Drakon (31 page)
This was a candy store for venture-capital types; and with half a dozen successful licensing operations already.
"I noticed Ms. Wayne wasn't at the final presentation," Jennifer said.
I really should turn in.
Somehow she didn't feel sleepy, even though everyone had been keeping country hours while the Belway team was here. More prickly and restless.
Hell, it's barely midnight—and we're going back to New
York tomorrow afternoon.
Back to sleet, back to slush, back to her cat, who wouldn't forgive her for a week.
She forced down bitterness.
It's been a very successful week.
The problem was that now she had to go back to the workaholic scramble of a semi-upper-middle-class New Yorker's life. Where "life" was two hours of watching PBS between supper and bed, or a squeezed-in night at the opera; lately she might squeeze in a movie with Henry. And Ms. Gwendolyn too-perfect-to-be-true Ingolfsson was going to stay here in this goddamned mansion and pluck the plums of life as she pleased. Give or take a few hectic months while the IPO went through.
Maybe I
should
have stayed in med school.
Then again, no. Doctors got even crazier than analysts, and they had to be around sick people all the time.
The secretaries began clearing away the documents.
"Well, that's all that can be done tonight," Gwen said. She stretched and yawned. "Let's get something to eat; and I'm going to go berserk if I don't hear somebody discuss something except due diligence reviews, draft registration statements, and the SEC."
The smile was infectious. Jennifer chuckled. "That's my life you're talking about. Odd to hear someone like you getting bored with business."
"It's a means to an end, as far as I'm concerned. This way."
This way was a small dining room, not the formal one downstairs. There were pictures on the walls; portraits. One of a woman with short blond hair and a face of delicate pointy-chinned beauty, dressed in a flowing off-the-shoulder gown.
"You might say that business doesn't run in my family," Gwen went on. "That's my mother, by the way—her name was Yolande."
"She looks sort of sad," Jennifer said.
"She had a hard life, in some respects," Gwen answered.
"What
were
your family in, if you don't mind me asking."
"My family? Well, soldiers, a lot of them. Gentleman-farmers, too." They sat and shook out their napkins. "The one thing I do envy you for living in New York," she went on, breaking a roll open, "is the opera and the galleries."
"You're an opera buff?"
"Mostly the older pieces. You know Delibes?"
"The one British Overseas Airways uses for their commercials?"
Gwen looked at her blankly for a second, then smiled. "I'd never thought of it that way," she said. "I had an aunt who was very fond of Delibes, though."
The servants brought in Jamaican jerk-pork soup, then steaks in a brown peppercorn sauce; the talk went from opera to design and back.
Jennifer took a mouthful of the steak. "That
is
good," she said.
"Buffalo," Gwen said. "Hump steak. I've been doing business with a certain TV magnate—he's probably going to be buying in heavily when we do the IPO—and he has a buffalo ranch, sends it over now and then. Nice of him."
That
TV magnate? Jennifer asked herself.
Oh-ho.
"It may be blasphemy, but even the seafood here palls after a while."
"Yes," Gwen said. "Every once in a while I like to know that a higher mammal died for my dinner."
"You may not be an entrepreneur by choice," Jennifer said, "but that sounds quite sufficiently predatory of you."
Gwen looked up at her. "Predatory? Oh, you have no
idea,
" she said, with a clear husky laugh.
God, she's strange,
Jennifer thought, chuckling herself.
Strange, but sort of fun. That charisma
should get damned old after a while, but it doesn't. Just less noticeable. Come on, now, girl
—
where's
your envy and resentment?
Gone, it seemed.
She'd make a great salesperson,
Jennifer decided. The
"trust me" vibrations were strong enough to do double duty as an oboe in a symphony.
She glanced over at the painting of Yolande Ingolfsson again, then glanced back sharply. The background seemed to be a window-seat at first glance . . . it
was
a window-seat, but the curved glass behind it framed a landscape on the moon, gray and silver and a ragged crater wall. Above that hung the full earth.
