Reality Matrix Effect (9781310151330) (39 page)

***

“I don’t care how clever it was
technically,” Tauber had told Wraggon, “it was a stupid thing to
do!”

Wraggon merely glared at the taller
man.

“We had a future together, you and I,”
said Tauber, “but now you have no future at all. What did you think
you were doing?”

Wraggon ground his teeth together
before answering. “I proved we mean business,” he hissed. “I proved
we wouldn’t wait forever for them to go along with our
demands.”

   “
You also got the world
too worked up too fast,” Tauber said coldly. “We’re not ready to
take full advantage of the situation. The zappers aren’t all here
yet. Once the entire system’s in place, we’ll have plenty of
time—and leverage—to turn the screws. But this—”  Tauber shook
his head in obvious disgust. “Starting a rumor about destroying the
Nitinol would’ve been one thing, but really doing the job.... 
Dumb, Wraggon. Plain dumb. I had plans for that
Nitinol.”

Wraggon grunted. “You and your lousy
plans!  We got a great little extortion racket going here. If
we keep the operation small, it could make us all rich. And like my
grandfather always said, if you got the money, you can buy the
power.”

“Is that all you care about,
Wraggon?  The money?”

“Like I said, Tauber, if you got the
money, you can get the power. That’s the whole point, isn’t
it?  But you and your damn ego. You got to do things your own
way. Well, I’m not just your errand boy!”

“I thought you were smart,” Tauber
sighed, “but you’re not. No wonder you’re just a glorified
rust-pusher.”  Wraggon lunged for Tauber but was restrained by
the bearded giant of a man who had brought him to this meeting at a
remote spot overlooking the ocean. “No, Wraggon, you’re not smart
at all. You have no real vision. Too bad. We could have used you.
But now you’re just dead weight—
very
dead
weight.”

Tauber jerked his head at the bearded
man, turned and walked away. Only a slight hesitation of step and a
momentary clenching of Tauber’s fists acknowledged Wraggon’s scream
as the giant lifted the robotics expert and threw him off the cliff
onto the rocks below.

***

Tauber blinked, and the mental image
of his final moments with Wraggon faded. In its wake was not
remorse but regret. Tauber’s Merchant Fleet experience had trained
him to avoid waste. Wraggon wasn’t much, but he had certain useful
skills. Killing him was like dumping a load of rocket fuel into
space because it’s going unstable:  You know it has to be done
or you could blow yourself up, but you still hate the idea of
losing all that fuel.

 
He rubbed his hands together and
returned his attention to the screen. Maybe there was something he
could use against Milgrom in her records, he thought. He’d already
combined available CDN data on Milgrom’s personal, professional and
medical history into a single file on the optical disk. Now he
pressed a series of keys to access it.

How the hell did she figure it
out?
he wondered again as he stared at the screen full of
information without really seeing it.

He sighed heavily and rubbed his eyes.
He tried to concentrate on the words before him, but his mind kept
drifting. Not toward anything in particular. It was more like
drifting away from something. Away from that vast emptiness inside
him. He was so close. Milgrom or no Milgrom, in a few more months
he’d have the whole world acting out parts in a play written,
directed and cast by one Henry Tauber. This Milgrom thing was just
a little glitch—an inconvenience, not a major catastrophe. But
Henry Tauber despised glitches. He didn’t like having his timetable
upset.

He gazed up at the ceiling, noticing a
fresh spider web in one corner.
Must be lonely being a
spider,
he thought absently,
sitting there all alone just
waiting, waiting, waiting for a victim to stumble into the web.
He banished the reminder of his own loneliness.
If loneliness is
the price of power, then so be it,
he mused
bitterly.

He returned his attention to the
screen. He hadn’t  studied Milgrom’s complete file before.
He’d constructed the file just in case it might contain something
useful later on. In her wheelchair, Milgrom seemed the perfect
symbol of a weak society and a vulnerable opponent for Rensselaer
as he climbed the political ladder. She was proving much more
troublesome than expected, however, and it occurred to Tauber that
her file might hold some secret of value. Derek Marsden’s name was
the last thing he’d expected to see, but there it was on a list of
Milgrom’s assistants.

