Death Wave (33 page)

“Only a few,” said Aditi. “Not more than six, I think. They believe that keeping me on this habitat, so far from Earth, is good-enough protection.”

“Not for long,” Jordan promised.

*   *   *

Rudolfo Castiglione was not accustomed to being rebuffed. To begin with, he chose his women carefully. Like a shark searching for prey, he sensed the inner vibrations of a woman who was vulnerable to his charm. Old or young, rich or poor, as long as they were physically desirable he knew he could put up with their emotional quirks and demands. After all, these encounters were not intended to last long. Ships that pass in the night, he thought. Or fish that feed the prowling shark.

Yet this alien woman had rebuffed him, in no uncertain terms. His cheek still stung from the memory of the slap she had given him. His pride stung still more.

Well, it's been long enough, he thought. I've escorted her here to the dismal space habitat. I've been the perfect gentleman. While she's been spending her days with Dr. Frankenheimer and his geeks, I've allowed her to spend her nights alone.

An interesting woman. No matter how we bug her quarters, within a minute of her entering the rooms all the sensors go dead. A pity. It would have been interesting to watch her shower and prepare for bed. Perhaps even informative.

Tomorrow night I shall try again. I will be pleasant and witty. She must be lonely. I will console her. I will tell her that I am lonely, too. I will ask her out to dinner, take her to the finest restaurant in this dreary space settlement. There must be a place that doesn't specialize in that overspiced Indian cuisine. A nice Italian restaurant, or even a French one. We will drink wine. We will be friends, two lonely souls cast away, far from home.

I will make her mine. One way or the other. I will remove the memory of that slap.

He smiled inwardly. The shark is circling its prey, he thought. And coming closer with each circle.

 

COUNTERINTELLIGENCE

“It's good of you to meet with me,” said Gilda Nordquist.

“I'm always happy to cooperate with the authorities,” Vera Griffin replied in her meekest little girl voice.

Nordquist was in Barcelona and Griffin in her office in the Otero Network building in downtown Boston. Yet the holographic viewers in their respective offices made it appear that they were in the same room, seated facing each other from behind their respective desks.

They made a dissimilar pair: Nordquist the blond, broad-shouldered female Viking warrior; Griffin the elfin, stylishly dressed child-woman, looking concerned, troubled, almost frightened.

“You were the producer of Jordan Kell's news interview,” Nordquist stated. It wasn't a question.

“That's right.”

“You witnessed the assassination attempt.”

“Yes, I did. From the control booth, up above the studio floor.”

“But you saw the whole thing.”

“Yes, of course.”

“You could identify the shooter?”

Griffin allowed a small smile to break her mask of vulnerability. “We have it all recorded. The local police already have a copy of the whole incident.”

“Please forward a copy to me, personally,” said Nordquist.

“Certainly.”

“Where is Mr. Kell now?” Nordquist tried to ask that key question in the same tone as all the others, but Griffin noted a slight rise in the intensity of her voice.

“I don't know,” Griffin answered honestly. “Mr. Otero himself has taken charge of his whereabouts.”

“He's in a hospital?”

“Mr. Otero told me that he's in a private medical facility.”

“In the Boston area?”

“I presume so.”

“With private security guards.”

“Yes.”

Nordquist hesitated, her eyes flicking to the screens off to one side of the 3-D viewer. Eye movement, vocal intonation, body tremors: apparently Griffin was telling the truth.

“How badly hurt was he?”

Griffin hesitated. This is the World Council asking the questions, she knew. Mr. Otero viewed the World Council as a pack of collectivists working to destroy American freedoms and establish a dictatorship across the whole solar system. Yet Griffin herself looked on the World Council as the force of international law, of stability and order, of safety despite the enormous upheavals of the climate shift.

And, perhaps, the World Council represented an opportunity for her to advance her career.

She answered, “From what I could see, he didn't seem so badly wounded. I mean, he walked with the security people to the elevator and then along the hallway to the infirmary. They didn't have to carry him or call for a stretcher or anything like that.”

