Death Wave (17 page)

“Perhaps,” Rudaki conceded. “But it seems to me that all he wants is for us to build a few starships.”

“He wants to control the World Council,” Halleck snapped. Before Rudaki could react she went on, “And his alien wife holds the secret of faster-than-light communications—as you yourself pointed out at the last Council meeting.”

“According to Kell, the aliens are quite willing to give us such technology.”

“He told you that?”

“We had a long conversation last night. He does not appreciate your attempts to keep him under your thumb. Nor your separating him from his wife.”

“That can't be helped.”

“Can't it? My sainted old grandmother used to tell me you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”

Halleck went silent for a moment, studying Rudaki's face. “What are you suggesting?”

“Nothing,” the professor answered. “Only that it would be better to have Kell's willing cooperation than to make an enemy of him, don't you think?”

“His willing cooperation.”

“Unite him with his wife. From what he tells me, the aliens on New Earth will willingly explain their FTL communications technology to us.”

Halleck slowly nodded, but she was thinking, This man doesn't understand anything. I can't let Kell be reunited with his wife. If they can take control of every broadcast channel in the solar system, what else might he be capable of doing with her helping him? No, they've got to be kept separate.

Rudaki was watching her with an expectant smile on his usually dour face. Makes him look like an old clown, Halleck thought. He's sheltered Kell. He probably knows where Kell's gone, although he denies it.

She let out a long, sighing breath. “Perhaps you're right, Professor,” Halleck said. “Perhaps I have been overly cautious. If Kell is willing to cooperate…” She let the thought dangle.

“I'm sure he will, if you allow him to be with his wife,” Rudaki assured her.

“But we don't know where Kell is,” Halleck pointed out. “How can we bring about this reunion if we don't know where he is?”

Rudaki started to answer, but hesitated before speaking a word. He's thinking it over, Halleck judged. He knows where Kell has gone, but he's not going to tell me. Not willingly.

The professor finally said, “Perhaps you should try contacting the other men who returned from New Earth with him. If anyone knows where Kell is, one of them is the most likely.”

Halleck nodded. “Yes. Of course.”

But she was thinking, You know where he's gone, little man. And you're going to tell me.

*   *   *

The brain scan was completed in less than a minute. Aditi sat up straight as Castiglione came to her, looking unhappy.

“Your husband has disappeared,” he said, his voice flat, almost accusing.

“Disappeared?” Aditi asked.

“Apparently he just walked out of the hotel we had put him in, right past an entire team of security guards.”

Aditi kept her face from smiling, but inwardly she exulted, Jordan's gotten away from them!

A sly smile sneaking across his face, Castiglione asked, “Would you happen to know where he might have gone?”

She shook her head and answered as innocently as she could, “I haven't the faintest idea.”

It was difficult to keep from laughing.

Frankenheimer, meanwhile, was staring at the three-dimensional image of Aditi's brain.

“Where's your communicator?” he asked. “There's no device showing.”

Glad of the opportunity to change the subject, Aditi got up from the recliner and stepped to the neurophysiologist's side. “You're looking for an artificial mechanism,” she said. “The system is composed of neural fibers, the same as my brain cells.”

His boyish face twisting into a frown, Frankenheimer grumbled, “Then how am I supposed to see what the device is?”

Castiglione bent over Frankenheimer's other shoulder. “It's not an artificial device?”

“It's not a
natural
device,” Aditi corrected. “But it's composed of the same type of cells as the rest of my brain: neurons, glial cells, the rest.”

For the first time since she'd met him, Frankenheimer looked annoyed. “Then how am I supposed to see what the device is like?”

Aditi pursed her lips for a moment, then replied, “Perhaps, if you allow me to work your imager…”

“You could highlight the communicator's cells?”

“I can try,” she said.

Frankenheimer got up from the little wheeled chair. “Go right ahead,” he said.

Aditi took the chair. Frankenheimer unclipped the pin mike from his shirt and handed it to her.

