Under Cover of Darkness (5 page)

Down the hall they were questioning a huckster. We listened for a few seconds.

These days there are programs to keep track of sales tax. The only judgment a merchant needs involves where to apply it. This Martin Massoglia was a dealer at conventions, a traveling show, and that left him more chance to make mistakes.

Glyer is a huge man, a mountain looming over the little huckster. Massoglia looked bravely up at him. “Doesn't it strike you as crazy, turning every shopkeeper and restaurateur into a tax collector? We're not all math whizzes like you guys. We only want to buy and sell.”

Mike Glyer belly-laughed. “Internal Revenue turns every citizen in the country into an accountant, and jails him if he won't play. Is
that
unfair?”

Massoglia said, “Yeah!” and Mike chortled. Woody and I kept walking. We'd heard the argument too often.

Gatherers, tax collectors, have to be good with numbers. We get more than our share of mathematical genius. Woody was a little worried about putting our programs to work in the office computers. Someone might notice.

“Tell them it's a game,” I said. “Maybe even get them involved.”

“I'm running just these five victims,” Woody said.

I got us coffee at the hidden pot, avoiding the coffee we keep for taxpayers.

“They were all married,” Woody said. “In fact, they were all married to taxpayers.”

“Mean anything?”

“Let's see if . . .” He typed. By and by he said, “Last two months, four suspicious deaths in Sales Tax, two married—but not to taxpayers—and two singles. Harry Tanner just disappeared.”

“Maybe they all cheated?”

“Let's see if Tanner had a significant other . . . okay, he dated some. Mel, do you remember Grace Wembley?”

“Sure.” She worked here. We'd shared dinner twice. She also dated taxpayers, though; she hung out in the better bars. Then—“She was mugged. Poor damn Grace.”

“She always talked her head off. I never knew how you could stand it.” He was typing. “And she dated Harry.”

I said, “See if any of the victims was considered a Security risk.”

Of nine possible deaths by foul play, seven were considered Security risks. “Maybe they talked to the other Gatherer clans. Or even to taxpayers,” Woody said. “That could be bad, couldn't it? What happens to Security risks in the IRS?”

“Or here in Sales Tax? Nobody quite knows. Woody, let's see how far back this goes.”

 

It must have started slow. The first disappearance that fit the pattern was in autumn of 1978. Then nothing for four years. Then it started building up, deaths and disappearances.

The hair stood up on the back of my neck. There were dozens. “Five on Independence Day, various years. That mean anything?”

Woody said, “Yeah, that was the other thing they had in common. July fourth, and lots more on the thirteenth of every month. It's two different messages, Mel, and that's why the program didn't catch it.”

“What's it mean? Bad luck? And . . . independence.”

A long silence ensued. Then Woody asked, “Have you ever listened to old Monroe Kennedy?”

“I try not to.”

“He's over a hundred twenty. In his day the Gatherers were sure that no tax should ever go over twenty percent. You could double—and triple-tax them, but if any tax went over double-tithe we'd all be found hanging from lampposts.”

“Obviously he was wrong. Your point?”

“They fixed it by taxing smaller groups. Any one group might want someone else's taxes to go up instead of his. Graduated income tax, it's called, and property tax increases. It's worked for years, decades, but how long can it last?”

“In California . . .”

“What?”

The memory wouldn't come.

We wandered back to the room where Glyer was still hassling Massoglia. We watched for a bit. They'd shot him with a truth drug. Veritas isn't proprietary; all of the tax agencies have it. Massoglia was babbling all his secrets, if he had any.

Office work can be entertaining at the IRS. They bring in famous writers and singers for audits and get them to dance through hoops, perform or lecture or autograph. Here, it's too much like work.

“Marion's backpacker,” Woody whispered, “must have been carrying a bomb. We've got no protection at all against a suicide bomber. How'd he get there? He didn't come in the Director's flight car. He couldn't have walked in, could he?”

I said, “Flight belt.”

“Did you see any other fliers?”

“No. I got to dinner a little late.”

“If he'd walked in, the guards would have stopped him. Hey.” He pointed as Glyer puffed a mist into Massoglia's face. The dealer would go home with no notion of where he'd spent the last six hours.

“Amneserol. Give a guard a little less than the standard dose, he'll lose an hour's memory of hanging out in the woods.”

I nodded. “He'd still have to come in with a flight belt. We'll find it ditched somewhere.”

Woody didn't answer.

 

Woody left after work. In an hour and a bit he'd be back in Portland with his wife.

I called the secret hospital, but Marion was asleep. I decided to stay in Washington. I booked a room in the Watergate, the part above ground, then went to the Smithsonian. I'd get them to open the back rooms. They've got more stuff stored than most taxpayers would believe.

I stopped in the gem display rooms to look at a gorgeous footbath-sized chunk of malachite. The legend said that it had been given to Spiro Agnew when he was Nixon's Vice President. I looked around . . . and she was looking over my shoulder. Pretty, middle-aged, curly brown hair.

“I love malachite,” she said. She was wearing a T-shirt under an open jacket. The shirt bore a symbol like a propeller with too many blades.

I said, “So do I.” I'd been thinking about pulling rank on the Smithsonian clerks. Sometimes they'll let a tax man go home with something.

She said, “It's too heavy to carry and too big to stick under my suit jacket, and we'd need a distraction.”

“Have dinner with me, and we'll come up with a plan.”

