CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Nikki’s only comment about the transit was to express her gratitude that it didn’t spark any nausea or dizziness. Probably adding those upsides to the list of practical possibilities she’d started making when I first told her about the portals.
I’d expected to find a full honor guard waiting for us when we arrived. But it was only Yimm, clearly armed, clearly bewildered by our sudden appearance. Even when Cherno had to bend his various paranoias and secrets, he still kept that bending to a minimum. Yimm greeted Nikki and Floyd, rather pointedly ignored me, then escorted us through the tunnel and up the elevator and to Cherno’s office.
Cherno went through the whole welcoming thing again. Then, as if it was just an afterthought, he turned to me. “I assumed your partner would be with you,” he said.
“Unfortunately, she had to stay behind to work on our ship,” I told him.
“Too bad,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “I wanted to thank her personally for helping you bring Ms. Piper here.”
“Hopefully, she’ll be able to come by later,” I said. “But as per our talk yesterday, we need to be ready to disappear in—what is it?—three days.”
“Five,” Cherno corrected me.
“Really,” I said. Either Cherno’s original timeline of six weeks had only been an estimate, or else the senator’s schedule had changed. “In that case, maybe I should go back and give her a hand.”
“Or you could stay here and keep Ms. Piper company,” Cherno said. “We wouldn’t want her to get bored, now, would we?”
I looked at Nikki. With her veil still in place, all I could see of her face were her eyes, and they weren’t telling me anything. “Certainly not,” I agreed heavily. “I’m afraid I didn’t bring my go bag this time.”
“Yimm can get you whatever you need.” Cherno snorted. “Oh, don’t look so glum,” he chided in the awkwardly humorous way of a person who hasn’t had to cajole or persuade anyone in years. “You’ll have a few days of rest and relaxation, and then you’ll be free to rejoin your partner and disappear for as long as you think necessary.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
And if what he really meant was that Selene and I would join each other in death? But there wasn’t any point in worrying about that now.
Worrying about it, no. Planning for it, yes. “So,” I said more cheerfully. “Back to the guest suite?”
* * *
To my complete lack of surprise, Nikki was given the guest suite. What I got was something that probably housed one of Cherno’s guards when he had more of them on duty here. It wasn’t much more than a sleeping room: no conversation area, no balcony, no spa in the bathroom, and only a limited-menu refreshment dispensary.
But the bed was reasonably comfortable.
The next four days settled into a mix of waiting and quiet. Cherno had granted me access to most of the mansion’s public areas, and I took advantage of that freedom to keep track as best I could of what he and Nikki were up to.
They were clearly up to a lot. Unfortunately, most of it seemed to be happening somewhere else. They were always gone before I awoke, and usually didn’t get back until early evening.
So much for me keeping her from being bored.
Late at night on the second day, I managed to sneak into the mansion’s garage. The first time Selene and I had come here the place had been empty, but now it was home to a van and five aircars. I checked each of the vehicles in turn, hoping a peek at their fuel gauges would tell me which one Cherno and Nikki had used that day and maybe give me an estimate of how far they’d traveled.
Unfortunately, the garage was also home to its own fuel synthesizer, and Cherno’s mechanics had evidently topped off Cherno’s vehicle when it arrived home.
Only once, on the third day, did Floyd accompany the two of them on their day trip. The rest of the time he, like me, was a clearly reluctant houseguest. He spent most of his time in his room, out on one of the mansion’s four balconies, or playing cards or otherwise hanging out with Yimm and the rest of Cherno’s thugs.
Though after the second such game marathon I wondered why any of them bothered. Floyd, for his part, didn’t seem impressed by the others’ attitude or general air of competence, while Yimm and his crew clearly thought Floyd didn’t give Cherno the degree of respect they seemed to think he deserved.
Considering that all of them worked for a pair of men who were ramping up to kill someone, I didn’t think either side had much claim on the moral high ground.
As my father used to say, Birds of a feather may flock together, but when they start pooping on your car they’re daring you to get out the shotgun.
It was on the fifth day that everything changed.
* * *
The place had been running at its usual degree of low-speed activity when I awoke that morning. I had breakfast, spent a couple of hours on one of the balconies trying to memorize every crag and cliff of the distant mountains in case I got a chance to look at a map or pictures of the region, then came in for lunch. I spotted Nikki once as she passed the dining room, her green-and-black outfit now reversed to its maroon-and-blue version. Cherno himself was nowhere to be seen, but I heard his voice a couple of times as he called to one or another of his thugs. After lunch I went back outside, this time focusing on the forested hills and paying particular attention to gaps that might indicate fire scars or old logging areas.
When I came back in, the mansion had gone quiet.
