Cauldron of Ghosts (43 page)

Chapter 47

From long practice and experience, Triêu Chuanli had no trouble keeping his expression impassive as he moved through the havoc that had once been the headquarters—lair, it might be better to say—of Lower Radomsko’s most notorious gang. But in truth, he was a little shaken.

It wasn’t so much the blood and gore, by itself. A man didn’t rise to the position of Jurgen Dusek’s top lieutenant if he was squeamish or faint-hearted. No, it was the . . .

What
was
it exactly? Chuanli tried to pin down what was bothering him so much about the ruin and destruction. Everything seemed just a bit . . .

“Too clean,” he said.

He’d been speaking to himself, but two of the people who’d come with him were standing close enough to overhear.

Tamara Hess made a face. “You call this
clean
? I’m sure glad you’re not my janitor bot.”

The other person, Henry Copper, shook his head. “No, Tam, he’s right. Except ‘clean’ is off a little. I think ‘precise’ is the word you’re looking for, Triêu.”

That finally brought the whole scene into focus for Chuanli. He looked around the room buried deep within one of Lower Radomsko’s residential towers. This time, noting the location of the splatter and other details as if he were a forensic medical examiner investigating a crime scene.

Yes, Henry was right. Too precise. Too one-sided, also. It was a little hard to be certain because some of the bodies were badly damaged, even leaving aside the one that had been decapitated. But so far as Chuanli could tell not one of the five people in this room had had time to defend themselves—despite the plethora of weapons available. He was pretty sure that at least three of them had never even had time to get to their feet.

“Check the magazines on all the weapons,” he said. “I want to know if any of them were fired. And see if any are missing, as best you can.”

That last order would be largely guesswork, of course. Still, at least with sidearms, they could check the pistols against holsters. There might be some gun cases in one of the closets, too.

Between Tamara and Henry and the other people Chuanli had brought with him, the work was done within a few minutes.

“The only weapon fired in this room,” Henry reported, “was that guy’s.” He pointed to one of the corpses lying in a corner. “And from the look of the wound and the tear in the bottom of the holster, I think he shot himself in the foot without ever getting the gun clear.”

“Missing weapons?”

“No way to be sure, but none that I can see.”

Tamara chimed in. “Every body has a weapon associated with it except that of the woman over there. She had two, one of them a backup in her boot. Neither was fired.”

Chuanli nodded. “And the other rooms?” They’d found a total of nine corpses in the apartment complex.

“Same story,” said Henry. “One guy killed in the corridor coming out of the bathroom. Two of them killed in bed while they were—” He waved his hand. “The one in the front room . . .”

“We think he was on his feet and facing his killer,” said Tamara. “He’d drawn his pistol, too, looks like. But it was lying on the floor a couple of meters away, never fired.”

By now, Triêu had a rough picture of what must have happened. “So . . . One shooter comes in the front door by blowing it in with an explosive charge. They could do that because their target was too careless to keep a guard on duty in the corridor. That made one hell of a racket, which would have momentarily stunned everybody. He or she shoots the guard on duty in the front room and then moves into this room—what I’d call a living room if it weren’t such a pigsty—and guns down all five people here. Meanwhile, another party or parties blows in the wall connecting the kitchen to the corridor on the other side and clears the bedrooms. He shoots the couple while they’re screwing and takes down the last guy coming out of the toilet.”

He looked back and forth between Henry and Tamara. “Does that match what you saw?”

Both of them nodded.

“Is there any indication there were more than two shooters?”

They looked at each other and then shook their heads.

Chuanli whistled tunelessly. “Mary. Mother. Of. God.” He said the words slowly and evenly. “That means the shooter who came in the front had to move . . . really, really fast. And he—maybe she—couldn’t afford to miss at all. Given the time they had.”

He gave the room one last look and then headed for the door. “All right, let’s go. You never know. A police squad might actually come to investigate.”

Tamara snorted. “You mean, before the sun goes nova? Maybe four billion years from now?”

Chuanli didn’t argue the point. She could well be right. The police didn’t respond quickly anywhere in the seccy districts. In Lower Radomsko, they often didn’t bother responding at all.

