"Comsquare Damon Lathe, Blackcollar Forces. Temporarily at your service."
Reger smiled again. But it was a tighter smile than before, and it was accompanied by a slight shiver.
—
They rendezvoused outside the still-closed service station after the tow truck and coveralls were back in place. Or, rather, four of them did. "Where's Hawking?" Lathe asked.
"I left him outside the road into Reger's little subdivision to watch for interesting traffic," Skyler told him. "Reger bought it?"
"It and us. And our part of the deal is to secure his house for him."
"Oh?" Skyler cocked an eyebrow. "Against whom?"
"He skimmed around that part, but there's only one real possibility."
Skyler glanced back at Phelling's car, where the barman was peacefully sleeping off the drug they'd given him. "The blackcollars Phelling mentioned."
"Whom he also implied were for hire," Lathe reminded him.
Jensen's eyes flashed with contempt. "Blackcollars for hire. He'd better have been wrong."
"Maybe they're just running a mission with the mercenary bit as cover," Hawking pointed out.
"Especially given that Reger apparently can't buy them out himself."
"Possible," Lathe agreed. "He certainly isn't dying to talk about them—I dropped one or two conversational gambits around the topic that he totally ignored. He may be hoping we'll get his job done before we find out we're working against other blackcollars." Lathe looked at Jensen. "I want you and Hawking to start work on the project as soon as we get back there. Do a good job, but leave a keyhole from due west to the house in case Reger tries to pull something backhanded. The rest of us will take the supplies he's offering and set up a safe house in central Denver. Then tonight..." He hesitated.
"It's only Monday," Mordecai reminded him quietly.
"I know," Lathe said. "But I think we'll give the Shandygaff Bar a try anyway. If this blackcollar contact man Kanai isn't there, maybe someone will know where we can find him."
"Are we in that tearing a hurry?" Skyler asked.
Lathe glanced at Jensen. "If Reger and the blackcollars are on opposite sides of the fence, we need to find out which side we should be on. And we have to do so before Reger's men find Caine."
Chapter 9
It was nearly ten when Colvin and Braune returned with the team's new clothes. Pittman, still keen on trying to find transportation, headed out alone shortly afterward on that errand. Privately, Caine considered it a likely waste of time, but was willing to let him indulge it for a short while, anyway.
Leaving his own house-hunting route with Colvin and Braune so that Pittman would be able to catch up later, Caine and Alamzad headed out.
And ran straight into delayed culture shock.
Caine had been raised in Grenoble, Europe, and his Resistance tutors had exposed him to even larger cities during his training. But none of that had prepared him for Denver at full blast.
It was incredibly crowded, for starters—crowded not only with pedestrians but also with all kinds of vehicles. Caine had seen traffic of such ferocity only once before, in the government sector of New Geneva. Alamzad, born on Plinry after its fall to the Ryqril, was clearly and thoroughly dazzled by it all.
The pedestrians they passed among were almost as bad a shock as the cars. The young people, especially, showed an incredible range of clothing style and demeanor, in sharp contrast to the drab outfits and almost universal sullenness Caine had always noticed in the teenagers of Capstone.
But perhaps strongest of all was the sense of antiquity that gradually grew as they wandered about the city. Denver felt old, its years somehow permeating even the newest of its buildings. Like an old man being kept physically young by Idunine, Caine thought once—and that realization prompted bitter comparisons. Plinry had been nearly destroyed by the Ryqril; on the other side of Earth, old Geneva was a blackened ruin.
Denver had hardly been touched. And Caine found himself resenting the city its good fortune.
They had been searching for nearly two hours without finding any place that had the combination of accessibility, safety, and space Caine was looking for when a familiar voice called to them. A
familiar voice, from a distinctly unfamiliar car. A minute later he and Alamzad were inside.
"Where did you get this?" Caine asked Pittman, looking around the aged but neat interior.
"I bought it," Pittman told him, voice tight with tension. Fighting the local traffic was clearly taking its toll. "I found a place that resells cars the owners don't want anymore. You have any luck out here?"
"Not so far." Caine shook his head. "What'd you use for money? One of our diamonds?"
"Indirectly. There was a jewelry store a block from this place, so I went there first, sold the diamond, and then went back and talked the car dealer down to that amount of cash."
"What did he say when you didn't have an ID?" Alamzad put in.
"He didn't ask for one. I get the feeling cash on the counter bypasses a lot of official regulations around here."
They reached a corner and turned right. "Where are we going?" Caine asked.
"I passed an old house on the way here that looked promising," Pittman said. "As long as you haven't found anything, I thought it'd be worth a closer look."
Then suggest it—don't decide it. With an effort, Caine swallowed the words unsaid. Command discipline and individual initiative, Lathe had often warned, could easily become mutually exclusive.
The best blackcollar comsquares worked hard to walk that thin line.
And in this case, it paid off. The house Pittman took them to was perfect.
"Probably been abandoned for months," Caine guessed, eying the broken windows, darkened gaps in the siding, and wild hedges gradually taking over the small front yard. "Wonder why it hasn't been torn down."
"A lot of the houses along here aren't in much better shape," Alamzad pointed out. "Could be no one's noticed."
"Maybe." Caine grunted. "Let's go inside."
The front door was locked, but not seriously so. Alamzad got it open while Caine and Pittman, the latter waving an official-looking note stick, stood near the sidewalk making house-inspection-type comments for the benefit of anyone watching. Inside, the house was in slightly better shape, though Caine had doubts about the stairs to the second floor, and in ten minutes he was satisfied. "Some blackout covers for the windows and I think we'll have it," he told the others. "Let's go get Braune and Colvin and load the gear into the car. We'll move in after dark tonight when we won't be so conspicuous."
"What do we do in the meantime?" Pittman asked as they locked up and went back to the car. "Try and hunt up the vets you want?"
"Or look for Torch?" Alamzad added.
Torch. Fanatics. Caine's lip twitched as he remembered Lepkowski's warning about such allies. But at least now he understood why the local resistance had gone that way. If Denver was at all representative, North America hadn't suffered from the war nearly as much as Europe had, and with life under the Ryqril essentially business as usual, there was little incentive for ordinary citizens to get interested in their overthrow. "I think just looking around would be a waste of time," he told the others. "We'll need to attract their attention, and that'll take preparation. For now I think it'd make more sense to go take a look at our target."
"Our target?" Pittman asked, his voice oddly tight as he slid into the driver's seat and gripped the wheel.
"Well, the place we need to get into, anyway," Caine amplified. "Let's get moving; we've got a long day yet ahead of us."
—
The satellite image of Denver skittered across the display screen in a standard scan pattern: northwest corner working down to southeast corner, then kicking back to the top again. "Damn it all," General Quinn ground out between clenched teeth. "Damn and damn and damn."
That makes number eight, Galway added to his mental tally, being careful to sit perfectly still in his chair. The mood Quinn was in now, even the slightest hint that Galway was about to speak might trigger a preemptive explosion. He'd argued strongly against Quinn's plan to put a tracer aboard the car they'd given Pittman, pointing out that Caine would surely go over the vehicle with a bug stomper at his earliest opportunity. The satellite-detectable infrared-reflective paint around the edge of the car's roof had been a reasonable compromise... except that the satellite had now completely lost the damn thing eight times since Pittman had driven it away.