Worlds in Chaos (126 page)

And for the time being—probably for a while to come after that too—that was about as much as could be said. The general arrived shortly afterward and went into conference with the Querl deputation. All around, as the morning wore on, the winding down and disbanding commenced of the elaborate orchestration of men and machines that had come together to make a last stand. The group found transport to an air supply base in the rear, where Koyne and Davis bade their farewells and departed to report to Air Force administration. Two hours later, Cade and his remaining companions boarded an airlift flight bound for the Los Angeles area. On the way, they restored contact with the Catacombs via one of the temporary satellite links that the Querl were setting up. Yassem, Vrel, Dee, Luke, and Di Milestro had stories of their own to tell, but they were all fine. Los Angeles was going to need some rebuilding in places. But perhaps that wasn’t such a bad thing, either.

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

Cars by the thousands, along with trucks, buses, and planes were pouring back into Washington, D.C., reversing the exodus that had cleared the city of eighty percent of its population. Compared to what had gone on in other places, however, damage in the east was light. Hyadean orbital weapons had dealt effectively with the long-range missiles lobbed from submarines and the easternmost parts of Asia, while conventional interceptors and antiaircraft ground systems had stopped most of the bombers and cruise missiles on their way from Federation territory or from Canada. The ones that got through had not brought the all-out nuclear annihilation of cities that the panic had been about. Now, Ellis’s administration had been toppled by rebellious military chiefs, following the Chrysean pull-out, and what might happen next was anybody’s guess. One sure thing was that the shakeup would be worldwide.

The news going around the Hill didn’t exactly speak of loyal camaraderie and trusty friends staying true to the end. With protectors and patrons tumbling by the hour, and the power holders of yesterday rushing to denounce each other while displaying their own clean hands, distinct risks could attend knowing too much about those with dangerous rivals. Acting as Toddrel’s dirty-work specialist had paid off and brought its benefits; but that same history also meant that Toddrel had much on Drisson that could be bargained or turned around to sanitize his own image. In short, it was time to claim on the insurance.

Drisson pushed a package wrapped in a plastic bag across the table to Laura as they sat in a secluded corner of a cocktail lounge called the Fairway, on the west side of the city toward Georgetown. “Untraceable. All identifying marks removed,” he murmured. He had established long ago that she could use a gun. Making sure of detail was another part of his business. Toddrel was in town, staying at a hotel called the Grantham that he often used, a couple of blocks off Rhode Island Avenue.

Laura took the package and put it in her purse on the chair beside her, zipping the top closed. “You’re really sure you want to trust an amateur with this?” She made it sound mildly playful, as if complimenting his own professionalism.

Drisson smiled. “We both know it has to be this way. You’re sure you have the routine? You call him to say you’re in town and need to talk to him. Turn on the charm once you’re over there. Then do the job after you’ve serviced him. Throw a few things around the room, fingernail scratches on the body. . . . Use your creativity. So when they find him, it’s a simple, open-shut case of Casper getting some relaxation after all the tension, ending up in a fight, and things went too far. Anonymous hooker. No political implications. Clean.”

Laura swirled her drink while she considered, then took a sip. “Isn’t it being a bit overfinicky?” she queried. “From what I hear, political cleanups are likely to be the fashion around here. Is anybody going to be caring about one more, one less?”

“Why risk anything needlessly?” Drisson watched as she thought it through, still looking for the flaws, her gaze darting now across the items on the table, then to the far side of the room. His hand gripped her wrist reassuringly. “Just this one thing, and we’ll be in the clear,” he told her. “Then we break out the stash, make a big transfer to Australia, south of France, Argentina—wherever you want. A year or two of yachts, classy people, sunshine, and beaches while the heat here dies down.”

Laura stared for several seconds at the almost-emptied glass of bourbon in front of him, then raised her eyes to meet his. For a moment, Drisson thought she was about to decline or start debating the issue. But she nodded finally and said, simply, “Okay.”

Drisson smiled, relieved. “I knew you had it in you. Call me immediately to confirm, before you leave. That’s important. I need the timing right to make sure Ibsan isn’t around when you leave. Afterward, I’ll meet you back here at say . . . eleven, unless we agree something different. Any more questions?” Laura shook her head. Drisson raised his glass, emptied it, and brushed his mustache with a knuckle. “Okay. Then we probably shouldn’t walk out together. I’ll see you here later.” He rose and squeezed her shoulder. “Don’t let me down, eh, baby?”

Actually, Drisson had arranged a quiet meeting between Ibsan and a confidential informant from the Pentagon concerning private matters that evening, so Ibsan wouldn’t be anywhere around. But the timing was still important. Drisson had other plans.

