Nobody said a word to Carpenter as he left the building.
As soon as he reached the Dunsmuir, half an hour later, Carpenter put in a call to Tedesco at the Samurai number he had been given. He expected to get some kind of corporate runaround; but to his amazement Tedesco appeared almost at once.
“You weren’t there,” Carpenter said. “Why the hell not?”
“It wasn’t required of me. I’ve seen the transcript.”
“Already? That was goddamn fast. What are you going to do now?”
“Do? What’s there to do? A fine has been levied for your negligence. The Port has stripped you of your sea license. Very likely Kyocera will sue us now for letting their people die out there in the Pacific, and that might be quite expensive. We just have to wait and see.”
“Am I going to be demoted?” Carpenter asked.
“You? You’re going to be fired.”
“I—fired?” Carpenter felt as though he had been punched. He struggled to catch his breath. “The Company is behind me, you said at the first hearing. Fired? Is that how you’re behind me?”
“Things changed, Carpenter. We didn’t know then that there were survivors. Survivors alter the entire circumstance, don’t you see? Kyocera wants your head on a platter, and we’re going to give it to them. We would probably have kept you on if there hadn’t been any survivors, if this had simply been an internal matter involving Samurai and the Port of Oakland—your word against that of your own crew, a matter of officer judgment and nothing else—but now there are accusers rising up publicly in wrath. There’s going to be a stink. How can we keep you, Carpenter? We would have hushed this all up and you might have hung on with us, but now we can’t, not with survivors speaking up, making us all look like shit. You think we can give you a new assignment now? Your new assignment is to look for a job, Carpenter. You have thirty days’ notice, and you’re damned lucky to get that. A termination counselor will advise you of your rights. Okay, Carpenter? You see the picture?”
“I wasn’t expecting—”
“No. I guess you weren’t. I’m sorry, Carpenter.”
Dazed, his breath coming in heavy shocked gusts, Carpenter stared at the visor long after it had gone blank. His head was whirling. He had never felt such inner devastation. Suddenly there was a hole through the middle of the planet, and he was falling through it—falling, falling—
Gradually he calmed a little.
He sat quietly for a while, breathing deeply, trying not to think of anything at all. Then, automatically, he started to call Nick Rhodes.
No.
No, not now. Rhodes would be sympathetic, sure; but he had as much as already said that he thought Carpenter had brought all this on himself, hadn’t he? Carpenter didn’t need to hear more of that just now.
Call a friend. A friend who isn’t Nick Rhodes.
Jolanda, he thought. Nice round jiggly unjudgmental Jolanda. Call her and take her out to dinner and then go back to her house somewhere in Berkeley with her and spend the night fucking her blind. It sounded good, until he remembered that Jolanda was up in the L-5s with the Israeli, Enron.
Someone else, then.
Not necessarily in the Bay Area. Someone far away. Yes, he thought. Go. Go. Far away from this place. Run. Take yourself a little trip.
To see Jeanne, for instance. Yes, sweet Jeannie Gabel, over there in Paris: always a good pal, always a sympathetic shoulder for him.
She was the one who had gotten him into this sea-captain business in the first place. She wouldn’t come down on him too hard for the mess that he had made of it. And during his thirty remaining days of Level Eleven privileges, why the hell not stick the Company for air fare to Paris and a bit of fine dining at the bistros along the Seine?
He keyed into the Samurai trunk line and asked for the Paris personnel node. A quick rough calculation told Carpenter that it was probably past midnight in Paris, but that was okay. He was in a bad way; Jeanne would understand.
The trouble was that Jeanne Gabel was no longer at the Paris office. In good old Samurai Industries fashion she had been transferred to Chicago, they told him.
He ordered the phone net to follow her path. It took only a moment to trace her.
“Gabel,” said the voice at the other end, and then there she was on the visor, the cheerful warm stolid face, the square jaw, the dark straightforward eyes. “Well, now! Home is the sailor, home from the—”
“Jeannie, I’m in trouble. Can I come see you?”
“What—how—” A quick recovery from her surprise. “Of course, Paul.”
“I’ll hop the next plane to Chicago, okay?”
“Sure. Sure, come right away. Whatever’s best for you.”
But his Company credit card seemed no longer good for air fare. After a couple of tries at reprogramming it, Carpenter gave up and tried car rental instead. Evidently they hadn’t canceled that yet, because a reservation came through on the first shot. Driving to Chicago probably wouldn’t be fun, but if he hustled he supposed he could make it in two days, at most three. He called Jeanne back and told her to expect him by midweek. She blew him a kiss.
The car delivered itself to the Dunsmuir forty minutes later. Carpenter was waiting outside the hotel with his suitcase behind him. “We’re going east,” he told it. “Head for Walnut Creek and keep on going.” He put the car on full automatic and leaned back and closed his eyes as it started up toward the hills. There was nothing to see, anyway, but the black unrelenting curtain of rain.
21
alone in his hotel room after his dinner with Meshoram Enron and Jolanda Bermudez, Farkas paced from corner to corner for ten or fifteen minutes, arranging pieces of the puzzle in his mind, tearing them down again, rearranging them. Then he put through a scrambled call to Emilio Olmo.
“I’ve been sniffing around a little,” Farkas told the Guardia Civil officer. “I’m starting to pick up a little whiff of conspiracy here and there.”
“Have you? So have I.”
“Oh?”
“You say first. What do you know, Victor?”
“The Southern California group that you heard rumors about? They’re real. Or at least, let me say, I’ve picked up the rumor about them now from an entirely new source.”
“A reliable source?”
“Reasonably reliable. A friend of a friend. Someone who is very well connected in the way of information transfer.”
“Ah,” said Olmo. “So the story is traveling. How very interesting. What else can you tell me, Victor?”
“Nothing, really.” Farkas saw no need just yet to provide Olmo with details of the Israeli involvement in the plot against the Generalissimo. That would be premature; it was clear to Farkas that Enron had some specific proposals to make, and Farkas wanted to hear them before he brought Olmo into the picture. If indeed he was going to bring Olmo into the picture at all. There was always the option of cutting the Guardia Civil man out of the scene, if the Israeli angle showed real promise. There might be more slope to gain by letting the coup happen than by helping Olmo snuff it out. Olmo, perhaps, could be used in some way quite other than to function as Generalissimo Callaghan’s chief policeman. The Kyocera plan of making him Don Eduardo’s successor whenever the Generalissimo finally died would guide Olmo toward making the correct choices. But Farkas did not know yet which side he wanted to sell out, and therefore it was appropriate at this point to be vague with Olmo. “As I said, this was third-party material. But I thought you would want to know that the project is being discussed in various places.”
“Yes. I do,” said Olmo. “Though in fact I am somewhat ahead of you. The Californians and their plans are not only real, but some of them have recently paid a visit to Valparaiso Nuevo to examine the territory.”