“Okay, that’s understandable. Maggie? Want to bring our guest on down?”
The woman nodded and stood and trudged upstairs.
“I’d offer you refreshments but we’re on slightly short rations here. So who’s waiting for you in the car? Your friend Trevor? That local woman who runs Gizmos on Main Street? Smart of her to dole out radios like that. Working the tranche, right? But we have friends in town, too. People who might notice something like a local Tau and some strange man hauling armloads of walkie-talkies out the back door of an electronics store.”
I said nothing. He shrugged. “Go on,” he said, “sit down,” waving his hand at a chair, and under the cuff of his sweatshirt I caught sight of a Het tattoo, small and black. A bisected rectangle, like a cartoon drawing of a sash window.
And then I realized: No, I hadn’t seen his face before.
I had drawn it.
The woman came back downstairs with Geddy behind her and another Het guy taking up the rear, as if they were afraid he’d make a run for it. Not that he seemed likely to do any such thing.
Geddy wore the clothes he’d had on when he left the house a day ago: linen slacks, khaki-green cotton shirt, a pair of ratty sneakers. He looked as grim as a prisoner on his way to the gallows. But he stopped moving the moment he spotted me. His face went through serial evolutions: he grinned; then he looked confused; then he looked frightened.
“Hey, Geddy,” I said.
“Hey,” he said tentatively.
“You all right? Did these folks hurt you in any way?”
He gave it a moment’s thought. “They won’t let me leave. They didn’t hurt me. But they threatened to.”
“We’ll get you out of here,” I said.
“Hold your horses,” the guy with the Het tattoo said. “That’s not an established fact just yet. That’s what we need to talk about. Sit over there on the sofa, Geddy.” He turned to me. “So did his mother name him after Geddy Lee? From that old-time Canadian band, Rush? Because we asked, but he wouldn’t tell us.”
“The name’s from his mother’s side of the family. Long line of Geddys. How about you? Do you have a name?”
“Call me Tom.”
“Is that your real name?”
“Of course not. And you really need to sit down.”
I sat in the chair next to the woodstove. I crossed my legs and put my left hand on my thigh so I could see my watch without obviously checking it. Five minutes had passed since I had left the car. Ten to go. I said, “There’s no point dancing around. Just tell me what you want.”
Tom pulled a chair away from the wall and put it in front of me and sat in it so that our knees were almost touching. When he spoke I could smell his breath, sour and pungent, as if he’d been living on black coffee and brie. “No offense, but you people must be pretty stupid if you don’t know what we want.”
“Who’s we in this case? You? Your tranche? Your sodality? Your Affinity?”
“Come on, Adam. We want your brother Aaron to vote on the Griggs-Haskell bill without interference. We know Tau has a different preference, and we know Tau is in possession of some video footage that might embarrass Aaron right out of the House of Representatives. We suspected something like that before we picked up Geddy, though he was kind enough to confirm it—right, Geddy?”
Geddy inspected the floorboards and said nothing.
“If you’re making a threat,” I said, “you need to be explicit about it.”
“You’re the folks making a threat. In your case, Adam, a threat against your own brother! We’re just responding in kind. So don’t talk like you have the moral high ground here.”
I had drawn this man’s face, years ago, in Vancouver, working from Rachel Ragland’s description of the men who had come to question her. (Bald as a bottle cap, she had said, head like a bread loaf, mouth that opens like a puppet’s jaw.) If this wasn’t the same man, it was at least someone who matched both the description and the drawing. Rachel had also mentioned the Het tattoo: same size, same place. So it was no surprise the guy seemed to know me. He worked for Het security, and he could have been keeping a file on me (and Amanda and Damian) ever since the disastrous Vancouver potlatch. He might even have been involved in the murder of Meir Klein.
I said, “You’re still not telling me what you want, Tom.”
“What we want is a guarantee that Aaron will be allowed to cast his vote unmolested, as God and the electorate intended.”
“God and the electorate and the Het lobby.”
“Sure, if you like. And let me emphasize, we have no interest in harming Geddy. But if you were to walk out that door with him, both Het and Aaron would be hanging in the wind. He’s our leverage against Jenny, and without Jenny you have no acceptable case to make. The video by itself won’t convince anybody. Jenny’s the key. So we need to be in a position to bargain. We need Jenny to know something bad might happen if she joins this conspiracy of yours.”
What this told me was that he didn’t know Tau had secured a second affidavit from one of Aaron’s recent girlfriends. As far as Tau was concerned, his threat was meaningless. Amanda had made it clear: the video would be released whether or not Jenny consented … and whether or not Geddy was still being held captive.
But I couldn’t tell him that. In all likelihood he wouldn’t believe me. He certainly wouldn’t consider it grounds to give up Geddy. And if, miraculously, he did believe me—or if he successfully communicated the news to some higher echelon of the Het command chain—I would have betrayed my own Affinity by revealing the secret.
Of course I had already betrayed Tau by lying to Trevor. But I hoped I could be forgiven for that once Geddy was safe. I figured I could make Trevor and Amanda and maybe even Damian understand why I had done what I was doing.
“So,” I said, “what are you proposing? Or do you have to wait for instructions before you can answer that question?”
He smirked. There was a twinkle in his eye: he actually looked merry. “That’s such a tired stereotype—hierarchical Hets, always need a boss to tell them what to do. Some truth in it, of course. When it comes to collective action, yeah, we make sure we’re all on the same page and doing the right thing. Situations like this, field operations? It’s not brain surgery. You send along someone who can assume the authority to issue orders. Pending the end of the blackout, I’m that person. If you think we’re paralyzed until the phones work, you’re not just wrong, you’re stupid.”
I looked at my watch. Twelve minutes had passed.
“So,” he said, “all I want to do here is lay out the terms. We can’t give you Geddy. Not today. You understand that, right? There’s no promise you can make that will secure his release. We need Aaron to vote as intended, and we need to hang on to Geddy until then. What I want to say is, that doesn’t have to be a hardship. The vote’s scheduled for next week, unless the crisis postpones it, and we can make Geddy perfectly comfortable until then. At an undisclosed location, of course, but somewhere comfortable and private.” He turned to give Geddy a puppet-jawed grin. “Think of it as a vacation. Eat, drink, relax, watch videos until this mess gets resolved. Het picks up the tab, and then you go free.”
Geddy continued inspecting the patch of floor between his sneakers.
I said, “And in exchange?”
“Isn’t it obvious? You have people down the road contemplating some kind of rescue attempt. Which, excuse me for saying so, is a truly idiotic idea. Which I imagine you hatched precisely because you’re out of contact with the, uh, Tau consensus, or whatever you call it. We both have so much to lose from a move like that. Somebody gets hurt. Or there’s police involvement, which neither of us wants. Or the conflict escalates out of control. A ridiculous risk.”