Death Wave (32 page)

*   *   *

The security team hurried Jordan, his hand pressed to his bleeding side, to the small infirmary on a lower floor of the Otero Network building.

Walking beside Jordan, Hamilton Cree said, “It doesn't look too bad.”

Jordan thought of Mercutio's line from
Romeo and Juliet
and quoted, “‘No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door…'”

“If I had reacted faster…”

“You did fine,” Jordan said. “Is he … did you kill him?”

Cree shook his head. “Nerve jangler. Paralyzed him. We're not allowed to carry lethal weapons.”

“But they do.”

One of the other security men, older, grimmer, said, “The three of those nitwits carried their gun in separate pieces, mostly plastic. Didn't set off the scanner alarm. Then they put it together once they were seated in the studio.”

“Who are they? Why did they want to kill me?”

“We'll find out, don't worry.”

A registered nurse and a diagnostic robot were waiting for them at the one-room infirmary.

“I don't think it's very bad,” Jordan said to the nurse.

“Let's see,” she said.

They laid him on the examining table and cut away his blood-soaked shirt. The robot ran its metal arm, filled with beeping, chirping sensors, up and down Jordan's body.

“No internal injuries,” its synthesized voice pronounced.

The nurse bent over Jordan's abdomen, a tweezers in one hand. “This may twinge a bit,” she muttered.

It did twinge, but only for a moment. The nurse held up the tweezers, a bloody sliver of wood in its grip.

Hamilton Cree said, “He had a semiautomatic pistol. Got off three shots. Two of 'em hit the lectern and shattered it. You got hit by a splinter.”

“And that's it?” Jordan asked.

“That's it,” said the nurse, beaming happily.

Carlos Otero burst into the tiny room. “Jordan, you're a hero! That idiot was firing at you and you stood there, strong as a rock. A hero!”

Jordan confessed, “I was too petrified to move.”

Otero laughed heartily. “It all went out live, every damned network in the solar system is rerunning it.”

“What about the shooter?”

“The police have him and his two girlfriends,” said the elder Unicorn man. “They'll fill 'em with babble juice and get to the bottom of this.”

“Every newsman in the solar system wants to interview you, Jordan,” Otero said. “McKinley's people are going crazy fielding all the calls.”

“No,” said Jordan. Before Otero could react, he went on, “I've been too badly wounded to be interviewed. You're taking me to a private hospital. No visitors.”

Otero's mouth popped open, but it was Cree who caught on first. “Perfect cover. We sneak you onto a shuttle, incognito, and take you to the
Gandhi
habitat.”

“And we start now,” Jordan said.

 

PREPARATIONS

“You speak Hindi?” asked the elder security man.

Jordan nodded, bringing a frown to the makeup woman's round face.

“A little,” he answered. “Enough to get along.” And he remembered the war in Kashmir. The war I was supposed to stop. The war that killed Miriam. The memory of his wife's death brought a stab of pain, but it was muted, softened, almost as if it had happened to someone else, in another life. Still, the pain lurked there.

The makeup woman complained, “You've got to keep still. Otherwise you'll smear the color.”

“Sorry,” Jordan said, properly sheepish.

He was sitting in the barber's chair in the Otero building's makeup room. The other two chairs were empty and the only people in the room besides Jordan and the makeup woman were a trio of Unicorn agents. More security people were out in the corridor, guarding the door.

As far as the general public was concerned, Jordan Kell had been seriously injured by the assassination attempt and was being whisked to a private medical facility, under heavy guard. Actually, he had never left the Otero building.

The heavyset woman stepped back to survey her handiwork. Jordan looked into the mirror and saw that his face was now as dark as a native Gujarati's and his silver hair had been transformed into deep black. His cheekbones had been sharpened, made more angular.

The elder Unicorn agent pulled a small black box from his jacket pocket, saying, “These contact lenses will show the proper retinal patterns to the scanners when you go through customs on
Gandhi
. The machines will think you're Lakshmi Ramajandran, a Unicorn employee who's vacationing at the habitat.”

