“Mr Redwater, with all due respect, I am not a fucking idiot, you kidnapping, evil fuck.” She said it evenly, but her pulse raced. Limpopo gave her a silent cheer.
“Can I come in, then? Alone?”
She thought. It wasn’t likely a zotta would turn suicide-bomber – blackmail or brainwash someone else to be a suicide-bomber, sure, but not risk their own skin. At the rate things were going, they were all going to die in hours, possibly minutes.
“I don’t think anyone here would object to that. As to what happens out there, with all those weapons and tanks and killer robots—”
“That’s my lookout.” He sounded in control of his emotions now.
“Leave our feeds up. No safe conduct if we can’t reach the outside world.”
There was a long pause. She thought he might have disconnected, but when he spoke, she heard a single clipped plosive as he unmuted his mic. He’d been talking to someone else.
“Out of my hands. But I’ve made a request.”
She shrugged. “It’s the boys’ prison. The southernmost one.”
Quickly, she tapped out a message to the rest of the walkaways, the ones in the jails and in the crowd, explaining Jacob Redwater had asked for safe passage so that he could talk to his daughter’s wife. She implied, but didn’t state, that Iceweasel and the boys were in the building. As the crowd voraciously doxxed Iceweasel’s dad and parceled up tremendous quantities of information on the sprawling Redwater empires, Limpopo and Gretyl whispered to one another about what would happen next.
“It sounds like he’s snapped,” Limpopo said. “Some kind of shear between Jacob Redwater, zotta, and Jacob Redwater, human. Deathbed conversion or something. You said his wife died?”
“Yeah, but from what Iceweasel said, they were basically divorced for most of her life, in all but name. She had a sister, don’t know what became of her. I’m sure he’s got access to as much company as he wants.”
“Whatever else he was, he was charming,” Etcetera said. “In that smart, sociopathic way. Fun to argue with, if you weren’t his daughter.”
“There he is,” Limpopo said. The boys gathered around their screen as they zoomed and error-corrected the feed from the remaining cams in the inner courtyard. He was dressed in bottle-green cords and a down vest over a long-sleeved shirt. His hair was white, but his face was smooth, his posture erect. He walked slowly and purposefully. He was old, but he didn’t look frail.
“Can one of you get him, please?” Gretyl said to the boys. “I don’t want to go up in case he’s planning to snatch me.”
The boys argued over who would do it. A kid named Troy, sixteen with a short afro, an easygoing smile and, smart, fast eyes, won. He raced away. A moment later, they watched him on the screen, talking with Jacob Redwater, leading him.
“This oughta be good,” Etcetera said.
Gretyl wondered where Iceweasel was, whether she was seeing this. There was a lot of clamor from the crowd to livecast her talk with Redwater. She said no, firmly, while agreeing to record and release it later, depending on whether there was a later.
Jacob Redwater came into the control room, preceded by a bow-wave of understated cologne. Gretyl stood and looked him up and down, looking for bulges indicating guns or other surprises. Not that they had to bulge much these days, and not that she knew much about what kind of bulges they made.
His face was impassive. He’d been crying, minutes ago, broken and lost. Now he wore the zotta mask, two parts charming sophisticate, one part dead-eyed predator. A man who could make entertaining conversation over dinner, then go home and bankrupt your employer and put you on the street.
“Hello, Gretyl.” He stood before Troy like Troy had a gun in his back and he was pretending that it wasn’t there.
“Hello, Mr Redwater.” She extended her hand.
His hand was warm and firm. “Call me Jacob.”
Limpopo gave him a funny look. Gretyl remembered Jacob Redwater had set her up to be rendered to this prison, ripped from family and everything dear to her. She was used to thinking of him as the man who’d sired and kidnapped her wife, but he was Limpopo’s arch-nemesis. She wondered if Limpopo would shiv the bastard, who surely deserved it. She was about to lunge to take out her frail old friend, frailer alongside this vigorous, unthinkably rich man, but Limpopo held her hand out.
“Limpopo.” He tilted his head, straining to recognize her.
“Hello, Jacob.”
“Nice to see you,” said Etcetera. Redwater’s eyes widened. He started at the speaker between her collarbones. “It’s me, Hubert. I’m dead.”
“I see. Nice to talk to you again, even so.”
Troy brought him a chair. The three sat together, boys clustered at the room’s other end, ostentatiously not listening while ferociously eavesdropping.
Redwater said nothing. Gretyl put her elbows on her knees and leaned forward, arching her back to work the creak and ache of sitting and terror out. “What did you want to talk about, Jacob?”
“I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“You don’t want your daughter hurt. You’re indifferent to what happens to the old dyke she’s shacked up with.”
He shook his head. “I don’t care about your sexuality. My cousin is gay, you know.”
“I know. That’s the reason you’re running the family fortune these days.”
He shook his head. “It’s more complicated. You can believe that if you want. The internal politics of the Redwater family are always and only about one thing.”
“Money.”
“Power. Money’s just keeping score.”
“Must have really fucked you off when Iceweasel gave her share to that merc.” She wanted him to squirm. She’d expected him to be the weeping man on the phone. She didn’t want to die with the sight of him erect and proud burned into her optic nerve, proof the sun would never set on the zotta empire.
He nodded. “It made things complicated in our family. But it wasn’t fatal. Nadie and I are on good terms these days, believe it or not.”
Gretyl kept her best poker face, willing herself not to give away the fact that Nadie had Iceweasel and the boys with her.
“I would like to see my daughter and my grandsons.”
“I think you gave up that right when you had her kidnapped, Mr Redwater,” Limpopo said. They looked at her. Her eyes glittered dangerously. “When you had me disappeared.”
“When you had me murdered,” Etcetera said.
Redwater was impassive. Gretyl thought she saw anxious tells, sudden realization by this arrogant princeling that he was three levels underground, surrounded by people who owed him a debt of violence.
He spoke carefully. “I didn’t say I had a right to it. The things that happened were beyond regrettable. They were terrible. I brought Natalie home because I knew there was trouble ahead for you and your friends. The murders of those two security operators tipped things over the edge. There was no way things would be business as usual after that. I wanted her safe. The things that followed, what happened to you, were nothing to do with me.”
She and Limpopo started to speak at once, broke off, looked at each other. Limpopo made a “go ahead” gesture. “He’s your father-in-law.” She smiled sardonically.
Jacob Redwater returned the smile, pretending he didn’t notice its venom.
“What murders, Jacob?”
“The two people that Zyz lost at the ‘university’ complex. Went in, never came out. That was bad enough. But then we discovered that they’d been captured and subsequently executed – euthanized – that their remains had been desecrated—”