As he started to explain the voice-activated control system, Aditi said, “I watched you working it. I think I understand how to do it.”

Frankenheimer glanced at Castiglione, then answered, “Very well. Go right ahead.”

Standing behind Aditi, Castiglione frowned unhappily. Kell just waltzes away from the team that was supposed to be holding him, and she can operate the imager after merely watching Frankenheimer use it for a few minutes.

That's eerie. These people are … frightening.

 

CHICAGO

“All this is yours?” Jordan asked.

“That it is,” said Thornberry, with a happy smile. “That it is.”

They had just stepped out of the elevator that had carried them to the fiftieth floor of a downtown Chicago office building. Jordan saw that Thornberry Enterprises, Ltd., took up the entire floor, from one sweeping windowall to the other, opposite. The area was open, no partitions between the desks and workstations, and plenty of space between them. Men and women were sitting at individual stations or clustered in little groups around circular conference tables. A few were standing beside a row of food- and drink-dispensing machines, chatting pleasantly.

“It's quiet,” Jordan remarked.

“Ah, that's the acoustic oscillators' doing. Damps down the sounds of conversations, y'know. And we use low-power energy screens instead of walls and partitions. That's better, don't you think?”

He started to lead Jordan across the wide room, nodding and greeting his employees more like a friendly paterfamilias than a corporate boss. No one paid any special attention to Jordan. They all seemed relaxed, cheerful.

Jordan felt pleased with the informality, the lack of hierarchy. Then he noticed a row of bigger, more imposing desks along the far wall, next to a broad window that looked out on Lake Michigan.

Leading him toward one of the unoccupied desks, Thornberry said, “Officer country.” Pointing, “That's my desk, there.”

Jordan felt a brief tingle as they came up to his desk, and all the buzzing hum of conversations cut off. Energy screens instead of walls, he realized. Quite effective. I suppose Mitch could make the screens go opaque if he wanted to.

“This is where I do me deep thinking,” said Thornberry. Instead of sitting behind the desk, he plopped himself in one of the softly yielding upholstered chairs arranged in front of it. Jordan sat next to him.

“Very impressive, Mitch,” he said.

“'Tis rather grand, isn't it?” Thornberry said, grinning happily. Waving toward his employees on the other side of the energy screen, he said, “They do the work and I rake in the profits. Capitalism at its best.”

Jordan laughed with him. Then he asked, “Which group is working on your propulsion ideas? I'd like to talk with them.”

“Ah, that'd be the physicists. They're not here. I've got them in their own location, where they can argue and quarrel with each other without bothering anyone.”

“And do experiments without endangering anyone but themselves.”

“That too,” said Thornberry. His smile fading, he said, “I wish Aditi could give them an education in physics the way she did me. An hour or so in her teaching machine and I learned centuries' worth of physics, just like that.” He snapped his fingers.

“Maybe we can build such teaching machines here,” Jordan said.

“Not before I get a patent for them!”

“The rich get richer.”

“Money buys power, Jordan me lad. And power is what you need to fight against Halleck and her World Council.”

“I don't want to fight against her,” Jordan insisted. “I just want to be with Aditi—and to start them to prepare for the death wave.”

Thornberry's usual little smile vanished. Very seriously, he asked, “You'll be willing to give Halleck the FTL communications technology?”

“Certainly.”

Thornberry drummed his fingertips against his thigh for a moment. Then, “I wonder if she'll be satisfied with that.”

Jordan understood. “Give her an inch and she'll want a mile.”

“I shouldn't be surprised.”

“So we should offer the communications technology to the full Council, not to her alone.”

“That might help.”

“And only after Aditi is back with me.”

Thornberry nodded. “She'll probably want your promise not to go to the news media again.”

“But, Mitch, I've got to let the people—”

The phone console on Thornberry's desk interrupted, “Incoming call from Chairwoman Halleck, sir.”

Jordan felt a pang of alarm. Does she know I'm here? Does she have Mitch's offices bugged? Then a new fear struck him. Has Mitch betrayed me?

