Ten minutes later, Alonzo Zercher and a lumbering black behemoth of monumental proportions entered the room, resplendent in coats and ties and carrying briefcases. Alonzo looked believable, but his trained ape didn't. While the giant dug out his hardware and trained it on us, Alonzo gave Maggie a squeeze and proceeded to position himself directly in front of me.
"Ah, Mr. Wages," he began in a throaty baritone, "at last we meet."
Alonzo Zercher wasn't exactly what I had expected. In fact, he wasn't anything like it. He was one of those broodingly handsome men with a thick crop of jet black hair and a neatly trimmed vandyke. His features were ruggedly bunched in the middle of the face, none of which seemed to be out of proportion with his muscular frame. He flashed a smile that showed a heavy investment in orthodontia, and he was surprisingly articulate.
''We don't have to prolong this," I said glibly. "If you let us have the cylinders, we can be out of your hair in a matter of minutes."
"I don't know about you, Mr. Wages, but for the most part I find people disappointing. And I must confess that I'm doubly disappointed when it's people that I've come to depend on. Take Bearing, for instance — trying to deceive me, sending his little team of amateur salvage experts down here to try to retrieve those ridiculous cylinders. And all this after he and I agreed that to do so would pose a certain amount of risk to our little operation. Then there is the matter of Marshal — equally disconcerting, don't you agree?"
There was no way of knowing whether Alonzo Zercher was in the mood for logic, but I figured that, all things considered, the risk was minimal. "Seems to me you'd have been ahead of the game to send some of your own men over there and salvage those chunks of metal for the old boy."
"Publicity, Mr. Wages, publicity. A man in my line of work doesn't need any publicity." He paused just long enough to haul out an impressive gold cigarette case, extract a long pastel filtered one and light up. "Suppose we had found the cylinders and turned them over to Bearing, and suppose the attendant publicity had brought hoardes of erstwhile treasure hunters and salvage experts into our little paradise. It would have made it even more difficult for us to run our little operation." He glanced over at Maggie. "As my attractive associate can tell you, it's already difficult enough. You see, Mr. Wages, for the most part, the world has forgotten about the Doobacque Cluster, and we like that. Life is — how shall I put it? — convenient and undistracting. I like that."
"Give us the cylinders and a ten minute head start and we can be out of your hair," I repeated.
"Oh, I can't do that, Mr. Wages. I can't let Bearing get away with his little scheme."
"Look, Zercher, you're in deep shit already. Detaining us isn't going to buy you a thing. You're not dealing with the likes of Packer and Poqulay. If we don't show up pretty soon, there will be a helluva lot more people down here looking for us than there ever would have been looking for those damn tubes."
Zercher's face fractured into a broad, toothy smile. "Come, come, Mr. Wages, I have no intention of detaining you. Quite the contrary. You and your lovely companion will be escorted to a quiet little spot some distance from here, far enough away that your seemingly accidental deaths can't be remotely tied to your fruitless efforts to retrieve my partner's foolish little folly."
11
A man of his word, Zercher went directly about the business of doing something I hadn't been able to do — tying up the loose ends of the Prometheus project. While his grunting helper firmly anchored Hannah and me to a couple of dilapidated chairs in the austere surroundings of his operations center, Zercher was busy on the telephone. He made two contacts, one to someone called Zapata, and the other to someone who was ordered to give us a "one way ticket out."
The flurry of abrupt calls was followed by an equally open discussion with the counterfeit Maggie.
"Posnick says he can be here within the hour," Alonzo informed her. "In the meantime, have one of the boys get the Piper ready. We can kill two birds with one stone. He can deliver the regular shipment to Marathon, and he can dump these two and the cylinders at the same time." The rest of Zercher's conversation with Maggie was a bit more subdued, and I couldn't hear what he was saying.
Maggie, or whatever her real name was, had her marching orders, and she glided out of the hangar with a smile on her happy face like she was headed out for an all day shopping spree.
When the door closed behind her, Alonzo walked casually back over to where Hannah and I had been placed, pulled up a chair, turned it around and straddled it as he sat down. The look on his face told me he was pleased with himself. His foul-smelling henchman, having now completed a series of convoluted knots, slouched back to his appointed place, guarding the door.
"So, Mr. Wages, it is done. How I like efficiency! Make a decision, initiate the action and see the results! Action oriented, that's the kind of people I like. I always say, conventional styles and conventional thinking get conventional results."
"Is that what you always say?" I threw back at him.
"Come, come, Mr. Wages, we have built a very different operation here."
"You'll have to excuse me if I don't seem overly impressed."
Zercher leaned back and casually began to fish through the pockets of his meticulously tailored, white linen coat. "A job well done deserves a reward." His hand emerged with a soft goatskin packet containing several hand-wrapped, green Havanas. He extracted one, bit off the end, spit it out and lit it. "How about it, Mr. Wages, would you care to join me in a fine smoke?"
"My daddy always told me smoking was bad for your health."
Zercher let out a deep, rich baritone laugh. It rolled out in unmodulated waves. "See what I mean? Conventional! That's what you are — very conventional. There you sit, denying yourself one of man's finest pleasures, and it won't prolong your senseless life one bit. May I be so bold, Mr. Wages, as to suggest that it will be your conventional thinking that is the death of you and not the cigar?" The laughter welled up again and thundered through the all but empty building.
"And what about your lovely associate here, Wages? Your conventional thinking has placed her in the same jeopardy that you find yourself in."
Hannah refused to look at him.
"Look, Zercher," I growled, "instead of sitting here pontificating on the questionable merits of your twisted philosophy, you ought to be concerned about those cylinders."
"Very good, Wages, very good. You were listening. I wanted you to overhear that conversation. You see, now I have you distracted; exactly what I wanted. As for the cylinders, why should I be concerned? In a matter of hours those tiresome cylinders will be out of my life forever, and we can get back to business around here."
"Damn it, Zercher, those containers are highly lethal bombs. If someone should happen to open one of those things in the wrong place, it could wipe out a whole city."
Zercher's toothy smile intensified. "Oh, really — bombs, are they?" He took a long thoughtful drag on his cigar and watched the smoke billow and swirl around him. "I consider your juvenile comments an insult, Mr. Wages." His face collapsed into a half-scowl. "Do you think I'm actually stupid enough to fall for one of the oldest tricks in the book?"
"Think anything you want to think, Zercher. The fact is, some if not all of those cylinders contain a highly toxic substance that is lethal enough to wipe out whole cities. That's what happened to your operation in Deechapal."
"And all of this is going to happen if I open one of those cylinders?"
"Let me put it like this. I don't want to be around when some clown decides to open the next one."