Call a friend. A friend who isn’t Nick Rhodes.
Jolanda, he thought. Nice round jiggly unjudgmental Jolanda. Call her and take her out to dinner and then go back to her house somewhere in Berkeley with her and spend the night fucking her blind. It sounded good, until he remembered that Jolanda was up in the L-5s with the Israeli, Enron.
Someone else, then.
Not necessarily in the Bay Area. Someone far away. Yes, he thought. Go. Go. Far away from this place. Run. Take yourself a little trip.
To see Jeanne, for instance. Yes, sweet Jeannie Gabel, over there in Paris: always a good pal, always a sympathetic shoulder for him.
She was the one who had gotten him into this sea-captain business in the first place. She wouldn’t come down on him too hard for the mess that he had made of it. And during his thirty remaining days of Level Eleven privileges, why the hell not stick the Company for air fare to Paris and a bit of fine dining at the bistros along the Seine?
He keyed into the Samurai trunk line and asked for the Paris personnel node. A quick rough calculation told Carpenter that it was probably past midnight in Paris, but that was okay. He was in a bad way; Jeanne would understand.
The trouble was that Jeanne Gabel was no longer at the Paris office. In good old Samurai Industries fashion she had been transferred to Chicago, they told him.
He ordered the phone net to follow her path. It took only a moment to trace her.
“Gabel,” said the voice at the other end, and then there she was on the visor, the cheerful warm stolid face, the square jaw, the dark straightforward eyes. “Well, now! Home is the sailor, home from the—”
“Jeannie, I’m in trouble. Can I come see you?”
“What—how—” A quick recovery from her surprise. “Of course, Paul.”
“I’ll hop the next plane to Chicago, okay?”
“Sure. Sure, come right away. Whatever’s best for you.”
But his Company credit card seemed no longer good for air fare. After a couple of tries at reprogramming it, Carpenter gave up and tried car rental instead. Evidently they hadn’t canceled that yet, because a reservation came through on the first shot. Driving to Chicago probably wouldn’t be fun, but if he hustled he supposed he could make it in two days, at most three. He called Jeanne back and told her to expect him by midweek. She blew him a kiss.
The car delivered itself to the Dunsmuir forty minutes later. Carpenter was waiting outside the hotel with his suitcase behind him. “We’re going east,” he told it. “Head for Walnut Creek and keep on going.” He put the car on full automatic and leaned back and closed his eyes as it started up toward the hills. There was nothing to see, anyway, but the black unrelenting curtain of rain.
21
alone in his hotel room after his dinner with Meshoram Enron and Jolanda Bermudez, Farkas paced from corner to corner for ten or fifteen minutes, arranging pieces of the puzzle in his mind, tearing them down again, rearranging them. Then he put through a scrambled call to Emilio Olmo.
“I’ve been sniffing around a little,” Farkas told the Guardia Civil officer. “I’m starting to pick up a little whiff of conspiracy here and there.”
“Have you? So have I.”
“Oh?”
“You say first. What do you know, Victor?”
“The Southern California group that you heard rumors about? They’re real. Or at least, let me say, I’ve picked up the rumor about them now from an entirely new source.”
“A reliable source?”
“Reasonably reliable. A friend of a friend. Someone who is very well connected in the way of information transfer.”
“Ah,” said Olmo. “So the story is traveling. How very interesting. What else can you tell me, Victor?”
“Nothing, really.” Farkas saw no need just yet to provide Olmo with details of the Israeli involvement in the plot against the Generalissimo. That would be premature; it was clear to Farkas that Enron had some specific proposals to make, and Farkas wanted to hear them before he brought Olmo into the picture. If indeed he was going to bring Olmo into the picture at all. There was always the option of cutting the Guardia Civil man out of the scene, if the Israeli angle showed real promise. There might be more slope to gain by letting the coup happen than by helping Olmo snuff it out. Olmo, perhaps, could be used in some way quite other than to function as Generalissimo Callaghan’s chief policeman. The Kyocera plan of making him Don Eduardo’s successor whenever the Generalissimo finally died would guide Olmo toward making the correct choices. But Farkas did not know yet which side he wanted to sell out, and therefore it was appropriate at this point to be vague with Olmo. “As I said, this was third-party material. But I thought you would want to know that the project is being discussed in various places.”
“Yes. I do,” said Olmo. “Though in fact I am somewhat ahead of you. The Californians and their plans are not only real, but some of them have recently paid a visit to Valparaiso Nuevo to examine the territory.”
“You know this definitely?”
“Third-party information, like yours,” Olmo said. “I haven’t seen them myself. But we know that they were here. We are working on tracing them, but we are having a little difficulty. Probably they have gone back to Earth already. But in that case we will be watching for them, the next time they return.”
“Well, then,” Farkas said. “You’re ahead of me, all right. I’m sorry to have wasted your time, Emilio.”
“It is always a pleasure to hear from you, Victor.”
“I’ll call you if I find out anything more definite.”
“Please do,” said Olmo.
Perhaps this was the moment to put through a call to New Kyoto and ship this thing up to higher levels. Farkas debated it inwardly and decided against it, for now. If one did not happen to be Japanese, the only way one could reach higher levels oneself was to take the initiative in situations that called for boldness and decisiveness, and then to display, when everything had taken shape properly, the excellent results that one had achieved.
Farkas slept on it. When he awoke, the patterns were clearer in his mind. Before going out for breakfast he called the number of the hotel room that Jolanda shared with Enron.
The dark, glassy column that was Meshoram Enron appeared on the visor.
“Jolanda’s not here,” Enron said, a little too quickly, not bothering to hide the hostility of his tone. “She’s downstairs in the health club.”
“Good,” Farkas said. “You’re the one I wanted to talk to.”
“Yes?”
“We need to have another little meeting. There are some loose ends left from last night that I’d like to tie up.”
Enron seemed to be considering that. But his glassy facade was unchanging: Farkas had no clear idea of the processes going on within the Israeli’s mind. Enron was too well guarded. It was impossible for Farkas to read any fluctuation in Enron’s emanations using only the image in a visor. He would have to be in direct contact with him to pick up nuances of that sort.
After a moment Enron said, “We’re expecting to go back to Earth later today, or maybe on the first shuttle tomorrow.”
“Then there’s plenty of time for us to get together, isn’t there?”
“This is important, you say?”
“Very.”
“Anything to do with Jolanda?”
“Not in the slightest. She is a very fine woman, but you and I have more significant things to discuss than who sleeps with whom, am I not right?”
