Star Wars: Scoundrels (21 page)

“The opera, huh?” Sheqoa said. “I would never have tagged you as that sort.”

“Oh, I’m not,” Bink said. “But the guy I was with at the time really liked them. I’m more the three-stroke glitz type. What about you? I assume you’re not an accountant, unless my ex-boss has opened an Iltarr City branch.”

“No, no, I’m something far less interesting,” Sheqoa said. “I’m with Master Villachor’s household security.”

Bink let her eyes widen. “Oh. Wow. Did I—I didn’t say anything bad about anything, did I?”

“You said Master Villachor runs a better Festival than Master Barrange, that my drink looked good, and you didn’t want to spill pental crackers all over the ground,” Sheqoa said. “The cleaning staff will be especially pleased about that last one.”

“Oh, good,” she said. “Because I really am enjoying this. I’d hate to be banned from the rest of it.”

“Just try not to run over anyone else and you should be fine.” He held out her cup. “And now I need to get back to my duties.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” Bink said, accepting the cup back. “Thank you again. Quick question: someone told me once that Master Villachor has the original Sunright Feinhomm glitz instruments. Is that true?”

“It is,” Sheqoa confirmed. “Maybe I can show them to you someday.”

“That would be
so
great,” Bink said, giving him her most dazzling smile. “Well, it was nice meeting you, Lapis. I’ll probably see you around.”

“I’ll be here,” Sheqoa said, smiling and giving her a sort of abbreviated wave. He was still smiling as he turned and wandered away into the crowd.

Taking a sip from her drink, Bink headed toward one of the seating areas. Yes, that had gone well. He was totally into her.

He was also totally on to her.

She smiled to herself. Perfect.

The crowds were already substantial, and it seemed like every third person who spotted Villachor wanted to come over to greet him, thank him for his hospitality, or chat a moment with him as if he were an actual friend.

But if there was one thing Lando had learned at the sabacc table, it was patience. He cultivated that patience now, strolling around the edge of Villachor’s entourage, studying the man and his bodyguards. The locals used particular words and gestures in their greetings, all of which he noted while at the same time trying to sort out Villachor’s own telltales for signs of interest, impatience, or boredom.

Finally there was a lull. Villachor paused, looking around as he murmured something to one of his bodyguards. Slipping around a pair of hammer-headed Ithorians, Lando moved toward the group.

Villachor spotted his approach, and Lando caught a brief twitch of his lip before his face broke into yet another of his counterfeit smiles. “Good afternoon,” he said, probably hoping that by getting in the first word he would be able to control the duration of the conversation. “Enjoying the Festival?”

“Very much,” Lando said, giving one of the polite nods that seemed to be associated with the upper-class Iltarr City citizens. “I imagine something like this is extremely expensive to run.”

Villachor’s smile slipped, just a bit. Apparently, most of the people he’d talked to had known better than to bring up such a crass subject. “It’s well worth the cost,” he said evenly. “The pleasure the Festival brings to the average citizen is something that can’t be measured.”

“Indeed,” Lando said. “And of course, I expect the Festival provides unique opportunities to meet with people. Some of whom may bring you interesting offers.”

Villachor’s smile broadened even as it cooled a few degrees. “I’m sorry, but all new business discussions are paused during the Festival,” he said. “But feel free to contact my office after the Honoring of Fire is over.” He inclined his head and started to turn away.

“I understand,” Lando said, taking a long step closer, aware that the two bodyguards were already moving to intercept. “Let me just say one word. Cryo—”

He broke off as both bodyguards grabbed him, one of them throwing a warning forearm across his throat as they started to pull him away from Villachor.

“A moment,” Villachor said, stopping them with an uplifted finger. “Very well,” he continued, his voice studiously casual. “One word.”

The guard lifted his arm fractionally from Lando’s throat, ready to clamp down again if necessary. Lando cleared his throat. “Cryodex,” he said.

He counted out six heartbeats before Villachor spoke again. “Bring him,” he said shortly. Spinning around, he strode back toward the mansion, heading in the direction of one of the smaller service doors. The bodyguards released their grips, one of them nudging a silent order into Lando’s back.

Not that he needed any prompting. He set off briskly after Villachor, adjusting his pace to slowly catch up to the other. There were dozens or possibly hundreds of extra people and droids moving in and out of the mansion today, he knew, resupplying the pavilions with food and drink and handling other chores. It would be instructive to see exactly how Villachor had arranged the door locks to allow for such traffic while at the same time preventing random strangers from wandering inside.

It was, as it turned out, distinctly anticlimactic. Villachor merely marched up the flagstone walkway to the door, gripped and turned the handle, and pushed open the door without any fuss, bother, or challenge.

Lando suppressed a smile as he and the two bodyguards followed him in. Like one of Zerba’s magic tricks, there was more to this one than it appeared. Villachor had gripped the handle, but right before he’d turned it, he’d bowed just slightly at the waist. Some kind of electronic trigger, then, with the receiver in the handle mechanism and the activator concealed somewhere in Villachor’s shoulder or neck area. Possibly the fingertip-sized rectangular glazed-stone pendant he’d noticed riding a small choker chain around Villachor’s neck.

And, he noted now, riding his bodyguards’ necks as well.

They had their way inside. Maybe.

Villachor had stopped a few steps inside the door and was waiting for them beside two more guards. “And now,” he said, even the false warmth gone from his voice, “let’s go someplace quiet and have a little talk.”

T
he various displays that Villachor had put together for the Honoring of Moving Stone were uniformly impressive, Han had decided early on during his private walking tour of the grounds. But for him, the sand tornadoes were the most interesting, the most photogenic, and, ultimately, the most potentially useful. He went from one tornado to the next, standing for a couple of minutes at each, admiring the twisting shapes and pretending to take endless pictures with the fake holocamera Chewbacca had built for him the previous night.

