Privateers (12 page)

Dan scowled, unable to think of a quick response.

“And placing yourself between this girl and Comrade Malik is like putting yourself between the jaws of a tiger. If you want the woman for yourself, that is one thing. I can understand the foolishness of romantic ardor. But if you are doing this merely to spite the Russian …” Yamagata shook his head like a worried father.

And Dan realized that he was a worried father. Even though everything that Yamagata said was true and made sense, there was a deeper motive behind his words. He’s trying to make sure that Nobo has a clear path, Dan realized. He wants to keep me out of the way so that his son can get close to Lucita without causing a conflict with me.

“You’re right, Sai,” he said aloud. “She’ll be nothing but trouble for me. I’ll bring her back with me tomorrow.”

Yamagata smiled and clapped Dan on the shoulder. “There are better ways to spite the Russians than to get involved in a romantic triangle,” he said. “We must not allow a woman to get in the way of our new project!”

Dan nodded, thinking. Especially when your son’s practically drooling over the woman. But he smiled back at his old friend and raised his glass.

“To the asteroids,” he toasted.

Yamagata clinked his glass against Dan’s and they drank. Then he proposed, “Ten thousand years of good fortune!” They drank again. By the time their glasses were drained, they had toasted the Emperor, Robert Goddard and Sir Isaac Newton.

Yamagata personally escorted Dan to his sleeping room, which contained a Western-style bed rather than Japanese mats and headrests. He handed Dan a palm-sized control box. “You can summon a robot servant with the green button, or a human servant with the yellow one. The human will be a very attractive young woman who will be happy to satisfy your every desire.”

Dan had expected nothing less, knowing what Japanese hospitality was like. But he said, “Sai, all I want right now is to get some sleep. My internal clock feels like it’s running backwards. And the sake and brandy didn’t help much, either.”

“I understand. Still, if you want anything …”

Looking down at the tiny control unit, Dan repeated, “Green for robot, yellow for woman. Wait, what about all these other buttons?”

“Oh, those? For TV, naturally.” Yamagata pointed to a large armoire. “Seventy-centimeter screen. One hundred fifteen channels. My rooftop antenna picks up eleven satellites.”

Dan laughed. “Great. But what I need is some sleep.”

“Have a good night, then. I will arise very early. I must be in Osaka by eight-thirty.”

“Then I won’t see you tomorrow morning.”

“1 am afraid not.”

Dan put his hand out. “Thanks, Sai. For everything.”

Yamagata took Dan’s proffered hand in both of his own. “It was good to see you again, Daniel. Very good. We will twist the bear’s tail, won’t we? The asteroids! Yes, we will twist the bear’s tail for certain. And make a lot of profit, too!” He laughed his way down the corridor.

Dan closed the bedroom door wearily, thinking that since bears don’t have tails it’s damned difficult to twist them.

He was drifting in that shadowy half-world between consciousness and sleep when he thought he heard a tap at his door. Dan turned over and told himself he had imagined it. Yamagata, always the perfect host, had outfitted this room with a king-sized waterbed, knowing Dan’s preference. Dan felt the warm softness enveloping him… .

And that damned tap-tap at his door again.

Muttering to himself, he sat up and touched the lamp on the bedtable once. It glowed softly.

“Who is it?” he called.

The door swung open and Lucita stepped into his bedroom. Her robe was buttoned from chin to hem, her feet demurely slippered. But her long black hair hung free about her shoulders. She seemed wide awake.

“Were you asleep?” she asked, almost whispering.

“Just about.”

She stepped into the room and closed the door behind her. Feeling slightly ridiculous, Dan pulled the bedsheet up to his chest.

“Are you angry with me?” she asked, walking across the bare floor to stand beside his bed.

“No,” he said automatically, realizing that it was not entirely the truth.

“You did not speak to me at all, during dinner.”

“I was discussing business.”

“I thought you were upset with me. Perhaps I said something that upset you.”

“No. Nothing.”

“I see.” Lucita sat silently for a moment. Then she said, “It is merely your custom to ignore a woman when there is business to be discussed.”

