Angel of Destruction (23 page)

Hilton eased himself down to the ground next to the singer’s silent partner, wondering what to do now. “So. What’re you having.”

No.

Something was wrong.

It was cold on the floor of the warehouse; and no warmth came from the inert body beside him. Hilton felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle with dread and horror: and pushed himself away from the unbreathing body, hands to the floor.

Unbreathing?

He had to check.

Setting the hand-beam down on the floor where it could illuminate some of the shadows, Hilton approached the still body that lay propped up against the crates.

No life.

No breathing.

Legs stiff, because he was dead; with the light shining on his face, the unnatural paleness of a countenance from which the normal blush of circulation had departed was too clear and too horribly unambiguous. Hilton had seen dead people before. There was no mistaking the chalk white putty of light-colored Langsarik skin when blood had ceased to color and warm it because the heart had stopped pumping.

Dead.

But there was no smell of liquor on him.

Perplexed as well as shocked, Hilton sat back on his heels to look at the dead man’s face. Did he know this person? Langsarik by the looks of him, but no one Hilton thought he recognized.

He cast about behind him with his hands, meaning to shift his rump from his heels to the floor so that he could contemplate this situation more in depth and needing to set his palms to the floor behind him for bracing as he moved his center of gravity.

He set his right hand flat on a piece of paper that slid under the pressure, destroying any chance Hilton might have had of keeping his balance. He fell over backwards and knocked his head against the hard warehouse floor with enough force to jar the curse he meant to speak on the slipping of his hand out of his mouth entirely, unspoken.

Lying on his back, staring up into the blackness of the warehouse’s rafters high above, Hilton caught his breath and composed himself. He was holding something in his right hand — he’d tightened his fist around the piece of paper, clutching for a handhold as he slipped. He brought his hand up in front of his face and turned the piece of paper front to back in his fingers.

Just a scrap of paper, really.

Poor quality, waxy finish, no wonder it had slid so easily. Marked in a fine bold hand. Trajectory calculations for a vector transit.

Hilton sat up slowly, his head spinning. What would any Langsarik be doing with a trajectory calculation?

There were other pieces of paper, fragments apparently abraded or torn while the drunken singer had beaten his friend in his unsuccessful attempt to rouse him. Hilton could read what was there, though. It was unquestionably a vector calculation of some sort, but it was maddeningly incomplete: the angle of approach was not specified, nor the point of departure. The only thing Hilton could tell with confidence was that the calculation was for an approach that started no closer to Port Charid than the Shawl of Rikavie.

Exactly where, in the Shawl of Rikavie?

A dead man, a drunk companion with a handful of notes. Too much celebration, perhaps. Celebrating what? Finalization of plans for the next “Langsarik” raid on warehouses in the Shawl of Rikavie?

This was not evidence which reflected well on Langsarik claims of innocence.

Until he had consulted his elders, he could not call in the Port Authority. It was too risky.

Hilton gathered the scraps of paper up and folded them into his blouse. The dead man could wait. Hilton dragged the corpse into a dark and very narrow space between cargo crates and marked his position with the hand-beam so that he could be sure of finding it again.

His duty was clear: He needed to go see Aunt Walton and let her know. About the overheard conversation that he had happened to interrupt. About this.

Then she and he could go together to put these findings before Bench specialist Garol Vogel, in Port Charid.

###

Garol Vogel woke up in the middle of the night because there was someone at the window coming in, and it was cold.

Startled awake, his physical twitch was enough only to shake his brain into consciousness — not enough to alert the intruder, apparently. The window was still on its way open. Garol sat immobile, listening, watching; he’d fallen asleep in the room’s one armchair, rather than lying down on the bed, so he was ahead of the game.

He heard whispers.

This is not a good idea, he’s a Bench intelligence specialist, he can probably shoot to kill in his sleep and not even wake up until morning.

Garol thought he recognized the voice. He couldn’t be quite certain; voices were different when a man was whispering. The window was open enough to admit a body, now, and the intruder angled himself through the gap awkwardly, a little too tall for a high-bay bandit — or just unschooled in his art.

