Hot Sky at Midnight

“Naturally.”

“I am useful to you, or at least to your employer. Your employer is Kyocera-Merck, Victor. You make no secret of that. Why should you? I work for K-M too, of course, although not quite so openly. Indeed, not openly at all.”

“True.”

“The Generalissimo has ruled Valparaiso Nuevo for thirty-seven years, Victor. He was not young when he seized power here and he is quite old now. When he goes, the Company sees it to be in its interest for me to succeed him. You knew this, didn’t you?”

“More or less.” Farkas was getting tired of Olmo’s circuitous manner. The fracas in the outer shell had wearied him and he wanted to go back to his hotel. “Would you mind getting to the point, Emilio?”

“I’ve given you a great deal of help in carrying out the project the Company sent you here to do. Now you help me. It is only reasonable, one K-M man to another. Tell me the truth. Do you know anything whatsoever about this takeover conspiracy?”

Farkas found this hard to believe. He hadn’t imagined Olmo to be so dumb.

“Not a thing,” he said. “This is the first I’ve heard about it.”

“You swear that?”

“Don’t be stupid, Emilio. I could swear to whatever you wanted me to, and what would it matter?”

“I trust you.”

“Do you? Yes, I suppose you do. You shouldn’t trust anybody, but all right. If it’ll make you feel any better, here: the holy truth is that I really don’t know a thing about any of this. God’s sacred truth. By the archangels and apostles, this is absolutely the first that I’ve heard of it. And I suspect that there’s nothing to the rumor at all.”

“No. I believe that you have spoken honestly. But what I am afraid of,” said Olmo, “is that there actually is such a conspiracy, and Kyocera-Merck may be behind it. Perhaps using these California people as proxies. And that when Don Eduardo goes, I will go with him. That I have become irrelevant to the Company; that the Company has decided to discard me.”

“This sounds crazy to me. So far as I know, you’re as important to the Company as you’ve ever been. And your role in facilitating the Wu business will strengthen your position in their eyes even more.”

“And the coup? Let’s say that the stories I have heard have substance behind them, this South California group. Let us assume that such a group exists, and such a plan. It is your belief that they have nothing to do with K-M, then?”

“How would I know? Am I Japanese? Use your brain, Emilio. I’m just a Company expediter, Level Nine. That’s pretty high up the slope but it’s nowhere near policy level. The boys in New Kyoto don’t call me in to share their secret plans with them.”

“You think, then, that the plotters of this coup are merely a gang of free-lance criminals from South California, acting completely on their own. Southern California.”

“God in heaven,” Farkas said, exasperated now close to his limit of tolerance. “Haven’t I made it sufficiently clear that all I know about this idiotic coup is the stuff you’ve just told me? I have no evidence that it exists at all, and apparently you don’t have much yourself. But all right. All right. If it’ll reassure you, Emilio, let me tell you that in my estimation the plotters, if there are any and whoever they may be, are more likely to want to cooperate with you than to put you down, if they have any sense at all, and when and if they get close to making their move on this place, the smartest thing they could possibly do would be to get in touch with you and hire you to help them overthrow the Generalissimo. You will furthermore have the backing of Kyocera-Merck in whatever happens, because K-M is interested, God knows why, in bringing this foul little orbiter into its sphere of influence and has already tapped you to be the next Generalissimo, so they are not likely to sit by idly while a bunch of free-lance gangsters from California push their chosen man out the window. Okay, Emilio? Do you feel better, now?”

Olmo was silent for a time.

Then he said, “Thank you. If you learn anything more about any of this, you will tell me, Victor?”

“Of course.”

“Bueno,” Olmo said, a fraction of a second before Farkas could say it for him. “I do trust you, my friend. As much as I trust anyone.”

“Which is not at all, correct?”

Olmo laughed heartily. He seemed suddenly much more at his ease, after Farkas’s long and irritable outburst “I know you will do nothing to harm me unless you find it absolutely unavoidable, for your own sake, to turn against me.”

“That sounds right enough.”

“Yes. Yes.”

“So you will let me know, if you hear from anyone about this plot?”

“Jesus! I’ve already said I would. Under the terms you’ve just laid out. Does that satisfy you?”

“Yes.”

“Then we can get back to the business at hand, all right? You agree to see to it that Wu and Juanito get shipped off promptly to the K-M lab satellite, as the Company has directed us to arrange. Yes?”

“Absolutely.”

“Bueno,” Farkas said. And they both laughed.

8

at quarter to eight sharp, Carpenter walked out in front of the hotel to wait for Rhodes to arrive. The night was mild, humid, a soft moist breeze blowing in off the ocean. You could almost believe that rain was on the way, unless you knew something about recent West Coast weather patterns, in which case you realized that the Second Coming of Christ would be a more probable event in San Francisco this evening. But Rhodes was, of course, late, and there was a nasty, sour, nostril-stinging chemical tang in the damp air that made Carpenter feel uncomfortable about standing outside maskless very long, despite all Rhodes had told him that afternoon about the relative benevolence of the Bay Area atmosphere. He went back inside and stood there peering out through the lobby portholes. Rhodes finally showed up around ten after eight.

He was driving a big, broad-nosed car, an antiquated-looking job extremely full of people. Carpenter got in back, next to a hefty Latin-looking woman with an immense mass of dark, tumbling hair, who flashed him a huge, beacon-bright, improbably glossy smile. Her eyes had a sheen and protrusiveness that said immediately to Carpenter that she was a heavy hyperdex user. She seemed about to introduce herself, but before she could say a thing a stocky, swarthy-faced man on the other side of her reached his hand across her, seizing Carpenter’s with a startlingly aggressive grip, and said loudly, in a deep, robust voice, faintly tinged with a European accent of some unspecifiable sort, “I am Meshoram Enron. I am from Israel.”

As if I couldn’t guess, Carpenter thought.

“Paul Carpenter,” he said. “Friend of Dr. Rhodes. Childhood friend, in fact.”

“Very good. I am extremely pleased to make your acquaintance, Dr. Carpenter. I write for Cosmos, on scientific and technological matters. You know this magazine? It is one of the biggest. I am with the Tel Aviv office. I have arrived from Israel only the day before yesterday, especially to talk with your friend.”

Carpenter nodded, wondering how often Enron began a sentence with anything except the first-person- singular pronoun. One out of three? One out of five?

“And I’m Jolanda,” said the big woman with the hair and the smile and the hyperdex eyes, now that Enron had subsided for the moment.

Her voice was a trained theatrical one, rich and husky, straight from the diaphragm. A cloud of pheromonal fragrance seemed to burst from her as she spoke, and Carpenter felt an immediate response in his groin. But he was too experienced to build any happy assumptions on that. Most likely she greeted everyone that way, plenty of voltage up front, nothing in particular behind it.

Rhodes said without looking back, “Paul, this is Isabelle.”

The woman sitting next to Rhodes up front swiveled and flashed the swiftest of how-d’ye-do grins, a mere