* * *

“Our best people couldn’t have done that, Jurgen. Well, a bunch of us could—but two shooters? No way. At least one of them
has
to be military.” Chuanli shook his head. “And I mean with commando training and experience, or at least some sort of elite unit that does close assaults. The Marines, maybe.
Solarian
Marines, not those jackoffs calling themselves ‘marines’ that Mesa’s got.”

“Could be more than one,” Dusek mused. “I’m sure Watson has some sort of background. Maybe that big woman our surveillance team spotted, too.”

Neue Rostock’s head boss leaned back in his large and comfortable swivel chair, propped his feet up on the desk and clasped his hands over his belly. “All right, let’s think this through. The way I see it, we’re looking at three possibilities. The first one is the obvious one.”

“Watson’s trying to intimidate us as a prelude to a power grab.”

“Right. In support of that theory . . .” He nodded toward the large freezecube perched on the far corner of the desk. Visible in it, although the features were a little hard to make out because of the damage, was a head. Dusek had had the head identified as that of Willi the Chin, the (former) leader of the destroyed gang. The monicker had been bestowed on him because of a very prominent chin, but there was no evidence of it now. That feature had been mostly shot off the face, along with the left cheek and ear.

The freezecube had been delivered that morning by a street kid. They didn’t know which one because the kid had plopped the package on the landing, whistled at the two people standing guard at the entrance to Dusek’s inner sanctum some twenty meters away, and hurried off. They hadn’t pursued the kid because they’d been delayed by the necessity of checking to see if the package was a bomb. All they had were a couple of recordings taken by surveillance cameras, but they weren’t any help because the kid had disguised his features by some sort of shielding device that a street kid had no business being in possession of. Those things were expensive.

The package had come with a note.
With my compliments. Philip Watson.

“But that’s about the only thing supporting the theory. Tell me, Triêu—as a purely academic exercise since I’m sure this thought has never, ever, not even once crossed your mind—if you wanted to bring me down, is this how you’d start?”

Chuanli smiled. “Not unless I was an imbecile. I wouldn’t try to intimidate you at all. I’d just go for it straight. Now that I think about it—for the very very first time ever—it occurs to me that taking you out would be a risky enough enterprise without giving you advance warning to boot.”

Dusek nodded. “What I figured. As a threat, this is just stupid. And I don’t think Watson is stupid. So. That brings us to the second alternative. He really does intend to do what he implied he was doing—take over Lower Radomsko himself.”

He paused for a moment, contemplating the mangled and severed head in the freezecube.

“What’s wrong with that picture, Triêu?”

“They went after the wrong gang.” Dusek wasn’t surprised that the answer came instantly. Major seccy criminal organizations didn’t call it by that term, but they engaged in what military forces called contingency planning. He and Chuanli and several other of his close lieutenants had once spent a whole afternoon discussing how they might take Lower Radomsko, if they ever decided to do it.

“They should have hit either the Nessie Girls or the Rukken. Taking out Willi the Chin and his loony bin doesn’t get you anything. Well, a lot of good public relations with the people in the area, but that’s what they call a really intangible asset. The Willies were probably the freakiest gang in Lower Radomsko, just in terms of sheer viciousness and unpredictability. Civilians were scared to death of them. But either the Nessies or the Rukken were more powerful—and a lot more successful in business terms.”

“Right. And there’s this, too.” Dusek picked up a data chip lying on his desk. “It took a while to crack the codes, but we analyzed this after you left to check on what had happened to Willi the Chin.”

The data chip had been included in the package with the severed head. “So what is it?” Chuanli asked.

“Willi the Chin’s business records. All of them, so far as we can tell.”

“Ah.” Chuanli leaned back in his own chair and looked thoughtfully at the ceiling. “And so Theory Number 2 just got iced. Why in the world would Watson send us Willi the Chin’s records if he was planning to take over his business?”

He brought his eyes back down. “Okay, you’re the brains of the outfit. Why you’re the boss. You said there were three alternatives.”

“The third explanation is that Watson is establishing his credentials. His
bona fides,
as they say. He does in fact want to work with us, but it’s got little or nothing to do with Lower Radomsko.”

“What does it have to do with, then?”