I went down to the garage. The last time I’d checked there had been five aircars. Now, four of them were gone, including all three of the six-passenger models. I went back upstairs and started a methodical search, looking for signs of life or, if it came to that, signs of death.
The mansion was big, and there were a lot of rooms I’d never been allowed in. There were also lots of places where a body could lie undisturbed unless someone was specifically looking for it.
I found nothing. No one alive, no one dead.
As my father used to say, If you appear to be the last one standing, you’re either the killer or the next victim. I’d never liked that particular aphorism, and I liked it even less now.
Finally, to my relief, I found them. Or at least, what was left of them.
“There you are,” Yimm called from the round table set up in the middle of one of the gabled top-floor rooms, swiveling his chair around to look at me over his shoulder. Floyd was sitting opposite to him, eyeing me closely, with the seat to Yimm’s right occupied by a thug named Buckley. The fourth chair, the left-hand one, sat empty. “Floyd tried to invite you to the game, but he couldn’t find you.”
“Strange,” I murmured, looking them over. Yimm and Buckley seemed to be nursing a quiet anticipation, while Floyd seemed even less happy than usual. “I wasn’t exactly hiding. Maybe he didn’t look very hard?”
“I looked just fine,” Floyd growled. “You playing, or not?”
“I’m playing,” I said, walking over to the empty chair. I rolled it out and sat down, then rolled myself back up to the table. With things clearly coming to a boil, relaxing with a good card game was the last thing on my mind.
But there were no answers anywhere else in the mansion. Maybe I could find a few in here. “What’s the game?”
“Five-card stud,” Yimm said, collecting the cards and starting to shuffle them. “You do know how to play poker, right?”
“How to play, and how to win,” I said with the kind of bravado I’d heard many a time from hunters and targets alike. As my father used to say, When someone decides they need to slap you down, it’s amazing how many times their weapon of choice is a secret that you came there hoping to learn.
“Yeah, words are cheap,” Yimm sneered. “Let’s see your money.”
I pulled a hundred-commark bill from my wallet and set it on the table. “So where is everyone?” I asked. “Out on a picnic or something?”
“Or something,” Yimm said. “Floyd, it’s your deal.”
“Today’s the day,” Floyd said, an edge of frustration in his voice and face. He took the deck and did a couple more shuffles. “They’re off doing the final setup.”
“Really,” I said, feeling my stomach tighten. So Nikki was about to earn her half-million commarks. “Shouldn’t you be there?”
“Why?” Yimm retorted before Floyd could answer. “Mr. Cherno has his own people. They don’t need him.”
“I was just thinking that Mr. Gaheen might like a firsthand account of the event and aftermath,” I said, looking back and forth between them, wishing fervently that Selene was here. Yimm knew something that Floyd and I didn’t—that much I could read in his face and body language. Cherno was up to something that went beyond the assassination of a corrupt politician. “Since Floyd is one of Mr. Gaheen’s right-hand men—”
“Mr. Gaheen doesn’t need Floyd,” Buckley put in. “He’ll be right there watching the whole thing go down.”
I stared at him. “Mr. Gaheen is here?”
“It’s none of your business,” Yimm cut in, throwing Buckley a quick glare. “Buckley, shut up. Floyd, deal the damn cards.”
“He came in last night,” Floyd said, staring hard at me. He’d caught the sudden change in my voice, I could see, and was wondering what had suddenly kicked me in the rear.
I took a careful breath, watching Yimm out of the corner of my eye. “Floyd, who hired Piper?” I asked. “Mr. Gaheen, or Mr. Cherno?”
“Mr. Gaheen,” he said, still gazing at me. “Why?”
“And he knows about the portal Mr. Cherno has stashed away out there?”
“Of course.”
“Do you know why Mr. Cherno needed it to be up and running before the job?”
A flicker of uncertainty touched Floyd’s face. “No.”
“I do,” I said. “Deal the cards, and I’ll tell you.”
For a moment the room was quiet. Then, still watching me, Floyd pushed the deck toward me. I cut the cards and he dealt out five to each of us.
“Here’s the thing,” I said, picking up my cards. A pair of fives plus junk. “First of all, that’s not Piper out there. That’s an assassin who switched places with Piper after you dropped her off at the Ruth. Her name is Nicole Schlichting.”
“Never heard of her,” Yimm growled, just a little too quickly.
“I have,” Floyd said, his throat suddenly tensing. “You’re sure about that, Roarke?”
“I’m sure.”
“Ridiculous,” Yimm bit out. He was still holding his cards, but his fingers were squeezing them hard. He knew, and he knew I knew. The question was what he was going to do about it. “Mr. Gaheen hired an assassin named Piper. Everyone knows that.”
