Wild Country (10 page)

But why had the Mossad converted a good syndicate soldier merely to contact Felix Sorel? Maybe because Sorel's own operations were so cagey, so condensed, so carefully interwoven with the politics of Mexico and Cuba. New Israel did not want trouble; it coveted only success—on terms that few men on Earth could appreciate. When you feel that you have been expelled, literally, from your mother planet, you are not likely to harbor tender thoughts about the people still living there.

The syndicate learned from their wigged-out soldier that New Israel had offered him a reasonable bribe: a sex-rejuvenation operation. Syndicate bosses smiled at this for two reasons. One was admiration: not many mobs could offer bribes like that. The other was savage satisfaction: the soldier would not live to enjoy it. The Placidas woman might be harder to catch.

After drawing a great lump of cash in St. Joseph, Marianne slept the night on a slow local to Des Moines, fretful at every stop. The Corsican soldier slept without further cares on the bottom of the muddy Missouri, undisturbed by the fish that nibbled at his eyes.

On Thursday. Marianne fretted through the contact from her Des Moines uplink to a terminal on Sharon Square. New Israel/Beth. The man's accent was clearly American, and his holo image reminded her charmingly of a witty professor or a successful salesman. He and two others just happened to be slated for shuttledown to Kingsley, the southernmost shuttleport under Canada's control, near Klamath Falls in Oregon Territory.

Could the lady and her friend Felix meet them in the little tourist haven of Ashland? The lady thought it might be arranged; border authorities rarely bothered tourists crossing into soil that had been American only ten years before and seemed likely to revert to statehood again, once the resentment over wartime quarantines had faded.

The man on the holo was nearly bald, with a strong nose and expressive brows. He assured Marianne he would recognize her by sight in Ashland's famed Lithia Hotel. He would be accompanied by an agronomist, Aron Maazel. and an attorney, Zoltan Azeri. His own name, he said, was Roger St. Denis; a trained negotiator.

Negotiators are good at half lies. He was trained all right, but his name had not always been St. Denis. Until the overthrow of the Young administration he had been Boren Mills, chief exec of International Entertainment and Electronics. As Mills, he had fled his collapsing corporate empire four years earlier, on the eve of the rebellion. Now, as St. Denis, he was returning Earthside with New Israeli credentials.

Marianne accepted her Ashland rendezvous and overflew the ruins of Omaha en route to Lincoln, Nebraska. After a change of clothing and a bleach job that infuriated her by tinting her dark hair a floozy red. she caught a bus to the university campus, where she disappeared into the main library. Though changing purses twice, she kept the contents. In the hubbub of young Cornhuskers flailing among their first library assignments of the fall season, Marianne managed to encode a message into her voder.

She refused two invitations to fraternity brawls while waiting for a phone booth in the bowels of the library, and the booth she claimed had no video. No problem; she did not intend to transmit her image anyway.

Marianne punched a SanTone number, unwilling to commit her voiceprint to the system. The voice that responded was obviously that of another voder. San Antonio Rose would return pronto; did the caller want to leave a message?

She thought fast and put the call on hold while she punched a brief message into her own voder. Her little machine then said into the speaker, in its professional baritone: "Cielita Linda is out, and she is in. She wishes to send a message and will call every hour on the hour until San Antonio Rose is ready to record." Then she punched off and sought a less crowded place. She was damned if she'd transmit until she
knew
an honest-to-God human was on the other end.

Like an army, a university advances on its stomach. While thousands of youths filled their bellies, Marianne had her choice of phone booths, and at seven P.M. she reached her contact in SanTone Ringcity. She transmitted the long string of numbers by voder tone, waited through the longest twenty minutes of her life, and finally got a coded response before she abandoned the campus in search of a hostel.

That response, when decoded, was a big relief. The Horse agreed to her Oregon rendezvous. He would be strolling on the monorail platform in Ashland before noon on Saturday. He expected Cielita Linda to do the same.