Vogel. Hey. Wake up. Don’t shoot me. I’m friendly. Are you here?

The intruder was silhouetted against the ambient light from the night sky outside the rooming house. It wasn’t bright, in the street, but there were clouds, and the airfield outside of town ran around the clock, so there was plenty of light hitting the clouds from the working beams on the airfield. It was enough. Garol knew his visitor, once he could put body and voice together. Hilton Shires. Walton Agenis’s nephew and once-lieutenant.

And behind him?

Walton Agenis.

For a moment the idea of Flag Captain Walton Agenis breaking into his bedroom in the middle of the night was almost too poignant for Garol to bear, but he put the irrelevant fantasy away immediately. For future reference.

Maybe he’s not even here, the bed doesn’t look particularly occupied to me. Damn. We’ll have to wait.

Walton Agenis, all right. Garol stirred where he sat slumped in his chair so that they would not be startled when he spoke. “That’s just a rumor, about me shooting in my sleep. Bad idea, keeping loaded weapons under the pillow.” If for no other reason than that was the first place people looked. “What can I do for you, Flag Captain?”

Shires had been visibly startled at the first sound of Garol’s voice, his body language evident even in the low light of the darkened room. Agenis took it all in stride, however.

“First you can not turn on any lights; we’d rather stay secret till you’ve heard the news.”

Fair enough. “No problem on this side. You might want to close the window. And the light-drape, while you’re at it.”

She kept to the wall, where the shadows were deepest. Shires shut the window and closed the light-drape carefully over it; Garol was happy to see that he used the drapes as his cover. Thinking every minute, that Shires. Agenis’s nephew for a fact.

“Right,” Walton said, once the room was safely shuttered against the night. “Have a seat, Shires. Talk to the Bench specialist. Tell him what we’ve been doing tonight.”

Was this something he really wanted to hear? Garol wasn’t sure.

But Walton hadn’t asked him.

“You may remember that I’ve been filling in for my floor manager at the new warehouse, Specialist Vogel.” Shires had sat down on Garol’s bed; just as well it was still made up from the morning. Climbing up exterior walls in the middle of the night was frequently a messy business. “About five days ago I overheard an interesting conversation, or part of it. I hadn’t told you because I hadn’t told anybody.”

He’d get to the details when the time came. Garol let him talk.

“Then tonight I heard a pair of drunks. Well, really only one drunk. There were two of them in the warehouse stacks, and one of them ran away. The other one was dead. There are incriminating but fragmentary documents. But the really interesting thing is that the body got up and walked off while I was briefing my aunt Agenis.”

Quite a lot of information. Succinctly presented.

“I don’t suppose there’s any chance he wasn’t exactly dead when you left him?”

Movement in the shadows, vague and ill defined. Garol turned his head away to let his peripheral vision work; Shires was shaking his head. “Body was cold, skin clammy to the touch, face and hands bloodless. Apart from that he wasn’t breathing. And had no pulse. Nobody’s gone missing tonight that we know of, Specialist Vogel, we checked.”

Garol knew what he would think in Shires’s place. At least approximately. “Your analysis, please, Lieutenant.”

Shires took a moment to reply. Apparently he wasn’t as sure of this next bit as he would have liked to be. “Well. You can call me paranoid, Specialist Vogel.”

No, Garol had called him Lieutenant.

“But I’m clearly meant to think that I’m picking up intelligence by lucky chance. There’s that other thing to consider, I already know I’m being set up.” The forged chop, he meant, Garol supposed. “But they don’t necessarily know that I know that I’m being set up. If whoever the enemy is was usually so clumsy as to let either incident occur, they’d never have succeeded in staying unidentified for so long.”

Garol had to agree. Shires’s reasoning was sound; in retrospect, happening on the detail of the chop had put them ahead of the game — because Shires had trusted him enough to tell him about it, when Garol had mentioned the problem.

Suspicion was highly subjective. However, Hilton Shires could be expected to be highly motivated to believe that he was privy to evidence that might clear the Langsarik name and save the Langsarik settlement. He might be excused if he didn’t examine the lucky chance that gave him such valuable information too closely.

