"Not at all. We simply had a few points to clear up in negotiations."
"Oh?" Coghlan's ears swiveled forward. "Negotiations with whom?"
"Why, the government."
"Isn't any."
"I beg your pardon—?" Orthis had taken one of her bagels and started spreading yellow glop on it when the flat of his knife went sliding across one knuckle. He looked at the shine of grease on his finger, then thoughtfully licked it off. "What do you mean?"
"You've seen the setup here. This place practically runs itself. Everybody's too busy making a living to engage in the higher forms of government. And I have it on good authority that they've no time for diplomats and diplomacy. So, just who is it you were going to meet with?"
"There's a mayor in one of the other colonies," Orthis said defensively.
"At Solis Planum? She's a figurehead. Cuts the ribbon on new tunnel openings. Makes speeches in favor of filtering the air. Gets a budget of about five thousand Neu per annum to operate the chamber of commerce. But that's it. You try to run a deal with her, you'll find she has to refer most of it back to the people who put her in office."
"You've tried?"
"No, I just do my homework. Ludmilla Petrovna doesn't make a move without prior approval."
"So, it's simple. We go for the electorate. We mount a public relations campaign, mold opinion toward our—"
"You don't get it, do you, Harry? There is no 'electorate.' There hasn't been an election in Solis Planum in twenty years."
"What are you trying to tell me?" Orthis asked, seemingly patient.
"You've brought a lot of people up here, right? Planning to negotiate with the Martians, right? Except there's no one to sit down at the table with, is there? Speaking of boondoggles, this is a helluva long way to come on a jaunt." Demeter thought of Nancy Cuneo, who had arrived only a day or two after Coghlan herself and not much ahead of Harry's more public entourage. Why were they suddenly scrambling on site? Instead she asked, "Is your intelligence on the local situation so bad you didn't know all this'?"
"We—" he replied slowly. Too slowly. "—were led to believe that proper accommodations would be made."
"Led? By whom?"
"I really think that's out of your purview, Demeter."
"By your subcontractors in the Valles? By some local acting as your agent? Who?"
"And why are you here, Demeter?' Orthis countered.
"I'm on vacation."
"This is a hellacious long way to come for a change of scene," he tossed back to her. "Especially for someone with diplomatic training—•"
"I never completed my credits."
"—and secret credentials granted by the Sovereign State of Texahoma—"
"That's not true!"
"—including provisional U.N. immunity, guaranteed by the signature of Alvin Bertrand Coghlan, member of the General Assembly."
"My grandfather can be overly protective."
"So it would seem." Orthis gave a world-weary shake of his head. "And perhaps you're planning to do things, deniably in his name, that require such protection?"
"Jesus," she breathed. "Well, Cuneo and the Korean have it figured anyway. I'm here to watch you, of course."
"Watch us do what?" He was smiling. But it was friendly now, not at all in triumph.
"Take the Valles Marineris away from us. Our computer projections—" Something about computers and their predictions pricked at her memory, but the thought faded out in her rush to explain. "—showed that your development work there would tend to tip the legal balance in favor of your claims stemming from the Potanter Expedition."
"Canyonlands is a purely commercial development," he said. "Our interest is solely for profit. The inhabitants will be native-born Martians, or immigrants from all Earth nations, owing allegiance under the appropriate U.N. charters. There was never any thought of making them citizens of North Zealand, either de jure or de facto. Our citizenship requirements are far too rigid to allow for that."
"Uh-huh." Coghlan was prepared to disbelieve anything he said. "And if Canyonlands is so commercial, why are you building an orbiting power station three times the size of your projected end-phase requirements?"
"Who told you that orbiter was ours ?"
Demeter shook her head, beaming at him.
"More computer projections?"
"A little bird," she offered teasingly.
"All right," Orthis went on, "if you know so much about the administrative setup here on Mars, and if we were going to take the Valles away from you—whom did you think we were negotiating with?"
Demeter could feel her own face go blank.
After too long a pause, she heard herself admit in a small voice: "I don't know. . . . Really, it just. . . never occurred to me."
Chapter 14
The Secret Underground
By waiting until the middle of the afternoon, Demeter was fairly sure Lole Mitsuno would be out studying rocks somewhere, looking for new water, and Ellen Sorbel would have her head in a computer program, doing ditto. Still, Demeter crept warily over the algae-slimed walkway, listening for voices or other sounds coming from the secret room.
All she heard was the thunk-thunk of the liquid surface in the tanks, thrumming in an outlet pipe off along the perimeter somewhere.
Beyond the tankage, she found the abandoned tunnel and the plain steel door. Demeter's memories of the sexual minuet leading up to last night's encounter with Mitsuno were a little hazy; had the door been locked? If not then, it was now—with a flat metal hasp and a big tumbler lock.
Demeter wrapped her fingers around the lock's smooth, stainless-steel case. She gave it an experimental tug; the shank jerked solidly on the thick metal staple. Demeter looked at the face of the lock's black dial. Forty white hash marks, numbered off by fives, spun under a triangular marker etched into the rim. She flipped the case up and read off the backside that this was a Crypton lock, serial number AB-2301435-YA.
What they teach you only in Elements of Espionage 101: every commercial lock comes with a default combination. For the convenience of lock company salespeople and troubleshooters, the standard combination is keyed to all those fussy little letters that are part of the serial number. For example, all Cryptons of the "YA" series initially open with the sequence 7-14-38, always going right-left-right and being sure to come all the way back around past the second number on your way to the third. Of course, the default combination can always be changed. That takes the customer, or the sales representative, about twenty minutes with a micropick and a jewelers loupe. Not everyone bothers.
Fifteen seconds later, Demeter had the lock off the hasp and was putting her weight against the door.
Scree-eee! Rusty hinges protested, but the door moved.
Inside, she reached around in the folds of cloth on the nearest wall until she found the switch that activated the leeched power circuit. The caged bulbs came on, showing the cave's interior. Coghlan walked past the bed and the hanging that closed off the chemical toilet. She was headed for the back wall.
Something very spooky was happening in this place.
Everyone of her acquaintance had seemed to know within hours last night that she had gone missing. Not just that she had wandered outside the purview of the video lenses and earjacks that were scattered around the complex. People must do that hundreds of times a day: when they went outside on the surface or sat quietly in their rooms or fetched something out of a broom closet. No, for nine hours there the grid and its systems had been totally blind to her. Not just unplugged, as she preferred her cybernetic eavesdroppers. But banished.