Kuklar stepped in front of the armored bulldozer. The vehicle’s rocket launcher was depressed to sweep the street ahead. If Kuklar realized that, he didn’t seem to care. He walked forward stolidly, the sheath of his hook-bladed knife swinging in synchrony with his right leg.
“You know?” said Vierziger idly. “If something went wrong right now, they might all kill each other.”
Coke shook his head. “Not all of them,” he said. “Besides, we’d likely catch something ourselves, you and me.”
“There’s that,” his companion agreed.
Suterbilt got out of the armored car and scuttled forward behind Peres and his escort. The factor was terrified, but he was the only one who could identify the stolen data bank so that the exchange could be completed.
The banks of lights on the opposing vehicles cast multiple faint shadows from the men converging between the armored lines. The Widow Guzman stood with her left hand on the blade of the bulldozer. Her right was extended toward Peres as the gigolo approached haltingly. Her visage trembled between fear and longing.
The engine of an Astra vehicle stalled. The driver restarted with a roar. Men on both sides jumped. Pepe Luria raised his face to the sky and laughed.
When Kuklar was almost halfway between the lines, Suterbilt ran to him. The TST factor tugged open the bag holding the computer core while Kuklar continued to grip one of the drawstrings. Suterbilt nodded his head furiously toward the L’Escorial line, invisible behind the blaze of headlights.
Kuklar looked at the Widow. She waved. Kuklar let go of the drawstring.
Peres’ escorts dropped their batons and ran to the armored vehicles. The gigolo, weeping with pain, staggered toward Widow Guzman. The ends of the wire trailed from his face like the barbels of a catfish.
The exchange was complete. Either side’s gunmen on foot— Coke was unwilling to think of them as infantry—streamed toward the safety of their headquarters.
The armored cars backed with greater difficulty. Two of the L’Escorial vehicles crunched, fender to fender, as they swerved in opposite directions at the start of the maneuver. The drivers rose from their cabs and screamed curses at one another. In ten minutes, even the vehicles had vanished from the street, however …
“Show’s over, I suppose,” Vierziger said. He let his chair drop onto its front legs. “No excitement at all.” He giggled. “Nobody killed.”
Coke looked at the little man curiously. “Is that the only kind of excitement?” he asked.
Vierziger stood up. “Well, there’s sex, I suppose,” he said. “But that’s a bad second for me.” He smiled. “What do you think about that, Matthew?”
Coke rose to his feet. Backblast from the directional mines the day the team arrived had left black starbursts across the reinforced concrete. He opened his mouth to speak.
The door of Hathaway House opened. Georg peeked out, then stepped into full view. “Major Coke,” he said. He cleared his throat. “There was just a message for you, a Mistress Ortega. She’d like you to call on her at your earliest convenience. She, ah, she said she was at home.”
Johann Vierziger chuckled. “I’ll give you a night to consider your answer, Matthew,” he said.
Pilar’s door opened as soon as Coke reached the landing. That meant not only that she’d been watching the surveillance screen for his arrival, but that she’d kept the door unlocked.
She shouldn’t take chances like that. Coke didn’t think she had a gun in the suite, not even a needle stunner like the one her husband carried.
He stepped inside. Pilar was wearing a strapless black dress with a mantilla of white lace over her bare shoulders. She closed the door without looking at him and began setting the multiple locks.
“You shouldn’t take chances like that,” Coke said. She turned and threw herself into his arms.
“Terry’s gone,” she said against Coke’s shoulder. “He went off on the ND Maru this evening. I guess he listened to you after all. Or she did.”
Coke tried to kiss her. She wouldn’t lift her lips to him. Her arms clamped him fiercely.
“He came to see you before he left?” Coke asked. He stroked her auburn hair with his right hand; she’d let it down for the first time since he’d met her. It was amazingly thick and fell below the pinch of her waist.
“No,” she whispered. “I—I recognized the number of the account to which the passage was charged. It was one of Terry’s, I suppose one I wasn’t supposed to know about.”
She nuzzled Coke’s shoulder for a moment before she added, “They traveled under the name Sanchez. Master and Mistress Sanchez.”
“I’m sorry,” Coke said softly. He was sorry. It surprised him. Sorry for her pain, though his body was very well aware of the implications of the new state of affairs.
“I need somebody to hold me, Matthew,” Pilar said. As she drew him toward the bedroom, he noticed that tonight she was not wearing her crucifix.
Cantilucca: Day Ten
Dawn was red with a promise of storm. The sky was bright enough to mute the lighted advertising signs, but too dim to bring out the color of paint.
At night Potosi looked tawdry. This morning the city was a dull waste; steel rusting on dirty sand.
Hundreds of men, all the members of both gage syndicates who remained in Potosi, lined opposite sides of the street. The gunmen looked sleepy, sickly, and sullen. Most of them would barely have gotten to bed when Madame Yarnell called, demanding that they be assembled to hear her.
The leaders of Astra and L’Escorial faced each other with only the width of the right-of-way between them. Both groups were nervous. Coke’s magnified view of their faces suggested that while the Widow Guzman and her companions felt uncertain, an air of monstrous glee underlay the Lurias’ twitchiness. The L’Escorial leaders knew, or they thought they knew….
The sound of Madame Yarnell’s reconnaissance vehicle preceded the car itself. The driver was winding out his motors, and the active suspension set up an audible keening as it smoothed the high-speed ride over the spaceport highway.
“As pissed as she was to come to Cantilucca,” Margulies said, squatting on the roof of Hathaway House beside the major, “you’d think she’d be happy to be going back to Delos. Doesn’t seem like she is, though.”
“There’s folks that’d bitch if you hanged them with a golden rope,” Coke said. He kept his tone light, but he knew that very shortly the survey team would have to fish or cut bait.
The Hathaways stored building materials on their roof. The team had converted the crates, lumber, and barrels into a temporary refuge against need, but it couldn’t hide them for long.
Madame Yarnell’s car didn’t slow until it reached the center of town. It skidded to a halt from a hundred, hundred-and-ten, kph. Pebbles and a stoneware bottle, miraculously unshattered by the poot! the tire gave it, flew out like langrage from a cannon.
The charge pelted the gunmen who hadn’t ducked away when they realized what was about to happen. The bottle dished in the sloped forehead of a L’Escorial gunman; two Astras leaped back with their hands to their faces, screaming that they’d been blinded.
The car’s passenger door lifted while gravel from the crash stop still clicked and pattered. Madame Yarnell got out. Her headgear was similar in design and purpose to a Frisian commo helmet. She surveyed the crowd that had gathered at her orders.
“You filth!” she said at last. Her voice boomed from the omnidirectional speaker on top of her helmet. “You cretins, you hog feces!”
The cartel representative turned as she spoke, so that all those present could receive her direct contempt. Lightning traced the eastern clouds. A gunman injured by the gravel whimpered brokenly.
“I’m going off-planet now,” Madame Yarnell announced abruptly.