"I can see that wasn't done from life," she said.
Gwen glanced over, tilting her face and looking out of the corners of her eyes. "No, I did it from memory," she said.
"You paint?"
"It's a hobby."
In your copious spare time, no doubt,
Jennifer thought.
"You find me a little odd, don't you?" Gwen said.
Sharp, too.
"
A
little . . . out of the ordinary," Jennifer said.
"Perhaps I'm an alien invader, then," Gwen said. Her green eyes sparkled. "From another dimension."
Jennifer found herself laughing harder. "Oh, right. And you prowl the back roads of America in your flying saucer, mutilating cows and performing proctologies on rednecks."
Gwen arched her brows. "Proctologies on rednecks?" she said thoughtfully. "Carefully selected rednecks . . . with the right prosthetics . . . perhaps occasionally."
Jennifer choked slightly on a mouthful of wine. "Who's Adonis there?" she asked.
The painting was of a youngish man standing on a vaguely tropical beach; long white-gold hair fell to his broad dark-tanned shoulders. He was wearing only loose duck trousers, and sitting casually on a fallen palm-trunk, looking sleekly muscular and utterly relaxed; if the painting was anything like the person, heads would have turned.
Not a dry seat in the house, as Louisa says,
Jennifer thought.
"Alois, not Adonis. My husband."
The New Yorker set her wineglass down. "You're
married?
" she said. Somehow it was startling, unexpected, like a cat tapdancing.
And I could have sworn Cairstens and she were involved.
At least from the way the Californian carried himself. She imagined Gwen next to the man in the painting.
And I
would have thought they were relatives. Maybe a cousin?
"Was; Alois died . . . some time ago. Sporting accident."
"Oh."
Foot-in-mouth disease, Jennifer.
"I'm sorry."
Gwen sighed and shrugged. "It was some time ago. He—we both—had a taste for dangerous pastimes. If you do that long enough, it'll kill you. I've just been luckier, so far. In fact," she said, "eventually the universe kills everybody; one argument for taking a theistic approach to it, I suppose."
That which kills everybody is God?
Jennifer thought. Perhaps not a tactful comment to make.
Odd outlook.
"You paint a lot?'
"It relaxes. Let's finish this Merlot off."
"I shouldn't . . ."
"Work's over, you're leaving tomorrow."
"True. There, dead soldier."
The dessert was various tiny pastries of tropical fruits; the pyramid on the serving tray was as colorful as a peacock's tail or a flower market, and she felt almost guilty at disturbing it. Kiwi, mango, mangosteen, sour-sop, and the coffee was Blue Mountain.
"This is the life," she sighed.
Gwen leaned back with her cup in both hands, sipping. "Its a change from shark hunting," she said.
"The Wall Street and finny varieties both."
"There are sharks in the water here? What a pity." The beach looked gorgeous, not that she'd had time for swimming.
Visit the tropics and stare at your computer,
she thought.
Sheesh. Bah, humbug.
"They can be entertaining to hunt, when you feel like spearfishing," Gwen said.
Jennifer looked at her, trying to see if she was serious. "Not the Great White Shark, I hope," she said.
"No." Another of the white grins. "Although I've found some remarkably hostile things coming out of the water at me here," she added. "But enough about me. Tell me what life in New York is like for you."
Later, she stopped herself. "I'm babbling," she said. "You can't possibly want to know about my cat."
"On the contrary," Gwen said, finishing her brandy. "I adore cats. Let's go for a quick swim, then."
Jennifer hesitated. "Not with the sharks, I hope."
"I've got a perfectly good pool here."
