Authors: Robert Buettner
Balance Point (9 page)
She raised a tiny palm. “Okay! Fuck yes, okay. Where do I sign?”
He nodded, pressed the call button beneath his side of the table, and the guard reappeared, with an armful of civilian clothes, release papers, and Parker’s personal effects box.
Ten minutes later, Orion Parker emerged from the Sanex adjoining the Kube looking almost human again in cheap civvies, cradling her release documentation chip and the effects box like it was a newborn. The guard tightened leg cuffs on her for the trip uplevels to resume a very ordinary life. It wouldn’t be a long or pleasant life by the standards of Polian’s class, but for someone from the detention blocks it was an ascent to heaven from hell.
As the guard led her past Polian, she paused, looked up at him. Her hard, old eyes were moist. “I don’t know why you’re
really
doing this, Polian. But,” she swallowed a sob, “may you be in heaven for an hour before the Devil knows you’re dead.”
Polian stood still and unblinking until she and the guard left and he was alone in the Kube. Then he wiped the tears that had welled in his own eyes.
FOURTEEN
A half hour after Polian had left Orion Parker in the detention block interrogation Kube, he sat shivering in the blessed coolness of the first-class car that bore him back uplevels. Before he opened the reader in his lap he looked round the car. He was the only passenger. Downbound workers were long since at their jobs. So were the few domestics who could afford to commute to their uplevels jobs first class.
Polian reviewed the copies of Orion Parker’s transfer documentation. His action in releasing her was unusual, but hardly unprecedented. Not a few persons of station had wangled releases for personal domestics of whom they were fond, who had committed crimes. But usually some family cook’s release was granted in lieu of detention, not after incarceration. Few who actually entered detention stayed alive long enough to come out at all.
So Parker had grit in plenty. But after the stresses of her life, she also had scant months to live, according to the results of her detention-block exit scan. That abbreviated timetable had forced Polian’s decision to proceed with the plan and proceed quickly, while his bait still wriggled. Now he hoped it would also force the bait herself to wriggle sooner rather than later.
He flipped to the contents screen of the “Outprocessing Personal Effects box.”
In order for his plan to work, Polian was betting that Parker remained in old age as frank and as gritty as she had been when Polian, in his uniform days, ran her as an informant.
But the old woman also had to have remained sentimental and gullible. There were no such things as Outprocessing Personal Effects boxes in the detention blocks because nobody ever processed out. At inprocessing, any personal effects of value were repurposed, and the rest were incinerated as fuel.
However, Parker scarcely would be able to compare notes with others released from a detention block and learn that. Because there were no such others. Parker knew returning personal effects was normal after casual interrogations. She had certainly survived casuals often enough. And because the evidence that she would find in her box would conform to what she wanted desperately to believe anyway, she would believe it. People generally believed “facts” that confirmed their hopes or relieved their fears.
Polian skipped to the document, shook his head in wonder. Two centuries ago Yavet had become a digital universe, in which government monitored every digitized communication. It had been only a bit later that spies, criminals, anyone with a secret, had responded by reviving the art of couriered paper messaging.
It mildly surprised Polian that it occurred to few that the revival of paper messaging would revive the art of forgery. The writing sample Cutler had provided from the Trueborn covert operator’s personnel file, along with the background dossier, even fingerprints lifted from the writer’s personnel jacket, were melded perfectly into the document. If forgery was an art, Sergeant Creter was an artist without peer.
Polian blinked, then read the letter again.
Dear Orion,
I figure you think I’m dead, and you almost think right. But I got through my Legion hitch, and even through a couple years as an officer in the Trueborn Army. I own my own business, now. Jazen’s. It’s a bar in Shipyard on Mousetrap. You’d like it. Well, you’d like the imported single-malt. Orion, I found out that my parents were Trueborns. That makes me legal under law! Their names are Jason Wander and Mimi Ozawa and they were officers in the Trueborn forces during the Slug War. Apparently they screwed up, which I suppose is where I get it.
Sorry this is so short after all this time. But you wouldn’t believe what I paid (we say here that in the Free City of Shipyard nothing’s free, but everything’s available if you’ve got cash) to have this delivered to you.
If this reaches you know that I think of you often, miss you terribly and owe you everything. I would love to hear from you, and to find my birth parents. I’ve prepaid for a reply, just send it to the P-mail return address.
Your loving son, Jazen
The letter was dated eight months after Orion was remanded to detention. Polian closed his reader, sat back as the car slowed, and smiled.
If Polian knew Orion Parker well enough to predict her behavior, and he did, and if Bartram Cutler knew this Jazen Parker equally well, and he apparently did, this portion of the plan was only a matter of time, now.
FIFTEEN
Orion Parker awoke in her windowless Kube in the mid-range downlevels. It was no bigger than any of the plain, worn Kubes she had occupied over the decades of her life on the run in the downlevels. As long and tall as her height, as wide as her wingspan, and accessing a shared Sanex, it still stunk of the previous tenant, who had died in the place the day before her release.