“I haven’t got a clue.” Dusek lowered his feet to the floor and brought the seat to an upright position. “Whatever it is, though, it’s bound to be pretty . . . what’s the word? Spectacular, maybe? You don’t wipe out the craziest gang in Lower Radomsko just in order to prove you can run a small-time gambling operation. ”

Chuanli had his lips pursed in thought. “No, you don’t. All right. What do you want to do now?”

“I don’t think we need to do anything. Unless I’m badly mistaken, we’ll be hearing from Watson very soon. Asking for another meeting.”

“Do we agree?”

Dusek scratched behind his head. “Yes. We can always say ‘no’ to whatever he proposes.” He held up an admonishing finger. “One thing, though, Triêu. Tell him he can bring one—that’s it, one—person with him. And if it’s a woman, she’s got to be normal sized.”

* * *

When Hasrul brought back Dusek’s reply to his request for a second interview, Victor chuckled and showed it to Thandi.

“Guess I’ve been made,” she said.

“You think?” He looked at Cary, who’d come to check on Karen. “You’ll be coming with me.”

“If Chuanli is there, he’ll recognize me,” she protested.

“All the better. It’ll add to our mysterious aura.”

Thandi sniffed. “Is that what it’s called? Aura? I thought you were just making it up as you go.”

“Like I said. Mysterious aura.”

Chapter 48

As soon as Victor saw the three men emerging from the same entrance he and Cary were approaching, he felt a thrill run down his spine. This sort of sheer blind luck happened just as rarely in his line of work as anywhere else in the universe.

“D’you see those men?” he asked. He faced her and spoke softly, as if he were engaged in a conversation, but not in a whisper. Whispering was inherently melodramatic. It tended to draw attention where simple speech didn’t. The trick was knowing how to speak in a way that your lips couldn’t be read. That meant the words would be slurred a bit. What actually came out was closer to:
Yuh thee ose meh?
But they’d still be perfectly understandable to anyone close by.

Cary, although she was technically an amateur, had lots of experience with clandestine activity. Her tradecraft was as good as most professionals Victor had known. Her only response was a slight nod.

“Trip and fall when you get near them. Nothing fancy. Don’t get hurt.”

This time, she didn’t bother nodding.

As they drew near, Victor gave the approaching trio no more than a long glance. Nothing rude; just the sort of quick appraisal that a man such as he seemed to be would give people like them when they came into proximity. The same glance came back to him from two of the three men, the two obvious sidekicks. The shorter, slighter man in the middle didn’t look at him at all.

He did look at Cary, though, as did his two companions. Again, nothing rude; no gawking was involved. Nothing more than presumably heterosexual males in good health being idly appreciative of an attractive woman they weren’t familiar with. The gazes, if you could call them that, didn’t last more than a second or two.

When they were two meters away, Cary’s left foot seemed to catch on something on the floor. Happily for the subterfuge, the flooring in seccy quarters often
did
have minor imperfections. She squawked something meaningless—
urk!
more or less—made a desperate attempt to catch her stride—just as desperate as Victor’s awkward attempt to grab her arm—and went sprawling down on her hands and knees.

The reaction of the trio was smooth and instantaneous. The one in the middle stopped abruptly, poised to run; the one on the left stepped back a pace, his hand moving toward his jacket; the one on the right stood still and made the same hand gesture.

Victor also stopped abruptly. Then, without making a big show of it, he was careful to move forward slowly and deliberately while keeping both of his hands in plain sight. By the time he reached Cary and bent over to help her, he could sense the relaxation in the people opposite them.

What followed was not blind luck, just a validation of Victor’s quick gauge of likelihoods. It was pleasing to have one’s skill demonstrated, to be sure, but there was no thrilling sensation in the spine.

If he’d been the one to trip and fall, none of the men would have come to help. A young woman, on the other hand . . .

The bodyguard who hadn’t stepped back took Cary’s other arm and assisted Victor in getting her back on her feet. Victor gave him a quick glance. “Thank you, sir.” He already had Cary’s right arm in his left hand. Now his free hand came around to settle on her left arm just below the other man’s. The fellow smiled at Cary, gave Victor a nod, and stepped away.

Victor paid him no further mind. His concerned attention was now entirely on Cary. “Are you all right?” he asked. “That was a nasty fall.”

She shook her head. “I’m fine. A little shook up is all. I’m sure it looked worse than it was.”

