Drakon (20 page)

All five of the humans and some of the ones at the nearer tables were reacting to her; her own three knew exactly what was happening to them, which made it harder for them to resist. She clamped down on the secretions.
Tsk. Keep your mind on business.
Besides which, it would be a shame to mark this dress.

Andrews looked up, his face damp with sweat; the lust was there, but directed at the folder in front of him—at the conscious level, at least.

"I thought you were mostly in biotechnology," he said shakily.

"Yes, but this is rather more immediate. With that data you could begin large-scale production immediately. At that
secret
little black-program place you have out in the California desert, for instance."

Debrowski looked up at her sharply. "You know about that?"

"What a lynx you are, Mr. Debrowski," Gwen said dryly. "Nothing gets past you."

Gwen smiled back with bland amiability at his frown, dabbing whipped cream on a kiwi tart and eating it. The smooth-bland-buttery combination of flavors made her close her eyes for a moment of pure pleasure. To complement it she kicked off one of her sandals under the protecting cover of the tablecloth and slid the foot between Dolores's knees. They opened immediately, though the Colombian's face remained a study in concentration as she bent over the notebook computer beside her plate. Gwen stroked the velvety softness of the other's inner thighs while she turned her face to the Americans. It must be terrible to be a human, sense-blind to three quarters of existence, noticing nothing.

"And the quid pro quo?" Andrews asked.

"Simply . . . protection. Let it be known in the appropriate circles that IngolfTech stands well with the government."

"And in return, we get a monopoly?"

Gwen laughed. "I have no intention of selling you the cow," she said. "We will let you milk it, but the beast itself stays beyond your reach."

Andrews looked down again at the folder with its laser-printed text and colored graphs. "This sort of thing can't fall into the wrong hands," he said.

"Exactly," Gwen said. "If IngolfTech released that, the whole world would be in an uproar."

And looking into things it shouldn't and asking questions I can't answer.

"But you
can
handle it. We'll certainly direct anything else of that nature to you; all we want is to be able to commercialize the more . . . conventional innovations that are our stock in trade. We're talking really considerable sums, here, in the immediate to medium term. Billions, enough to make Microsoft look like a mom-and-pop store, as you Yanks say."

Andrews closed the folder, fingers unconsciously caressing it. "We'll certainly be in touch, Ms.

Ingolfsson," he said, grinning.

"By all means." She returned his handshake, squeezing just enough to startle him a little.

Tom chuckled and poured another mineral water over the crushed ice and lime in his glass as the Americans left. Their walk quickened as they left Greycliff, turning almost into a trot as they reached the street outside. Gwen raised her own glass in a toast; she smiled over the rim at Dolores with affectionate cruelty.

"Nothing gets by them, eh?" she said.

The Colombian began to laugh, then caught her breath and bent her head and bit her linen napkin.

Tom and Alice looked over suddenly, blinked, then burst into chuckles themselves. The Draka gave a final tweak with her prehensile toes and withdrew the foot, wiping it on the inside of the other's skirt.

"I should
think
they'll be in touch," Tom said. "Show those goons a weapon, and they get one on the cat couldn't scratch."

He winked at Dolores, and the woman gave a breathless sigh and dabbed at her forehead. The waiters brought the dessert tray around again, noticing nothing of the byplay. .

Blind,
Gwen thought. Humans were absolutely
blind, as
well as scent-deaf. It made them endlessly amusing. This Andrews, for instance, had a diverting sense of his own importance. It would be entertaining, when he realized he was a toy, a plaything.

"Still, it's best we get some other influential contacts in that direction," Gwen said thoughtfully.

"Tom, Alice—after we've celebrated for the rest of the afternoon, I want you to firm things up with that communications mogul you've been cultivating. I'd like to have that solid before the bankers arrive, and we've only got three months."

Tom nodded, blotting his lips. "Shall we?" he said, rising.

"By all means."

