-conductor cells shorting out. As he watched, flames began to lick out of the gashes.
No one could have survived that blast. Through the shock, all he could think of was that he never even knew the pilot's name.
"The plane is returning," Jason Whitehurst said with deliberate calm. "Subsonic, and slowing."
"Can the Colonel Maitland hold it oft?" Greg asked.
"We have some ECM systems naturally," Jason Whitehurst said. "But this is not a warship. I consider my staff more than adequate to deter any normal kidnapping attempt."
Greg was still gaping at the ruined Pegasus when a thin column of air above the landing pad seemed to sparkle for an instant. The hangar blister and whatever plane was inside disintegrated into a vivid plume of white fire. A shock wave thumped the wreckage of the Pegasus into the rim around the pad, flinging out a flurry of debris. The incandescent tumour of light swelling out of the ruptured hangar had turned the flatscreen image black and white. Large strips of the solar cell envelope all around the landing pad were curling up like autumn leaves, edges crisping, exposing the thin monolattice struts of the fuselage.