He was surprised at the sudden sharpness of her tone. “It is my custom,” he said with a smile, “to conduct business and allow children to find their own entertainments.”

“I’m not a piece of luggage that you can take off your airplane and put in a closet!”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m not in the habit of being ignored,” Lucita said. “Your behavior toward me was very rude.”

“You seemed to get all the attention you wanted,” he said.

“Teresa and I sat through that wretched dinner while you ignored me!”

“So you got Nobo to take you to your room.”

Her eyes flashed. “He, at least, has some sense of propriety. He knows how to be kind to a woman.”

“Propriety?” Dan almost laughed. “You hitchhike halfway around the world with a man you just met a day earlier, and then march into his bedroom to complain that he didn’t pay enough attention to you during dinner. Some propriety!”

“You’re impossible,” Lucita snapped.

“No, I’m bare-assed naked under this sheet. And if you don’t march yourself the hell out of here, I’m going to get up and drag you back into this bed with me. Will that be enough attention for you?”

She stood her ground. “You wouldn’t dare! My father …”

“Your father probably thinks I’ve kidnapped you. I’m going to have a tough enough time with him. I’m bringing you back with me tomorrow.”

“Never! I won’t go!”

“You’ll go whether you like it or not,” Dan said.

“You can’t force me.”

“The hell I can’t.”

“I’ll tell my father that you raped me.”

“Okay. Fine. Do that,” Dan snarled. “I might as well be hanged for a goat as a sheep.”

He swept the sheet off his body and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. He expected her to turn and flee for the door. But instead Lucita stood there before him, unflinching, unmoving, her jet-black eyes fixed upon him. He stood up, looming over her tiny frame. She did not run. There was no fear in her eyes.

Wordlessly he reached for the collar of her robe and opened the clasp, then began to undo the buttons, one after another. She stood mutely, unresisting. She wore nothing beneath the robe. He slid it off her slim shoulders and let it drop to the floor. Lifting her slender body in his arms, he carried her to the bed and gently put her down on its softly undulating surface.

“We’re both crazy,” he said, his voice a husky whisper.

“Yes,” she said. “Completely insane.” But she laced her fingers into his hair as he slid his body over hers and kissed her with all the longing that a man can have for a woman.

In the morning she was gone.

Dan awoke slowly, lingering for a long while in that half-dreaming twilight world between sleep and full wakefulness. When he realized that he was alone in the bed, though, he sat up abruptly, sending waves spreading through the waterbed.

Lucita and her duenna aunt had left the house just after dawn, Nobuhiko told him over a Western-style breakfast of eggs, fruit and coffee.

“My father had already departed for Osaka,” he told Dan from across the breakfast table, “so I had one of the chauffeurs drive them to the airport and see that they got the accommodations they desired.”

“Where did they want to go?” Dan asked.

Nobo took a long sip of black unsugared coffee before answering, “It would not have been polite of me to ask. But I believe they intended to go to Rome. That is what I gathered from what they said.”

Rome. Easy enough to check it out, Dan thought. He laughed inwardly. Left without so much as a good-bye kiss.

Not even a note. At least there’s no entanglement. No tears, no scenes. Wham, bam, thank you, sir. Except she didn’t even say thank you. Nobuhiko looked much more upset about her abrupt departure than Dan felt.

“Well, Nobo, that’s women for you. Unpredictable.”

The young man nodded, sighing. He could not hide his emotions any more than his father could. Saito was the least inscrutable Oriental that Dan had ever known.

“Are you ready to come to work in Caracas?” Dan asked.

Brightening, Nobo bobbed his head eagerly. “I am prepared to leave whenever you wish.”

“Might as well come back on the plane with me.”

“Hai!” said Nobo.

Rafael Hernandez was furious, of course. Dan had expected it, and was hardly surprised when his redheaded secretary told him in her apologetic singsong way that the Minister of Technology had been on the phone constantly for the past day and a halt.

“He wants you to come to his office?” she said, standing before Dan’s desk with her electronic memo pad clutched tightly in both hands. “He said he expects you there as soon as you return?”