 
Tauber stared at the name for
several seconds. Then, slowly, his hands curled into fists, and he
ground his teeth so hard his head began to ache. The memories tore
through his brain like a tornado, tossing his most closely guarded
emotional secrets like balsa wood.

Derek had been his friend. Maybe his
only friend. He remembered the good times, their times together as
two of the five “bad boys” of the Academy. He remembered that awful
day in R-4 when, his own cheek and ear burned by an errant laser
beam, he had cradled the unconscious Marsden in his arms and
screamed for a medic as blood flowed from the wounds in his
friend’s neck. He remembered the softer, gentler Derek Marsden who
emerged after months of treatment in the colonies, too. And he felt
again the stirrings he’d long repressed, the desire to touch that
thin, wiry body—and be touched in return.... 

With a savage sweep of his arm, Tauber
cleared the top of the desk on which the computer rested, sending
papers, manuals and a random assortment of unwashed coffee cups
flying and crashing in all directions.

 
The sound of the doorbell was a
welcome interruption to this uncomfortable line of thought. He took
a deep breath, squared his shoulders and cleared the computer
screen, then went to the door.

 
Keith Daniels stood in the
corridor outside Tauber’s apartment, a troubled look on his
face.

“Is all this part of your plan, Hank?”
he asked without prolog.

Tauber, once more in complete control
of his emotions, invited Keith inside. “Is what part of the
plan?”

“The zappers. You’re not really going
to—”

“Sit down, Keith, and relax. Of course
they’re part of the plan. And with Althea Milgrom talking about how
the communications have been faked, they may be the most convincing
piece of evidence we have now to keep public attention focused on
the colonies and off of us.”

 
Keith shook his head. “I don’t
like it, Hank. Those things are too dangerous. They could take out
a city block at the flick of a switch.”

“That’s the whole idea,” responded
Tauber. “If there’s no danger, there’s no heroes. And we need a
hero to promote for the presidency—or maybe for U.N. secretary
general.”

Keith shook his head. “You’re crazy,
Hank!  I know you want to change the world,
but—” 

The force of Tauber’s backhanded slap
caught Keith in mid-sentence and whipped his head sideways. “Don’t
you ever call me crazy,” Tauber said in low, menacing tones. “Not
ever.”

Keith put his hand to the side of his
face and blinked.

 “
The zappers are weapons of last
resort,” said Tauber. “Wraggon programmed the targets according to
my instructions, and I selected those targets very
carefully.”

“Are you sure about that?” Keith
asked, finding his voice again.

“What do you mean?”

“Are you sure Wraggon did what you
told him to do?  He didn’t exactly follow orders when it came
to the Nitinol storage.”

Tauber glanced at the floor, then met
Keith’s frank gaze with an ominous smile. “I guess we’d better find
out.”

Keith studied Tauber nervously but
said nothing.

 ”
Althea Milgrom’s become a much
bigger problem than I expected,” Tauber said. “I think she needs to
be taught a lesson. And I can’t think of a better way to discredit
her than a zapper attack.”

Keith went white but once again
remained silent.

“Listen, Keith, don’t you worry about
it. You concentrate on the lawsuits. We’ve got more cases ready to
file now, don’t we?”

Keith nodded.

“Fine. You keep the authorities busy
with the lawsuits, and leave the grand planning of Operation Strong
Man to me. Just stay away from John Martin Roberts Park next
Saturday.”

“The park!  On the busiest day of
the week?  But—” Tauber’s glare cut Keith short, and the
lawyer slumped back in his chair with a sigh of
resignation.

Tauber wasn’t at all pleased. He had
begun to regard Keith as a friend—his first since Derek Marsden.
But like Marsden, Daniels was beginning to show weakness. What was
that old saying about change?  You can’t make an omelet
without breaking eggs. Couldn’t Daniels see that?  What did
the lives of a bunch of nobodies matter when a zapper strike on the
park could put Operation Strong Man back on track?