The previous tenant had been another poor released nobody, like herself, although he had only suffered a casual interrogation, not detention.
Just by surviving one day, she had already made more of her new lease on life than this Kube’s previous tenant had made of his. But Orion’s was still a short-term lease. Her exit scan showed she had a year or less. What the hell. Most little people never got to play with house money. There was no point bitching that she hadn’t won enough of it.
Orion sanexed, stepped out, and the threshold plate announced that, since she had arrived, she had already gained one pound. Not much more than a big dinner for a Trueborn, or for an upper class Yavi like Polian, but she felt fat.
She popped a therm cup of coffee—coffee!—and a bun, and as she ate her breakfast in luxuriant solitude and blessed coolness she took out the letter from Jazen that she had found in the effects returned to her by Polian’s dungeon masters. Orion turned it in one shaky hand while she held her thermcup in the other. By the pay marks, it had apparently been left a month after she entered the detention blocks, at one of the dead drops she used to receive payments, both from customers and from vice.
Polian’s weasels would have monitored her drops for a month or two, hoping some preg would be dumb enough to contact a midwife that way. Vice were a tunnel-vision bunch. Any document they recovered that didn’t point toward an impending illegal birth they would have ignored.
She ran her fingers over the blue marks on paper, the penmanship she had taught the boy unmistakable, and she cried.
Polian had no reason to suspect that his least appreciative snitch had raised a Trueborn Illegal to adulthood. He had even less reason to suspect that the anxious parents had entrusted Orion with an avenue by which to contact them.
But then, Max Polian didn’t have much reason to care, either. Sure, if he found out about the boy, he would killed one more Illegal. And for that reason alone, if not just to stick it to Polian one more time, Orion would have taken that secret to the ovens with her.
But Polian had no reason to suspect. And even less reason to care, now that Jazen’s confirmed lineage had lifted the death sentence on him.
Orion finished her meal, then she sat down and wrote two paper letters that she would send via P-mail. The first was a brief reply to Jazen. The second shared the glad news with the two people in the known universe who would be as happy as Orion herself to know that Jazen Parker was alive.
SIXTEEN
Carl Otto stroked his red beard with his right hand as he peered at the couple seated inside the Bank of Rand’s depositor hospitality suite. The two were displayed on the surveillance screen alongside the suite’s outer door.
The woman looked barely older than she had on the couple’s last annual visit. Otto guessed her physical age at middle fifties, and she remained slim and handsome, with the exotic eyes common to Trueborns of Asiatic lineage.
The man was taller, with close cropped gray hair and traditionally Trueborn complexion and features. He sat erect in the way that, say, a soldier typically did. The scanner showed that the man wore a blocky gunpowder pistol in a shoulder holster beneath his jacket, and the woman a slender shiv sheathed to her inner thigh beneath her skirt.
Neither weapon troubled him. These two were hardly the first of the Bank of Rand’s depositors who armed themselves. And the only thing of value he would carry into the suite was the couple’s safe deposit box, cradled in his left arm. They would hardly rob him of what was already theirs.
Besides, he liked them. The stipend they picked up each year was a comfortable sum, but far less than the bloated withdrawals made by most of the bank’s customers. Also, when he had taken them hunting that first visit, each had proved a better marksman than himself, but had declined the opportunity to kill game in favor of paper targets. Mostly, he supposed, he liked them because they were spies like him. Meaning spies on the side of right in this wretched Cold War.
Not that anyone had told Otto that the couple were spies. But the same agent handler who had recruited him had introduced them to Otto as “very special depositors.”
Otto clicked off the screen, straightened his tie by the reflection in its shiny black surface, then entered the suite wearing the Class One Account smile that matched his tie. The three of them sat after greetings.
The couple declined kaffee, and the woman leaned forward, now unsmiling. “Your message at the hotel moved our meeting up two hours, Mr. Otto.”
He nodded, pulled the sealed paper envelope from his pocket. Class One accounts like this couple’s included the unofficial perquisite of a P-mail box. This couple received their stipend funds by secure, anonymous electronic transfer. Perhaps not coincidentally, Otto’s compensation for information he passed on via his handler arrived the very same way.
But many depositors’ funds arrived by physical “black bag” transfer. The P-mail system facilitated this, bypassing customs and declaration protocols. Why a depositor might prefer to avoid such entanglements the Bank of Rand considered none of its business.
Otto slid the envelope across the ironwood tabletop. The address was, of course, only the account number at the bank. He pointed at the layers upon layers of pay marks. “The sender paid for special handling. Therefore I assumed you would want to see it sooner rather than later, and took the liberty of accelerating your appointment.” Otto stood to leave, but the man waved him to stay.
Otto knew of only one special handling service that cost the ransom that this letter had cost. And that service was to get anything off Yavet.
The woman frowned as she tore the letter open, then as she read the single sheet inside her eyes widened and her hand trembled. “Jason, he’s alive!”