“Let’s hear some of the details of your experiences. It won’t be sun-up for hours, take your time.”

Nobody would wonder if they heard noises coming from his room in the middle of the night. This was a decent rooming house, but it was a rooming house, and not all of its transient guests were reliable sober people or never wanted company at night. That was a part of the reason Garol was here, instead of insulated from the life of the port either on the Malcontent’s courier or in one of the few more expensive lodgings Port Charid had to offer; he liked to be in the middle of life.

He was also much more easily approachable, here, if anyone needed to come and tell him something and didn’t particularly care to be observed.

“All right. First. Days ago. I was working late, doing cargo reconciliation.”

Still, Port Charid did have a curfew; it was a common tactic for a port with limited police resources. A curfew, and the bars were all closed; so who was making that racket, on the stairs? The bars closed well before curfew, so that people had time to get off the street. But whoever it was who was just coming home was very drunk indeed, to go by the shouts and exaggerated hushes Garol could hear coming through from the stairwell down the hall.

“Checking in the stacks. I started to hear voices. Nobody should have been in that part of the warehouse.”

Oh good, the drunk was on this floor. And had a friend with him. Annoying; but no more than a petty irritation — the drunk would pass out, his friend would do the same, and things would be quiet again soon.

“I wanted to know who it was and what they were talking about. I snuck up on them. Two men, or two people anyway, talking. I wrote down the exact words I heard as well as I could remember them. But it was about fencing a cargo. Someone may have mentioned Honan-gung, but I’m not sure anymore about that.”

No, the drunk wasn’t in another room on this floor, the drunk was at his door. Hammering on the wall and calling to be let in. “Oh, let me in, friend, comrade, cousin, come on, I know you’re in there.”

Drunks made mistakes like that all the time.

But this drunk had a Dolgorukij accent; and — drunk as he seemed to be — he still spoke a dialect of High Aznir that was pure and sweet and beautiful.

Garol stood up.

“Company,” Garol said. “Cousin Stanoczk. Malcontent. And, logically, Kazmer Daigule with him. What do you want me to do, Flag Captain?”

Walton Agenis spoke from the shadows, and her voice was clear and calm and confident.

“I want you to stop calling me Flag Captain, Garol; after all we’ve been through together it’s insulting. Let the Dolgorukij in. All right, let the Sarvaw in, too.”

Well, if she was going to be that way about it.

He’d better get Cousin Stanoczk out of the hall before he woke the entire hostelry.

Garol turned on the overhead light. It didn’t shed all that much light, but it would be a noticeable anomaly if he opened the door with the lights still out. Out in the hallway Cousin Stanoczk was singing a song so purely obscene that it made Garol blush to hear it.

“Can’t you quiet him down?” Garol hissed, checking the securities, opening the door. “People are trying to sleep.”

Cousin Stanoczk fell against the door as Garol opened it, toppling into the room to fall flat on his face. He was carrying a full flask of something; Garol was grateful that it didn’t break as Stanoczk fell — even while he registered suspicion in his mind over the fact that it didn’t seem to so much as spill.

“Come on, come on.” Hurrying Daigule into the room, Garol checked the hallway with a quick scan. No heads poked out of the other rooms. At least one door was ajar, though, signaling the interest of someone within who was listening — but reluctant to be caught at it. “Sorry about the noise,” Garol said. “I’ll take care of things from here. Thank you for your concern, good night.”

He waited.

The door that was ajar fluttered, wavered, and finally closed; but with a very adept air of having been on the way to closed anyway, no thanks to you, sir or madam.

Cousin Stanoczk was sitting on the floor at the far end of the room with his back leaned up against the bed, his knees splayed widely in front of him and an expression of utter stupidity on his face. Walton Agenis had taken the chair, with Shires behind her for protection.
Who was protecting whom
? Garol wondered. Perhaps the point was simply that they wouldn’t be visible from the street or across the street in that position, should there be any gap in the light-drape across the window.

“To what do we owe the pleasure,” Garol asked Stanoczk. Stanoczk waved the flask at him cheerfully.