The Wiz Biz II: Cursed & Consulted (20 page)

Lisella faced Aelric square on and said something. Aelric half-nodded, as if agreeing with her, and then responded calmly. Lisella seemed to have trouble controlling her temper. She said something short and sharp.

Aelric made a chopping motion with his hand and turned away, as if to leave. Lisella's voice caught and held him. He turned back to her. Without moving closer he spoke firmly to her. She looked at him closely and then shrugged.

Lisella cocked her head and said something with a mocking little smile. Aelric nodded.

She arched an eyebrow slightly but he said nothing and stood firm. At last she nodded and spoke. He bowed formally and she responded with a half-curtsey. Then she turned and swept out of the clearing. Aelric stood watching her for a moment and then took the moonlit path back toward headquarters.

June remained flat on her belly under the ferns for a long time before she rose cautiously and slipped back to the fortress.

Wiz got an early start the next morning and by the time Danny arrived in the lab he was deep in his latest project.

"You know your buddy, the elf dude?" the young programmer said as soon as he stepped into the room.

"It's elf
duke,"
Wiz said without looking up from the code he was debugging.

"Whatever. Anyway you know Lisella, the one you said was trying to kill you?"

Wiz looked up cautiously. "Yeah?"

"Did you know Aelric's meeting her here?"

"What? How do you know that?"

"June saw them out in the forest last night. She says it looked like they were arguing about something."

"So June's still following Aelric."

"You ought to be glad
someone
is," Danny snapped. "Didn't you hear what I said? He's meeting with the one who's trying to kill you!"

"She's not trying to kill me anymore."

"She sure wasn't trying to do you any good when she showed up at the City of Night."

Wiz laid down the scroll he was holding. "Look, I don't know why Aelric's meeting Lisella. But right now we can't afford to alienate him. So tell June to lay off, will you?"

Danny stared at him, hard. "Man, you're goddamn blind! You just don't want to see, do you?" With that he turned on his heel and stomped out of the lab.

In the next hour Wiz got maybe two lines of code written. Finally he gave it up and went to find Moira.

Moira was in the storeroom, overseeing the stocking of a load of supplies which had been brought over the Wizard's Way that morning. While the servants bustled about, Wiz took her off in a corner and told her June's tale.

"A human spying on elves?" she said when Wiz had finished. "It seems unlikely. They can pass unseen by mortals as easily
as they breathe."

"Yeah, but if anyone could do it, it would be June. Besides, magic doesn't work as well here, remember?"

The hedge witch wrinkled her brow. "To be sure it is an unlikely tale for her to concoct. Well, if it is true, then we must be even more careful with our elf duke."

"I thought you trusted him, more or less."

"Less now than before."

"I don't know, though. If he wanted to harm us there are a lot easier ways to do it. Why go through all this rigamarole of pretending to ally with us?"

"Well," Moira said, "it is said that elves are tricksome and strange."

Ivan Semonovich Kuznetsov, major in the GRU, snapped awake and sought groggily for the thing that had awakened him.

The four big Ivchenko turboprop engines on the wings of the AN 12 transport beat steadily as the plane bore east and a little north toward Leningrad. His cheek was slightly numb from the cold and vibration where it had rested against the metal side of the cabin.

But there had been something . . .

He shook it off. Too much vodka last night, that was all. Truly it was a terrible thing to grow old. Not that thirty-three was old, but he could no longer drink the night away and rise fresh with the dawn.

But this dawn there was cause enough for celebration. Snug in the belly of the aircraft was the newest, fastest graphics supercomputer the Americans made. In a few hours it would be in Leningrad and Major Ivan Kuznetsov could expect to share in the rewards of a job well done.

The computer had traveled a long
and shifty path from the factory in Texas. It had originally been ordered for a research institute in England, but by a carefully staged "coincidence" it had been diverted to Austria and from there on to what had been East Germany where the Soviet intelligence service still had friends. Kuznetsov had some small part in all of that. Now he was accompanying it on the last leg of its trip to the Soviet Union.

