reaching for the light. Then Mabry laughed, not without humor, and said, “I don’t suppose this has anything to do with a certain Treasury operation that’s going down tonight.”
Cerise revised her mental image, erased the bedroom, replaced it with office space, then killed that as well. “I don’t suppose you’re involved in that operation, Mr. Mabry?”
There was another, shorter pause, and Mabry said, “In point of fact, I’m not. My input was refused, with thanks.”
Cerise drew a deep breath. If the Eurocops had been cut out of Treasury’s plan, she might be able to use that old rivalry to her—and Trouble’s—advantage. “Are you still interested in finding Trouble, then?”
“It depends on which one,” Mabry said, dryly. “After all, you were pretty convincing that your Trouble wasn’t the one causing the disturbances.”
“Not—” Cerise bit off the rest of her comment—not my Trouble, she would have said, and that was beginning not to be true anymore, if it ever had been—and said instead, “But my Trouble knows where your Trouble is.”
“Does she.” Mabry’s voice was flat, not quite openly skeptical.
“Close enough,” Cerise answered, and crossed her fingers against her thigh, grateful for the blind connection.
“What’s the deal?”
Cerise took another deep breath. “Trouble—my Trouble— is willing to deal with you, give you what she knows, since she knows you’ll find out it wasn’t her causing all the trouble, and she can walk away clean.”
“The statute of limitations hasn’t run out on your earlier activities,” Mabry said. “Didn’t you know that was what this was about?”
“What?” Cerise made a face into the handset, annoyed that she’d betrayed her ignorance.
Mabry said, as though he’d expected her surprise, “Three years isn’t long enough to reach limitations, Cerise, and Evans-Tindale didn’t offer any amnesties. You—both of you—are still liable for—well, for quite a lot of things, if Treasury speaks true. Starling thinks he’s got proof of a couple of them. Or someone gave him proof.”
“What we did wasn’t exactly illegal then,” Cerise said. “The courts have ruled against retrofitting the laws.”
She could hear Mabry shrug. “John Starling seems to think he can make it stick.”
“Fuck him.” Cerise made a face, regretting the betrayal, and Mabry laughed shortly.
“No, thank you. What do you want from me, Cerise?”
“I’m offering you a deal,” Cerise said, as calmly as she could. “All you have to do is keep Trouble—my Trouble— out of Treasury’s hands. You can have newTrouble. Even the Conventions give you plenty to charge him with.”
“Can you deliver?” Mabry asked. “You said before, you and Trouble didn’t part on the best of terms—not friendly, I think you said.”
“Things change,” Cerise said, with more confidence than she felt. She could deliver Trouble. Trouble wasn’t stupid; better to make a deal with Mabry than face Treasury. The question was, could they deliver newTrouble? She put the thought aside, said, “I can deliver, Mabry. Are you interested?”
“Maybe.” There was a little pause, and then she heard Mabry sigh. “All right, yes, I’m interested. You say you can give me your Trouble, and newTrouble through her— precisely what does this entail?”
“You’ll have to get Treasury off her—our—backs,” Cerise answered, and did her best to keep the elation out of her voice. “How—that’s your business, you’d know best. But do that and we’ll give you everything we’ve got.”
There was another, longer silence, and at last Mabry said, “All right, I can do that. You’re in Seahaven, I presume?”
“Yes.”
“It’s going to take time to get there,” Mabry said. “And to get some necessary paperwork taken care of. Can you keep Trouble out of Treasury’s hands for another, say, twelve hours?”
“I can try,” Cerise said.
“I can’t get there any faster,” Mabry said, and for the first time Cerise heard annoyance in his voice. “You’ll have to do it.”
“I’ll try,” Cerise said again. “That’s the best I can promise, too.”
“All right,” Mabry said. “I will meet you in Seahaven—I will be at, what’s it called, Eastman House? The hotel that isn’t The Willows—”
“Eastman House,” Cerise said.
“Eastman House,” Mabry repeated. “I’ll be there from ten A.M. on.”
“We’ll be there at ten,” Cerise said.
“I’ll expect you,” Mabry said. “And, Cerise—thanks. I want this new Trouble very badly.”
“So does John Starling,” Cerise said, in spite of herself.
“But I really don’t like to lose,” Mabry answered. “I’ll see you in Seahaven, Cerise.” He broke the connection before she could think of a reply.
Cerise sat for a long moment, staring at the screen, while the program ran through its complicated disconnect routing. She would need the runabout, and all her hardware; Trouble was almost certainly without her equipment, or she would have made contact on the net. Money, too, and false ID, both of which she had, the money in a thin stack of bearer cards, the ID—several sets—tucked into protected memory. The machine beeped at her, signaling that the program had finished its run, and she bent over the keyboard to type the nonsense password that gave access to her most sensitive storage. The machine beeped again, flashed a warning, and she made a face and reached to disconnect it from the hotel systems. Not that I expect anyone to be watching, she thought, but it’s better to be safe. She had set the program to force that choice—it was too easy to get careless otherwise— and a moment later, as the system acknowledged that it was isolated again, she typed the password a second time. This time, the space windowed, displaying a preliminary menu. She selected the IDs she wanted, and hit the series of commands that would dump the first to a standard datadisk. She waited until she was sure the transfer had begun, ID, work cards, health certificates, all the rest of the information that one accumulated over the years, and went into the bedroom to get dressed again.
The machine beeped at her before she had finished, and she went back out into the main room to give it another disk, buttoning her shirt as she went. It was a night for practical clothes, not display; she had chosen jeans and a plain shirt and a man-styled jacket, nothing to mark her either as a cracker or as law, just another of Seahaven’s residents out for the evening. She inspected herself in the mirror, one eye still on the whirring transfer drive, and nodded to herself: she would pass.
The machine beeped again, and she fed it the final disk, then went back into the bedroom to collect her money. All things considered, it was likely to be an expensive evening—
Trouble always had been an expensive date. Cerise smiled to herself, remembering an evening that had begun with dinner and ended in the emergency room, with nearly five hundred citiscrip scattered to the winds in between. That had been the first time she’d fully appreciated that Trouble had earned her name off the nets as well as on… The machine beeped a final time, and she returned to the media console, collected the last disk and began breaking the system down into components that she could carry in a single inconspicuous bag. She left some of the heavier pieces—the diskwriter and the printer/recorder, as well as the secondary memory box— slung the bag easily over her shoulder, and reached for the handset to call for her runabout to be brought up to the door.
Trouble leaned back in her chair, staring into the dregs of her drink, and wondered if she could avoid ordering another. It was a virgin drink, sweet and sickly, getting you high with sugar rather than alcohol, but she’d had more than enough of it. She glanced at the clock, displayed in a box that hung above the garden like a stadium Scoreboard, slung from a network of poles and wires. Still twenty minutes before she could leave to meet Cerise. She looked away, avoiding the waiter’s eye, and saw a movement in the doorway, a shift of the light as though someone very big had entered. She turned her head to see more clearly, and saw Aimoto threading his way between the tables, broad face drawn into a faint, fastidious frown. Maybe it’s not for me, she thought, without hope, but was not surprised when Aimoto stopped beside her table, leaning down slightly to be sure he saw her face.