“He's a security man?”

The agent made a sour face. “He's an accountant, a bean counter.”

Looking at the image of the real Ramajandran on the viewscreen set up on the shelf beneath the wall mirror, Jordan muttered, “I hope you don't have to break my nose.”

“Nope,” said the makeup woman. “Just a little prosthesis and you'll look just as ugly as he is.”

*   *   *

Gilda Nordquist was not accustomed to being stonewalled.

“Surely you could at least tell me where Mr. Kell has been taken,” she said to the image on her phone screen.

The flinty-eyed Unicorn executive replied evenly, “I'm sorry, ma'am, but we feel it's necessary to keep Mr. Kell under wraps, for the time being.”

“But I represent the World Council,” Nordquist reminded him, trying to keep the frustration from showing in her face or her tone. “We can demand that you reveal his whereabouts.”

The man hiked his thin brows a little. “I suppose you could ask Mr. Otero himself, or maybe go to the International Court of Justice and—”

“That would take days, perhaps even weeks.”

“For what it's worth,” the man said, “Mr. Kell has agreed to our arrangements.” A trace of a smile curled the corners of his mouth. “Apparently, he doesn't want you people to put him in protective custody.”

“But he agreed to come to our facility on the space habitat, to be with his wife.”

The man shook his head. “He's not going anywhere. Not for a while, at least.”

Nordquist abruptly cut the connection, thinking, Now I'll have to get a team to ferret out Kell's location. And what then? Can the Americans keep him out of our hands? I'll have to ask the legal department about that.

And, she knew, she'd have to tell Anita Halleck about this latest kink in the road. Too bad the assassin didn't kill the troublesome sonofabitch.

*   *   *

In the headquarters of the Boston Police Department, local and federal police detectives crowded the three interrogation rooms where the would-be assassin and his two female companions had been taken. A trio of World Council security agents were also there, one in each room.

Nick Motrenko still looked woozy from the paralysis charge that Cree had fired into his neck. A matronly Boston Police Department nurse brandished a hypospray syringe, while one of the detectives rolled up Motrenko's sleeve.

“Whass that?” Motrenko mumbled.

“Just something to wake you up,” said the detective.

“It won't hurt a bit,” the nurse reassured him.

Motrenko flinched when the cold metal touched his skin, but once the stimulant hissed into his bloodstream he perked up; his eyes focused on the men and women around him.

“Did I get him?”

“Clean miss,” said one of the detectives.

“You're a lousy shot, kid.”

“I never fired a gun before,” Motrenko admitted.

“You blasted the lectern pretty good.”

“But I didn't kill him.”

“Why'd you want to kill him?”

Motrenko looked up at them with disbelief. “Why? He's a traitor! He's selling us out to the aliens!”

The World Council agent leaned in between a pair of Boston detectives and asked stonily, “What makes you think that?”

Within half an hour they got Nick's story of Jordan Kell's selling out the human race and the impending alien takeover. Motrenko earnestly pleaded with them to “do something” about the coming alien invasion. It wasn't until he realized that they all thought he was slightly daft that he thought to claim his rights and demand a lawyer.

*   *   *

By nightfall Jordan and three Unicorn agents—including Hamilton Cree—were at Logan Aerospaceport, lining up to board the rocket shuttle that would take them to habitat
Gandhi
. They were all traveling as tourists. Jordan saw that Cree was several places ahead of him in line, the other two agents were behind him.

The Unicorn men were all in casual clothes: colorful short-sleeved shirts and trim dark slacks. Jordan was dressed as a Gujurati workingman, in a hip-length white tunic and slightly baggy tan slacks.

He placed his travel visa on the electronic scanner's plate, then stood before the optical scanner that registered his retinal pattern. Despite himself, he held his breath. The machine beeped and flashed a green light. Suppressing a grin, Jordan headed down the access tube that led to the shuttle's main hatch.