By then, the trio had resumed their progress and were several meters away. One of the bodyguards turned back to look at them but Victor was careful to keep his eyes on Cary alone. It was essential that no suspicions be aroused by the incident.

Once they were ten meters off, he took Cary by the elbow and headed once again for the entrance to Jurgen Dusek’s complex. Two people, one male and one female, emerged from what must be recessed guard posts. Both of them were holding pulse rifles. The weapons were not aimed at anyone, but could obviously be brought to bear in an instant.

“And what was that all about?” she asked—also being careful not to move her lips much, he was pleased to see. The words came out as:
An wha was zat aw a-out?

“Tell you later,” was all he said. That seemed more appropriate than
Hallelujah!

* * *

The trip through the headquarters complex wasn’t as tortuous as the one that had gotten them there. They couldn’t possibly have managed that at all without being guided by one of Dusek’s kids—in this instance, a girl who looked to be about ten years old, although she conducted herself with a solemnity that more properly belonged to an elderly usher in an opera house.

“Not as tortuous,” though, still meant a maze of passageways—a maze that, the farther they progressed through it, was clearly designed for defensive purposes. This went far beyond the complexity you’d encounter in any gigantic residential/commercial edifice that had undergone the inevitable Brownian motion that affected the internal layout of such buildings when they’d been in existence for centuries. Anton had checked the records for Victor and discovered that this particular building had been erected in 1576 PD, almost three and a half centuries earlier. (“Erected in 1576”
actually meant “erected
by
1576.” Even with modern construction methods and materials, it took several years to put up an edifice this huge.)

Of course, some of the walls in ceramacrete buildings were load-bearing, and those were usually made of ceramacrete as well. Rearranging
those
walls was technically possible, but it was so difficult and required such specialized—and very expensive—equipment that it was rarely done. So, the original structural grid of the building tended to remain the same even over a period of centuries.

But the same was not true of other walls—or even floors. Ceramacrete was so strong and durable that it was actually more expensive to raze a large building made of the material than it was to erect it in the first place. As a result, such buildings once created were as permanent as any of the major geographical features of the surrounding countryside.

More
permanent, in fact. It would be easier and cheaper to level hills and small mountains, or drain swamps, or change the course of rivers—or even redesign small gulfs, bays and inlets—than it would be to level the ceramacrete constructions that made up the heart of any modern city.

The end result, over a long period of time, was that the interior of such edifices underwent a constant rearrangement within the fixed structure of the load-bearing grid. Modest apartments were replaced by larger and more expensive ones, or the converse; one type of shop was replaced by another that had different space or height requirements; corridors, auditoriums and interior parks were redirected or shifted, expanded or contracted—the process was never-ending.

In most modern societies, therefore, the laws regulating such (re)construction were strict and well-enforced. You not only needed a permit to undertake such a project, you needed to file—and maintain—your plans, diagrams and blueprints. In theory, even in the largest such building in existence, police or firefighters or medical personnel could find their way anywhere using their equipment’s computers to access the up-to-date data off the net.

Not so, however, in societies whose central authorities were weak or corrupt—or, as here on Mesa, simply didn’t care what second-class citizens did in their own districts.

That was foolish on their part, looked at from one direction—because it meant that if a major revolt
did
take place, the military forces trying to suppress the revolt would be forced to operate on the worst conceivable terrain. Thandi had told Victor that Solarian Marines dreaded nothing so much as having to engage in inner-city—not even that; inner-
edifice
—street fighting. The advantage was entirely on the side of the defenders, no matter how lightly armed—even if the attackers had access to up-to-date and accurate records of the interior layout. If they had to operate blind . . .

On most worlds, this wasn’t a huge problem. First, organized armies seldom met in pitched combat on inhabited planets because of the provisions of the Eridani Edict and the Deneb Accords. A planet was required by interstellar law to surrender when an opponent controlled orbital space around it; if it didn’t, then the attackers were allowed to use kinetic energy weapons against its planet-side defenders, and very few people were stupid enough to go up against KEWs. So armies—and Marines—were unlikely to encounter one another in that sort of urbanized terrain.

