The Sam Gunn Omnibus (57 page)

“Don’t!”

“What
will you do? Kill me?”

He
grabbed my arm. I tried to pull free but he was stronger. I struggled but he
held me in his powerful arms and pulled me to him and kissed me. Before I realized
what I was doing I was kissing him, wildly, passionately, with all the heat of
a jungle beast.

At
last Ric pulled loose. He stared into my eyes for a long, timeless moment, then
said, “Yes. Call your father. Warn him. I can’t be a party to murder. It’s one thing
to talk about it, plan for it. But I just can’t go through with it.”

“OIB
in one minute,” Spence’s voice chirped.

“Copy
OIB in fifty-nine seconds,” I said as I took up the telephone. My eyes were
still on Ric. He smiled at me, the sad smile of a man who has given up
everything. For me.

“You
are not a killer,” I said to him. “That is nothing to be ashamed of.”

“But
the revolution—”

“To
hell with the revolution and all politics!” I snapped as I tapped out the
number for my father’s hotel room.

“We
are sorry,” said a computer-synthesized voice, “but the number you have called
is not in service at this time.”

Cold
terror gripped my heart.

I
called the hotel’s main number. It was busy. For
half an hour, while Spence’s OTV settled into its equatorial orbit and he read
off all the radiation monitors inside and outside the spacecraft, the hotel’s main
switchboard gave nothing but a busy signal.

I
was ready to
scream when Ric suddenly bolted from the control center and came back a moment
later with a hand-sized portable TV. He turned it to the all-news channel.

“... hostage situation,” said a
trench-coated reporter standing in front of a soaring hotel tower. It was
drizzling in New York but a huge throng had already gathered out on the
streets.

“Is the president of Venezuela
still in there?” asked an unseen anchor woman.

“It’s the president of Ecuador,
Maureen,” said the reporter on the street. “And, yes, as far as we know he’s
still in his suite with the gunmen who broke in about an hour ago.”

“Do you know who’s in there with
him?”

The reporter, bareheaded in the
chilly drizzle, squinted into the camera. “A couple of members of his staff.
The gunmen let all the women in the suite go free about half an hour ago. And
there is apparently an American businessman in there, too. The hotel security
director has identified the American as a Sam Gunn, from Orlando, Florida.”

“How could the rebels get past my
father’s security guards?” I wondered out loud.

“Bribes,” said Ric. He spoke the
word as if it were a loathsome thing. “Some men will sell their souls for money.”

I
told Spence what
was happening, of course. He seemed strangely nonchalant.

“Sam’s been in fixes like this
before. He always talks his way out of ‘em.”

He was trying to keep my spirits
up, I thought. “But these men are killers!” I said. “Assassins.”

“If they haven’t shot anybody yet,
the chances are they won’t. Unless the New York cops get trigger-happy.”

That was not very encouraging.

“For what it’s worth,” Spence
added, “the radiation monitors inside my cabin are still in the green.”

We had not had time to link the
radiation monitors to the telemetry system, so there was no readout for them on
my console.

“Maybe you could pipe the
television news up to me,” he suggested. “I’ve got nothing else to do for a
stretch.”

I
did that. We
watched the tiny television screen until Gene Redding and his assistants showed
up at eight
am
A murky morning was
breaking through the clouds in New York. I thought about hiring a jet plane to
fly up there, but realized it would do no good. The hostage crisis dragged on,
with the hotel surrounded by police and no one entering or leaving the
penthouse suite of my father.

All the employees of VCI were
watching the TV scene by now. It seemed as if at least half of them were jammed
into the mission control center. Gene Redding had taken over as controller; I had
moved to the right-hand chair, a headset still clamped over my ear.

“Want to make a bet Sam talks them
out of whatever they came for?” Spence asked me.

I
shook my head,
then realized that he could not see me. “No,” I said. “Not even Sam could—”

“Wait a minute!” said the news
reporter. Like the rest of us, he had been on the scene all night without
relief. “Wait a minute! There seems to be some action up there!”

The camera zoomed up to the rooftop
balcony of my father’s suite. And there stood Sam, grinning from ear to ear,
and my father next to him, also smiling—although he looked drawn and pale,
tired to the point of exhaustion. Behind them, three of the rebel gunmen were
pulling off their ski masks. They too were laughing.

I
rented the
fastest jet available at the Orlando airport and flew to New York. With Ric at
my side.

By the time we reached my father’s
hotel suite the police and the crowds and even the news reporters had long
since gone. Sam was perched on the edge of one of the big plush chairs in the
sitting room, looking almost like a child playing in a grown-up’s chair. He was
still wearing the faded coveralls that he had put on for the space mission.

My father, elegantly relaxed in a
silk maroon dressing gown and white silk ascot, lounged at his ease in the huge
sofa placed at a right angle to Sam’s chair. The coffee table before them was
awash with papers.

My father was smoking a cigarette
in a long ivory holder. He was just blowing a cloud of gray smoke up toward the
ceiling when Ric and I burst into the room.

“Papa!” I cried.

He leaped to his feet and put the
cigarette behind him like a guilty little boy. Sam laughed.