Because the hoverbus to Ashland would not leave Lincoln until early morning, she relaxed in her spartan room, watching an enhanced holovision remake of
Duel in the Sun
. One good thing about holo enhancement: it let a director choose from the entire array of entertainers who had ever been committed to film or tape. The cast of
Duel
now included Leslie Howard, young Henry Fonda, Evelyn Keyes, Gloria Swanson, and William S. Hart—plus the ungimmicked Jennifer Jones, whose willful, half-mad, half-caste Pearl Chavez could not have been improved by any video gimmick. Marianne also enjoyed Fonda as lewd Lewt McCanless: she'd always had a weakness for men of action who were also men of ideas. Why the hell else, she asked herself, would she look forward to third-class travel halfway across Reconstruction America?

Feeling slightly raffish in his new finery, the young man found the Al Fresco Cafe in the western outskirts of SanTone Ringcity in time for a late lunch on Saturday. Al Fresco, with its outdoor canopied tables and a view of the new high rises, managed to combine TexMex and Creole trappings without being pricey or pretentious. He admired the available women as he ate a single crepe; noted that one or two of them made the admiration mutual; ordered a Dos Equis and waited for something better.

Something very much better arrived within the hour. He needed a double take, but with his second glance came an instant erection. Her fine straight hair was gathered loosely over her bare right shoulder in a cascade of reddish gold with auburn highlights, her flowered Mexican peasant blouse tucked into a wide belt decorated with flashy conchos. She carried a big cheap shoulder bag. Her skirt, a pleated black lace affair, showed off exquisitely modeled calves, her ankles accentuated by colorful needle heels. He had never seen anything in his life that looked more like instant nookie—and at a modest price.

She sat near the entrance, gripping her bag as though fearing it would wander off. He shouldered his first impulse aside—it would have been a blunt frontal approach—and waited, sampling her with his gaze. He wasn't the only one.

The waiter seemed to regard her as special new talent and leaned over her chair in a frank assay of her cleavage, his grin insolent and knowing. When she had to wave the waiter on his way, the watcher broke into a smile, which she discovered by some kind of personal radar. She looked away quickly, a blush mounting from her bare shoulders, and he found his erection throbbing at this lapse from her commercial appearance.

Presently, while studying a new arrival, he saw that the honey-blonde was staring at him with new interest. When the waiter appeared with her drink, a bulky gentleman wearing expensive rings, who had never let his eyes stray from her since she arrived, tried to pay. She seemed to consider the offer but refused it with a winning smile. The young man across the patio relaxed; this time, his impulse had been to weave himself a penholder using a few of the man's ring fingers.

Now the blonde's appraisal of the young man involved something between a glare and a leer. He let her look, gripping his beer to show the cords in his forearms, the open collar of his yellow shirt revealing sinew at his throat when he smiled. Then he came to an internal decision and stood up slowly, running a hand through his freshly barbered black thatch, shoving his chair back with a careful thrust of a sharkskin boot that matched the color of his hair. In those new western boots he stood tall and knew it.

Neither of them had any doubt about his intentions from the very first. "Waiting for anyone special?" He wondered if she suspected why he was holding his Stetson over the bulge at his crotch.

She must have known, for she studied the hat before meeting his gaze. "I could be. Are you anyone special?"

"I'm Sam Coulter from Monahans, ma'am, and that's special enough for most folks."

"I'll just bet it is," she said, and took his hat. Her smile was wide and innocent, but the hand that brushed his fly was deliciously guilty. "Sit, Sam Coulter from Monahans—if you can, in those tight britches."

He sat down as if poleaxed. "My Gawd, you're really something," he said, laughing.

She nodded, studying his face. "Those big brown eyes of yours affected my judgment," she murmured. "Buy me a drink?"

His turn to nod. He gestured to the waiter, pointed to her drink, made a two-finger V. "What do I call you?"

She drained her glass, licked her lips carefully before answering. "Margarita. Like it?"

"A blond Margarita; why not?" Suddenly, with an intensity he could not mask, he was leaning forward, gripping his elbows with opposite hands: "Let me tell you something for your own good, Margarita. You're lookin' at a man who's been hungry a lo-o-ong time. If you're not careful, I just might make a crepe out of you right here in front of all these people. Consider yourself warned."