“You’re right, he did,” I agreed, keeping Buckley in the corner of my eye. Yimm was clearly going to play it cool and keep the story going as long as he could. Buckley, on the other hand, looked like he could break at any moment. “Interesting thing about Nikki—we call her Nikki, you know. Anyway, Nikki has an interesting code of ethics that includes never taking a job against someone who’s ever hired her.”
I raised my eyebrows. “That’s the key, really. Because Mr. Gaheen didn’t hire her. He hired Piper. It was Mr. Cherno who hired—”
Abruptly Buckley dropped his cards and darted his right hand inside his jacket. Floyd tossed his own cards into the thug’s face with one hand and dropped his other hand out of sight beneath the table. There was the sharp crack of a Skripka 4mm—
And Buckley collapsed face-first onto the table.
But Yimm was already in motion, shoving his chair backward hard enough to send it rolling nearly to the door. He leaped up and to his right, putting Buckley’s slumped body between him and Floyd. “Freeze!” he snapped, yanking out his own gun and pointing it at Floyd. “Hands on the table.” He threw me a glance, noted that I was still holding my cards with both hands visible, then turned back to Floyd. “You hear me?”
“I hear you,” Floyd said coldly. His left hand was still above the table; now, moving slowly, he brought his empty right hand up to join it. “Is Roarke right? Is Mr. Gaheen Cherno’s target?”
“Is he Mr. Cherno’s target,” Yimm corrected with a sort of oily maliciousness. “Come on, Floyd, don’t be naïve. Gaheen’s gone soft. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. Mr. Draelon would never have let him rise as high as Mr. Varsi did. Neither of them would have been stupid enough to just hand everything over to him.”
“Since neither of them is around anymore, I don’t think their opinions matter much,” Floyd countered.
“No, the only opinion that matters is Mr. Cherno’s,” Yimm agreed. He hissed between clenched teeth, scowling uncertainly. “See, here’s the problem. Mr. Cherno told me to keep you two alive, that he still had a job for you. But that was before Roarke opened his fat mouth.”
“I wouldn’t do anything rash if I were you,” I cautioned, lifting a hand warningly. “Mr. Cherno needs me to leave here with the tragic news of the accident that took Mr. Gaheen’s life. Why else do you think he kept me around this long?”
“Yeah, that was the job, all right,” Yimm growled. “But like I said, that was before you opened your mouth.”
“It’s supposed to look like an accident?” Floyd asked, frowning.
“Oh, it’s going to be a dandy,” I assured him, trying to run the odds. I was still holding my cards; Yimm was still holding his Skripka. My plasmic was still in its holster, while Floyd’s Skripka was presumably on his lap—that was the only way he could have gotten to it in time to beat Buckley to the draw. All that put together left Yimm in complete control of the situation.
But he was standing behind Buckley, and the front of Buckley’s chair was within reach of my own foot. If I could give the chair a hard enough kick to knock it back into Yimm, it might throw his aim off long enough for Floyd or me to get in a kill shot. “But like I said, Yimm, Mr. Cherno needs an unbiased observer like me to tell people about it,” I continued, casually laying down my cards and resting my hands flat at the edge of the table. “Everyone else involved is one of Mr. Cherno’s thugs. I’m the only one people will believe.”
“You’d just flat-out lie about it?” Floyd demanded.
I shrugged. “Sorry, Floyd,” I said. The table seemed heavy enough to provide the counterweight I needed for my move, but there was no way to know for sure until I tried it. “But I’m just a crockett, with a crockett’s chronic financial trouble. I’m pretty sure Mr. Cherno can persuade me to tell the right story to the right people.”
Yimm snorted. “Yeah, like Mr. Cherno’s going to trust you,” he said sarcastically. “You know what’d be a lot easier and a hell of a lot cheaper? Starting a few rumors and letting the gossips do the heavy lifting.” His face cleared of the uncertainty and he turned his Skripka toward me. I shifted my hands to a grip on the edge of the table—
Abruptly, across the room to my right, the door jamb exploded in a banshee scream and a blazing shower of white-hot sparks.
I jerked, my mind freezing at the sudden and bizarre intrusion into our moment of truth and death. But Yimm wasn’t so easily stunned. He spun toward the door, his gun tracking across the opening, his eyes trying to pierce the dazzling light show and see what was beyond it.
He was still watching and waiting when Floyd rolled his chair back a few centimeters, retrieved the Skripka from his lap, and put three 4mm slugs into Yimm’s torso.
I tore my eyes away from the already fading spray as Yimm collapsed to the floor and lay still. “Let the gossips do this heavy lifting, you traitor,” Floyd said coldly to the corpse as he stood up. “Come on, Roarke.”
He started toward the door. “Yeah, coming,” I said, watching the spark shower burn itself the rest of the way out. “What the hell was that?”