“No, no! I don’t want to talk to them. Just say you couldn’t find me. . . . I
said
I’d take care of it.” In his room at the Grantham, Toddrel cut off the phone. Everything was closing in. The Hyadeans were looking for blood over what had gone wrong in South America. Police detectives were already rounding up victims for the war-crimes show-trial circus that would be staged eventually to allay the public’s already emerging thirst for revenge and justice. His name would surely be on a dozen lists. He wiped his brow. The clean shirt he had put on after getting back was already sodden. Had to control his nerves. He reached for the printout he had taken of the progress being made in restoring travel services. As he did so, his eye caught the shot being presented on the room’s view screen of Cade, Cade’s former wife, and the two Hyadeans talking to a news reporter on their arrival in California.
Cade!
. . . Toddrel’s fingers crumpled the paper involuntarily. Ever since their interference in Chattanooga, vanishing and subsequent reappearance in South America, and then the screening of that disastrous TV documentary, it seemed they had been at the center of everything connected with the reversal of Toddrel’s fortune’s. Arcadia, the agent in California, was supposed to settle the score; only, Arcadia turned out to be the one who was blown up instead. Toddrel still hadn’t heard a satisfactory explanation of how that could have happened. Cade hadn’t even been there, in any case. So Cade had to be dead—killed in South America somewhere, Toddrel had been told—until intelligence reported him turning up again, alive and well in Beijing with the Hyadean. And finally bringing the whole house down, Cade and his woman were there in the broadcasts coming back from Chryse itself!—which had resulted in a whole planet erupting in turmoil there and the final ruin of everything here. Now all Toddrel had left was his neck, and that was on the line.

The phone beeped again before his anger boiled over. Even though it was his private channel tone, he kept it on audio. “Yes?”

“Casper, it’s Laura. I was in town. With everything that’s going on I thought you might be here.”

Toddrel keyed the screen on to reveal Laura. “I . . . I am rather busy just now.” He didn’t sound especially pleased.

“Staying low? I hear it’s a witch hunt out there. The long knives are coming out everywhere.”

“That’s friends for you. It’s what you get to expect.”

“Can I come over there?”

“I’m hardly in a mood for romantic distractions right now.”

“Nothing like that. I’m scared, Casper. I need to talk to you. A lot’s going on that I don’t understand.” Her gaze from the screen was insistent.

Toddrel gazed at her sourly, seemed about to refuse, then thought better of it. “Very well,” he said curtly. “I’ll order dinner in the room at, say, eight. We can talk then. Would that suit you?”

“That would suit fine. I’ll be there shortly just. Which room is it? The desk wouldn’t tell me.”

“Six fifty-one. I’ll tell them to give you a key.”

Laura called Drisson immediately afterward. “It’s arranged,” she said. “He’s having dinner in the room. I’ll be arriving there at seven.”

“Don’t forget to call me as soon as it’s done,” Drisson said.

She entered the main door of the Grantham Hotel shortly before seven, walked to the desk, and collected a magnetically coded key to room 651. Then she paused, looking in her purse, until there was a knot of people waiting at the elevators before crossing the lobby to join them. As she did so, she had the strange, prickly sensation of being certain that unseen eyes were watching her. A car arrived. She got in with several others, made sure that the sixth floor button was pressed, but went all the way up to the penthouse bar and found a booth far from the door, where she ordered a coffee. She stayed there almost an hour. Ten minutes before eight, she took the elevator back down to the mezzanine terrace, from where she was able to observe the lobby floor below from behind a screen of ornamental ferns and a rubber-tree plant. She had stopped by earlier, after leaving the Fairway lounge, to check over the hotel layout. Laura believed in getting the details right too.

She called Drisson’s number from there, making her voice shaky and a little breathless. “Okay . . . it’s done. I’m on my way out.”

Drisson appeared from a corner of the lobby below, talking into his phone. “No, don’t. We’ve got an unexpected problem. Ibsan is around in the building. Stay where you are. I’m coming there to get you out a safe way.”

“How long will you be?”

“On my way now. Just a couple of minutes.”

Laura watched him cross to the elevators and push the call button. One of the sets of doors opened. He disappeared inside. She nodded faintly to herself. It was the way she had guessed. She raised the phone again and called Toddrel’s private number. He answered almost at once. “I’m on my way up now,” she told him. “There was a crowd around the desk. I’ll get the key later.” Unzipping the top of her purse, she made her way back across the terrace to the mezzanine-level elevator doors and pressed the “up” button.

Drisson would arrive at the room any moment now. He would knock, thinking Laura was there, waiting. Toddrel would open the door, expecting Laura; or even if he checked through the spyglass first, seeing it was Drisson, he would let him in. Finding Toddrel alone and unharmed, Drisson, being Drisson, would immediately conclude a double cross and have seconds to decide his move. Laura thought she knew what the outcome would be.

She came out of the elevator and followed the corridor to 651, holding the key in one gloved hand, the other resting lightly inside the top of her purse. She looked quickly left, then right. The corridor was empty. Producing the gun, she slid the key softly into the slot until she heard the lock disengage, then pushed the door open and stepped quickly inside. Toddrel’s body was crumpled on the floor, crimson spreading across his shirt and oozing onto the carpet. Drisson was between it and the door, already turning at the sound of its opening, the gun still in his hand. Laura shot him before his mouth had framed the first word. Then she eased the door shut and stood motionless with her back pressed against it, feeling her chest pounding while she listened for any reaction to the shot. Everything outside seemed quiet. She looked apprehensively at Drisson, dreading that he might make some sound or move, and if so, wondering if she would be able to bring herself to finish the thing. But he remained inert. Laura could detect no sign of breathing. She forced herself to be calm.

The line about making it look like a hooker had been for Laura’s benefit. She was supposed to have been next. Drisson’s real intent had been to set up a scene that would look like a fatal quarrel between Toddrel and his high-class mistress. Being the only other person who would have known about Drisson’s insurance to protect himself hadn’t seemed like the surest way of getting to see much sunshine or many beaches.