She promised they wouldn’t be able to beat it out of her.
That evening she flew to within a kilometer of Tora’s home, landed, and walked the rest of the distance. The lights were on when she arrived, and she saw movement inside the cottage. Tora had a guest. Several guests, in fact. Three flyers were parked on or just off the pad.
But she knew that the sleek orange-and-black Kondor belonged to the archeologist. She watched for a few minutes to be sure no one was outside, then circled around to the pad and taped the microtransmitter to the top of a tread, where it disappeared into the well. When she was satisfied, she retreated into the woods and turned on her receiver. The signal came through loud and clear.
27
No treasure should be thought secure against thieves so long as any one person knows where it lies.
Kim was up early next day. She had a light breakfast, and then changed her appearance to that of a trim young male, including a mustache, which she thought made her look quite dashing. Then she took her rented aircraft out to Tora Kane’s neighborhood, timing her flight to be overhead when the archeologist came out the door. She had a cup in one hand and a leather case under her other arm when she got into her flyer and lifted off.
Kim monitored her flight until she was down at the dig site. Then she descended nearby in a glade, avoiding Kane’s landing pad because she didn’t want to take a chance of leaving a record of the aircraft with the house AI. There were only a few other dwellings in the area, but none within visual range. No one seemed to be abroad.
There was no way to be certain that she wouldn’t be recorded by a security system. If that happened, Tora would get a picture of a young man, and the plan would be blown, but she at least would escape detection.
She went behind the villa, got the ladder out of the shed, and used it to climb to the roof. She now removed her universal tap from a jacket pocket and secured it to a cornice. It was painted the same dull brown, so it would be almost invisible to anyone arriving in a flyer.
Satisfied, she climbed down, put the ladder back, and left.
She returned home to work on Aquilla Selby’s lines, but had hardly gotten started when Matt called to ask whether she was okay, by which he presumably meant had she been arrested yet? He also reported that he’d found a lab they could use to examine the Valiant, but that it would be a couple of weeks before they could get access to it.
He asked again whether she would not relent and give him access to the “bric-a-brac.” He was so mysterious that she knew anyone listening would understand he was trying to talk in code.
“Best to leave things as they are,” she told him.
“I don’t understand why you don’t trust me,” he said.
And she said the usual things, it wasn’t that she didn’t trust him, but these things have a way of getting out, and they needed to concentrate on security, and so on.
He gave up, and informed her he’d pared the list of potential researchers to six.
“Three at most,” she insisted, knowing even that was too many.
They agreed that no feelers would go out until the lab was available.
After he’d disconnected she sat for a while studying the Kane print, Storm Warning. It was an ominous landscape, ruined towers in the distance, oncoming thunderheads.
She ran through the Selby script several times before she was satisfied. Then she downloaded it into a compupak, had dinner, and went for a long walk in the twilight. The tides on Greenway did not share the rhythmic aspect they would have had under a single satellite. These were up and down all the time, pulled constantly in different directions by Helios and the four moons.
They were at extreme low tide, the ocean far out, more beach exposed than would usually be visible in a month’s time. She strolled along the water’s edge, letting the waves wash over her feet, watching the stars appear. They looked far away and she wondered again how anything capable of mastering those immense distances could behave so irrationally. Yet there had been the war with Pacifica.
Such things could happen apparently. The people who devised physical theory and constructed jump engines were not the same people who made political decisions, or who allowed themselves to be swept up by the current media craze, or to be ruled by centuries-old traditions that might once have served to hold nations together but had now become counterproductive.
Don’t assume that a species is intelligent because it produces intelligent individuals. Brandywine’s Corollary.
Maybe in the end she’d be remembered for some such principle rather than the discovery of the Valiant. She smiled and decided she’d be willing to settle for that.
The next morning she flew over to Bayside Park where she could use a private commbooth, ensuring that even if things went wrong no one would be able to track her down.
The booth was located in a mall along a gravel walkway off the ocean. It was still early in the season, and there were few people abroad: a few university students between classes, some locals taking their constitutionals. No tourists yet. The morning was bright and cloudless, and the air still cool, with a crisp wind coming inshore.
She tied in the Selby program and punched in Tora’s number.
The link chimed at the other end.
A couple of kids with balloons chased one another through the mall. She watched the long lines of breakers moving toward the beach.
“Hello?” Tora’s voice, audio only.
“Dr. Kane?” It was Kim who spoke, but Tora would be hearing the voice she’d constructed for Selby. “My name is Gabriel Martin. I was your father’s lawyer some years ago.”
Kim got a picture. Tora was wearing a light blue shirt and baggy blue slacks. Working clothes. She looked puzzled. “What can I do for you, Mr. Martin?”
Kim sent Selby’s image and the construct lawyer, she knew, now materialized in Tora’s projection area. He was a tall, aristocratic figure. “Doctor, let me say first that Markis was a close friend, as well as a client. I owe him a considerable obligation. I won’t go into that at the moment; the details don’t really matter.
“Unfortunately, I can no longer do anything for him, God rest his soul. But I am in a position to pass along some information that you might find useful.”
God rest his soul. That had sounded pretty good when she inserted it. Real lawyer talk to clients. But it sounded so artificial now that she bit her lip and waited to see whether Tora would recognize the charade. She didn’t.
“I appreciate the thought, Mr. Martin. And what information would that be?”
To Tora, the lawyer stood beside an expanse of desktop, covered with disks, pens, and a fat notebook. His wall showed a series of beribboned certificates, plaques, and a picture of Martin shaking hands with the premier himself. “I don’t know exactly how to put this, Doctor, because it’s only rumor, but I have it on quite reliable sources.”
Tora waited for him to come to the point.
Kim stretched the moment out by having Martin advise her that the information he was about to pass on was confidential, and that if she repeated it he would have no choice but to deny everything and to withdraw from any further participation in the proceedings.
“Yes,” she said, her impatience starting to show. “Quite so. So what is this about?”
“I understand the government has acquired the Hunter logs. The real ones.”
Tora paled and then recovered herself. “I don’t know anything about it,” she said. “What real logs? I understood the logs were filed in the Archives years ago.”
“Dr. Kane.” Kim allowed herself to sound simultaneously sympathetic and well informed. “I understand your reluctance to discuss this. We are after all talking about violations of law, are we not? Violations to which you have been party.”