"Yes?" McMicking answered.
"I'm here," I said. "Where are you?"
"Inside," he said. "Hang on—I'll unlock the front door for you."
He keyed off. Muttering a curse, I reversed direction and went back to the house.
The front door opened as I approached. "About time," McMicking commented in greeting. The middle-aged jogger Bayta and I had had dinner with had been replaced by an elderly Oriental man with a small goatee and hair gathered high on the back of his head. "What did you do, walk the whole way?"
"I had to run the Zumurrud obstacle course," I growled as I brushed past him. "I thought I told you to wait for me."
"I'm on Mr. Hardin's clock here, not yours," he pointed out reasonably as he locked the door behind me. "Come on in and give me a hand."
I walked into the meditation room to find a half-dozen small Quadrail-style cargo crates lined up near Veldrick's artificial stream. On top of one of them were a pair of thick, elbow-length leather gloves. "Where did you get the crates?" I asked.
"Veldrick's storage room," McMicking told me, crossing to the boxes and pulling on the gloves. "I figured that however he moved the stuff in he would probably have kept the transport boxes. Turns out I was right."
"It'll certainly make it easier to move it back out again," I agreed, frowning. Something was nagging urgently at the back of my mind. "You have a story ready in case Veldrick walks in on us?
"Veldrick won't be walking in on anyone for a while," McMicking said. "He's sleeping off a snoozer in the master bedroom."
"You have any trouble getting in past the alarms?"
"Not a bit," he said. "I shot him as he opened the door for me.
I stared at him. "You knocked on the door?"
"Actually, I rang the bell." He gave me an innocent look. "You worried he's going to describe his assailant to the police when he wakes up?"
"That would be amusing," I growled, eyeing his Seven Samurai look. "How long have you been here?"
"Here in the house? About twenty minutes."
I frowned. "You made it all the way from downtown that fast?"
"Who says I started from downtown?" he asked, reaching into the flowing stream and working at a piece of coral. "It's as easy to tap into a computer system from one neighborhood as another."
"So you came here directly from the restaurant?" I asked. The urgent nagging in the back of my mind was getting stronger.
"More or less," he said, lifting out the coral and holding it gingerly at arm's length. "I did have to stop once along the way to change faces. You want to open that first crate for me?"
I moved toward the crate, staring at the coral. He'd been here twenty minutes …
And suddenly, the nagging in my mind blew into full-fledged certainty. "You know, these crates are going to be a bear to get out of here," I remarked, keeping my voice casual. "I've got some smaller ones in my car that we won't need a forklift to move."
Behind his makeup, McMicking's forehead creased slightly. "You have a car?"
"A borrowed one, yes," I said. "Smaller boxes will be easier to get through Customs, too."
"You may be right." He set the coral back into the flowing water, his eyes never leaving my face. "Where are you parked?"
"Two blocks away," I said, nodding the opposite direction to where I'd actually left the car. "Come on—you might as well give me a hand with them."
A minute later we were outside the house. "This way," I said, heading off at a fast walk toward my car. "Hurry."
"What's going on?" McMicking murmured as he caught up with me.
"Bayta once told me the polyps in Modhran coral could detect and interpret vibrations when they were underwater," I said. "In other words, the coral can hear."
"Yes, I remember her saying that," McMicking said. "So?"
"So you've been in the house for twenty minutes, getting ready to carve up the coral," I gritted out. "Not just attacking a major Modhran outpost, but also ruining his detector array. So why haven't the Filly walkers shown up in force to stop you?"
"Oh, hell," McMicking said, his voice soft but deadly.
"You got it," I said bitterly. "He doesn't need the array anymore.
"He's found Rebekah."
Ninety seconds later, we were in the car, barreling down Imani City's peaceful streets toward Zumurrud District.
"She says they're all right," McMicking said, his comm still at his ear as I took a corner way faster than either the laws of man or physics would have preferred. By a miracle of engineering, the car stayed on the pavement. "She can hear a lot of commotion going on in the bar, but so far no one's come poking around Karim's office."
I didn't answer, my stomach knotted with fury at my stupidity, my mind fogged with images of Bayta standing alone against the full strength of the Modhri.
"How did he figure it out?" McMicking asked.
"He didn't figure it out," I snarled. "I told him."
"How?"
No gasps of surprise, no blank stares, no time wasted with recriminations. Sometimes I forgot what it was like having a fellow professional like McMicking at my side.
And that reminder loosened the knots in my stomach a little. Together, we might still have a chance. "Because I was stupid," I told him. "I even said he was putting the damn coral in cars."
"You mean he had some in the police car?"
"Can you think of a better way to keep the local kids from taking it out for a spin than to stash it with a couple of dead cops?" I bit out. "It's either in the trunk or just sitting on the ground underneath the car. I never thought to look either place."
"I thought he also needed a Filly nearby to make this trick work," McMicking said.
"This particular chunk wasn't part of the tracking array," I said, a fresh wave of self-disgust washing over me. "It was put there to eavesdrop when I went to investigate the bodies. And I fell for it. I stood there feeling all safe and secure and unobserved and blabbed my stupid mouth off."
McMicking was silent for a few more blocks. "If you're right about the Modhri eavesdropping on you, he knew I was heading over to Veldrick's," he said at last. "But he didn't know what I was going to do to the coral once I got there."
"You're taking it home to Daddy, aren't you?"
"You miss my point," he said. "You and I know that, but the Modhri didn't. Neither of us said anything about it in that conversation, or any other he might have listened in on. For all he knew, I was going to bring a sledgehammer and beat him to death."
He drew his gun and laid it ready on his lap. "But the Fillies still didn't show up," he continued. "That means he was willing to sacrifice an entire coral outpost if necessary in order to get at this girl."
Which was pretty much the same deal he'd offered me a couple of months ago, with those boxes of coral on the train from Ghonsilya to Bildim. He'd been willing to sacrifice all that in order to get his hands on the third Lynx sculpture.
I knew now why he'd considered that trade worth making. What the hell was Rebekah to him that he was offering to make the same trade for her?
I had no idea. I just hoped we would all live long enough to find out.
At first glance Karim's block looked pretty much the way I'd left it. There were still drunks and toughs all over the place, making navigation hazardous as they wandered onto and off of the street.
But on second glance I could see that something about the scene had changed. A lot of the drunks weren't wandering anymore, but were just lying or sitting along the sides of the buildings. Passed out, or else on their way there.
McMicking noticed it, too. "They crash and burn early around here, don't they?" he commented.
"Hardly seems worth the effort of going out," I agreed as I let the car roll quietly to a halt by the curb half a block from the bar. "Snoozers, you think?"
"That would be the simplest conclusion," he said. "But bystanders normally don't hang around when that much shooting starts."