The man squeezed his eyes shut, and when he opened them, they glistened. He said to Otto, “Maybe you should give us a minute, after all.”
Otto reached the door, switched off a red key in a wall socket, and laid it on the table. “Surveillance is off. Take as long as you wish. Reinsert the key and turn it when you wish me to return.”
Thirty minutes later, Otto sat at his desk when the hospitality suite’s call chime sounded on his console.
When he returned to the suite, the woman’s eyes sparkled, while the man paced the room, unsmiling.
She said, “Mr. Otto, we’ll be needing extra funds this time.”
He smiled. “A loan?”
Such more familiar banker’s business was a refreshing diversion for Otto.
She said, “We’d like to liquidate a physical asset.”
“Of course. We do it all the time.” And we realize a fair but substantial fee for doing so. The Bank of Rand was no fence outfit. But extraordinary customer service took many forms. “We maintain appraisers on premises for everything from Trueborn impressionist canvases to precious metal cargoes. What sort of asset?”
The man turned up the lid of their box on the table and lifted out a diamond as large as a breakfast egg, turning it between forefinger and thumb.
Otto’s jaw dropped. “Weichselan?”
Otto’s clients knew jewels. And therefore, as a matter of extraordinary customer service, so did Otto. The thing had, in aggregate, to weigh over two hundred carats. A stone so massive could only be Weichselan.
On frigid Weichsel, legend had it, such jewels could be picked up off the ground like pebbles. But nobody really knew, because the Trueborns had declared the distant outpost a “strategic reserve” during the War, after a clandestine military operation there.
The man called Jason nodded. “Blue-white, with a one-hundred-six-carat perfect core if it’s cut right, I’ve been told.”
“It’s so large that the market may limit what we can appraise it for as-is, where-is.” Otto frowned. “We would pay fairly, of course, if that’s your preference. But I’d advise that for now you let us determine the value of the salvageable stones that would be cut away from the core, and pay you that today. Then we’ll have the core stone prepared. We know several cutters here on Rand who apprenticed in Amsterdam, are most discreet and charge reasonable fees. We will insure the stone against loss or damage in the process, of course. Then we’ll have the resulting major piece auctioned on your behalf. Otherwise, you might not break even.”
“We need to settle this today, so let’s go your way, Mr. Otto.” Jason nodded, smiled. “And let’s just say I picked it up. Cheap. So breaking even won’t be a problem.” He swiveled his shoulder, winced, then smiled again.
“Of course.” Otto should have seen it before. Jason had a scar on his neck that his collar scarcely covered. The woman, a smaller one, at the throat. War wounds. A modern shoulder-down regrow was indistinguishable from natural. But limbs regrown back during the War, when the process was new, often ached. If Jason, here, had brought back a war souvenir from Weichsel, these two were veterans of the Pseudocephalopod War.
Simple mathematics suggested that these two apparent middle-agers could be pushing a hundred years old, chronologically. Otto had heard that time dilation from near-light-speed travel extended some Trueborns’ lives as much as their medicines. Now here was the proof.
The woman said, “We’re also going to need travel documentation and passage.”
“Certainly. I’ll ring the travel department and—”
“We’re going to Yavet.”
Otto sat back in his chair, smiled. “No. Seriously.”
From what he knew of the place, no one of right mind would go
to
Yavet. Though there was a tourist industry of sorts. If one’s homeworld exchange rate put Rand or Funhouse beyond reach, Yavet offered a cheap, if bleak, alternate holiday.
“Seriously,” said the woman.
“That would require, ah, extraordinary documentation.”
Yavet wasn’t merely drab and industrial. It was a police state. These clients were Trueborn spies who intended to go where Trueborns were unwelcome. Each of them would need a scrub-quality identity change, including retinals.
Before he could catch himself, Otto blurted to the two spies, “Your employer is in a far better position to provide it than the bank would be.”
The woman didn’t bat an eye. “This isn’t a business trip. We’re visiting a relative.” Then she fixed him with a stare. “In fact, Mr. Otto, we would be quite disappointed if our employer learned that we were making the trip.”
Otto glanced at the bulge in the man’s jacket. “This is the Bank of Rand. You may rely on our complete discretion.” Otto cleared his throat. “The Bank doesn’t provide travel documentation directly, but we do have a list of preferred vendors.”
The woman smiled as though she were dress shopping. “Perfect. Can we have the list and the settlement by the end of the day?”
The two rose to leave, and the man took the woman’s arm in his.
Otto called after them, “And may I offer a recommendation about how you take the funds?”
They turned to him, and both nodded.
Otto said, “Twenty percent in your usual assortment of currency, but this time the balance in brilliant cut blue-white diamonds, VS1 or better, one to three carats each. Diamonds are so much easier to carry when traveling.”
The woman smiled and nodded. “And
so
much easier to fence than most stones. Very thoughtful of you, as always, Mr. Otto.”
These two were thirty years older than Otto’s own parents, who Otto thought remained pretty lively. He could only wonder what this pair’s kids thought of them.