He wasn’t alone in his activities, either. Lots of others were doing exactly the same thing, and Han usually found himself in the middle of a small crowd as he snapped his pretend holos. Most of those crowds involved families with younglings, all of whom treated the miniature storms with a combination of amazement, delight, and solemnity that only very young children could pull off. The more adventurous of the younglings dared to step closer, a few recklessly, the rest cautiously, reaching out to touch the edge of the swirling sand and then rushing, giggling, back to their parents. The parents, for their part, seemed to trust Villachor’s engineering, assuming that the tornadoes’ designers had made sure the tethering and repulsor-field encasing would keep the sand from leaking out and endangering their offspring.

They were mostly right. The first four tornadoes Han checked out were as isolated and protected as if they were just holos floating above the ground. The children could still get to the spinning sand, but each touch released only a few grains from the fields, which dropped harmlessly to scatter across the ground. Han spent as little time at each of those as he figured he could get away with, considering his role as holo-crazy tourist, before moving on to the next.

It was at the fifth tornado that he finally hit pay dirt.

Literally.

Something had gone wrong with that display’s confinement field. Not seriously wrong, not even all that obviously wrong. But whereas the ground by each of the others showed only the light scattering of sand released by the probing of small human and alien fingers, this one had an obvious ring of escaped material that had gathered about a meter away from the tornado’s edge.

The ring wouldn’t be there long, he knew, not with cam droids floating past overhead and security men roaming the grounds. Sooner or later, someone would spot the problem and call it in, and maintenance droids dressed in those ridiculous moving-stone outfits would hurry out to fix the leak and clean up the sand.

But the ring was here now, and that was all Han needed.

He’d made sure to keep track of the time he’d spent at the other displays, and had no intention of drawing attention by spending significantly more or less at this one. But this time he eased his way a little closer to the tornado as he took his pretend holos, listening closely to the chatter of conversation around him.

Just to his left was a middle-grade child asking her parents for permission to touch the tornado. Still snapping away with his holocamera, Han edged closer to the child. The parents discussed the matter briefly, then gave their permission. The girl scampered adventurously forward—

And as she brushed past Han’s elbow, he jerked his hands as if she’d slammed into his arm, losing his grip on the holocamera and sending it arcing right into the middle of the ring of sand.

“Meelee!” the girl’s mother gasped. “Look what you did!”

“It’s okay,” Han hastened to assure her as he stepped forward and knelt down by the holocamera. The girl, for her part, had already stopped and turned around, clearly confused by the outlandish result of what she knew had been barely a sleeve-on-sleeve touch, and equally confused by the grief she was getting for it. “Don’t worry—these things hold together real good,” he added. He reached down and got his hand on the holocamera.

And as he closed his fingers around it, he surreptitiously pressed the hidden button.

He’d told Chewbacca to make the vacuum pump quiet, and as usual the Wookiee had taken him at his word. Even kneeling directly above the device Han could barely hear the scratching noise of the sand being sucked in through the baffle vent, and the pump itself was completely inaudible. The rest of the crowd, three meters or more away, couldn’t have heard a thing.

“See?” he said, picking up the device and turning back to the anxious parents. As he did so, he moved one foot casually across the sand, erasing all signs of the small crater the pump had made in the neat ring. “No problem. It’s fine.”

And with a friendly smile at the still confused girl, he slipped through the crowd and strode casually away.

He visited two more of the volcanoes, just to clear his backtrail, then headed off for his rendezvous with Kell.

He found the kid waiting in a seating area between two of the pavilions near the northern end of the mansion and Villachor’s oversized landspeeder and airspeeder garage. “Any trouble?” Kell asked as Han came up and sat down across the table from him.

“Nope,” Han said, patting the vest pocket where he’d stashed the holocamera. “You ready?”

In his opinion, Kell still didn’t look ready to knock over a child’s coin bank, let alone a crime lord’s private vault. But his nod was firm enough. “Let’s do it.”

“Okay,” Han said, reminding himself yet again that Mazzic had vouched for the kid. He looked around and spotted a pair of droids busily collecting discarded plates and cups from one of the nearby tables. “Give me a five-count lead,” he instructed. “And watch your timing.”

The droids were still clearing the table when he got there. “Hey,” he said, coming up to one of them. “Can you tell me when they stop serving lunch stuff and switch to a dinner menu?”

“There is no set time for food exchange,” the droid said, turning its hooded face toward Han as it continued to gather the tableware. The cowl covering its face fluttered in the breeze, giving an unsettling masquerade-type atmosphere to the conversation. “The various dishes change at different times throughout the day. If you wish, the servers in the pavilions can provide you with a schedule for each switchover.”

“Yeah, well, I’m mostly looking to see if you’re going to have braised kiemple,” Han said. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Kell approaching the table from his right. “You know what that is? Never mind,” he said before the droid could answer. “I’ve got a holo here somewhere from last year’s Festival,” he went on, pulling out his holocamera and fighting back a sudden surge of doubt.

I can do this
, he told himself firmly. The timing was going to be close, but he and Chewbacca ran close timing every time they flew the
Falcon
. This would be like a normal smuggling day. “Here it is,” he continued, thrusting the holocamera in front of the droid’s mask. Beside him, Kell stepped up to the table.

And as the kid reached past the plate the droid was aiming for, Han tapped the holocamera’s release and dumped the sand he’d collected straight down the droid’s glove. As the hand closed around the plate and Kell’s wrist there was a soft crunching noise—