Hot Sky at Midnight

the middle of the night.

Olmo knew nothing about the deadline, then. The coup attempt had misfired.

But the bombs were still set to blow at half past one.

“Excuse me,” Carpenter said to a woman at an adjacent table. His voice was hoarse, ragged, broken, the voice of a torture victim recently released from the grasp of the Inquisition. “Can you tell me what time it is?”

“Eleven-thirty,” the woman said.

Jesus. Less than thirty minutes to go to the putative deadline for the abdication. Two hours until the time the bombs were supposed to go off.

Carpenter began to see that he must have been zonked out on the floor of the shell for hours after the fight with Farkas.

He looked around for a public communicator wand at his table and found one clipped to its left side. Its keyboard was tiny and his fingers seemed as thick as tree trunks, and when he tried to remember the call code for Davidov’s hotel room he came up with fifty thousand different eight-digit numbers in a fifty-thousandth of a second.

Calm. Calm. He threaded a path through the maze of numbers and found the right one, and punched it in.

No answer.

No hunt-and-seek, either.

Carpenter punched the “help” node and told the wand to go looking for Davidov anywhere on Valparaiso Nuevo. Why that hadn’t been done automatically, Carpenter didn’t know; but in a moment the communicator came up with a null code for the desired person.

Where was Davidov?

He tried the number of the room that Enron and Jolanda were sharing. Nothing.

Something very wrong here. Where was everybody? The bombs were ticking.

He took a deep breath and punched what he hoped was the directory code, and told the communicator wand that he wanted to talk to Colonel Olmo of the Guardia Civil. The communicator got him a line to the Guardia operations room.

“Colonel Olmo, please.”

“Who is calling?”

“My name is Paul Carpenter. I’m with—” He almost said with Samurai Industries, and caught himself. “With Kyocera-Merck, Ltd. I’m an associate of Victor Farkas. Tell him that. Victor Farkas.” It was very difficult for him to enunciate clearly.

“Wait one moment, please.”

Carpenter waited. He wondered how much to tell Olmo, whether he should spill out the whole conspiracy scheme to him. It wasn’t his responsibility to deliver the ultimatum. He was only a flunky in this thing. On the other hand, he was the one who had removed Farkas from the picture, and nobody knew that except him. Was it now his duty to take Farkas’s place in the program?

A voice said, “What is the nature of your call, Mr. Carpenter?”

Jesus. Jesus.

“It’s a confidential matter. The only one I can communicate it to is Colonel Olmo.”

“Colonel Olmo is unavailable now. Would you like to speak to the officer on duty, Captain Lopez Aguirre?”

“Olmo. Only Olmo. Please. This is very urgent.”

“Captain Lopez Aguirre will be with you in a moment.”

“Olmo,” Carpenter said. He felt like crying.

A new voice, brusque, bored, said, “Lopez Aguirre speaking. What is this in connection with, please?”

Carpenter stared at the wand in his hand as though it had turned into a serpent.

“I’m trying to reach Colonel Olmo. It’s a matter of life and death.” He struggled to make his words understandable.

“Colonel Olmo is not available.”

“I’ve already been told that. You’ve got to put me through to him all the same. I’m making this request on behalf of Victor Farkas.”

“Who?”

“Farkas. Farkas. Kyocera-Merck.”

“Who am I talking to?”

Carpenter started to give his name again. Then he said, “Who I am doesn’t matter.” He was still fighting the hyper-dex, stumbling over his own tongue. “What matters is that Mr. Farkas has very important information to give to Colonel Olmo, and—”

“Who are you? What is this all about? You are drunk, are you? You think I have time to speak with drunks?”

Christ! Lopez Aguirre sounded very annoyed. In another moment, Carpenter realized, Lopez Aguirre was likely to send someone over to the plaza to pick him up for questioning, a suspicious character, a public nuisance. Toss him in a back room somewhere, get around to him after lunch. Or maybe some time tomorrow.

He shut the communicator wand off and headed across the plaza, expecting a Guardia Civil man to step out from behind one of the palm trees and clap a set of magnetos on him before he reached the far side. But no one interfered with him. He moved jerkily, in double time, still hopped up on the hyperdex to some degree. He knew that he would be for hours more.

Into the elevator. Down-spoke to the hub, to the shuttle terminal. Most likely that was where everybody was, Enron, Jolanda, Davidov, Davidov’s people. Waiting to catch the twelve-fifteen shuttle if Olmo turned out to be unable to topple Generalissimo Callaghan from his throne.

Through the glass wall of the elevator tube Carpenter caught sight of a clock. Quarter to twelve, now. Unless Davidov had had some kind of backup scheme ready, the noon deadline was going to run out without anything being communicated to Colonel Olmo. Which was not the really serious problem. The really serious problem was that when the ninety minutes of grace expired and nothing had been heard from Olmo, the bombs were going to go.

At the terminal, the outbound shuttle was all ready to take off. Carpenter saw its gleaming shaft jutting right into the rim of the docking module, and the shuttle itself stretching upward behind it. Bright confusing signs blinked everywhere. Where the hell was the embarkation lounge? he wondered.

He found himself in some kind of waiting room. Half a dozen local kids were slouching around in there. Carpenter remembered seeing them upon his arrival: couriers, they were, sharp operators who preyed on the incoming travelers. He looked for the one who had checked them through customs— Nattathaniel, that was his name—but didn’t see him. But then another one, a hefty, pink-faced blond boy who was probably not as soft as he seemed to be, came over and said, “Help you, sir? I’m a licensed courier. My name is Kluge.”

“I’ve got a ticket on the twelve-fifteen to Earth,” Carpenter said.

“You go right through that door, sir. Shall I get your luggage from the locker?”

Carpenter’s luggage, such as it was, was still in his hotel room. To hell with it.

“I don’t have luggage,” Carpenter said. “But I’m looking for some friends who are supposed to be taking the same shuttle out with me.”

“They’d be in the embarkation lounge, then. Or on board the shuttle. Boarding time’s come and practically gone, you know.”

“Yes. I wonder, have you seen them go past?” He described Enron, Davidov, Jolanda. The courier’s eyes lit up at the description of Jolanda, particularly.

“They haven’t been through here,” Kluge said.

“You’re sure of that?”

“I know those people. Mr. Enron, of Israel, and Ms. Jolanda Bermudez. And the other one, the big one with the close-cut hair, he uses various names. I worked for Mr. Enron and Ms. Bermudez the last time they were here. I’d have seen them if they had come past here anywhere in the last hour.”

Carpenter’s eyes grew wide with dismay.

“You’d better go into the lounge, sir,” Kluge said. “They’ll be calling last call any minute now. If I see any of