She found his knee with hers. As the waiter set down their drinks, she spoke as if they were alone. "What flavor?"

"Hm?"

"I mean, will I be your main course, covered with cream cheese and spice, or more like a light dessert crepe?"

The waiter, wearing a freshly-goosed expression, wheeled away only after a pointed stare from both of them. Then the young man nodded at her, picked up his drink, sipped, nodded again. His aspect was friendly but determined. "You're gonna pay for that, Margarita. Wait and see."

She grinned, a bright, salacious challenge, and said, "It's you who's supposed to pay, cowboy. Didn't they teach you that in Monahans?"

Helplessly amused, he let the drink dilute his excitement. The drinks did not last them long. "We sure don't have anything like you in Monahans," he said finally. "No professionals, anyhow."

"Actually," she said, purring it, "I'm only a gifted amateur."

He leaned back and guffawed, then wiped his eyes and, after a glance around, said, "There's not a man in this cafe who couldn't make a list of those gifts from memory, twenty years from now."

"That was the idea," she said, and emptied her glass. "Now that you've won my heart with sweet talk, I wonder what else you can win. No, don't get up yet," she said, rising, probing in her bag. She swept around the table, bent down, cupped his head between her hands. The kiss she gave him was enough to raise the local humidity. The twenty dollars, clinking from her fingertips to the table, broke a silence maintained by a dozen envious idlers.

She crooked a finger to bring her young man up from his chair, linked arms with him, then glanced at their audience. "This one," she said to them all, "will be on me." She noted with joy that her companion was too flustered to hold his hat down where he really needed it.

She expressed surprise at his Lectrabout, an obvious rental but still expensive for a West Texas saddle-slapper. Was he, perhaps, a foreman? No, he said, not even a cowpoke; he was one of the lucky ones who'd taken a chance with a wildcatter outside Odessa and hit a pocket of natural gas. And by the way, it was almost siesta time. Before doing the town, would Margarita care to see his motel room and catch a few winks?

She agreed with a single wink, the only one that counted, and played the ticklish tease while he drove as she let his free hand wander. In ten minutes and after one near collision he navigated them to the underground parking at his motel.

Like many new motor lodges, this one offered maximum privacy by placing the whole complex into insulating earth, with one glass wall of each room facing a sunken private sundeck. This man who called himself Sam Coulter, she mused, may have carried a heavy need out of Wild Country, but he wasn't too antsy to put careful planning into a private conquest.

Once inside the room, she took her shoulder bag into the dressing alcove and prepared her tawdry magics. When she strode out, he was still standing by the sunlit deck, hat in hand. Her forthrightness had a devastating effect.

He turned and saw that her skirt and blouse were gone, the gold-auburn hair parted so that it flanked her throat, hiding her nipples while permitting a view of the undercup bra, itself an architectural marvel. Under the skirt she had worn—still wore—a black lace apron no larger than a doily, with a similar tiny tapestry over her ample behind. And she still wore the stylish needle heels, hardly more than stiletto-tipped sheaths, cemented lightly to the soles of her feet.

He watched her approach, scanning every centimeter of her, and his Adam's apple bobbed convulsively. Then: "I just discovered there's such a thing as too much," he said with an idiot grin, and put his Stetson on. She saw that he had intended a modest surprise of his own, protruding through his open fly. It was now a limp surprise.

A series of unspoken responses wafted across her face, and the one she kept was with narrowed eyelids, hands on her hips, one seminude foot tapping in pornographic satire of a vexed schoolmarm. "I told you and told you, don't touch it 'til I get there," she said.

"What? No, I—uh, dammit, I didn't! I
said
you'd be sorry," he said, palms out at pocket height.

"No you didn't, lover," she replied, near enough for him to feel the heat of her body. She took the hat from his head, her smile full of warmth and promise and without the faintest hint of smugness. "You said I'd pay for it." Her brows asked for endorsement; he nodded. "And as it happens, I will love paying for it," she said, tossing the hat into a corner. "Get over on that bed, mister; your first payment's going to be a massage."