***

"So, you haven't heard back from David yet?" Jennifer Feinberg dumped Nutra-Sweet into the coffee. The radicchio salad looked particularly disgusting today, but that was what the diet said she could have. She speared a forkful moodily and munched.
I want corned beef on rye, with mustard, pickle on
the side, order of french fries, and a nice gooey pastry to follow. Fat chance.
Chez Laurence wouldn't have anything so plebeian as corned beef on the menu; their French pastries were divine, though .

. . . The little restaurant had a friendly bustle at lunch hour, the more so as the day outside was sleet and ghastliness. Some of the sleet had gotten inside her rubbers.

"David? He said he needed more space."

"If he had any more space, he'd need a spacesuit," Louisa Englestein said.

"Forget David. David is history."

"Your personal history, you should forgive me, is getting to be like the history of Canada—boring."

"You'd rather my life was like the history of, say, Poland?" She swallowed the raddicchio leaf.

"Besides, who's got time for a life?"

Louisa did, but then Louisa worked as an assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum, when she wasn't reading manuscripts for a genre publisher. Both jobs together didn't pay half what Jennifer made, but they didn't amount to an eighty-five-hour week together, either.
And
they didn't leave her feeling like a beaten dishrag at the end of that week.

"The only date I've got is with the police," she said, looking at her fork.
I'm hungry, but I don't
want to put that leaf into my face.

"Police?"

"That slimy whoever-it-is keeps phoning me. I'm talking to the detective again, in case it really is connected with poor Stephen . . . well, you know."

"What's really bothering you?" Louisa said, patting her hand.

Jennifer looked up. "It's this IngolfTech thing," she said. "I don't know, something doesn't look right."

"A try for a phony flotation?"

"No, the cash flow's there, the
product's
there. It just doesn't smell
right,
somehow.

Thirty-year-old women from nowhere don't turn up in the Bahamas, pull off an eight-million-dollar salvage operation—pirate treasure, no less!—and then start successful companies buying and selling patents and licenses. And make a fortune in less than three years. Not in the real world."

"You're going to give a negative report?"

"Not on your life. Not without some facts to back up the gut feeling." She sighed. "Now, tell me about the weekend."

Louisa rolled her eyes. "You're not going to
believe
what happened," she began.

Jennifer settled in to listen. For once, her friend's love-life wasn't completely enthralling. There
was
something rotten in the state of IngolfTech underneath the shiny figures; all her experience said so.

***

"God . . . damn . . . it . . . all," Carmaggio said quietly, crumpling the fax and starling to throw it into his office wastepaper basket.

After a moment's thought he tore it up instead, stepping out and down the corridor to the men's room. He tossed the fragments into one of the toilets, paused, then unzipped his fly.

Nice and confidential, and I can show the spooks what I think of them,
he thought as he returned to the office.

"What's the news?" Jesus asked.

"You remember Andrews and Debrowski?"

"The two who leaned on Chen?"

The Puerto Rican's narrow dark face flushed slightly. Henry knew exactly how he felt. It was a shitty thing to do, first—no better than blackmail—but that wasn't all. They'd all done some questionable things now and then; you couldn't always operate by the rulebook. It was a matter of turf, as well. Bad enough to have the Feds muscling in on a case you were running; at least the FBI were real cops, and they could be useful for some things. A gang of spooks—who weren't officially supposed to operate on American soil anyway—was another matter entirely. Particularly when their objective seemed to be to stroke the perp, not catch her.

"A little bird from the Feds tells me they got sent to the Bahamas. To visit one Gwendolyn Ingolfsson, head of IngolfTech."

"
Mierda.
"

"Yeah. You know how much chance we've got of pulling in someone who's become a pet of the Powers That Be."

Jesus hesitated for an instant. "We could leak it."

"Damn, that's tempting."

He toyed with the notion for a moment. Headlines, embarrassments, maybe the Blackmail Twins thrown to the wolves as scapegoats—anyone who relied on
their
bosses for backup had better keep a jar of Vaseline handy.

"Nope. Not enough evidence. Hell,
no
evidence. It'd be our word against theirs—and they lie better than we do. Pity about that. I'd love to do it."

Jesus sighed. "And here I was looking forward to interviews. Maybe a book deal,
si?
How I tracked down space aliens and humongous baboons."

