Chapter Eight
The art of business is not a pretty one; it requires blood-red pigment.
—Francella Watanabe, private reflections
In her white-and-gold dress and star-shaped headdress, Noah’s sister gave the appearance of a lady of leisure. It was just one of the subterfuges the tall, redheaded woman employed to conceal the fact that she was responsible for the assault on CorpOne headquarters, and that she herself had received training in the most advanced styles of combat and tactical warfare.
“Faster!” Francella shouted to four company policemen who carried her injured, comatose father on a hover-bier. With her leading the way, they ran through a dimly-illuminated corridor, just one of the tunnels that formed a maze beneath the office-industrial complex of more than twenty buildings. Originally these subterranean passageways had been the streets of an ancient Nopan city, but the community had been abandoned long ago when the inhabitants fell victim to a mysterious malady.
Old Prince Saito, with his head bandaged, came to life suddenly on the bier. His eyes opened wide and he groaned loudly, then flopped one of his beefy arms over the side. “Noah?” he said, while lifting his head and looking toward Francella.
She wanted to scream her rage and pound on him, but instead pressed a small skin-colored pad against her own neck, right over a throbbing vein. Almost immediately she felt a custom drug take effect, deadening her emotions and dampening twinges of personal guilt she had been feeling, concerning the things she had to do.
Abruptly the nobleman’s eyes closed again, but he kept murmuring Noah’s abominable name. Finally he fell silent and his face went slack, though his chest heaved up and down as he clung stubbornly to life. She stared at a sapphire signet ring on his right hand and vowed that Noah would never possess it. She considered slipping it off the old man’s finger at the first opportunity, but hesitated. Soon she would have everything she wanted anyway.
In order to maintain appearances, Francella fell back beside her father and re-secured his arm inside the electronic strap that had been holding it. His eyelids fluttered, but didn’t open.
She spoke his name, but he did not respond. His breathing remained steady.
Prince Saito had been injured by a hail of alloy-jacketed projectiles fired into his office building by the phony Guardians, who were conducci, mercenaries she had hired secretly. Murdering her father had been the primary objective of the professional fighters, but they may not have succeeded. She hated sloppy workmanship.
“You’ll be fine,” she assured Prince Saito, though he seemed unable to hear her. “We’re taking care of you.”
“Noah?” he murmured, with his eyelids still closed.
“I’m Francella,” she said, arching her hairless brows in displeasure. “Noah tried to kill you.”
“He wouldn’t do that … wouldn’t do that … “ Prince Saito’s face became a twisted mask as he struggled to think, struggled for consciousness, and finally gave up the effort … but kept breathing.
She studied the heaving of his chest, and thought, Die, damn you!
They ascended a corrugated alloy ramp to a platform and ran across to the opposite side, where they boarded a small maglev rail car. Francella took a seat at the rear of the vehicle, while the others placed the bier on the floor in the center of the aisle, and then took seats themselves. Armored doors closed and the car accelerated quickly, throwing Francella against her seat back.
Only half an hour earlier, fifty-eight heavily armed conducci had attacked the CorpOne complex. She had hired them through a series of middlemen in such a circuitous chain that no one knew who had originally paid for their services. As the Security Chief for the company, Francella Watanabe had ways of getting things done discreetly. She had, however, put out the word that any mistakes would be handled brutally … and the killers had not done their job cleanly, as she had demanded.
The CorpOne policemen in the rail car with her had known nothing of the plot and had interfered, going to the aid of the Prince and whisking him off to safety, with Francella in tow … trying to figure out what to do.
Her thoughts racing, she touched an electronic transmitter at her waist, setting off explosives in the tunnel behind them. The company security men chattered excitedly and stared out the rear window of the railway car at the flaming tunnel.
But Francella had other matters on her mind. Privately, she was considering how best to finish the job on her father, but she needed to do it carefully, so that no one suspected a thing. For years she had been monitoring the old man’s declining health, and had hastened it along by seeing to it that the “cellteck” life extension drugs and other medicines he took were of less effect than they should have been. With those products at full strength—many manufactured in CorpOne laboratories—he might have lived to a hundred and ten, another twenty-seven years.
Too long for her to wait. She wanted control of all family corporate operations as soon as possible, before anything could erode her position.
The alterations in her father’s pharmacopoeia had been slight but cumulative, so that over a period of years they undoubtedly subtracted time from his life. An actuary secretly in her employ (his services obtained through another circuitous series of middlemen) had prepared projections showing how much she had probably shortened the unnamed subject’s life. Based upon raw medical data that she had provided for the actuary, he had originally estimated a reduced life span of seventeen months, twenty-four days, and a few hours.
Unfortunately that had been modified by the interference of the Prince himself, who had unwittingly compensated for her tricks by improving his diet and instituting a moderate exercise program. In the process, the big man, unaware of her actions, had been bragging that he’d lost two kilos over the past few weeks. Undoubtedly the net effect on his health had been minimal, since he had always been sedentary and had such an enormous girth. She had been waiting for him to slip back into his old ways, but the crisis had interfered … the meeting between Noah and her father that she could not allow.
At Francella’s instigation another explosion sounded behind the maglev car in which she rode. The vehicle shuddered, but kept going. It entered a brightly-illuminated tunnel, and moments later a heavy alloy door slammed shut behind them, keeping them safe from pursuers or the fire and detonations that she had set off.
A rapprochement between Francella’s brother and father would have unraveled much of her carefully-crafted efforts over the past decade, allowing her hated brother to gain a toe-hold on CorpOne operations.
She and Noah, her fraternal twin, had never gotten along very well, and the problems started early. After the babies were born, they thrashed around on a table and gave each other bloody lips. Over the years there had been respites between them, cease-fires, but they were few and far between … and tense. The siblings had always loathed one another, and had exchanged few words in the last fifteen years.
Their mother Eunicia, the only woman Prince Saito ever married, had almost died in childbirth. She had lived for years afterward, but never fully recovered, and was always a frail woman, finally dying in a grid-plane crash at the age of fifty-one. Prince Saito had never been the same afterward.
In recent weeks the old man had been wavering about Noah, and had mentioned the possibility of revamping his business operations in order to satisfy his son. This could involve bringing her hated twin back into the corporation, with all of his costly, meddlesome ideas about environmental issues. Francella could not tolerate that.
Upon learning of the scheduled meeting between the men, she had gone into a crisis mode. Setting aside her attempts to erode the Prince’s health, she had moved forward quickly. Her military-style attack with phony Guardians was a risky course of action, but offered the potential of distinct benefits. It could eliminate the Prince much more quickly, while placing the blame for his “tragic death” on Noah.
It might still work, if the old man died of his head injury.
On the bier beside her, Prince Saito groaned again. Francella felt like stuffing something in his mouth to shut him up, but resisted the temptation. She would take the rational course, not letting her emotions get the better of her.