"I'm not vulgar, I'm bored. You are really lousy in bed."
"Of course I'm lousy in bed. I don't do anything. And that's hitting below the belt."
"Big deal. Far as I'd know, there's nothing down there anyway."
Anton heard a slight choking sound. At a guess, he thought Victor was trying to suppress a laugh. Fortunately, the momentary lapse was small enough that the scrambling equipment would disguise the slight break from what was supposed to be the body language of a couple having a quiet but rather fierce argument.
The equipment they had wasn't really top of the line. For that, they'd have needed Manticoran gear which could potentially cause trouble. But the stuff they'd obtained on the black market in Neue Rostock—Victor's contact Thiêu Chuanli was a veritable cornucopia of handy items—was plenty good enough for their purposes. The equipment not only protected against sound detection efforts, which any well-designed scrambling equipment would do, but it also produced just enough in the way of visual distortion to make lip-reading impossible and even interpreting body language all but impossible for any but a trained expert—and then, only if the people being interpreted were incapable of acting at all.
Victor Cachat, on the other hand, was a pretty decent actor. As you'd expect from a secret agent. And Yana had a natural flair for it.
They wouldn't have to keep it up for much longer, anyway. Anton was almost done. He kept his head down, concentrating on the personal com device in his hands. To any observer, the little not-so-dramatic scenario in the underground passageway would appear to consist of a couple having a quarrel, which their friend and companion was politely ignoring by taking care of some personal business while he waited for them to be done.
Unlike the scrambling equipment, the com device was top-of-the-line, cutting edge equipment. More precisely, it was bleeding edge equipment, specially designed for Anton by own of Manticore's top electronics firms, for a cost that was normally associated with the price of air cars, not personal handheld communication equipment.
Anton could afford it. Or, rather, Catherine Montaigne could afford it. Anton was stubborn about not relying on Cathy for his personal financial needs, but he didn't hesitate to tap into her enormous fortune when it came to his professional work.
"—you manage that, anyway?"
"Not my fault that you—"
Anton keyed in the final instructions. "We're just about done with the sandbox, kiddies," he murmured, loud enough for Victor and Yana to hear him.
That done, he slid the com into his pocket. He made no attempt to disguise the motion, or the device itself. He was just a man finishing some routine work. To anyone who examined it, the com unit would seem to be a perfectly normal if somewhat expensive item produced in the Solarian League. Only if someone really attempted to break into the device would they be able to discover otherwise—and, by then, the com unit's self-destruct mechanism would have been triggered and there'd be nothing to examine but a small pile of smoldering slag.
By the time he'd put away the com unit, Victor and Yana were embracing each other. Nothing passionate, just the sort of embrace with which a pair of lovers resolve a quarrel. Or, at any rate, end it for the moment.
"Okay," he said, almost as softly. "One more to go."
They walked off, the three of them side by side. There was plenty of room, since the underground passageway was more in the nature of a large open space. The area was primarily used for the storage of private vehicles.
"I'm sick of arguing with him," muttered Yana. "It's like trying to pick a fight with a rudabaga."
"Save it for the next stop, Yana," cautioned Anton.
"What's a rudabaga?" asked Victor.
That night, in Anton's room—not the one he still maintained in the back of Turner's restaurant, but another one he'd obtained without using Saburo's contacts—he and Victor and Yana held another of the meetings they tried to hold at least every three days.
"It still seems like sorcery to me," Victor complained. "And spare me that tired old cliché about a sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic. This is not all that advanced, damnation."
"Yes and no," said Anton. "The technology itself isn't especially advanced, true enough. State of the art, is about the best you can say for it. But the specific programs that we developed are . . . I don't know if 'advanced' is the word I'd use. It's more like 'esoteric.' There just aren't very many people who work on this level of security programming, Victor. Sure, there are plenty of people who could have figured out how to bypass the security systems and implant false records, but so far as I know there are only two people in the whole galaxy who'd know how to prevent anyone from being able to detect that it was done afterward, even with a thorough investigation. One of them is named Anton Zilwicki and the other is Ruth Winton."
"Modest, isn't he?" said Yana. "At least he gave the woman some credit too."
Anton smiled. "In some ways, she's better at this that I am. The truth is, Ruth's reached the point where she's operating on a plane I don't even usually reach. I'm mostly acting as what you might call her crosscheck and rudder, these days. She's still prone to being over-confident."
Victor ran fingers through his hair. "And you're sure it'll work?"
"Yes. When we run—assuming we do, but we'd be fools not to count on it—we'll have left a completely false trail. Assuming you can get Carl Hansen and his people to take care of their end of the deal, so far as anyone on Mesa will ever be able to figure out, you and I and Yana exist only as scattered molecules."
Victor grunted. "The technical side of it's not a problem. That bomb will vaporize anything within two hundred meters. Whatever DNA traces they'd expect from a normal explosion will simply be too scattered to be usable, even with Mesan or Beowulfan techniques and equipment. The real problem is . . ."
He shook his head. "Let's just say that the people Saburo put us in contact with aren't as tightly wrapped as I'd like. They're not crazy, as such, but . . ."
"Fanatics," said Anton. "I do hope you notice that I didn't add any wisecrack such as 'and coming from Victor Cachat, that's saying something.' "
"Very funny. The problem is that tepid, wishy-washy people like you, whose commitment to anything beyond immediate personal matters is like mashed potatoes, just don't grasp all the fine distinctions between 'fanaticism' and 'fervor' and 'zeal.' "
Victor took a deep, slow breath. Not to control any anger—by now, the banter between him and Anton produced nothing more intense than occasional irritation—but to give himself time to try to figure out how to explain his concern.
"You just . . . don't really know, Anton. That's not a criticism, it's just an observation. From the time you were a kid, you lived in a world with wide horizons."
Zilwicki snorted. "Not usually the way the highlands of Gryphon are described!"
"Try growing up in a Dolist slum in Nouveau Paris. Trust me, Anton. The difference is huge. I'm not talking in terms of any scale of misery, mind you. I'm simply talking in terms of how narrow a view of the universe you're provided with. When I entered StateSec Academy, for all practical purposes I had no real knowledge of the universe beyond what I'd grown up with. Which wasn't much, believe me. That's . . ."
He paused for a moment. "I know a lot of people think I'm inclined toward zealotry. I suppose that's fair enough. What has changed, as the years have passed, is that my understanding of the universe has become . . . well, very large. So while I still retain the fundamental beliefs I had as a teenager, I can now put those beliefs in a much better context. I can, for instance, spend hours discussing politics with Web Du Havel—as I have, any number of times—listening to his basically conservative views without automatically dismissing those views as the self-serving prattle of an elitist."