Chapter Seventeen
Marianne was fleeing up North Broadway before the syndicate had time to react. Within twenty minutes, she reached the sprawling shuttleport outside Kansas Ringcity; in another five minutes she parked her Ocelot in an expensive sealed compartment deep inside the fifth underground level of the shuttleport parking complex. A shuttle-setter herself, Marianne knew that such parking compartments were available for storing an automobile while you spent a month on New Israel/Aleph, if you could afford the tab.
A tracer bug will not transmit through five layers of ferroconcrete, so the syndicate only knew that she had gone to ground north of the Ringcity beltline. Marianne was smart and lucky. Smart to hurry aboard the first monorail to St. Joseph; lucky to find a suburban mall immediately in old Saint Joe.
By the time Marianne had outfitted herself in cotton work clothes, the syndicate had called off their womanhunt. They knew Marianne Placidas lived near SanTone, and they knew what their own man had told her because they had him under narcosis. Very soon after the interrogation began, they knew that they were not going to muscle out the rival outfit.
For one thing, the rival's address was on Sharon Square in the satellite colony of New Israel/Beth. Had it been New Israel/Aleph, they might have entertained a hope that some Earth-based drug baron was taking it easy in the low-gravity spa on that carefully groomed tourist haven. They could get an ID check and, when he shuttled back Earthside. deal with him in customary ways.
But Beth was New Israel's second satellite colony, the one devoted to research.
The syndicate knew its limitations. It enjoyed traditions as old and honored as the island of Corsica, and no doubt it could find — or force — some accommodation with any government on Earth, at some level. But New Israel? Every year those hardnosed sabras seemed to care less about the world they had left; a world they felt had exiled them to space colonies. Oh, they still had friendly arrangements; for example, with Turkey, the site of their original spaceport. And of course, Turkey was a prime region for producing poppy heads. Who would know that better than Corsican middlemen?
Now, perhaps, the middlemen were to be thrust outside. The syndicate resolved to peel every eye, prick every ear. It would
But why had the Mossad converted a good syndicate soldier merely to contact Felix Sorel? Maybe because Sorel's own operations were so cagey, so condensed, so carefully interwoven with the politics of Mexico and Cuba. New Israel did not want trouble; it coveted only success — on terms that few men on Earth could appreciate. When you feel that you have been expelled, literally, from your mother planet, you are not likely to harbor tender thoughts about the people still living there.
The syndicate learned from their wigged-out soldier that New Israel had offered him a reasonable bribe: a sex-rejuvenation operation. Syndicate bosses smiled at this for two reasons. One was admiration: not many mobs could offer bribes like that. The other was savage satisfaction: the soldier would not live to enjoy it. The Placidas woman might be harder to catch.
After drawing a great lump of cash in St. Joseph, Marianne slept the night on a slow local to Des Moines, fretful at every stop. The Corsican soldier slept without further cares on the bottom of the muddy Missouri, undisturbed by the fish that nibbled at his eyes.
Chapter Eighteen
On Thursday. Marianne fretted through the contact from her Des Moines uplink to a terminal on Sharon Square. New Israel/Beth. The man's accent was clearly American, and his holo image reminded her charmingly of a witty professor or a successful salesman. He and two others just happened to be slated for shuttledown to Kingsley, the southernmost shuttleport under Canada's control, near Klamath Falls in Oregon Territory.
Could the lady and her friend Felix meet them in the little tourist haven of Ashland? The lady thought it might be arranged; border authorities rarely bothered tourists crossing into soil that had been American only ten years before and seemed likely to revert to statehood again, once the resentment over wartime quarantines had faded.
The man on the holo was nearly bald, with a strong nose and expressive brows. He assured Marianne he would recognize her by sight in Ashland's famed Lithia Hotel. He would be accompanied by an agronomist, Aron Maazel. and an attorney, Zoltan Azeri. His own name, he said, was Roger St. Denis; a trained negotiator.
Negotiators are good at half lies. He was trained all right, but his name had not always been St. Denis. Until the overthrow of the Young administration he had been Boren Mills, chief exec of International Entertainment and Electronics. As Mills, he had fled his collapsing corporate empire four years earlier, on the eve of the rebellion. Now, as St. Denis, he was returning Earthside with New Israeli credentials.
Marianne accepted her Ashland rendezvous and overflew the ruins of Omaha en route to Lincoln, Nebraska. After a change of clothing and a bleach job that infuriated her by tinting her dark hair a floozy red. she caught a bus to the university campus, where she disappeared into the main library. Though changing purses twice, she kept the contents. In the hubbub of young Cornhuskers flailing among their first library assignments of the fall season, Marianne managed to encode a message into her voder.
She refused two invitations to fraternity brawls while waiting for a phone booth in the bowels of the library, and the booth she claimed had no video. No problem; she did not intend to transmit her image anyway.
Marianne punched a SanTone number, unwilling to commit her voiceprint to the system. The voice that responded was obviously that of another voder. San Antonio Rose would return pronto; did the caller want to leave a message?
She thought fast and put the call on hold while she punched a brief message into her own voder. Her little machine then said into the speaker, in its professional baritone: 'Cielita Linda is out, and she is in. She wishes to send a message and will call every hour on the hour until San Antonio Rose is ready to record.' Then she punched off and sought a less crowded place. She was damned if she'd transmit until she
Like an army, a university advances on its stomach. While thousands of youths filled their bellies, Marianne had her choice of phone booths, and at seven P.M. she reached her contact in SanTone Ringcity. She transmitted the long string of numbers by voder tone, waited through the longest twenty minutes of her life, and finally got a coded response before she abandoned the campus in search of a hostel.
That response, when decoded, was a big relief. The Horse agreed to her Oregon rendezvous. He would be strolling on the monorail platform in Ashland before noon on Saturday. He expected Cielita Linda to do the same.
Because the hoverbus to Ashland would not leave Lincoln until early morning, she relaxed in her spartan room, watching an enhanced holovision remake of