This was an overnight flight that accelerated at slightly less than one
g
halfway to its destination, then decelerated to a zero-
g
rendezvous with the gigantic habitat. Before liftoff the passengers had to watch a safety video that emphasized they would experience weightlessness—near-zero gravity—only for the few minutes of turnaround and during the final approach to the habitat's air lock.

The shuttle lifted off with a shuddering roar that pressed Jordan deep into his cushioned seat. The video screen built into the seatback in front of him showed the Earth falling away. The sky turned from blue to black, and in a few minutes the vibrations smoothed out and he felt comfortable again.

“We're on course and on time,” came the captain's reassuring voice. “Next stop: habitat
Gandhi
.”

Most of the passengers cranked their seats back and tried to sleep. The woman next to him slipped a blindfold over her eyes, Jordan saw.

He tilted his seat back and slid a set of smart glasses over his eyes. Their frames included tiny speakers that he could hear through bone conduction. To the travelers around him, Jordan seemed to be drowsing off.

But actually he was waiting for Aditi to call him.

 

INTELLIGENCE

“You've had a long day,” said Frankenheimer.

“So have you,” Aditi replied.

They were sitting together at a table in the small dining room on the ground floor of the building where Frankenheimer and his team had set up their equipment. Between them, the crumbs and crusts of their dinners lay on a clutter of plates; their glasses were nearly empty. The room was deserted except for the two of them. Robots had placed the chairs on the tops of all the other tables and wet-vacuumed the rest of the floor. Now a single robot stood by the door to the kitchen, silently waiting for them to leave.

Frankenheimer smiled tiredly. It made his roundish face look like a teenaged boy's, Aditi thought.

“A long day,” he said, “but a very successful one.”

“You've confirmed the measurement?”

“More than seventy-five thousand times the speed of light,” he said, awe in his voice. “Seventy-five
thousand
times faster than light! That's how fast your communications travel.”

Nodding, Aditi said, “Back on New Earth, one of the physicists told me that once you break through the light-speed barrier, there's no physical limit to how fast information can be transmitted.”

“Seventy-five thousand,” Frankenheimer repeated, as he reached for his wineglass. He drained it, put it down on the tabletop with a thump, then pushed his chair back and got to his feet, a trifle unsteadily.

“I don't know about you, ma'am, but I'm going to sleep. Tomorrow we repeat the test and see if we get the same results.”

Aditi rose also, smiling as she said, “Good night, then.”

“G'night.” And he toddled off, leaving Aditi alone.

She watched him go, then turned and said to the robot standing patiently by the wall, “You can clean up now.”

The robot stirred to life and trundled toward the table. Aditi headed for the door and her own bedroom, on the top floor of the building.

Time to call Jordan, she said to herself.

*   *   *

Jordan had nearly drowsed off when he heard Aditi whispering his name.

“Are you there?” he whispered back. He looked sharply at the passenger next to him; she was deeply asleep. Good, he thought.

“I'm here, dearest.” And Aditi's image took form in the smart glasses he was wearing.

“Where are you?”

“In the habitat. Frankenheimer and his staff have commandeered a whole building to conduct their experiments. But where are you?”

“In a shuttle rocket, heading toward you.”

“Really?” The delight in her voice thrilled Jordan.

“Really,” he said.

“How soon? When will you get here?”

“We're scheduled to dock at ten in the morning, your time.”

“Wonderful!”

“But it's a very large habitat. I need to know exactly where you are.”

Aditi's smile thinned. “By ten
A.M.
we'll be doing more tests of the communicator that Frankenheimer has built. I'll try to include you into the receiving loop.”

“You can do that?”

“I think so. I'll try.”

“Then I can track you,” Jordan said.

“Yes. Right.”

“If not I'll tear down the whole habitat until I find you.”

She laughed. “You're bringing an army with you?”

“Three men.”

“I don't think that will be enough.”

Glancing at the woman sleeping beside him once again, Jordan asked, “How many security people are guarding you?”