“Called a sparkler,” Floyd said over his shoulder, pulling out his phone with his left hand and punching in a number. “Nice and discreet. No one even notices it until you need a distraction.”
“It’s very good at its job,” I agreed, peering at the burned spot on the jamb as we passed. “Where did it come from?”
“Where do you think?” Floyd retorted. “My pocket. I put one by the door whenever I go into a room. If I don’t use it, I take it off again when I leave. Remote trigger in my jacket cuff.”
“On every door you go through?” I echoed, frowning. I’d never seen him do anything of the sort. “Since when?”
He gave me a pointed look. “Since Fidelio.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right.”
Floyd muttered a curse and jammed the phone back in his pocket. “No connection,” he said, picking up his pace and heading for the nearest staircase. “The center must be comm-blocked.”
“Where Mr. Gaheen is right now?”
“Yeah, the Colonnade Center in Bachar Lune,” Floyd said. “About an hour’s flight from here.” He gestured ahead. “I just hope there’s still an aircar down there we can use.”
“There was when I checked an hour ago,” I told him. “I just hope you can get it started.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Floyd said firmly. “So what the hell is going on, anyway?”
“Like I said, a very clever plan,” I said. “Mr. Gaheen hires Piper to take out Senator Gilles, so everyone in the organization who knows anything about the plan assumes it’s Piper out in the darkness taking pot shots. I’m guessing that Mr. Gaheen will be chatting with Gilles, maybe even just walking past him, when the shot comes blasting in, barely missing the supposed target and regrettably taking out the wrong man.”
“Mr. Gaheen,” Floyd said, his forehead still furrowed with confusion as we reached the staircase and started down. “But it’s not Piper out there. It’s Schlichting.”
“Right,” I said. “According to Nikki, Piper is known more for quiet subtlety than total unerring accuracy, especially in a moving-target situation. A supposed misfire that kills Mr. Gaheen instead of Gilles will be chalked up to bad luck.”
“Only it’s Schlichting out there,” Floyd repeated, still working it through. “And Schlichting never misses.”
“She never misses,” I agreed grimly. “And that’s the problem Cherno had with his scheme. If anyone even suspects Schlichting pulled the trigger, the assumption that Senator Gilles was the true target goes straight out the window.”
“And if they think Mr. Gaheen was the target, they’ll start looking at Cherno.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Which is why a few hours from now Nikki will be seen on Meima, either by prominent upstanding citizens, the local badgemen, or both.”
Floyd braked to a halt so suddenly he nearly lost his footing. “The portal?”
“You got it,” I said. “The portal isn’t just a convenient way to get from one planet to another. It’s also the ultimate alibi machine.”
For a pair of heartbeats Floyd stared at me. Then, abruptly, he turned and continued down the stairs, again picking up his pace. “The big meeting at Cherno’s HQ on the Greater Southern Continent,” he snarled over his shoulder. “It was scheduled for two weeks after Cherno first had me bring you here.”
“Ah,” I said as the final piece of the puzzle fell into place. “Yes. If we’d been able to activate the portal when we first arrived, Cherno would have had you run the Piper/Schlichting drama to Kanaloa in time for that meeting. But when he couldn’t make that work, he shifted his plans another month to the next time Mr. Gaheen would be here. Why exactly is he here, by the way?”
“Governor’s dedication of the Colonnade Center,” Floyd growled. “Mr. Gaheen has interests on Kanaloa, and also figured it would be a good cover for some quiet conversations.”
“Very reasonable,” I said. “Cherno probably didn’t even have to suggest it to him. Of course, moving the date required the rest of us to tread water for a few weeks, but it was the best he could do.”
“Yeah,” Floyd said. “It would have taken a few more hours to get Schlichting here after the HQ meeting, but she’d still have shown up on Meima way before any ship could make the trip.”
“Exactly,” I said. “And if Selene and I hadn’t found the other end in time for this one, he’d have postponed it until the next time Mr. Gaheen was in town.”
“If there was a next time.”
“There would be,” I assured him. There’s always a second opportunity somewhere down the line, Nikki had said, and usually a third and a fourth. “As long as Cherno had the portal and Nikki was on retainer, he could find another time and place.”
We reached the bottom of the staircase and headed for the garage. “So let’s make sure he doesn’t get any more of them,” Floyd said. He shot me a sideways look. “That is, if you’re aboard.”
“Mr. Gaheen was very nice to Selene and me once,” I reminded him. “More importantly, I’d rather have him in charge of the organization than Cherno.”
“Oh, Cherno will never be in charge,” Floyd said softly. “Not for long, anyway. Trust me. Come on—let’s get that damn aircar started.”