“What are you frightened of, my friend?” Klien said. “You want the money, don’t you?”
This shut him up. “Ah-cha,” he said at last. “We go.”
Klien led the way back down the footpath. He judged that the nearest residence was perhaps fifty metres away. The crack of a laser charge would go unnoticed. He reached into the jacket of his sabline suit and caressed the butt of his laser pistol.
He paused in the silver illumination of a streetlight, and half turned. He wanted to look upon the face of the criminal as Khan realised that he was about to die, see the surprise in his eyes.
“What?” Khan said. “I don’t see—”
Klien withdrew his pistol, took aim and fired. By some fluke, Khan anticipated the shot and ducked to one side. The charge missed the man’s head by a fraction and, screaming in panic and pain, he turned and staggered off along the footpath. Klien gave chase, his stomach churning. Khan fell to his knees, then slumped on to his side. Klien stood over him, kicked the giant on to his back. Khan stared up at him with terrified eyes, the flesh of his forehead and a great chunk of hair burned away.
“Why?” Khan managed in a whisper.
Klien knelt, aware of the overwhelming feeling of exultation coursing through him. He was being presented, on this occasion, with the opportunity always denied him: to inform his victims why they were about to die, to make them face the ultimate consequence of their ways.
“Do you repent?” Klien almost spat, his face inches from the dying man’s. “Do you recognise your sins and are you truly sorry?”
“I…”
“What? Say it! Say you repent!”
“You’re… you are mad.”
“Verily I am angry, Khan. I am angry on behalf of God. You’—he pointed the pistol, almost firing then—‘and people like you deserve no more than summary execution. Criminals, drug dealers, pimps and murderers, you bring misery to the innocent, the blight of evil into the lives of those who have done you no harm! Do you repent?”
“I…” Khan spluttered, a mere gasp of pain. “I was doing what I had to do to survive.”
Klien almost wept with rage. “You brought pain and misery to the innocent,” he said, “and for this you must die!”
“No!”
Klien fired, the charge frying the right side of Khan’s face, causing instant death by massive neural dysfunction. Kneeling over the body, crying quietly to himself, Klien reached out with his razor and sliced the sign of the cross into the ample flesh of Raja Khan’s left cheek.
He stood and hurried from the body, enraged still by Khan’s defiance in the face of death. Perhaps, he thought, as great an evil as one’s original crime was the inability to see it as such and admit to one’s sins.
He heard a noise to his right, movement in the garden beyond the hedge. He stopped and listened intently, but no further sounds came. Perhaps it had been an animal, or in his anger he was becoming paranoid. He hurried on, almost running in his haste to gain the sanctuary of his home.
Ten minutes later he locked his front door on the world. He put his pistol and capillary net in the safe behind the Vermeer print, moved to the bathroom and showered. As the hot water massaged his tired skin, he felt the tension drain from him. It was a mistake, he realised, to have tried to extract some admission of sin from Khan. Evil men would never admit to the errors of their ways. He would not make the same mistake in future. He would merely carry out the killing and rest assured in the knowledge that the world was then a little safer.
He moved to the lounge, poured himself a large brandy and lay in one of the sunken bunkers. For the next hour he closed his eyes and concentrated on the taste of the brandy, riding the wave of exhilaration surging through him. It was at times like this, when he seemed to be most alive, before, during and immediately after a killing, that he was reminded of why he came to Earth.
From a drawer in the table in the middle of the sunken bunker he withdrew a stack of pix. He spread them on the cushion beside him and sipped his brandy.
On arriving on Earth almost fourteen years ago, Calcutta had struck him as a hellish congestion of humanity, traffic and constant noise. He had literally stopped in his tracks on stepping from the spaceport at midnight. He had never before seen so many people. They flowed down the streets in never-ending waves, thousands of people of all types: Indians in strange clothes, more familiar Europeans in suits and dresses, tall jet-black Africans in robes and djellabas. He’d thought that perhaps this area was so congested for being so close to the spaceport, but when he caught a taxi to the city centre he’d stared out in horror: the entire city was a madhouse of crowds and deafening traffic and strobing lights and vast nightmarish screens that hovered over everything and exhorted the populace to buy. He had booked a room in a hotel and did not venture out for two days.
Then, the urgency of his mission spurring him on, he’d emerged on to the crowded streets. The city was a curious mixture of the ultra-modern and the old, with the soaring polycarbon structures of the city centre overlooking a sea of slums patched together from scavenged carbon-fibre scraps and polythene, the rich commingling with the poor. His first experience of beggars, their tenacity some measure of their desperation, had shocked him profoundly. He’d wondered how a rich citizen of the city could exist without being tortured by guilt and shame.
Klien had located the headquarters of the Mackendrick Foundation, and Mackendrick’s private residence to the west of the city, and considered how he might go about obtaining the softscreen. To his surprise he’d discovered, over a period of days of surreptitious surveillance, that Mackendrick’s mansion was not only inadequately guarded, but lacked security cameras. He’d considered the possibility of breaking in and locating the softscreen by chance, but dismissed the idea. He would stand a better chance of finding the softscreen if he could by some means gain legitimate admittance. He’d been considering this when he heard on a news report that the house had indeed been broken into. A safe was robbed and Mackendrick’s daughter had been kidnapped.
Klien saw his opportunity and had moved quickly to set up his own security and investigative company. He sent com-messages to Mackendrick’s business headquarters and private mansion, detailing his spurious expertise in the field of security and private investigations.
About ten days later he’d received a summons to an exclusive city centre restaurant, not to meet Charles Mackendrick, as he’d expected, but his Indian wife, Naheed. She had explained that Mackendrick’s own security firm was handling the investigation into the theft and the kidnapping of their daughter, and that Mackendrick did not want outside concerns working on the case. Naheed had argued that surely two sets of people working on the same case would be an advantage, but Mackendrick had been adamant. Therefore, for the sake of her daughter, Naheed was willing to pay him a considerable sum to track down the kidnappers and return Sita. He’d asked if he might be able to visit the mansion at some point, but Naheed Mackendrick had been unsure.
“Is it absolutely necessary? I mean, if my husband found out…”
“It would help in my investigations, madam,” he’d said.
“What do you need to know? I have pictures of Sita’—she’d given him half a dozen pix of a shy-looking girl in a blue knee-length dress—‘and if you need to know what was stolen…”
Klien had frowned, wondering how he might gain admittance to the mansion. “It might help.”
“All that was in the safe at the time was a small sum of money, and something belonging to my husband—an old softscreen entertainment.”
Klien remembered feeling the bottom drop from his stomach. He’d looked up at Naheed to see if she had noticed his reaction.
“A softscreen entertainment?” he’d said. “What exactly… ?”
Naheed Mackendrick had waved dismissively. “Oh, it was some old screen thing that Charles brought back from one of the colonies. He seemed to think it was valuable.”
“What did the… the screen show? What kind of entertainment?”
“I only glanced at the thing. It was some adventure story, set on a mountainous planet. Three explorers were looking for alien artefacts or some such.”
“I see,” he’d said, at first elated that he had made the breakthrough, and then immediately daunted at the prospect of having to find the kidnappers and the soft-screen in a city as populous as Calcutta.
“Do you think you’ll be able to find my daughter, Mr Klien?”
He had reached across the table and touched her hand. “You have my word that I will do my very best.”
From that day he had devoted his time to finding Sita Mackendrick. If he could locate the girl, and find out
