We’ll just have to succeed, Hansel thought.
Hansel had the key codes for the locks on the warehouse doors. He got them open in seconds, both the small door at the top of the loading ramp, and the big garage-style door next to it. Inside, the warehouse was full of containers like the ones being off-loaded from the truck.
“Jacques, Benny,” he said. “Get down here and move some of this stuff out of the way.”
Two men, both built like drilling ’Mechs, detached themselves from the group of laborers. Jacques asked, “Where do you want us to put the stuff we’re moving?”
“Stack it a bit higher, move the boxes a bit closer together… we want our stuff mixed in with it, but still easy to find in a hurry.”
“Right you are, boss.”
“And make certain to leave enough room for the big surprise. We don’t want to spoil the day by having it found too soon.”
The men laughed and began shifting boxes. When all of the weapons and ammunition had been safely unloaded and concealed, Hansel returned to the truck. He mounted into the cab, started the engine, and brought the truck around so that he could back it through the big door and into the warehouse. It wouldn’t all fit—the cab and the front container were still outside—but the rear container was inside and out of sight. He hit the button on the cab console to open the back door of the rear container and lower its heavy-duty hydraulic ramp.
That done, he climbed down from the cab again. “All right, take her out.”
Two of the men climbed up into the container, the others waited outside it. A moment later a Fox armored car emerged from the truck’s dark interior, was pushed down the ramp and braced by the team to keep it from rolling out of control.
“Boss?” said Benny. “How are we going to hide something like that?”
“You’ll see.”
Soon, the armored car had been covered with a canvas drop cloth, its outline under the cloth obscured by boxes of office supplies—innocent ones this time—stacked on its flat surfaces. Half a dozen similar canvas drop cloths went over random piles of crates throughout the warehouse.
“The armored car doesn’t have to stay hidden forever,” Hansel explained. “Just so no one looks at it until Friday, that’s long enough.”
The work crew got back into the truck container. Hansel shut the warehouse doors and climbed into the cab. Shortly afterward, he was signing back out through the compound gate, on his way to repeat the process twelve more times, at different locations, before dawn brought returning workers and increased traffic to the streets of Geneva.
36
First Stop Bar, Geneva
Terra, Prefecture X
16 December 3134
Another late evening in a string of too many found Jonah Levin once more in workingman’s clothing at the First Stop Bar. He was drinking beer with a chaser again, amid a crowd hoping to drink enough to forget the past 365 days. It made him feel old, revisiting the bad habits of his youth, even for a good purpose. The things we do for The Republic, he thought; I ought to be at home on Kervil with Anna, not sitting here drinking by myself.
This evening, after a long day of interviews, Jonah had found a message from former-sergeant Turk waiting for him at the Pension Flambard asking for a meeting. From one meeting to another to another, Jonah thought to himself. I’m really a politician now. He yearned to have someone try to kill him, if only to break up the meetings.
After reading the note left for him at the front desk in Madame’s careful handwriting, he’d changed out of his regular clothing and into his workingman’s disguise, then slipped out through the back entrance of the pension.
This close to the election, there was no telling when a roving tri-vid reporter or some faction’s spies might decide to get ambitious and stake out the front door. He was certain that most of them already knew where he stayed when he was in Geneva; after all, he’d never made any attempt to conceal it. Fortunately, Madame Flambard’s discretion was phenomenal, and she was willing to go considerable lengths to protect the privacy of a long-time returning guest.
The First Stop Bar was as dim as before and, thankfully, filled with conversation on every topic except politics. People discussed music, vids, sports, their jobs—but not the election. Jonah let the cleansing flow of casual discussion soothe his jangling nerves. He sat at a table in the back, listening to the scraps of conversation drifting past him while carefully presenting a front of a misanthropic solitary drinker. And as such, he was left alone until late in the evening, when Turk finally showed up.
The former sergeant collected his own beer-and-chaser from the bar and joined Jonah at the table. “Good to see you made it here,” he said. “I couldn’t tell if the woman I left the message with was going to pass it along or not.”
“That’s Madame Flambard.” Jonah smiled. “She’s protective of her guests’ privacy. But extremely reliable.”
“Reliable’s good.”
“Yes. Your message made it sound like you had some information to pass along.”
“Maybe. I’m not sure.”
That was unusual, Jonah reflected. He didn’t recall Turk ever being unsure about anything, back on Kurragin. “‘If it’s worth noticing, it’s worth reporting,’” he said—he was quoting himself from that long-ago time, yet another sign that he was getting old. “Pass it on up and let somebody else sort it out.”
“This isn’t about what you asked me, about the government offices,” Turk said. “I haven’t heard anything from that team yet. This is something different—but if it’s what I think it is, then somebody needs to know about it in a hurry.”
“Don’t keep me in suspense, Sergeant. Spit it out.”
“Here goes, then.” Turk took a long pull at his beer, then settled back in his chair. “The first thing is that my people don’t just work at the government buildings. The Republic gave us our first big custodial contract, all right, and that arrangement is still our bread and butter, but the outfit’s picked up quite a few other clients since you helped me get started.”
“That’s good.”
“Yeah. Anyhow, when I put the word out that a friend of mine from way back was looking for information about stuff going on where it shouldn’t be, I didn’t expect anything to happen quite this soon. I thought people would still be trying to make up their minds whether they’d seen something wrong or not.
“But this morning, I had the guy in charge of the St. Croix contract show up in my office with one of his people, a kid by the name of Bruno who does cleaning detail in one of the St. Croix warehouses in the outer ring of the city.”
“Reliable?”
“Not especially. Just not quite unreliable enough to entirely ignore. You know the type.”
“I’ve run into it once or twice,” Jonah admitted. “You don’t often get that sort volunteering information, though. What happened?”
“Well… Bruno ran across something that scared him enough to tell his boss about it, and his boss took one look and brought him over to talk to me.”
“What was it?”
“Bruno says—” the skepticism was evident in Turk’s voice “—that he was just shifting a crate so that he could run the floor cleaner over that area when it somehow broke open.”
Jonah couldn’t suppress a low chuckle. “We’ve heard that song before.”
“He swears the crate opened all by itself.”
“As crates will do,” agreed Jonah, still smiling. “Go on. I’m assuming that what he saw wasn’t—what is it that St. Croix sells?”
“Office supplies.”
“—that the crate wasn’t full of paper clips and manila mailing envelopes.”