“But he was wounded?”

“His shirt looked bloody, from what I could see. But he stayed on his feet the whole time.”

“How close did you get to him?”

“I rushed down to the infirmary, but the security people wouldn't let me in.”

Nordquist's pale blue eyes narrowed. “Was Mr. Otero there?”

“Not then. A little later, I think. He went down to the infirmary, and then the security guards took Mr. Kell away.”

“To the hospital.”

Nodding, Griffin replied, “That's what they told me.”

Pouncing on the slight uncertainty in her reply, Nordquist snapped, “You don't believe that?”

Griffin hesitated. The last thing she wanted to do was to make Otero angry with her. But the next-to-last thing was to give this World Council woman some excuse to arrest her.

“I … I'm not sure,” she said, reverting to her little girl voice.

“What do you mean?”

“I don't really know, but…”

“But what?”

“There were a bunch of security people in the hallway just outside the makeup room,” Griffin said. “About a half hour after the shooting. Maybe more like forty-five minutes after.”

“In front of the makeup room?”

“I don't know why, but they wouldn't let anybody in there.”

“And where was Kell at that time?”

“Still in the infirmary, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“I don't know. There were security people all over the place. They wouldn't let anybody near Mr. Kell.”

Nordquist kept on asking questions and Griffin kept on being cooperative, but it was clear that she didn't know anything more.

After closing down the link to Boston, Nordquist rocked back in her commodious swivel chair, thinking: Kell didn't seem that badly injured. Somebody was in the makeup room. What if they whisked Kell from the infirmary to the makeup room? Why? To disguise him.

What if they didn't take him to a hospital? Instead, Otero helped ferret him out of the building. To go where?

The answer leaped up in Nordquist's mind. He's gone to habitat
Gandhi
! He's gone to get his wife away from us!

 

HABITAT GANDHI

“This is
big,
” said Hamilton Cree.

He and his two cohorts were standing with Jordan just inside the entryway to the interior of the cylindrical habitat. Before them stretched kilometer after kilometer of tidy green fields, with streams meandering through them and little villages standing like toy towns here and there. Off in the hazy distance the fields ended at what looked like a huge metal cap, but the fields rose up and curved overhead in a complete circle.

Their guide, an almost painfully thin, gray-haired, dark-skinned Bengali, smiled brightly. “It is an inside-out world,” he said, in lilting English. Pointing to the long, bright window that ran the length of the cylinder, he added, “Welcome the new day and your arrival in habitat
Gandhi
.”

Jordan replied in Hindi, “Thank you.”

The guide's smile got even brighter. “It is nothing.”

It was unusual to see a person who looked so old. Jordan wondered if the man's religious beliefs forbade rejuvenation therapies. Whatever his age, he seemed sprightly enough as he led them to a gaudily colored minibus. There was no driver; the bus was fully automated. Jordan took the front seat, hoping their guide wouldn't test his Hindi vocabulary too far. The guide sat on the opposite side of the aisle while Cree and the other two security agents took seats behind them.

“We are going to a very fine hotel,” said the guide, after telling the voice-recognition system their destination. “Very fine indeed.”

The practically noiseless electric engine started up and they were on their way through the gracefully curving roads that threaded from village to village, heading for the biggest town in the habitat and the very fine hotel they'd been booked into.

By noon Jordan had unpacked his meager travel bag and was pacing his hotel room impatiently. He had removed the prostheses that the makeup woman had applied, and thoroughly washed up. Lakshmi Ramajandran was gone; Jordan Kell had reappeared.

There was a holographic viewer on one wall of his hotel room, but Aditi had not contacted him. Nor did he pick up any signal from the communications test that she was involved in.

She's probably surrounded by the technical team she's been working with, he told himself. Be patient.

Still, he paced nervously.

The room's phone buzzed. Startled, Jordan called out, “Answer!”