Where it would go once it reached Soviet soil he did not know and would never have dreamed to ask. There were many important projects in the motherland that required computers which were beyond the current abilities of the socialist nations to build. Since the Americans still would not sell such computers openly, the nation relied on the GRU, the intelligence arm of the Red Army, to acquire them in other ways.

"Comrade Major . . ." Kuznetsov jerked fully awake. Whenever one of his subordinates addressed him as "comrade" he knew something had gone wrong.

"Yes, Sergeant?"

"The computer . . ." Vasily began. In a flash the GRU major was out of his seat, thrusting the man out of the way and diving headlong through the door into the cargo compartment.

"It's gone," the sergeant's voice echoed after him.

Kuznetsov didn't need Vasily to tell him that. The webbing that had bound the computer tightly in place was a tangled limp mass on the floor. The wooden pallets were exactly as they had been, but the crates were gone.

"Yo momma!"

Like a wild beast Kuznetsov spun and sprang for the cockpit door. His sergeant pressed against the bulkhead to let him pass as he squeezed into the cockpit. Before the pilot could turn to him he grabbed the man's shoulder and tried to twist him around in his seat.

"The cargo door," he demanded. "When did it open?"

"It didn't open," the pilot, Volkov, protested. "There's an indicator . . ."

"The devil take your fucking indicator," the GRU man roared. "When did that door open?" 

"It didn't! We would have felt it in the controls. Comrade Major, I swear to you on my mother's grave that door did not open."

"Don't lie to me!
That door opened.
Now when?"
He took a deep breath, pulled his pistol from its holster and pressed it against Volkov's head, just in front of his earphones. "If you do not tell me the truth immediately I will blow your brains all over this cabin."

The co-pilot and flight engineer had their eyes studiously glued to their instrument panels. The pilot looked at the pistol out of the corner of his eye and Kuznetsov jammed the gun against his head even harder.

"Major," Captain Volkov said with quiet dignity, "you may arrest me. You may shoot me here and now. But that door did not open. It could not have."

"Very well," Kuznetsov said softly, so softly he was almost inaudible over the roar of the engines. "Very well, the door did not open." He took the gun from the pilot's head. "Then would you please tell me
where is the fucking cargo?"
His voice dropped again to a near whisper. "That is all I want to know."

Volkov blanched and started out of the pilot's seat. Kuznetsov moved to block him and then thought better of it. He nodded curtly. "Sergeant, accompany him."

As the two scrambled aft Kuznetsov stared moodily at the cloudscape below him. They were somewhere over Estonia, he knew, and the Estonians were notorious through the USSR as the biggest thieves of state property in all the republics. The Georgians were bigger black marketers and the Azerbijaniis were more violent, but over the years the Estonians had stolen everything from a freight train to an entire fleet of fishing trawlers. "Well, this time those damned Estonians have gone too far," he muttered to himself.

"Sir?" asked the co-pilot. Then he withered under the GRU man's glare.

"Sir, should I radio Leningrad and declare an emergency?"

"No, you idiot! The last thing we need is to have Leningrad Center shouting questions at us."

Although the questions would come soon enough, he realized. Chill fear clutched at his stomach as he thought what those questions would be like.

Just then the intercom squawked. "Major," Vasily's voice came over the loudspeaker. "Major, I think you'd better come down here and take a look at this."

Kuznetsov looked down at the co-pilot and flight engineer and decided he was not going to leave them alone in the cockpit to do God-knows-what.

"Come with me," he commanded. The co-pilot opened his mouth to protest and Kuznetsov touched his holster. "Now," he ordered, "immediately." Wordlessly the men slid out of their seats and preceded the major down to the cargo deck.

Volkov and Vasily were squatting over the heap of webbing where the computer had been, staring intently at one of the pallets. As Kuznetsov made his way back to them, bracing with one hand against the side of the plane, he saw there was a small pile of something shiny and metallic in among the straps and buckles.

"When we looked closely we found this," Vasily shouted to make himself heard over the din of the engines. He handed Kuznetsov an object off the stack, an object that glinted like summer sunlight even in the gloom of the aircraft deck.

