Nightside CIty (23 page)

“True enough.” He sat back to think some
more.

I was doing a little thinking of my own, and
I thought I had an idea. I was remembering some of what I’d been
thinking back in my office when I got horsed, and again on the
dayside. I thought I saw why they might have done what they did—the
silent treatment and the attempted disappearance both. If I was
right it would be a relief in some ways, but a bit
anticlimactic.

Mishima interrupted my chain of thought.
“Hsing,” he said, “it seems to me that you’ve got a big edge on
them now. They tried to kill you. That’s illegal.”

The illegality of attempted murder was not
exactly hot news to me, and I was not impressed. “So?” I said.

“So you can get Orchid and Rigmus put in for
reconstruction. We’ve got your testimony, we’ve got my tapes from
the sky-eye, and there’s got to be other evidence. Charge them with
attempted murder. I’ll back you up.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but where does that get us?
It may keep them from trying again, but I’m not even sure of that;
I think it might be Doc Lee who’s running the whole program. And
while I can see how revenge might be fun, I hadn’t figured
you’d
care about it. Are you developing a civic
consciousness or something, trying to get criminals off the
streets?”

“Hey, no, don’t you see?” he said. “It gives
you leverage. You’ve got a hold on them. Maybe you can pry what you
want out of them with it.”

I couldn’t see using the attempted murder as
a bargaining chip until I knew just what the hell was going on.
Yes, it ought to work, but then, I had thought that threatening to
put everything on the nets should have worked, too. “And maybe I
can’t,” I said, “or maybe I don’t want to. Look, Mishima, I
appreciate what you’ve done for me, and I can definitely see
working for you...”

“
With
me,” he interrupted, and I
accepted the correction.

“With you, then. I can see that. But not on
this case. We’re going at it from different angles, and I can’t
work your way on it. It’s too important. You seem to keep missing
what I consider the real central issue here. You ask about the
squatters, and you suggest getting Orchid and Rigmus put away, and
ordinarily, that would be fine—you’re protecting the client,
concerned with my safety, and on most cases that would be great,
but on this one my priorities are a little different. My first
priority is the future of Nightside City. That’s more important
than squatters are, or than I am. If the city’s destroyed, we’re
all dead anyway—who cares about the rents in the West End if
there’s no West End?”

He considered that for a minute, then said,
“I see your point, I guess, but I’m not used to thinking in those
terms. Just what is it you think these people are planning? I know
you said something about a fusion charge, but I didn’t follow that.
When you said they might wreck the city, I thought you were talking
about bankrupting it, or knocking down buildings after it’s
evacuated.”

I shook my head. “No, that’s not it at all.
Nakada says that they intend to secretly rig and set off a fusion
charge big enough to halt the planet’s rotation, before the sun
rises. Before the sun rises means no evacuation. That means there
will still be people in the city. And a fusion charge big enough to
do the job is enough to do one hell of a lot of damage if something
goes wrong, and I don’t see how a scheme that simple could go
right
. Look, if there were any economically sound way of
saving the city, don’t you think the casinos would be trying it?
They’ve talked about it for years now, but they’ve never come up
with anything. You think Sayuri Nakada and Paulie Orchid are
smarter than the best the casinos can do?”

“The casinos weren’t figuring on buying the
whole city up cheap beforehand,” he pointed out.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “If it can make
Nakada rich, it could have let a consortium break even, at the very
least.”

He didn’t argue with that. “So what do you
think is happening? Is this all just a front, and they tried to
kill you before you found out what’s
really
going on?”

I nodded. He’d hit my little idea pretty
squarely—maybe it was obvious, and I’d been too close to the case
to see it before. “I think that just might be it, yeah. But you’re
getting off the track again. It’s the city I’m worried about.”

“Go on,” he said.