“When’s Barnard’s ship due back from
the Asteroid Belt?” Keith asked, trying to change the
subject.

The question caught Tauber in mid-.
“What?  Huh?  Oh, yeah. Barnard. Don’t worry about Vince.
He won’t be coming back.”

Keith swallowed hard. “But isn’t his
ship about due to—”

“Yeah, yeah. The ship’s due back next
month. But Vince won’t be on it.”

Keith raised his eyebrows, and Tauber
continued:  “He was already a liability even before they
shipped out. Once he found out about Wraggon, he’d be impossible to
control. In his own bumbling way, Vince could unravel the whole
operation. So I worked things out with two of his shipmates. They
just happened to be old shipmates of
mine
, too.”

Keith closed his eyes and pressed his
lips together.

 ”
What’s the matter, Keith? 
No stomach for the hard decisions?”

Keith held Tauber’s gaze for a moment,
then looked away. He glanced at a clock on Tauber’s wall and jumped
up with an exaggerated sense of urgency.

“Look at the time!  I’ve got to
go, Hank.”  He grinned apologetically. “Appointment with one
of your merchanter friends on a new case.”

 
Tauber rose, too, and looked
over his guest with undisguised suspicion.

“A new case?”

“Yeah.”  Keith shifted his weight
from foot to foot. “Uh, let’s see....  Clark?  No—” he
tapped his temple “—Clarkson. Jared Clarkson. Yeah—that’s it. Jared
Clarkson. Merchanter First Class on the R-4 run about two years
ago. Says some colonists tried to poison him with tainted squawker
meat just before the return trip because he refused to smuggle
colonial goods to black-market friends of theirs on
Earth.”

Tauber frowned but said nothing. He
remembered Jared Clarkson. Straight as an arrow. Would he have
filed a lawsuit like this?

Keith looked at Tauber with strange,
almost imploring eyes. He seemed to be debating with himself about
something.

“Listen, Hank, about the zappers, I
really wish you’d—”

“What, Keith?  You wish I’d just
leave ’em floating around the Earth like so much space junk? 
All that firepower, and you don’t want me to use it. Is that
it?”

“It...it’s just that—” Keith
stammered.

“Yeah, Keith, I know. It’s not your
fault. You’ve been conditioned, living in a world where weakness is
king, and manhood is a lost art. But all that’s going to change.
Just trust me.”

Keith bent his head and rubbed the
back of his neck. “Okay,” he said with a sigh and an unconvincing
half-smile. “Guess I’ll have to.”

“Just stay away from the park on
Saturday,” Tauber reminded him, opening the door.

Keith nodded and crossed the
threshold.

 
Tauber watched the lawyer’s
receding figure for a few seconds before closing the door, then
returned to the mundane task of picking up the papers that still
lay scattered on the floor near his computer. More and more lately,
Daniels reminded Tauber of Derek Marsden. Not physically, of
course. Daniels was taller and more athletic looking than the thin,
wiry Marsden. And though Daniels didn’t lack a sense of humor, he
lacked Derek’s sense of adventure and wild abandon.

Then why does he remind me of
Derek?
Tauber asked himself. And, as quickly as the question
formed in his mind, he knew the answer:  Daniels was beginning
to remind Tauber of the post-accident Derek Marsden.

 
Before that terrible day, Derek
had been one of the best, Tauber recalled. Absolutely fearless, the
man would try anything once for fun—twice for spite. The word
“consequences” wasn’t even in his vocabulary. Never had anything
more serious on his mind than proving his mettle and having a good
time. And what ideas he had for good times!  Tauber paused in
the midst of straightening some papers and smiled at the memory of
a particularly clever prank the “bad boy” crew had pulled on the
chief cook in Alpha Colony on their first trip to the Asteroid
Belt.

“Dammit, Derek!” Tauber said aloud.