She looked me over. “Okay. I'm Winnifred. Have you got a car?”

“No.”

“I do.”

Back in the Watergate, I got us drinks from the minibar—miserably poor stuff—and ordered a room service dinner. We talked a little. I spun the usual tale, not hiding that I was a tax man. But Winnifred, I thought, was being evasive.

Presently a waiter knocked. Winnifred stood briskly and went to the door. I was startled enough to remain seated. I was feeling the liquor, too.

She signed the check and got rid of the waiter. “I've given you a Mickey,” she said.

She must have used a lot. I was feeling the effects despite the garnetine. I stayed seated. “That symbol,” I asked, waving my arm wildly, letting the words slur. “What's it mean?”

“Prop Thirteen. Aren't you out yet? Proposition Thirteen was the law they passed in California in nineteen seventy-eight, that dropped property taxes back to normal levels and kept them there. We use it as a symbol for—Why am I saying this?”

“I put a little something in your drink, too.”

She broke into a delighted smile. “I knew it!” she crowed. “You bastards have got an actual, working truth serum, just like in the pulps! How long does it last?”

I grinned at her. “It's permanent. Can you imagine what would happen if that ever got loose among the taxpayers?”

“Congress first. Then the Supreme Court.” Winnifred was beginning to babble. “There's nothing in the Constitution about abortions and evolution and, and, they bloody well knew it. Then give it to the media. Then—” She lost some of her smile. “Everybody. How could you stop? Bomb the rivers in the Muslim countries with truth stuff so the ones who can read can't lie about what's in the Koran.”

Damn, I was thinking of hiring her! I liked the way she thought. But—“Winnifred, what were you going to do with me?”

“Hang you from a lamppost.”

“No.” Even during the interbureau wars, we never hanged a tax man in public. It's far too likely to start a trend. “The others, you never did that.”

“It's time.”

“You'll see weapons you never dreamed of,” I said. We glared at each other. “How did you set off that explosion in Oregon?”

“Our man hiked in with a bomb. Sequoia National Park, after all, and you don't have to stick to the trails. He had an amnesia drug we got off an IRS man, for the guards.”

“How did you talk him into it?”

Her face screwed up in hatred. “
You
did. He lost everything to taxes.”

“And the others? Drowning, poison—”

“And strokes! The Customs people have something that will cause a stroke a few days after you take it. You people have endless miracles, Mel, some evil, some wonderful. Why not share?”

“Not enough to go around,” I told her.

“We . . . not
we . . . you
went to the Moon in 1969, and built a base, and stayed. Where do you launch from?”

“The Saturns launch from Kennedy, at a base that's supposed to be closed. Closed to us, too,” I said bitterly. “Nobody gets to Lyndon Base but IRS people.”

“And the freeway system under Beverly Hills, and the Caspian lakes full of beluga sturgeon—and then you put luxury taxes on food. How can you justify it?”

I sighed. “Winnifred, have you ever read the newslet ter they put out just for funeral directors? ‘The bereaved have a deep need to spend more money than they can afford. It ameliorates their grief.' Or listen to anything the nurse and teacher unions tell themselves. It's just incredibly easy for anyone to believe he deserves more than he's getting. What if you did get to keep all you make? What would you spend it on? Look what you buy with it now!”

She glared. “We'll take you down. You can't keep drowning us in paper forever.” With Veritas in her, she had to mean it.

“I'm sorry, Winnifred.” I got up, and she got up, but I was faster.

 

I was looking out at the dawn when she woke. She sat bolt upright in bed and stared at me. “Oh, God, who are you? I don't remember anything.”

“We were picked up by a flying saucer and got to know each other that way. How about breakfast?”

Puzzled look. I said, “Kidding. It was the Smithsonian.”

She left cheerful. We'd exchanged phone numbers. She thought I was an accountant for Wachovia.

And I took the elevator down to Minus Forty-Two.

She hadn't known as many names as I'd have liked. Even so, when I turned my list of the Prop Thirteen Gang over to Woody, we'd have something to trade with IRS. Maybe I'll see the Moon before I die.

Darwin A. Garrison

 

 

K
YRI TRELLAN CLOSED her eyes and leaned back against the warm plastic of the air supply duct, breathing out a long sigh and trying to let go of the nervous knot in her stomach.

The end of supply duct four had become her hidden sanctuary less than a day after she had arrived on Cross-road Station. Here, far above the hustle and bustle of the freight and passenger decks, she could find a cool breeze and a measure of quiet. The scents of flowers and food plants arriving with the freshly recycled air from hydroponics soothed her nerves. When she closed her eyes, she could imagine herself laying on her favorite grassy hill on Escaflow, listening to the birds in the maples.

“They should be on this one,”
said a soft, childlike voice inside her mind. She felt the tickle of tiny claws against the skin between her breasts as Eperr, her bonded Nlyx, stirred and began to climb up to his “look out.” She opened her eyes and glanced down in time to see his tiny, hamsterlike nose and twitching whiskers poke out of the button loop in her blue coveralls to peer through the grate at the end of the duct. Kyri smiled in spite of her nerves.

“Ever the optimist, eh?” she asked out loud as she turned her head to watch the
Merlin's Pride
drifting toward docking clamp number seven. Her spot at the end of the duct also provided a spectacular view of the three-story-tall transplast panels that converted the hulking freighters into glittering technologic koi floating within the infinite black aquarium of space.