“Look,” I said, “just because the fusion
charge can’t work, just because it’s going to probably leave the
whole city flat as that desert you found me on, that doesn’t mean
these people aren’t going to try it, and try it while there are
still people here. Or even if they do wait until the city’s been
evacuated, there are still going to be miners scattered all over
the nightside who could get killed.” I didn’t mention the
possibility of a meltdown. That seemed too damn melodramatic; I
didn’t think Mishima was the kind of person who thought in those
terms. He’d just about said he wasn’t.

That didn’t mean I thought a meltdown was
impossible; it just meant I didn’t think Mishima would take it
seriously.

Overkill from a botched fusion charge,
though, that he could accept.

“Yeah,” he said, “I see that.”

I nodded. “So,” I said, “I have
got
to
find out what they’re really doing. And if they’re really going to
flatten the city, I’ve got to stop them. That’s more important than
anything.”

“I see that, too,” he said.

I waited, and he went on, “Hsing, you were
right. I’m out of my depth here. I came in in the middle, and I
don’t know a damn thing about all this fusion-charge stuff. You
handle it, you do it all your way, and I’ll back you up. You need
muscle, I’ve got three good people on retainer. You need com
service, I’ve got some nice stuff. You need an in anywhere, I’ll
see what I can do. You just keep me updated, and I won’t interfere.
And when it’s done, we’re partners, all right?”

“Either that,” I said, “or you can try and
collect what I owe you from my estate.”

I was joking, but I was also puzzled. Did
Mishima really think I was that valuable? Why was he going along
with all this? Why was he so eager to take me on as a partner?

But as I’d just told him, Nightside City was
the important thing. I would worry about just what the Ipsy was
really planning for the city, and when that was settled I could try
and figure out Big Jim’s program. Once I knew whether the City was
about to be reduced to radioactive debris or not I could worry
about loose ends like Orchid and Rigmus.

I was tired of talk. I was ready to get back
to work.

The hospital let me go without an argument, and I
got a cab home. I’d borrowed a couple of hundred credits from
Mishima to make sure my card would keep working. That put me a
notch deeper into the hole, but I couldn’t see any way around
it.

My Sony-Remington was still lying on my desk
where Orchid had dropped it, and the holster was somewhere on the
dayside; I got an old shoulderbag and put the gun in that. Then I
sat down at my desk and got the com up and running.

The first step was to kick all my security
into high, and to hell with the cost. The next step was worse.

I stopped for a minute to fight down
trembling before I plugged myself back in, but I knew I’d need to
run on wire for what I had to do next, so I held myself still and
jacked in. I wasn’t expecting any more horses. I just had to hope
that Mishima was playing straight, and that he’d sent the
protection he’d promised. The high eye was back overhead, another
normal-field spy-eye was on its way, and tracer microintelligences
were all over the area—but not on me, because without a symbiote
the damn things might kill me if I picked up enough to clog an
artery. The hospital had given me a little anti-invasive treatment
that was supposed to last a week or so—one more item on the bill
Mishima was paying—but I was still eagerly avoiding micros of any
description, as much as I could. It could have been my mind playing
tricks, but had a constant reminder of my unprotected status—I
itched, and I hadn’t really itched since I was a little girl. Even
the cheap symbiote I’d had could take care of itches.

I didn’t let that distract me. I knew what I
was after. Money leaves a trail. If the people at the Ipsy were
working for Nakada, she had to be paying them. I wanted to know
where that money was going, what they were buying with it. I had a
theory I wanted to check out.

If they were planting fusion charges, they
had to be buying them, or buying materials for them, or at the very
least buying the building programs for their microassemblers. If
they were planning anything at all, they’d have expenses of some
sort. I intended to take a look at those expenses.

I wasn’t expecting trouble. After all, Lee’s
bunch thought I was dead—or at least they were supposed to think
that. They shouldn’t have been on guard.

They weren’t. I got back to that numbered
account, the one Nakada had used for her real estate purchases,
without any problems at all. Getting a list of all outgoing
payments wasn’t too difficult, either.

Besides that one, I tracked down and checked
out every other account Nakada had used for her real estate buys. I
went back to my old list of property transactions and traced every
one of them back to Nakada—sometimes directly, sometimes through
blinds, sometimes through Orchid—and then I traced forward on every
account.