Second, very few guerrilla or terrorist organizations had the manpower to mount a coordinated defense of such a large tower. They could have all sorts of positional advantages, but if the attackers had the manpower and the technology to come at them from too many directions at once, that wouldn’t do them a great deal of use. That meant that even OFS police actions were unlikely to face that sort of challenge very often. As far as police organizations were concerned, they were usually quite good at taking down individual floors or even multifloor levels of towers, although the job got a lot harder if they didn’t know the lay of the land. On the other hand, most criminal organizations suffered from the same relatively low manpower levels as terrorists and guerrillas: it was simply very, very difficult for such organizations to match the sort of manpower and equipment a genuine government could throw at them.

And third, cities—on most of the really poor Verge worlds, at least—tended to sprawl horizontally rather than rise vertically. For all ceramacrete’s advantages as a construction material, it was by no means the cheapest. Or, rather, its
components
were (quite literally) “dirt cheap,” but the technology and technicians required to pour and fuse it were not. Urban centers, and the housing of the local elites, might well be of the latest design, using ceramacrete and counter-grav to reach the heights of any Core World city, but the natural lairs of criminals, outlaws, and terrorists tended to be found among the sheltering cover of the lower class and the outright poverty stricken. And as long as there was space available, which there usually was on Verge planets, the poor population would spread by erecting flimsy and rather low buildings, usually made of local materials that were the native analog for wood, stone, brick and thatch.

Buildings, in short, that a modern mechanized military force like the Solarian Marines could tear their way through easily.

Mesa was an exception. It was a highly advanced society whose cities—and especially the capital of Mendel—had been built along modern lines. But which, because of its peculiar social structure, had allowed a large portion of its population to ignore the law when it came to internal construction.

Why? Victor had pondered the problem when he first encountered it. Nothing he had seen or learned about the still-mysterious Alignment led him to think they were at all sloppy or haphazard in their planning or actions. So why would they have tolerated, all these centuries, such an obvious chink in their armor?

Eventually, he’d concluded that their seeming-carelessness stemmed from two factors. The first was the awkwardness—for them—of Mesa’s political structure. The planet’s regime was not a police state in the normal, so-called “totalitarian” sense of the term. (Victor always added
so-called
to the term because such societies were anything
but
“totalitarian” in the long run—as the Pierre-Saint-Just regime on Haven had just proven again. They rarely lasted more than one or two centuries and often collapsed in mere decades or even a few years.)

Mesa was a hybrid. For a very large minority of its population, the full citizens, it was fairly democratic, egalitarian and ruled by law. True, it had a corporate political structure rather than that of a republic like Haven or a constitutional monarchy like the Star Empire—but so did Beowulf and any number of star nations which no one considered authoritarian or repressive. Moreover, however constrained the political power of the citizenry might be, their personal liberties were generally respected.

Not so for the seccies, of course, much less the outright slaves. The slaves could be controlled directly by their own masters. There were twice as many slaves as there were free citizens on Mesa, but that ratio was not historically unusual for slave-based societies. The ratio between Spartans and helots had been considerably worse, almost eight-to-one, and the ratio of slaves to owners and overseers on Caribbean plantations had been even more extreme. But the advantages of better organization and communication and an effective monopoly on weapons—at least, beyond the level of blades and clubs—made their rule quite secure.

There was the occasional example of successful slave revolts, like the one on ancient Haiti. But such revolts were few and far between. In their great majority, throughout history, slave revolts had been mercilessly crushed.

But what did they do with seccies, who constituted a full ten percent of the population? Seccies had no direct and immediate owners to oversee them, which meant the authorities would have to do it. Such a responsibility, however, quickly becomes impossible for normal-sized police and regulatory agencies. Law-enforcement has to be
self-
enforced to be workable, in most societies. The great majority of people obey the laws not because they fear punishment but because they acquiesce. They usually agree with the laws—most of them, anyway—and see them as being in their own interests. The first line of enforcement is their personal conscience and the second line is not a policeman’s citation or an arrest, it is the social disapproval of friends, family and neighbors.

Which carried the problem back full circle. The only way to really control the seccies would have been to set up a full-blown police state—but that would have brought all the problems of such a regime. Time after time, since the rise of literate and industrial civilization, “totalitarian” states had proven themselves to be extremely brittle, however hard and impervious they might appear at any one time. Would the people who’d created the Alignment—people who were not only shrewd and intelligent but also thought in terms of
centuries
—have chosen that option?