“Audio only,” Thornberry said, his tone dark, hard.

Anita Halleck's three-dimensional image took form between Thornberry's desk and the window, solid and completely realistic. She appeared to be sitting in her own office in Barcelona.

“Mr. Thornberry,” she said, almost pleasantly. “Is there something wrong with your video?”

“We're working on it,” Thornberry replied, in a flat, almost dismissive tone.

“I see,” Halleck said.

Jordan hoped that she didn't.

In a somewhat lighter manner, Thornberry asked, “To what do I owe the honor of your call, Madame Chairwoman?”

Her dark eyes narrowing slightly, Halleck said, “We're trying to locate Jordan Kell. He left the hotel we had him quartered in and—
poof!—
he's disappeared.”

“Really?”

“We don't know where he is and, naturally, we are concerned for his safety.”

“Naturally.”

“Has he contacted you?”

Thornberry glanced at Jordan, then replied, “He hasn't called me. Not at all.”

Halleck frowned slightly. “I see. Well, if he does, please tell him that we're terribly concerned about him. We wouldn't want anything to happen to him.”

“Of course not,” Thornberry said. Then, with a crooked little grin, he asked, “And Mrs. Kell? I presume she's with him?”

“No. She's here, in Barcelona. She's quite safe.”

That means they've got her in their hands, Jordan thought.

“Well now,” said Thornberry, “if Jordan calls me I'll be sure to tell him that you're worried about him.”

“You do that,” said Halleck. And her image disappeared.

Thornberry scowled at the empty air. Turning to Jordan, he growled, “She'll have her security goons crawling over this place before another hour passes. We've got to get you to somewhere safe.”

Nodding, Jordan said, “Yes. But where?”

 

BARCELONA

Anita Halleck asked her deputy director of security, “Was he telling the truth?”

The woman sitting before Halleck's desk was Gilda Nordquist: young, large-boned, statuesque, flaxen hair braided tightly, wearing a short-skirted dress of glittering metallic fabric. She reminded Halleck of a Valkyrie, strong and dedicated. On her lap rested a small electronics box, not much bigger than a personal phone. She was squinting at the varicolored curves wriggling across its screen.

Nordquist raised her head to look directly at Halleck. “The scanner is analyzing his voice tremors,” she said, in a voice as clear and vibrant as a Nordic stream. “It's too bad we got no video; his eye movements would have been useful in determining if he were lying to you.”

“Maybe that's why he killed the video,” Halleck said.

“Probably. The scanner should be finished with its analysis in a few seconds.”

As Halleck waited impatiently, she thought that perhaps she should relieve the oaf who had allowed Jordan Kell to escape and hand his position of security director to Nordquist.

The box beeped once. Nordquist looked down at its screen again. “He wasn't obviously lying,” she reported.

“What does that mean?” Halleck demanded.

“Mr. Thornberry's vocal patterns don't show the kind of stress that's associated with outright lying. There's some stress there, yes, but that might be simply from the fact that he was speaking to the chairwoman of the World Council.”

“Was he telling the truth or wasn't he?”

“I'd say he was, within the limits of the context of his words.”

Halleck frowned. Why can't she give me a definite answer? Was Thornberry lying when he said he hadn't heard from Kell?

Seeing the annoyance in the set of the chairwoman's jaw, Nordquist explained, “What Mr. Thornberry said to you was truthful, but it might not be the entire truth. He said that Mr. Kell did not call him, and that's probably the truth. But it doesn't mean that he doesn't know where Mr. Kell is.”

“I've already dispatched a security team to search his premises,” Halleck said.

Nodding, Nordquist murmured, “Always a good maneuver. Even if they don't find anything, they might frighten him into admitting his guilt.”

“Where else could Kell have gone?” Halleck asked the empty air. “He doesn't know anybody; he's been off-Earth for nearly two hundred years.”

“Douglas Stavenger?” Nordquist suggested.

“How would he get to Selene?”