Just as I figured, she’d paid one hell of a
lot of money to Paulie Orchid. I couldn’t find anything to Lee or
Rigmus or anyone else at the Ipsy, but there was plenty that had
gone to Orchid, and I set out to trace that.

That was easier than I had any right to
expect. Orchid was an idiot. He had no security at all on any of
his accounts, and he generally used his right name.

Once the money came in, it went nine ways. A
little of each deposit got shunted off to a numbered account; I
figured that was either expense money, or Orchid skimming a little
before his friends got their fingers into the pot. The rest got
divided into eight even shares.

One share went off-planet, as negotiable
securities on every ship outbound for Prometheus. My guess was that
that was Orchid’s own cut, being tucked away safely out of
sight.

Another share went to an account for
Beauregard Rigmus, at Epimethean Commerce.

Another went to Mahendra Dhuc Lee.

The others went to five other people at the
Ipsy, all human.

I noted all their names and numbers, and then
I dropped that line for the time being and went at the Ipsy’s
financial records.

What I was after was simple enough. I wanted
information on everything that the Ipsy, or anyone working there,
had bought lately, or had delivered anywhere, with special
attention paid to Doc Lee and the five others on my list.

I wanted to see if they were really
assembling a monster fusion charge, or some huge tractor to pull
the crater westward, or any other device that might have a shot at
saving the city.

I’ll save you all the details. It took me six
hours, and you don’t want to hear it all, so I’ll just tell you
what I found.

They weren’t.

All the money from Sayuri Nakada was going
straight into personal accounts, and then being sent on to more
personal accounts on Prometheus, and it was staying there. No money
from the Ipsy’s regular accounts was going into fusion charges or
any other sort of heavy equipment that might conceivably be used to
stop a planet’s rotation or move an entire city. In fact, no money
from the Ipsy was going anywhere; except for my six little
darlings, the Institute was effectively shut down and bankrupt. Its
funding had dried up about two years back, when its best people
decided to beat the rush and emigrate.

My guess was right. The city was safe from
any glitching rescue attempts. The whole thing was a fraud, a scam,
a way to pry enough money out of Nakada for those eight people to
get off Epimetheus and live comfortably on Prometheus.

Except, of course, the city was still going
to fry on schedule. That was why these eight wanted off.

I unplugged myself and stared at the screen
for a moment, at the list of the eight names. Then I leaned back,
touching keys without thinking about it, and watched as the big
holo across the room lit up with a scene of robot beasts in spikes
and armor churning up an alien landscape and each other in some
sort of competition.

I was at the bottom of the puzzle, I was
pretty sure. I had it all. And I was disappointed.

It was all a cheap little swindle. Nightside
City would not get a last-minute reprieve.

It wouldn’t go out in a sudden blaze of
glory, taking the entire planet with it, either. It would slowly
cook away, and wind up an empty ruin out on the dayside, just the
way we’d all thought it would all along.

It was often that way, in my line of work.
The big cases don’t turn out as big as you think they will. Sordid
little details don’t lead to criminal masterminds, or big breaks in
vast schemes, they just lead to more sordid little details.

These eight people, desperate to get
off-planet without winding up broke, had put together a con and
picked Sayuri Nakada as their mark. They had tried to kill me when
I came looking at it, not because they were afraid I’d tell the
cops, or ruin Nakada’s profits, but because they didn’t want me to
uncover the fraud and tell Nakada she was being swindled.

And that was all there was to it.

Except that their little scheme had started
affecting other people. The squatters were going to be evicted. The
real estate market in the City was probably going to be all screwed
up. Sayuri Nakada was probably running on family credit, and when
the plot failed and the sun rose she might drag the entire Nakada
family down with her—at least, I thought so for a minute or two,
but then I changed my mind. The Nakadas wouldn’t be stupid enough
to let Sayuri get at that much money. They could lose a few hundred
megabucks and never notice it.