The speakers over the screen squawked an attention tone and began issuing a litany in several languages, and simultaneously the screen cleared and showed text. None of the languages was anything he wanted to hear, but the third or fourth one was English: “John Peters, you have a visitor. Report to the visitation room, John Peters.” The screen said the same thing, and the synthesized voice went on to what he guessed was French.
He did get visitors occasionally. Mannix had come once, two prisons ago; Tom Goetz and Vanessa, neè Williams, had dropped by, a surprise, and he’d seen Warnocki twice, one of them at the last place. They’d all told him flatly that they weren’t allowed to talk about anything currently going on, and had chatted about the voyage and Llapaaloapalla with an eye to where they thought the cameras were. From hints and subtext he gathered that the ship had left a few weeks after Agent Cade had tossed him in the slammer. From the trend of recent interrogations he thought it was back. Nobody at all had come for at least a week. Be interesting—well, less than totally boring—to see who this was.
“Mornin’, Miz Cade,” he said to the hall guard. The woman—not Laura Cade—scowled behind her face mask but said nothing, and Peters walked briskly, head high, toward the visitation room. “Mornin’, Mr. Briggs,” he told the sharply-dressed middle-aged man waiting on the other side of the armor glass.
The man’s chuckle came through the speaker. “Actually, it’s a little after three in the afternoon, John,” he said.
Peters shrugged. “It’s always mornin’ of a new day for me.”
“You always say that.” Briggs smiled and shifted in his chair. “This time you may have some reason for your optimism.”
Help, or at least amelioration, had come from an unexpected source. Harold Carstairs had, in fact, gotten promoted; legal fiction or no, he’d “captured” Peters before witnesses, and the regulations required it. Carstairs had an uncle whose wife’s maiden name was Briggs; her brother’s son Sheldon was an attorney living in Hartford, Connecticut, specializing in tax law. Sheldon Briggs’s brother and his wife had died while sailboating in the Bahamas, and Sheldon was guardian to their daughter, Evelyn, who had joined the Navy and become a fighter pilot. This unlikely chain of circumstances had resulted, to Peters’s astonishment, in his having both expert legal representation and a little medium-weight political influence.
“You said that before,” Peters remarked as he took his seat. He liked Briggs, keeping in mind that as a lawyer the man had probably had special training in how to be liked.
Briggs smiled. “Got something for you,” he said, and held up a rolled paper with a red-white-and-blue ribbon around it. He put it in the passthrough and closed the lid, and after an interval—during which it was probably inspected by radar, IR, visual, X-ray, and Y and Z rays if they were available—the latch on Peters’s side clicked.
“What’s this?” Peters asked as he took it out.
“Have a look.”
The ribbon slipped off easily. The paper was thick and luxurious-feeling, really high-class stuff. At the top, centered, was a round shield Peters recognized, and below was a short paragraph, which Peters read aloud: “‘To all before whom these presents may come: John Howland Peters, Taxpayer Identification Number 1457-96-2307, is hereby pardoned for any and all offenses against the peace and good order of the United States of America.’ Then there’s a scrawl, an’ after that it says ‘Eugene V. Hansen, President of the United States’. Well, ain’t that spiffy. Reckon these folks’ll let me frame it and hang it on the wall?”
“You don’t sound impressed,” Briggs noted. “Hansen just got sworn in. That was his first official act. Ought to tell you something.”
“We talked about it already, can’t remember when that was. I ain’t accused of much against the peace and good order of the United States. Violatin’ air traffic regulations is about it.”
Tax offenses weren’t criminal offenses. The IRS attorneys made a big point of that, but as far as Peters could see the only effect it had was that the Feds didn’t have to worry about criminal-law rules of evidence. The penalties were, if anything, worse, except that it seemed they couldn’t just take him out and shoot him, despite several individuals who apparently would have preferred to do just that. He wasn’t a criminal; he just owed one Hell of a tax bill.
The Federal Security Administration had an astounding amount of information, some of it quite detailed, about what had gone on aboard Grallt Trade Ship Llapaaloapalla during the last uzul and a half, and had shared it generously with the IRS. It wasn’t sorted worth a damn—that was part of what they wanted him to do—and there were many lacunae, but the data had painted a surprisingly complete picture. Informers, of course, but who?
Jacks. Had to be. Smiling, gregarious Jacks, who was slightly older than was really credible for his rate and rating, and who had established a close relationship with a Grallt. Se’en wasn’t stupid, quite the contrary, but she liked to gossip and didn’t pay attention—and she’d been part of the communications and translation section for most of the voyage, and involved with Peters’s coordination between Traders and humans for the last zul of it. If she’d told Jacks everything she knew or surmised, the pattern of information the Feds had matched what Jacks would have known. The name went on his list. The chances of his getting to act on that list were minimal to nonexistent; he kept it anyway.
At the end of the form-filling and information-sorting his total tax obligation had come to $178,714,231.17; they’d offered to strike the seventeen cents, making it come out in round dollars, but Peters refused out of whimsy. Penalties, interest, and a whopping fine had brought the total as of the arbitrarily selected cutoff date of 1 June 2056 to a trifle under a billion dollars—$982,211,704.84, to be exact. Six and a half percent interest added over five million dollars a month, almost two hundred thousand a day. Five bucks a breath, more or less. The cost of living was outrageous these days. At that point Briggs had entered the picture, and one of the first things the lawyer had accomplished was to get the continuing interest accrual stopped.
The IRS had offered to accept a handwritten order of payment to be delivered to Llapaaloapalla, in ornh at one to the dollar, exactly as he and Todd had predicted. Peters had cheerfully written it out, in English and decimal numbers, and gotten transferred to a high-class prison with windows and grass outside when he handed it over. Two weeks later he’d been brought here and tossed into solitary for ten days. He knew why, too: he could just imagine Prethuvenigis’s face when the paper had crossed his desk.
“I don’t see a check,” he told Briggs. “That’s the only thing I know of that’ll get me out of here.”
The lawyer smiled again, and Peters drew back. He hadn’t realized that a pudgy, blond, balding guy in a sharp suit could look so feral. “Well, not quite the only thing,” Briggs said, his tone tense with an overlay of whimsy.
Peters was trying to formulate an answer when the door behind Briggs opened briskly and Dzheenis strode through, carrying one of the bent-level bür weapons and wearing a bright shield on his left breast. Must have stuck the pin in the pocket slit, Peters thought irrelevantly, as the guards on Briggs’s side brought weapons to bear and the two by him, whom he’d ignored as usual, aimed pistols at his head. The damnedest assortment followed the Grallt: a pair of bür, also with shiny badges; two Marines with M27 sliver guns; a couple of ferassi in Trader 1049 livery, with badges; and Prethuvenigis’s goons, again with shiny shields. There seemed to be more outside, but the room was only so big.