Death Wave (24 page)

With a flourish, he whipped a bouquet of exotic-looking colorful flowers from behind his back. “They're from the jungles of Brazil. I thought you might like them.”

“They're beautiful, Rudy,” she said, her inflection as flat as the communications system's. “Put them down somewhere. We have a problem to discuss.”

“Problem?”

“Jordan Kell has apparently gone to Boston. My security people believe he's with Carlos Otero.”

Castiglione laid the flowers on an end table and walked toward her, his lips pursed.

“Otero? That could be trouble.”

“We've got to stop Kell from going public again. He's got to be contained.”

“And you want me to, uh … contain him.”

“That's right.”

“No questions asked? I can use whatever means necessary?”

“Within limits. I don't want anyone murdered, or an urban riot, for god's sake. You've got to be discreet.”

Castiglione nodded. “All right. I'll go to Boston.”

“Good. Have you been there before?”

“Ages ago. As a student I played a football match there—although the Americans called it soccer. An odd sort of people.”

“Very well,” said Halleck. “Get to Boston and bring Kell back here.”

With a sigh, Castiglione said, “We could have had this discussion over a secure phone call. There wasn't any need for me to come all the way out here. And now it's started to rain.”

Halleck looked into his softly dark eyes and saw an expectation there.

The shadow of a smile curling her lips, she said, “Well, as long as you're here, I suppose you ought to stay the night.”

Castiglione's answering smile was incandescent.

 

PREPARATIONS

Morning in Concord, Massachusetts.

Jordan stood beneath the graceful willow tree in the garden outside his bedroom, watching the buildup of going-to-work traffic on the street beyond the hedge. Cars and the occasional bus flowed along quietly, their electric engines purring softly. Not much of a morning rush, he thought. It's actually rather peaceful.

Otero had arranged a date with a tailor for Jordan. He had brought only the clothes on his back, and the network owner wanted him to look stylish, attractive. Although he laundered the shirt, slacks, and underwear he'd been wearing before going to bed, Jordan had to admit they were beginning to look shabby.

Glancing at his wrist, Jordan saw that the tailor was due in another half hour. Stepping back into the bedroom, he decided to finish his morning coffee and then stand to be measured.

“Friend Jordan.”

Adri's tall, lean figure stood in the bedroom's holographic viewer. Wearing a full-length softly creased robe of grayish blue, the old man appeared to be walking in a park thick with brightly colored flowers.

“I know your responses to me will take an hour to reach here,” Adri said in his soft, slightly sibilant voice, “so if you don't mind I will talk while you listen.”

Jordan hurried to the sitting room and dropped onto the sectional sofa. Adri was on the viewer there, as well, of course. Jordan saw a small, furry, big-eyed head peeking out of the folds of Adri's robe. One of his pets.

“Aditi has told me that you require imagery of some of the worlds our exploratory spacecraft have observed. I can send you such images, although many of them—images of worlds that have been destroyed by the death wave—will undoubtedly be quite disturbing to you.”

The more disturbing the better, Jordan replied silently.

“I presume you have equipment that can record the images. Otherwise we will have to arrange to send them to you at the time you are actually making your presentation. That might be a little tricky, you know.”

His eyes riveted on Adri's seamed face, Jordan tapped the phone console on the sofa's end table and canceled his tailor's appointment.

*   *   *

Carlos Otero's personal assistant was Elizabeth Beauregard, a short, stocky, highly intelligent woman who was known to Otero's top staff people as Betty the Bodyguard—or even Betty the Bitch. She had worked for Otero for nearly ten years and had seen more than her share of importunate people who simply
had to
see the Big Boss: connivers and con men, ardent champions of Noble Causes who wanted to bend Otero's ear about how much good he could do—for them. Intensely serious people who had the inside information on scandals, on government cover-ups, on imminent disasters and hidden treasures. Beautiful, impatient, smoldering women eager to have Otero smile upon them.

