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when we left it with the burned-out body. You really are a nuisance, you know that? Thanks to you, I am
having the worst day of my life. All I wanted to do was talk to you-and now you've realty messed things
up."
"You followed me into the alley because you wanted to talk tome?"
"Sure. Once you'd got rid of Yamanaka's bugs my employers figured it was safe to have a private
word. You could have had it in town and been free and clear by dinnertime, if you hadn't taken it into
your fool head to start a shooting match in a public corridor."
"You started a shooting match," Damon pointed out. "Lenny only started a brawl."
"Either way," the tall man said in an aggrieved tone, "the cops will have dug out every bug in the walls by
now and run the tapes. Your face, my face ... and the face of my colleague here, who had no option but
to pull his gun before your friend carved him up. All you had to do was let us in, but you had to wade in
and we had to defend ourselves any way we could. Violence escalates-and now we're all in Yamanaka's
file. You could have cost us our jobs."
"How sad," Damon muttered. "Who exactly is your employer?"
"I can't answer that," the tall man complained. "All I wanted was a quiet word, and now I'm up for
kidnapping. They have my face. They never got my face before, but who knows what'll happen now? I
could be in real trouble."
"Why?" Damon wanted to know. "How many kidnappings did you do before they got a picture of your
face?"
His captor wasn't about to answer that one either.
"Why didn't your employer have his quiet word before he turned me loose last time?" Damon
demanded, allowing his tone to declare that he was the one who had the serious grievance, even though
he no longer felt as if he were a fleshy ants' nest. "Why come after me again, after a mere matter of
hours?"
"Something else went wrong," the tall man muttered. "You Heliers are absolute hell to deal with, I'll give
you that."
"What?"
The man with the bruise shrugged his shoulders impatiently. "We were monitoring an eye at the place
we left Arnett," he said. "We were expecting hugs all round when your people came to get him-but that
wasn't the way it went. They shot him! Can you believe that? They shot him. Next thing we know, he's
been dumped in the road!"
"Are you sure they killed him?" Damon asked sharply.
The tall man hesitated before he shrugged again, which suggested to Damon that it was a recognized
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possibility that Silas hadn't been killed and that the body dumped in the road might have been the same
kind of substitute as the body left for Madoc to find. "His nanotech had all been flushed," the man with
the bruise said eventually. "They must have known that if they watched the tape we put out on the Web.
Maybe they were just knocking him out-but they had no reason to do that if they were your people.
Who'd ever have thought Eliminators could be that smart, that well organized?"
"Who are my people supposed to be?" Damon asked him. "You mean Conrad Helier's people-except
that Conrad Helier's dead. So is Karol Kachellek, except that you probably don't believe that either. So
who's supposed to be running things, given that Eveline Hywood's a quarter of a million miles away in
lunar orbit? Me?"
The tall man shook his head sadly. "All I wanted was a quiet talk," he repeated, as if he simply could not
believe that such an innocent intention had led to brawling, shooting, and kidnapping-all of it dutifully
registered on spy eyes that the police would have debriefed by now.
"Where are we going?" Damon asked.
"Out of town," the tall man informed him gruffly. "Your fault, not mine. We could have sorted it out back
home if you hadn't blown it. Now, we have to take it somewhere really private."
The Sespe and Sequoia Wilderness reserves had supposedly been rendered trackless in the wake of
the Second Plague War- by which time its chances of ever getting back to an authentic wilderness state
were only a little better than zero-but Damon knew that closure against wheeled vehicles didn't signify
much when helicopters like this one could land in a clearing thirty meters across.
"You can't get more private than Olympus," Damon said- but as he looked out again at the nonvirtual
mountains which were now surrounding the helicopter he realized that he had actually contrived to force
his adversaries to take a step they had not intended. This time, there was a record of his abduction in
Interpol's hands. This time, Interpol could put faces and names to his captors, or at least to their foot
soldiers. He knew that he could claim no credit for the coup-it was all the result of a chapter of accidents
and misconceptions-but the fact remained that the game players had finally been taken beyond the limits
of their game plan. They had been forced to improvise. For the first time, PicoCon-assuming that it was
PicoCon-was losing its grip.
"Your boss is scared," Damon said, working through the train of thought. "He thinks it really might have
been the Eliminators who got to Silas, after the people he expected to collect him never showed up. One
minute he was convinced the message Silas was supposed to deliver was home and dry, the next he was
unconvinced again. You're right-if Silas is dead you could be, in real trouble, especially now that Interpol
has two faces in the frame. Mr. Yamanaka doesn't like the way you've been running rings around him. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]