Designated Targets

welcome to have a drink and enjoy themselves, but they definitely had no business here, if you understand what I’m saying.”

Dan watched Julia’s eyebrows climb halfway up her forehead. He had no idea what they were talking about, but she’d obviously been taken by surprise, which he found astonishing.

“Shit,” she said. “How’d that go down?”

O’Brien shrugged. “I played some footage taken off a couple of microcams we planted on them. They had no idea what we’d done or how we did it. But they know we’re totally out of their league. So they won’t fuck around. They’re just here because it’s the hottest fucking joint in town. Oh, and the food, of course. They love the food.”

“I can imagine,” said Julia. “Dan, darling, you’ve got to try everything on the menu. Joybelle used to produce Sir James Oliver’s show on Fox, before she moved over to the news.”

Dan’s blank look was eloquent.

“He’s a chef, sweetie. Modern Italian, by way of Cool Britannia.”

He was still floundering.

Julia sighed. “She had all his books and shows on stick. Not just recipes, but the actual chef demonstrating how to put them together. Then she grabbed a crew of young guys out of kitchens all over town. Of course they’re going to kill for the chance to jump their own cooking up to warp speed—you know, eighty years ahead of the game. And it’s like . . . honest to God . . . it’s like eating in New York the week we left.”

“Well, not exactly,” O’Brien corrected her. “Try getting a decent plate of wagyu in this town.”

The young waitress reappeared. In the rush of the arrival, he hadn’t noticed before, but she was dressed like a man. In a white shirt and a business tie. “So, have you made any decisions?”

The two women didn’t even bother checking the menu. O’Brien ordered her usual, whatever that was.

“I’ll have the flash-fried spanner crab omelet, to start,” said Julia, “with a glass of that thirty-eight pinot grigio, if you still have it. And a bowl of spaghetti alla vongole for main. Now, Dan, I know you’ll want to order the T-bone, but how about letting me do you a favor?”

“Okay,” he conceded, but with no sense of confidence.

“Good. The big guy here will have the truffled mushrooms on olive toast with Reggiano and rugetta as an appetizer, and the seared pork belly with scallops to follow. Bring him a beer to settle his nerves, and a very light, peppery red to have with the meal. The sommelier can choose.”

“Excellent.” The girl’s head bobbed once as she finished the order.

Dan shifted on his chair. “Don’t you feel a little, uh, odd eating you know—”

“Enemy food?” said O’Brien.

“Well, yeah.”

“No,” they both answered at once.

Without missing a beat, O’Brien plowed on. “Now, Dan, Jules tells me you need to look at an investment portfolio. Because of your position in the Zone, we’d have to establish it as a blind trust so there could be no question of your having profited from inside knowledge.”

The former Marine Corps captain reminded Black of a hundred other women he’d met in the Multinational Force. As soon as they switched to work, they became almost robotic. Even though she was no longer dealing in war Maria O’Brien gave him the impression she would have briefed a team of fighter pilots or navy divers in the same tone of voice she was using now to review his investment options.

Truth be told, he had no real interest in his investment options. He’d only agreed to come because of Julia.

“. . . are no-brainers,” she was saying. “Burroughs. And IBM, unless the Holocaust connection bothers you. Aerospace. GM. Ford. All of them easy picks for both wartime and postwar expansion. Then there are the less obvious, longer-term options, like pharmaceuticals, especially corporations that will be registering patents in drugs for heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and so on.

“No matter what happens with the baby Bells, you’ll want a lot of exposure to telecoms. That area is going to go ballistic. I wouldn’t advise putting anything into the content providers for now, though. The copyright issue is going to be twenty years getting itself sorted out, especially with so many German, Japanese, and Chinese firms holding the rights to stuff like Disney and Warners. A better bet would be intellectual properties developed by firms with no parentage in this era, especially if the IP was generated in jurisdictions which don’t exist yet, and may never exist, for all we know.”

Julia, he noticed, was nodding as the lawyer delivered her pitch, dropping in the occasional comment of her own. He was really surprised—by both of them, actually. They spoke like Wall Street veterans, but neither of them were what he thought of as capitalists. A reporter and a marine. You didn’t think of those sort of people as having these sort of concerns. It opened another window onto the world they had come from, but even so, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. Grantville hadn’t prepared him at all for this. They were talking like the mine bosses his daddy hated so much.

“Here you go.” The waitress was back, delivering their first course.

Dan’s plate held one large, flat black mushroom, drizzled with some kind of oil and sprinkled with spiky green leaves and shavings of a dry, pungent cheese. Julia’s omelet looked just like an omelet, for which he was unexpectedly glad.

“What are you having, Maria?” he asked, glad of an opportunity to change topics. He just didn’t feel comfortable talking about money. It wasn’t a proper topic for the dinner table. He figured he’d agree to some sort of investment, just to keep Jules happy, and also, he thought, because they’d need a little nest egg to start a life together after the war.

“I always go for the vegetarian option,” she said, clicking out of her professional personality. “It’s nothing philosophical, really. I don’t mind meat stocks or sauces. But when you’ve exhumed as many mass graves as I have, you lose your taste for T-bones.”

He was sorry he asked, but she didn’t seem to mind.

“And they do the most exquisite minty peas here,” she added.

So that’s what she was having. A big bowl of minted peas.

“Wow,” said Dan. “My ma would have died a happy woman if she thought I was eating a whole bowl of peas for my dinner. She used to have to stand over me with a wooden spoon to make sure I didn’t flick mine out the window.”

“Try your own dish, Dan,” said Julia. “It’s not meat, but you’ll love it. Trust me.”

In fact, he didn’t mind it. It was warm, and felt a bit like steak in his mouth, which, O’Brien explained, was why she didn’t order it. If he thought there would be a respite from the financial conversation, though, he was wrong.

Julia had no sooner swallowed a mouthful of omelet before she started up again. “Maria, you were warning us off content providers, but I know you’ve got Davidson and some of your other clients hooked into that market.”

The lawyer shook her head. “No. We’ve signed them up to an agency agreement, you know, guys like Elvis and Sinatra. And we’re taking the industry-standard commission off their royalties, but where there’s an extant commercial entity that could claim ownership of say, the words and music to ‘Blue Suede Shoes,’ we’ve actually sought them out, provided the product, and offered the right of first refusal. Nine times out of ten, they jump at it, and we negotiate a much better deal for the client than was the case originally, back in our world. So everyone’s a winner.”

“Really?” said Dan, who was only following a fraction of what she was saying.

“Well, no, not really,” she admitted. “The recording companies are getting screwed, because their original contracts were so onerous. But they know a guaranteed income stream when they see it. They don’t want to lose it to a competing company, which they could do, because their legal claim is tenuous at best. Nobody likes arguing jurisdictional issues, and there is no case law in Multiverse Theory. So most of the time they just sign up. And the artists do get a much better deal.

“For example, we got Sinatra out of Tommy Dorsey’s band and right into his solo career. He’s so grateful that he’s playing four nights a week here, for free.”