“Papa, are you all right?” I rushed
across the room to him. Awkwardly,

he
balanced the long cigarette holder on the arm of the sofa as I flung my arms
around his neck.

“I
am unharmed,” he announced calmly. “The rebels have gone back to Quito to form
the new government.”

“New
government?”

“General
Quintana will head the provisional government,” my father explained, “until new
elections are held.”

“Quintana?”
I blurted. “The traitor?”

Ric’s
face clouded over. “The army will run the government and find excuses not to
hold elections. It’s an old story.”

“What
else could I do?” my father asked sadly.

Still
seated in the oversized chair, Sam grinned up at us. “You didn’t do too badly,
Carlos old buddy.”

Sam
Gunn, on a first-name basis with my father?

Getting
to his feet, Sam said to me, “Meet the new co-owner of OrbHotel, Inc.”

One
shock after another. It took hours for me to get it all straight in my head.
Gradually, as my father and Sam told me slightly conflicting stories, I began
to put the picture together.

Sam
had barged into my father’s hotel suite just as the rebel assassination team
had arrived, guns in hand.

“They
had bribed two of my security guards,” my father said grimly. “They just walked
in through the front door of the suite, wearing those ridiculous ski masks.”

Sam
added, “They were so focused on your father and the other two guys in his
security team that I walked in right behind them and they never even noticed.
Some assassins. A trio of college kids with guns.”

Once
they realized that an American citizen was in the suite the student-assassins
became confused. Sam, of course, immediately began bewildering them with a
nonstop monologue about how rich they could become if they would merely listen
to reason.

“They’re
all shareholders in my new corporation,” Sam told us happily. “Sam Gunn
Enterprises, Unlimited. Neat title, isn’t it?”

“They
refrained from assassinating my father in exchange for shares in a nonexistent
corporation?” I asked.

“It’ll
exist!” Sam insisted. “It’s going to be the holding company for all my other
enterprises—VCI, OrbHotel, I got lots of other ideas, too, you know.”

My
father’s face turned somber. “They did not settle merely for shares in Sam’s
company.”

“Oh?
What else?”

“I
had to resign as president of Ecuador and name Quintana as head of the interim
government.”

“Until
elections can be held,” Ric added sarcastically.

“Who
is this young man?” my father asked.

“I
am Ricorio Esteban Horacio Queveda y Diego, son of Professor Queveda, who fled
from your secret police the year you became president.”

“Ah.”
My father sagged down onto the sofa and picked up his cigarette holder once
again. “Then you want to murder me, too, I suppose.”

“Papa,
you’re murdering yourself with those cigarettes!”

“No
lectures today, little one,” he said to me. Then he puffed deeply on his
cigarette. “I have been through much these past twenty hours.”

“Ric
did not condone assassinating you,” I told my father. “He wanted me to warn
you.” That was stretching the truth, of course, and I wondered why I said it.
Until I took a look at Ric, so serious, so handsome, so brave.

For
his part, Ric said, “So you have joined forces with this gringo imperialist.”

“Imperialist?”
Sam laughed.

“I
have invested my private monies in the orbital hotel project, yes,” my father
admitted.

“Drug
money,” Ric accused. “Cocaine money squeezed from the sweat of the poor
farmers.”

“We’re
going to make those farmers a lot richer,” Sam said.

“Yes,
of course.” Ric looked as if he could murder them both.

“Listen
to me, hothead,” said Sam, jabbing a stubby finger in Ric’s direction. “First
of all, I’m no flogging imperialist.”

“Then
why have you claimed the equatorial orbit for yourself?”

“So
that nobody else could claim it. I don’t give a crap whether the UN recognizes
our claim or not, I’m
giving
all rights to the orbit
to the UN itself. That orbit belongs to the people of the world, not any nation
or corporation.”

“You’re
giving... ?”

“Yeah,
sure. Why let the lawyers spend the next twenty years wrangling over the
legalities? I claim the orbit, then voluntarily give up the claim to the people
of the world, as represented by the United Nations. So there!” And Sam stuck
his tongue out at Ric, like a self-satisfied little boy.

Before either of us could reply,
Sam went on, “There’s big money to be made in space, kids. VCI’s just the
beginning. OrbHotel’s gonna be a winner, and with Carlos bankrolling it, I won’t
have to fight with VCI’s stockholders for the start-up cash.”

“And how are you going to make the
farmers of Ecuador rich?” Ric asked, still belligerent.

Sam leaned back in the plush chair
and clasped his hands behind his head. His grin became enormous.

“By making the government of
Ecuador a partner in Sam Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited.”

Ric’s face went red with anger. “That
will make Quintana rich, not the people!”

“Only if you let Quintana stay in
office,” Sam said smugly.

“A typical gringo trick.”

“Wait a minute. Think it out.
Suppose I announce that I’m willing to make a
democratically
elected
government of Ecuador a partner in my corporation? Won’t
that help you push Quintana out of power?”

“Yes, of course it would,” I said.

Ric was not so enthusiastic. “It might
help,” he said warily. But then he added, “Even so, how can a partnership in
your corporation make millions of poor farmers rich?”