Betty the Bodyguard sized them up and put them down. Only rarely did she allow someone—anyone—to break through and see the Big Boss. Her instincts seldom failed her. When she did allow someone to get past her, as she had with Vera Griffin little more than a week ago, it almost always worked out well.

Now she was facing a smiling, smooth-talking, devilishly attractive Italian from the World Council. Rudolfo Castiglione claimed to be a personal assistant to Anita Halleck herself, and he flashed impressive credentials along with his killer smile.

But Elizabeth Beauregard knew that her boss loathed Anita Halleck, and thought the World Council was a gaggle of collectivists who were determined to establish a global tyranny. No, an interplanetary tyranny.

Sitting at her immaculately clean desk, Betty looked up at Castiglione and said in her unemotional, no-nonsense voice, “I'm very sorry, sir, but Mr. Otero has a totally full calendar. He gave me strict orders not to add a single item to his schedule.”

Castiglione's smile did not diminish by a single watt. “Not even an urgent request from the chairwoman of the World Council?”

Blinking her brown eyes at him, Betty replied, “I could lose my job, sir.”

“But this is
important,
” Castiglione insisted.

Betty knew that sometimes appearing to bend a little could disarm an insistent visitor. She said, “Perhaps if you could tell me what this is all about…”

Castiglione drew himself up to his full height. “It concerns the starman, Jordan Kell.”

“Oh,” she said. “Then you'd probably want to talk with Vera Griffin.”

“Who is she?”

“The producer of a show we're going to do about New Earth and this death wave that's supposed to be coming our way.”

Castiglione's brows knit slightly as he thought it over. After a few heartbeats, he said, “Very well, then. I'll talk with her.”

Betty the Bodyguard kept herself from smiling. But she was thinking, The old deflection routine. Palm them off on one of the péons and keep the boss happy.

Then she added, And it'll serve Ms. Griffin right; her and her goddamned persistence.

 

EVIDENCE

Jordan Kell slumped back on the sofa in the guest suite's sitting room, aghast at the images in the holographic viewer, unable to tear his eyes away from the utter devastation he was seeing.

From slightly more than eight light-years away, the astronomers of New Earth were sending him the images they had amassed of planets overtaken by the deadly wave of gamma radiation flowing through the galaxy.

He recognized Elyse Rudaki's voice describing the scenes he'd been watching since morning. Ordinarily warm and vibrant, the astrophysicist's voice was trembling on the brink of tears. Jordan felt close to tears himself as he gaped, slack-jawed, at what had once been a living, thriving civilization.

Now it was a charnel house.

“It must have been done in a few hours,” Rudaki was saying. “A whole world, slaughtered.”

Puppies, Jordan thought. They look like … puppies.

Not really, his rational mind countered. Puppies don't have six legs. Puppies don't sprawl in heaps and mounds of death.

Yet the inhabitants of that world reminded Jordan uncannily of prairie dogs or meerkats: puppies, really. Small and furry, with six limbs; four for walking, two for grasping. Jordan saw pincerlike hands at the ends of those upper limbs.

They had built cities, of a sort: aboveground structures made of sun-dried mud bricks, most of them no more than two stories high, although here and there a slender tower rose somewhat higher. They must have had a much more complex system underground, a warren of tunnels and dens. But they were intelligent enough to start building cities aboveground.

The cities were intact, undamaged, frozen in time. And all around them lay the intelligent creatures who had built them—dead, every one of them. Tongues lolling from their mouths, eyes staring blankly. They piled together as if trying to comfort one another, huddling instinctively in the last moments of their lives.

A whole world, utterly dead.

“The gamma radiation reached far enough belowground to kill those who remained in the tunnels,” Elyse Rudaki's voice was saying, choking back sobs. “Even the bacteria that normally decompose dead tissue were killed by the gamma radiation, so there's no rotting of the bodies. They're p-perfectly preserved.”

The planet orbited a greenish star, and its sky was a sickly pale gray. The satellite view moved across the landscape. Everything was dead. Jordan recognized what must have once been the equivalent of trees: bare, burned black, limbs twisted and pleading.

