CHAPTER NINE

Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please.”

The auctioneer tapped a finger delicately onto the bulb of her no-hands mike and the sound frub-frubbed through the vaulted space over our heads like muffled thunder. In keeping with tradition, she was attired, minus helmet and gloves, in a vacuum suit of sorts, but it was moulded in lines that reminded me more of the fashion houses on New Beijing than a Mars exploratory dig. Her voice was sweet, warm coffee laced with overproof rum. “Lot seventy-seven. From the Lower Danang Field, recent excavation. Three-metre pylon with laser-engraved technoglyph base. Opening offers at two hundred thousand saft.”

“Somehow I don’t think so.” Matthias Hand sipped at his tea and glanced idly up to where the artefact turned in holographic magnification just beyond the edge of the clearing balcony. “Not today, and not with that bloody great fissure running through the second glyph.”

“Well you never know,” I said easily. “No telling what kind of idiots are wandering around with too much money in a place like this.”

“Oh, quite.” He twisted slightly in his seat, as if scanning the loosely knotted crowd of potential buyers scattered around the balcony. “But I really think you’ll see this piece go for rather less than a hundred and twenty.”

“If you say so.”

“I do.” An urbane smile faded in and then out across the chiselled Caucasian planes of his face. He was, like most corporate execs, tall and forgettably good-looking. “Of course, I have been wrong in the past. Occasionally. Ah, good, this looks like ours.”

The food arrived, dispensed by a waiter on whom had been inflicted a cheaper and less well-cut version of the auctioneer’s suit. He unloaded our order with remarkable grace, considering. We both waited in silence while he did it and then watched him out of sight with symmetrical caution.

“Not one of yours?” I asked.

“Hardly.” Hand prodded doubtfully at the contents of the bento tray with his chopsticks. “You know, you might have picked another cuisine. I mean, there’s a war on and we are over a thousand kilometres from the nearest ocean. Do you really think sushi was such a good idea?”

“I’m from Harlan’s World. It’s what we eat there.”

Both of us were ignoring the fact that the sushi bar was slap in the middle of the clearing balcony, exposed to sniper view from positions all over the auction house’s airy interior. In one such position, Jan Schneider was at that moment huddled up with a snub-barrelled hooded-discharge laser carbine, looking down a sniperscope at Matthias Hand’s face. I didn’t know how many other men and women might be in the house doing the same thing to me.

Up on the holodisplay over our heads, the opening price slithered in warm orange numerals, down past a hundred and fifty and unchecked by the imploring tones of the auctioneer. Hand nodded towards the figure.

“There you are. The corrosion begins.” He started to eat. “Shall we get down to business then?”

“Fair enough.” I tossed something across the table to him. “That’s yours, I think.”

It rolled on the surface until he stopped it with his free hand. He picked it up between a well-manicured finger and thumb and looked at it quizzically.

“Deng?”

I nodded.

“What did you get out of him?”

“Not much. No time with a virtual trace set to blow on activation, you know that.” I shrugged. “He dropped your name before he realised I wasn’t a Mandrake psychosurgeon, but after that he pretty much clammed up. Tough little motherfucker.”

Hand’s expression turned sceptical, but he dropped the cortical stack into the breast pocket of his suit without further comment. He chewed slowly through another mouthful of sashimi.

“Did you really have to shoot them all?” he asked finally.

I shrugged. “That’s the way we do things up north these days. Maybe you haven’t heard. There’s a war on.”

“Ah, yes.” He seemed to notice my uniform for the first time. “So you’re in the Wedge. I wonder, how would Isaac Carrera react to news of your incursions into Landfall, do you suppose?”

I shrugged again. “Wedge officers get a lot of latitude. It might be a little tricky to explain, but I can always tell him I was undercover, following up a strategic initiative.”

“And are you?”

“No. This is strictly personal.”

“And what if I’ve recorded this and I play it back to him?”

“Well, if I’m undercover, I have to tell you something to maintain that cover, don’t I. That would make this conversation a double bluff. Wouldn’t it.”

There was a pause while we looked impassively at each other across the table, and then another smile spread slowly onto the Mandrake executive’s face. This one stayed longer and was unmanufactured, I thought.

“Yes,” he murmured. “That is so very elegant. Congratulations, lieutenant. It’s so watertight I don’t know what to believe, myself. You could be working for the Wedge, for all I know.”

“Yes, I could.” I smiled back. “But you know what? You don’t have time to worry about that. Because the same data you received yesterday is in locked-down launch configuration at fifty places in the Landfall dataflow, preprogrammed for high-impact delivery into every corporate stack in the Cartel. And the clock is running. You’ve got about a month to put this together. After that, well, all your heavyweight competitors will know what you know, and a certain stretch of coastline is going to look like Touchdown Boulevard on New Year’s Eve.”

“Be quiet.” Hand’s voice stayed gentle, but there was a sudden spike of steel under the suave tones. “We’re in the open here. If you want to do business with Mandrake, you’re going to have to learn a little discretion. No more specifics, please.”

“Fine. Just as long as we understand each other.”

“I think we do.”

“I hope so.” I let my own tone harden a little. “You underestimated me when you sent the goon squad out last night. Don’t do it again.”

“I wouldn’t dream—”

“That’s good. Don’t even dream about it, Hand. Because what happened to Deng and his pals last night doesn’t come close to some of the unpleasantries I’ve been party to in the last eighteen months up north. You may think the war’s a long way off right now, but if Mandrake tries to shaft me or my associates again, you’ll have a Wedge wake-up call rammed so far up your arse you’ll be able to taste your own shit in the back of your throat. Now, do we understand each other?”

Hand made a pained face. “Yes. You’ve made your point very graphically. I assure you, there will be no more attempts to cut you out of the loop. That’s provided your demands are reasonable, of course. What kind of finder’s fee were you looking for?”

“Twenty million UN dollars. And don’t look at me like that, Hand. It’s not even a tenth per cent of what Mandrake stands to make from this, if we’re successful.”

Up on the holo, the asking price seemed to have braked at a hundred and nine and the auctioneer was now coaxing it upward a fraction at a time.

“Hmm.” Hand chewed and swallowed while he thought about it. “Cash on delivery?”

“No. Up front, on deposit in a Latimer City bank. One-way transfer, standard seven-hour reversibility limit. I’ll give you the account codes later.”

“That’s presumptuous, lieutenant.”

“Call it insurance. Not that I don’t trust you, Hand, but I’ll feel happier knowing you’ve already made the payment. That way, there’s no percentage in Mandrake fucking me over after the event. You don’t stand to gain anything from it.”

The Mandrake exec grinned wolfishly. “Trust works both ways, lieutenant. Why should we pay you before the project matures?”

“Other than because if you don’t I’ll walk away from this table and you’ll lose the biggest R&D coup the Protectorate has ever seen, you mean?” I let that sink in for a moment before I hit him with the relaxant. “Well, look at it this way. I can’t access the money from here as long as the war’s on; the Emergency Powers Directive ensures that. So your money’s gone, but I don’t have it either. To get paid, I have to be on Latimer. That’s your guarantee.”