Lessing peered into the crinkly, white plastic bag. The silvery PCV-1 spheres winked evilly back; the black vials of PCV-2 kept their counsel to themselves.
He slipped a hand tentatively into the bag, extracted one sphere and one cylinder. They felt cold, inimical, hostile. He thought, then made up his mind: he dropped them both down into the hidden pocket sewed into the lining of his canvas trouser leg. If Gomez or anybody asked, he would claim that he had only found twenty-nine. Who could know? Up Gomez! Up them all! Such insurance might come in handy some day.
It was time to go home.
I do not set much value on the friendship of people who do not succeed in getting disliked by their enemies.
CHAPTER THREE
Sunday, April 6, 2042
“Love you too,” Wrench grumbled. He glanced up to find Lessing beside him, awash with undulating, grey-green light from the row of security TV screens, like some archaic idol submerged beneath the sea.
“So you got me out of bed. Who the hell is it?” Lessing fingered the TV camera-control console, but the visitor had passed beyond the range of camera three and was not yet visible to camera two. He rubbed sleep out of his eyes. Goddamn it, he’d been meaning to splice in another camera to cover the blind spot between two and three. Camera twenty-six, down at the bottom of the garden by the factory fence, was also out. Lessing just didn’t have the energy. Northern India in April was a cauldron of white-hot heat, and May and June would be worse. Only after the rains broke in July would the parched plains cool off again. And then only a little.
“Looks like one of your scruffier friends.” Wrench remarked mildly. A small, neatly packaged man in his late thirties, his real name was Charles Hanson Wren, but his Army footlocker had borne the legend “WREN, C. H.,” and the nickname “Wrench” had stuck. He was Herman Mulder’s house security man. Lessing had charge of the compound and the buildings of Indoco’s chemical factory in India, just south of Lucknow, off the Kanpur road.
Lessing said nothing.
“Look, I’m sorry to get you up,” Wrench’s tone indicated that he thought it was funny. He smirked up at the wall clock, which read 0210, and showed teeth so white and even that everybody thought they were a plate. Actually they were his own. Wrench was just a trifle jealous: Mulder always chose Lessing as his beegee whenever he made one of his infrequent forays out into the chaos that was twenty-first-century India.
“Sure.”
“Sleeping’s a comfort in this heat.”
Lessing looked at him. Like everybody else in Indoco’s Lucknow operation, Wrench knew that Lessing shared his bed with Mulder’s Indian liaison girl, Jameela Husaini. Nobody gave much of a damn where or with whom the hired help slept, and Wrench didn’t care, nor was he himself interested in Jameela. She was over-educated for his tastes, a graduate of the Kennedy School for Special Children in Delhi and later of Columbia University. Wrench did enjoy knowing everything, however. Too damned nosy — and too much of a comic! One day somebody would hoist the little smart-ass by his head of glossy, dark hair, as wavy as an ad for gigolos, and drop him off a minaret!
An image moved on camera two’s small screen. The visitor halted before the outer gate, glanced around, looked up at the lens mounted above his head, and made a nervous gesture toward the bell.
“Uh… is Mr. Lessing there? I… ah… am sorry to bother you… him… at this hour.” It was the man Lessing had named Doe: Felix Bauer, as he had learned from Gomez a month after his return to India.
Wrench pressed a button. A ruby warning light flashed. “He’s carrying a popper. Or else he’s wearing a cast-iron jockstrap.”
Lessing picked up the microphone and said, “Hello, Bauer. Put your ordnance into the lockbox on the post next to you. Then follow the left-hand path around to the rear.”
The lockbox duly registered the weight of a good-sized pistol — and possibly a boot knife as well. The metal detectors pronounced Bauer clean. Only then did Lessing press the double buttons that opened the gate.
At this lime of night the verandah of the senior-staff quarters was deserted. Lessing met Bauer at the top of the steps and pointed him to a rattan settee as far away from the main circle of porch furniture as possible. The lighted area had two disadvantages: it teemed with flying insects, and the ceiling fan concealed a surveillance mike. Why make it easy for Wrench to eavesdrop?
Bauer sat, licked his lips, and looked about. His glance lingered on the gleaming, white refrigerator visible inside the screen door. Lessing took pity on him; Bauer’s journey out here from Lucknow at this hour of night must have been a hot, dusty, and thirsty one — and he must have paid the taxi-wala a fortune to boot! Lessing got up again and came back with two bottles of Indian beer.
“Well?” Lessing decided the German looked terrible. They hadn’t met since the New Mexico business in January, but then they had never been friends — or enemies either. Just two people doing a job.
The other gulped cold beer. Then he said, “Einar Hjellming… the Swede you called Panch… is dead.” Lessing grunted. “How?”
“Shot. From ambush. They tried to kill Hollister… your Teen, the Britisher… too. Missed him by five centimeters.” Bauer pawed at his greying hair with thin fingers.
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“People said you would know.”
“Me? I don’t know anything.” He did have a question: “What about Cheh, the Australian girl? Rose Thurley is her name.”
“I haven’t heard. She went back to Canberra, I think.”
“Well, uh, fine. I… I’m sorry about Hjellming.” He wasn’t, but it seemed to mean something to the other man.
“May I speak frankly?”
Lessing watched him. “Sure.”
“I came to ask you to leave me alone. You don’t have to say anything, just let me go my way. Don’t thumb me.”
Lessing snorted up a nose full of bitter beer. He coughed, wiped his mouth, and growled, “What?”
“I mean it. I don’t cause problems.”
There were stories, of course, of mercenaries who were later “thumbed” by their employers or by their comrades. Too much knowledge wasn’t smart. Such incidents were fewer since it had become acceptable for nations and corporations and causes and even individuals to hire meres to do their “spesh-ops” — special operations. Now the world, the Western world anyway, thought of mercenaries as glamorous Samurai, an honor-bound warrior class, the stuff of endless TV series.
Bauer knew Lessing ‘s reputation: no one had ever accused him of thumbing before. And, supposing that he had been paid to thumb his squad, Bauer should realize that he’d do the job himself and not hire some grimy, city hit-man to handle it.
Lessing kept a straight face and said only, “Mercs get killed all the time. One of the joys of the trade.”
The blunt numbness of the accusation was wearing off, and Lessing’s mind began to work again. Bauer was clearly frightened: his rigid jaw line showed it. Was he sane? Paranoia was a common ailment amongst mercenaries. You didn’t learn to suspect every bush, every door, every footstep, and not have some of that caution sift down into the cracks of your immortal soul.
Bauer clutched his beer bottle with both hands. “People… we… do get killed. But not by hit-men, not in Copenhagen or Rio! Lessing, for God’s sake…!”
“For God’s sake what? I haven’t anything to do with this… not with Hjellming, not with Hollister. Not with you! Who gave you this idea? Who said I was thumbing my squad?” Even a breath of this kind of rumor could end a man’s career. Worse, it could get that man himself thumbed.