“Perhaps some of them survived the gamma wave,” Rudaki went on, “for a while. Maybe they were too deep underground for the radiation to reach them. But with all the vegetation dead, all the other animals killed, they couldn't have lasted very long.”

Jordan wanted to ask where this planet was, how far it was from Earth, when the death wave did its deadly work. But then he realized, What difference does it make? Nothing can change what happened there.

Rudaki was saying dolefully, “The astronomers here on New Earth have estimated that at least a million young civilizations have already been destroyed by the death wave.” Her voice nearly broke as she added, “Nothing can stop it.”

*   *   *

In Boston, Vera Griffin was sitting at the desk in her cubicle, staring up at the devilishly handsome Rudolfo Castiglione.

“Mr. Otero's personal assistant, Ms. Beauregard, told me to speak to you,” Castiglione was saying as he stood before her desk. As he spoke he quickly took in the cubicle's décor—or lack of it: bare partitions, a delicate little curved desk, a set of bookcases that were empty, two cushioned chairs that looked as if they'd been purchased from a discount furniture store.

Vera Griffin herself appeared to be young: quite slim, stylishly dressed and coiffed, her soft brown eyes studying him intently. Good, thought Castiglione. She can be charmed out of her shoes, no doubt. And out of her clothes, most likely.

Gesturing to one of the chairs, Griffin said, “Please make yourself comfortable. You said this is about the star traveler?”

Castiglione sat and leaned back casually. “Yes. Jordan Kell.”

“We're doing a show about him.”

“So I've heard.” Castiglione allowed his smile to contract slightly. “You know, he's a fugitive from custody.”

Her eyes went wide. “Really?”

“Yes. I'm trying to find him.”

“What's he done?”

Nonchalantly, Castiglione replied, “Oh, there are no criminal charges against him. The World Council decided to put him in protective custody after some terrorists made an attempt on his life.”

“They tried to kill him?”

“Yes. We want to protect him. It's for his own safety, you know.”

Griffin thought, What a show it would make if we could get an assassination attempt! Maybe we could re-create what actually happened. But a real attack would be terrific!

“So you see that it's important that we locate the man,” Castiglione was saying.

I'll have to tell Mr. Otero about this, Griffin realized. Maybe we should hire some security people.

Watching the emotions playing across her face, Castiglione said, “You do know where he is, don't you?”

Griffin actually flinched, as if he'd slapped her. “No, I don't,” she answered. Too quickly, in Castiglione's view.

“Really?”

“Really,” she said. Then, more slowly, “But perhaps Mr. Otero does. Let me ask him about it.”

His smile returning, Castiglione said, “Please do.”

Griffin went through the motions of phoning Otero's office, keeping the phone's handset to her ear, so Castiglione couldn't hear the other end of the conversation.

After a few seconds, Griffin nodded and said into the phone, “Okay. I'll come up at five o'clock.”

Castiglione nodded and smiled as he replaced the handset. “And perhaps after you've met with Otero you and I could have a drink together. I'm all alone here in Boston and I don't know anyone in town.”

Griffin smiled back and nodded. “That would be fine.”

I've got her, Castiglione said to himself. And she'll lead me to Kell, one way or the other.

 

BARCELONA

Aditi felt tired as she entered the sitting room of her apartment in the underground communications complex. She had spent the day with Frankenheimer, using the communicator implanted in her brain to contact Adri and others on New Earth.

The physiologist seemed rapt with delight as he studied the neutrino tomographs of Aditi's brain while she talked to people more than eight light-years distant. He traced circuits in her brain that interlaced with the natural network of neurons.

While Aditi grew more weary of the tests, Frankenheimer became more excited.

“Your communicator is made of neuronal tissue,” he exclaimed at the end of one hour-long call to New Earth.

Nodding, she agreed, “Yes, it is natural tissue, grown from stem cells just like the rest of my brain.”

“And it grows and develops just like the rest of your brain.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Of course,” Frankenheimer echoed. “It's just as natural as your heart's beating—to you.”