She hesitated again. You had to watch out about getting too friendly with clients. On the other hand, why not? Nothing wrong with a swim, and Gwen was nice enough—weird, but nice. Also Klein and Coleman were pills. And she felt restless, as if someone were pricking her skin very lightly with invisible needles. The room swayed a little; she'd exceeded her usual rule of no more than three glasses of Chardonnay or something similar. They walked out to a terrace and down a flight of stairs; the pool was floodlit from below, lined and set among marble tiles and edged with a decoration of colorful Portuguese majolica. Water burbled from the mouth of a bronze lion, into a rock-edged basin and then into the pool itself.
"Which way's my room?" she asked, a little disoriented. "Got to get my suit."
"Why bother?" Gwen said, stepping out of her clothes. "Nobody here but us girls."
Jennifer gaped as the other hit the water in a perfect arching dive and with hardly a ripple. Her shape eeled down the pool, flashing into and out of the puddles of light thrown by the underwater sconces.
She surfaced at the other end, mahogany hair plastered to her head, a flash of teeth and eyes.
"Chicken!" she called.
"Hell with that!" Jennifer called back. To hell with being sober and staid.
Hell with the extra ten pounds, too,
she thought. She didn't have anything to prove. Still, she kept her briefs on as she waded down the steps. The water was barely cool to the skin, the stone smooth under her feet as she stood hugging herself. Fingers like steel wire suddenly gripped her ankles. She yelled as they heaved her upwards, catapulting her forward into the middle of the pool with a huge splash that sent water fountaining over the cool white and blue of the marble flooring. She whooped and thrashed her way back to the surface, glaring and sputtering.
"You looked so much like
September Morn,
" Gwen said, surfacing not far away.
"Showoff!"
***
"I'd like to know how they do that," Bill Saunders said.
There was a slip of something the size of a business card underneath the image, on the businessman's desk table.
"I don't even understand TV, really," the detective said. "But I can switch it on or off. This quadrant," he added, raising his voice a little. "Enlarge."
The sphere vanished, to be replaced by a three-foot-square section. That flashed down and then down again, until they could all see the street outlines of a city; the buildings were perfectly to scale.
"Yep." Bill Saunders looked at the holograph again. "That's pretty damned convincing. You've convinced me, it's that simple."
He sank back in his chair, fingers steepled and eyes closed.
Taking it easier than I did,
Henry thought. But then, he hadn't been easily thrown back in Nam either.
"Okay," the businessman said after a moment. "Why not the government? I've got some pull with them; they owe me. Not least for staying out in '96, that was close."
"Lafarge thinks—and I agree, and our contact with the FBI does too—that we couldn't get anything done quickly. Too much incredulity. And anything the government knew, she'd know. By now she's probably got some influential people working for her."
"Yep," the Texan said again. "But with this, or a few things more, we
could
convince the necessary people. This Ingolfsson, the time traveler, she doesn't have much fancy gear, you say. We send in a Ranger team, and the problem's solved."
Carmaggio shook his head. He could feel sweat break out on his forehead. The more people in the know, the closer to disaster.
"Bill, that's just what we
can't
do. Lafarge says these Draka, they specialize in genetics—that fits what Ingolfsson's been doing with her company; yeah, plenty of electronics, but biotech stuff too."
"That oil-eating bug," Saunders said thoughtfully. "I
figured
that one was too good to be true. But I bought a piece of the action," he added. "Made a fair dollar. So, they're geneticists. So what?"
"So making a plague would be trivial work for her. That's how Lafarge puts it: trivial. They won their version of World War Three with something like that. Something that could wipe out ninety-nine point nine percent of the human race, leaving her to pick up the pieces."
"Judas priest," Saunders said. The words grunted out as if he'd been punched in the belly. He sat silent again for a full minute before barking: "Why hasn't the bitch done it already?"
"These
drakensis,
they're conquerors. As far as I could follow the explanation, they get a major charge out of making people truckle to them. You can't get much groveling time out of a corpse; and it would slow her down considerably, having to make components for her beacon instead of ordering them from working firms. But if Ingolfsson thinks her cover's been blown, she'd do it—Lafarge said he'd bet his life, literally, that something like that is in place right now and ready to roll."