Cree's somber face appeared on the phone's screen. “We're ready to move whenever you give the word,” he said.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, Jordan replied, “I have no idea when the word might come through. You might as well go out and see the local sights. I'll call you if anything turns up.”

Cree shrugged. “Not much of a town. Shouldn't take more than ten minutes to take in the local sights.”

With a sardonic smile, Jordan said, “I'm sure you'll find something interesting. I'll stay here and wait for a call.”

*   *   *

“He's gone to the habitat?” asked Anita Halleck.

Nordquist said, “I'm sure of it.”

Halleck was on her way to a committee meeting. Nordquist paced alongside her down the long, crowded corridor, followed by a phalanx of Halleck's aides and sycophants. The two women made a striking sight: Halleck youthfully vigorous, sleek, long-legged, wearing a trousered suit of royal blue, her chestnut hair coiled atop her head; Nordquist several centimeters taller, athletically built, blond braids hanging down her back, pale-eyed, in a glittering metallic sheath.

“Why would he go to the habitat?” Halleck demanded. “He agreed to let us take him there.”

“He went on his own so he could find his wife and get her away from us,” Nordquist answered.

“You're sure of this? You have evidence?”

Without breaking stride, Nordquist shook her head. “Just a hunch, but it all adds up. We're checking the passenger manifests and the visual imagery of everyone who boarded a shuttle for
Gandhi
since yesterday.”

“The time of the shooting.”

“That's right.”

Halleck fell silent for several hurried strides. Then, “If you find any shred that he's already gone to the habitat, any speck of evidence at all, I want you to take a team up there and
find him
!”

“I should put a team together and go to the habitat right now. No sense wasting time. I can still review the passenger lists while I'm on the way.”

“How long would it take you to get there?”

“High-priority flight? Six hours, maybe less.”

“That fast?”

“It'd be a high-
g
boost,” Nordquist said. With just a hint of a smile she added, “The guys won't like it. They're always worried about straining their testicles.”

Halleck smiled back at her. “Do it.”

*   *   *

Castiglione was bored by the scientists' work. It's like watching a Wagner opera, he thought: hours of tedium interrupted by moments of brilliance.

The tedium was getting on his nerves.

Frankenheimer and his aides were tinkering with an assemblage of equipment that was far beyond Castiglione's understanding or interest. That pile of junk is supposed to do the same things that Aditi can do in her head? he wondered.

Aditi was sitting quietly in one corner of the cluttered room, while Frankenheimer and his people puttered around the incomprehensible heap of electronic hardware scattered across a tabletop. Something had gone wrong with their first attempt to communicate with their colleagues back in Barcelona, and now the nerds were frantically replacing microscopic components and thumbnail-sized circuit chips.

Aditi watched patiently, her lips moving now and then. She's talking to her people on New Earth, Castiglione realized. Eight light-years away, and she's having a conversation with them.

So what? he asked himself. Tonight she's going to have a conversation with me. And I'll be much closer to her than her friends on New Earth.

*   *   *

Still pacing impatiently in his hotel bedroom, Jordan was startled to see Adri's seamed, bald face appear in the holographic viewer. The old man seemed to be sitting in a park somewhere in the aliens' city on New Earth.

“Friend Jordan.”

“Adri! This is a surprise.”

“I'm afraid it still takes an hour or so for your words to reach me, so if you don't mind, I will tell you what Aditi wants you to know,” Adri said, in his slightly sibilant, paper-thin voice.

Jordan nodded.

“By the way, your brother Brandon sends his regards, as do the others of your group.”

Good, Jordan replied silently. But what of Aditi?

As if he could read Jordan's mind, Adri went on, “Aditi is well, but the communication device that your scientists have built has broken down. They are trying to fix it. That's why she hasn't contacted you directly.”

Relief washing through him, Jordan asked, “Can you show me where in the habitat she is located?” Then he mentally kicked himself, realizing that Adri wouldn't hear the question for an hour.