Dan looked up at her. “Honey, 1 don’t go to other people’s offices. Especially if they’re going to try to put me on the carpet. They conic to me. You tell Senor Hernandez that I’m back from my business trip-and be sure to say business trip. Tell him that I will be happy to see him here, in my office. At his convenience. Tell him that I’ve instructed you to change my schedule to accommodate him. Whenever he wants to come over here, I will be happy to see him.”

The redhead got it all down on the memo pad, which recorded voices and transcribed them automatically onto computer tape.

“What’s he so all-fired worked up about?” she asked.

Dan grinned at her. “His daughter. She hitched a ride to Japan with me.”

The secretary’s mouth pursed into a round little “Ohh.”

“The Latin father, upholding the honor of his family,” Dan said. “You’d better have security check him out for weapons when he gets here.”

“D’you mean that?”

“You bet I do! But have them do it discreetly. Use the remote sensors. I don’t want them patting him down; he must be pissed off enough as it is.”

“He certainly was angry,” she said.

Dan felt impressed. It was the first time he had ever heard the redhead speak a declarative sentence.

He had spent the two hours in flight from Sapporo getting Nobo squared away with living quarters, employment forms and briefings on his new duties as an employee of Astro Manufacturing. All done by computer linked to Astro’s office systems in Caracas. By the time they landed in Venezuela it was evening, and Dan spent most of the night at the desk in his apartment, catching up on the work that had accumulated while he had been away. A dozen separate messages from Hernandez were waiting for him, amid all the other things. Zachary Freiberg had sent back his employment contract, signed, with a salary figure written in that was about fifteen percent less than Dan would have been willing to offer him. And an official notification, on paper embossed with the red hammer and sickle of the USSR, that prices for lunar ores would be increased across the board by twenty-five percent, starting the first of the month.

By one A.M. Dan was ready for a few hours’ sleep. He entered his office that morning slightly before nine. The redheaded secretary was already at her station, reaching for her memo pad as he breezed past her and entered his own office.

After she left, and Dan gulped down his first cup of coffee from the gleaming stainless-steel automatic brewer on the side table in the corner behind his desk, he instructed the phone to set up a conference with the chiefs of his engineering, research, cost accounting and security departments.

“And add Nobuhiko Yamagata to the conference,” he said. “He’s a new hire.”

“Understood,” said the phone. “Is this to be a telephone conference call or a personal meeting?”

“Personal meeting,” Dan replied instantly. “Top priority and top security.” He had no intention of risking a leak to the Soviets about his plans for an asteroid mission.

His secretary’s pretty face appeared on the phone screen. “Mr. Hernandez will be here in fifteen minutes?”

“Fine,” Dan said. “Show him right in when he arrives and then hold all calls. I don’t want us to be disturbed.” With a slight chuckle, he added, “Unless you hear a gunshot.”

Her eyes widened. She did not laugh.

“And one other thing,” Dan added. “Get Ambassador Andrews and set up a private meeting for me, preferably this evening at his home. Informal. I don’t want to be seen at his office or have him seen coming here. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

Hernandez was half an inch short of being livid with rage. His eyes blazed, his nostrils flared, his mustache bristled. Even his stiff-backed posture and abrupt, angry pace radiated fury as he crossed the carpeted floor of Dan’s office and took the chair in front of his desk.

“Could I get you some coffee, sir?” the secretary asked.

“No. Nothing. Thank you.”

Dan waved her away. She closed the door softly behind her as Hernandez sat silently, ramrod-straight, glaring at Dan.

“She’s gone to Rome with her aunt,” Dan said, without preliminaries. “She was properly chaperoned. She and her duenna were the guests of Saito Yamagata, the head of Yamagata Industries and one of the oldest and most respected families in Japan, at his home in the mountains of Hokkaido, roughly eight hundred kilometers north of Tokyo. She was not on the Ginza visiting nightclubs.”

Hernandez blinked, took a deep breath, but before he could speak, Dan added:

“Yamagata’s son came back with me to start employment here with Astro Manufacturing. He was at dinner with his father and me, and your daughter and her duenna two nights ago. You can ask him about it, if you like.”