Kuznetsov had never seen gold before, but no one had to tell him this was gold.

"But where did it come from?" Volkov asked, bewildered.

"That is a very good question," Kuznetsov said, kneeling down to study the pile of gold bars. They were surprisingly tiny, each one fitting neatly in the palm of his hand and weighing about two kilograms. There were no identifying marks of the kind usually found on bar gold, not even assayer's marks.

"How much do you suppose it is worth?" asked the co-pilot.

"If I had to guess, I would say perhaps ten million American dollars. That was the value of our cargo."

"What was our cargo, anyway?" the pilot asked.

The GRU man glared at him. "That is none of your concern."

Volkov did not flinch. "If my career is to be ruined I would at least like to know what over."

Kuznetsov considered and then nodded. "Very well. It was an American supercomputer. The latest model of supercomputer and one that took us nearly two years to acquire."

The pilot's mouth dropped as he realized the enormity of the loss. "Boishemoi!" he breathed.

The GRU man nodded curtly. "Just so."

"What I don't understand," the co-pilot said, "is why go to the trouble of leaving the gold after stealing the computer?"

"That too is a very good question," Kuznetsov said sourly as he braced himself against the plane's gentle bank to the right. "Does anyone have any more good questions?"

"Just one," Vasily said hesitantly as the craft began to bank more steeply. "Who is flying the plane?"

Volkov and Semelov gaped at each other and both dashed for the cockpit.

"Well," Wiz said at last for want of anything better to say, "there it is."

Sitting under the lights on the concrete floor were two dozen boxes full of computer and supporting equipment, all cocooned in foam and cardboard, wrapped around with clear plastic and bound with metal straps.

Moira followed the programmers' admiring looks and tried to be enthusiastic, but it all looked so
ordinary.
The way Wiz and the others had been talking she expected a nimbus of power around the boxes, or lightning bolts or something.

None of the programmers noticed her disappointment. They were too busy swarming over the pile, touching cabinets and opening boxes.

"I hope the installation instructions are complete," Danny said dubiously. "I've never installed anything bigger than a 386 PC."

"Voila!" Wiz stood up from a newly opened box waving a black oblong. "A complete installation course on video tape. Just sit ourselves down with some popcorn and get educated."

"Wiz."

"Yeah, Jerry?"

"Where are we going to get a VCR?"

"Lift one out of a store the same way we lifted the computer," Danny said.

Wiz frowned. "I dunno. That would be stealing."

"Wiz."

"Yeah, Jerry?"

Jerry gestured at the $10 million pile of crates. "What do you call this?"

"Well," Major Ivan Kuznetsov said, hefting the bar of gold absently, "what do we do now?"

The occupants of the cockpit looked at one another and no one said anything. By now it was painfully obvious they would all share the same fate.

"Think, comrades," Kuznetsov urged. "Think as if your lives depended on it."
As they well may,
he didn't have to add. "What could have possibly happened to that computer?"

"It was fine when we loaded it aboard," Vasily said. "I checked and rechecked it myself."

"And I also," Semelov put in. "The webbing was secure and there was nothing unusual about it."

The pilot and the major nodded. They had also checked the cargo and the mountings before takeoff and Kuznetsov and Vasily had been on the cargo deck for takeoff.

"And there was nothing out of the ordinary when you left to go to the latrine?" Kuznetsov asked Vasily.

"Not the least little thing."

Kuznetsov said nothing. Technically both he and the sergeant were supposed to have been on the cargo deck at all times. But rank has privileges and he had chosen to ride up front where it was warmer and quieter. Abstractedly he realized that would be seen as dereliction of duty by his interrogators, but he did not think it would matter much. He turned to the pilot.

"And you are sure the cargo doors did not open in flight?"

"Major, I swear to you on my mother's grave that none of the aircraft doors opened after we left the ground," Volkov said. "For that matter the load did not even shift. We would have felt the alteration in the center of gravity."

Kuznetsov looked at him with contempt. "So one moment it was there and the next it vanished like winter fog?"