Carmaggio snorted. "I'd feel better if we could find the Phone Bandit," he said. "The bastard knows things he shouldn't."

"He's no friend of the cutting lady," Jesus pointed out. "Not from what he's been saying,"

"He's a goddamn ghost, is what he is. And he's bugging people over at Primary Belway Securities again, too."

Jesus grinned. "That nice lady stockbroker—"

"Analyst."

"—analyst been calling you up to complain again?"

"Yeah, and there's nothing I can do. We can't trace the calls, and the case doesn't exist anymore.

God damn all hackers, anyway. They can always use the computers better than we can. I don't see how the phone companies make any money at all with these little fuckers hacking into their billing programs and whatnot."

"Why don't you hand her over to the receptionists?" Jesus asked. "The captain, he's not going to be happy if he finds out you're still talking to people about the case."

"Ah, she's not so bad. And she
does
have a legitimate beef. Nothing the captain can do if I want to talk to someone on my own time and ticket. It's a free country."

***

"We haven't been able to trace the calls," he said, stirring his coffee. "I'd write it off as a crank, except that he does seem to have some information." Broad spatulate hands spread. "That's about all I can say."

The detective looked a lot like a bear. A
teddy bear,
Jennifer thought. If you could imagine a middle-aged blue-collar Italian teddy bear, that was. She'd always imagined detectives as more . . . dashing, somehow. Detective Lieutenant Henry Carmaggio looked like a plumber in a suit, a rather wrinkled suit at that.

He looks like he expects me to make a scene,
Jennifer thought. Which was something she never did, unless it was necessary and justified.

"Thank you," she said. "Anyway. It's satisfying just to
talk
to someone—in person, I mean. I get all these calls from this lunatic, and then I phone the police and get the runaround."

The detective shrugged. Behind his thick shoulders the window of the little Italian restaurant was fogged with condensation; it was a cold afternoon, freezing rain and slush. Smells of garlic and spices came from the kitchens, wafts that sent saliva spurting into the back of her mouth in a way that no radicchio leaf on earth could do.

"Ms. Feinberg—"

"Jennifer, please."

"Jennifer. One of the many lousy things about my job is the limited number of ways I can help people. People come to the police when something bad has happened to them; and they want us to, hell, put it right. Usually we can't."

"Is that official?" she asked.

Carmaggio laughed, and mimed taking something off his head. "No.
Strictly
no. My official NYPD

invisible detective's hat is now off. Matter of fact, I've already clocked out for the day. We're not this reassuring, officially—what with the budget squeeze, it's hard enough to account for our phone bills, much less coffee."

Jennifer chuckled. "It's not that I'm
really
worried, Detective—"

"Henry."

"—Henry. It's just, you know, you can feel sort of vulnerable thinking there's someone
out there.

Especially after what happened with poor Stephen."

Carmaggio sighed. "I know. From my point of view, it's frustrating as hell." He smiled. "Maybe we ought to remember what my grandmother Lucrezia always said."

"What was that?"

"That you get maybe three big breaks in a whole life—but you can eat pasta three times a day."

Grinning: "A cousin of mine runs this place, too."

"I shouldn't . . ."

"Hiya, Henry. Who's the girl?" A waitress bustled up with a plate of bruschetta.

Goil. She actually said
"
goil,
" Jennifer thought, slightly bemused. Even for a middle-aged, thick-armed lady of Neapolitan descent with a mustache, wasn't that a bit Old New York?

"That, Lorenza, is not a girl. It's a
lady.
"

"I shouldn't . . ." she repeated, and took a piece. Tomato, cheese and oregano exploded across her tongue, along with the crusty bread and smooth olive oil. "Oh, well. Who wants to try getting home at seven, anyway. Dutch treat."

Henry nodded. "Sure, no problem."

She took another bite. "This is
good.
"

"The thought of this place kept me alive in the Parrot's Beak," he said. "Its kept me overweight ever since I got back to the World."

Jennifer paused. "You were in Cambodia?" she said.

"Yeah?"

A slight silence fell. Carmaggio hunched a shoulder—slightly defensive even now, she thought.