Juggler of Worlds (3 page)

“I’m logged into an anonymous account. All other comm functions are locked out. Moments after my funds are received, they’ll be shifted elsewhere.” Grimaldi laughed. “My colleagues, as I’m sure you know, are skilled in anonymous transfers.”

My funds
. Sigmund held in his anger. “Funds transfer from Bank of North America.” He paused for the voiceprint check. “Account: five… four… one.…” He articulated slowly and distinctly, leaving no chance for misinterpretation. Account number. Subaccount. Access codes.

The good news was the response time. He was still on Earth.

The stunner never wavered. He’d be lucky to utter a suspicious syllable without being zapped. “Four… two… niner….”

The bank AI spoke a challenge code. Grimaldi snorted in disgust. He wiggled the stunner, just a bit, in warning.

Sigmund shrugged. Clank. With the challenge-response feature set, a bank would accept transfer authorizations only in real time. Challenge-response defeated coerced recordings. What rational person
didn’t
configure his account this way?

Sigmund could authorize the transfer with a duress code. That would alert his bank, but so what? Money laundering was big business for the Trojans. Within minutes of the money’s release, it would be laundered through a dozen shell companies, off-world tax havens, and other anonymous venues. The duress code would accomplish nothing.

If he purposefully aborted the transfer, Grimaldi would know instantly—and the coming questioning could become a
lot
less pleasant. Or—

Dr. Swenson had been right: Sigmund
was
paranoid. And now, he thought, we’ll see if I’ve been paranoid
enough
.

SIGMUND REMAINED IN CHAINS, but he’d been offered a chair, an improvised chamber pot, and a greasy drinking bulb with tepid water. For a million stars, there should have been at least a leaded-glass tumbler and ice.

Grimaldi was long gone. He had delegated the detailed questioning to the lanky Belter Sigmund had met earlier. His interrogator disdained to offer a name. Sigmund chose to think of him as Astyanax: Hector’s little boy, hurled from the ramparts of Troy. Like Achilles’ son, Sigmund wanted no more kings of Troy.

Slow, pensive sips didn’t buy much time.

All crimes lead to tax evasion. Sigmund had concentrated his quest for the Trojans there. He discoursed methodically on forensic techniques in spotting hidden income, waxing ever more pedantic. Whenever Astyanax began looking impatient, Sigmund offered a tidbit about which banking investigations had suggested what line of further investigation. A few such admissions evoked surprisingly astute questions. The Belter was something of an expert himself on income-tax evasion.

A handheld in Astyanax’s pocket squawked in alarm. There was sudden pandemonium in the corridor. Thudding footsteps. Thudding bodies? The unmistakable zap of sonic stunners.

Astyanax dropped his own stunner, and took a utility knife from his belt. Low-tech but lethal.

“Don’t,” Sigmund said. “You’ll only make it wor—”

He gasped in shock at the sudden agony in his stomach. His shirt and Astyanax’s hand were bright red. Lifeblood red.

“Nothing personal,” Astyanax said.

As Sigmund slumped, a squad of battle-armored ARMs burst through the door. To the frying-bacon sound of stunners, as everything went dark, Sigmund thought: Too late.…

Sigmund awoke. The incredible pain in his gut was gone. His wrists and ankles no longer throbbed from tight restraints. He was clearheaded and full of energy. Rested. Content.

It scared the hell out of him.

He opened his eyes. A transparent dome hung centimeters from his face. Reflected LEDs shone steadily all in green.

He was in an autodoc.

Readouts told Sigmund that the ’doc had replaced his heart and part of his liver! And two liters of blood, and—he stopped reading. He raised the massive lid and sat up, to echoes of pain in his chest and belly. Logically, those pangs were in his head, since the ’doc had declared him healed. They hurt regardless.

The room seemed chilly, but that might only be because he wasn’t wearing anything. You never did in an autodoc.

“Welcome back.”

His head swiveled. A stranger in a drab bodysuit occupied the room’s only chair. She was lean, almost gaunt, but also massively muscled. He guessed she worked out obsessively. She would have been striking, if not exactly pretty, if she didn’t scare the bejesus out of him.

The stranger stood and handed Sigmund the robe that hung from a hook on the door. She did not turn her back. “You’ll want this, I expect. Then we should talk.”

“Where are we?” Sigmund asked.

Instead of answering, she waved a blue disc at him. A holo shimmered, Earth, and a bit of text: Special Agent Fiona Filip.

It appeared to be an ARM ident. Perhaps she had answered him.

The Amalgamated Regional Militia was the unassuming name for the UN military forces. Understatement sufficed when merely to see an ARM made most people quail. Everyone knew the militia was how the United Nations maintained control, not just civil order.

Sigmund slipped on his robe and climbed out of the autodoc. Everyone knew what someone meant everyone to know. Grimaldi? The people for whom Grimaldi worked? Maybe the rescue had been staged, Sigmund’s
stabbing a bit of theater for credibility, to hear what he’d tell those he thought were the authorities. To see whom he’d contact next.

“Sigmund, this will be hard for you. I understand better than you can know.” The stranger sighed. “Let’s start over. I’m Fiona Filip. My friends call me Feather. I’m an ARM—but not the kind that extracted you. I prefer to avoid guns and knives. People can get hurt with those things. As you recently learned.”

When had they become friends? “Where am I, Agent Filip?”

Her smile looked wrong, somehow. Unpracticed rather than insincere. “A SWAT team extracted you from an interplanetary freighter on the tarmac at Mojave Spaceport. You were dying of a stab wound. You were also, by the way, pumped full of truth serum.

“They always bring autodocs on raids. The squad leader popped you into a field ’doc and delivered you to the nearest ARM District Office. That’s Los Angeles. Hollywood, more precisely, if you know the area.”

Sigmund remembered saying he wasn’t trying to trick Grimaldi, and the bastard had taken his word for it. Truth serum explained it. He had told the literal truth. He hadn’t been
trying
to trick Grimaldi—he
was
tricking him.

If any of this was real, of course.

“I want you to trust me, and that doesn’t come easily to you, does it?” Filip turned the chair and sat, legs straddling the back. “I don’t expect an answer, by the way. As I said, I understand you. I’ll answer the questions you don’t dare to ask. For starters, you’re not a suspect. Not for anything.”

Sigmund’s mind raced. Except for the usual fresh-from-the-autodoc burst of energy, he felt normal. Normal for
him
, that was. How could that be? “Then I’m free to go.”

She flashed an I-know-something-you-don’t-know grin.
This
smile looked natural. “Yes, but you won’t, because you need to know more.”

If Filip was who she said she was, she must know how he had signaled for help. If she wasn’t… to even reveal that he
had
signaled could bring on retribution. It would, at a minimum, make the Trojan Mafia hide him better.

“You’re dying to know how you were rescued. No, let’s be honest. Sigmund, you’re wondering
if
you were rescued.” She laughed at his twitch of surprise, but it wasn’t a cruel laugh. “You’re kind of cute in an intense way. Just hear me out.

“You came into a fair amount of money when your parents died, part inheritance, part insurance. You took control of that money once you
reached twenty-one. The interesting thing, Sigmund, is what you’ve done with that money.”

“Nothing.” Sigmund willed his voice to stay level. In fact, he’d divvied the money into several accounts, two directly in his name, the rest far more subtly registered. He hadn’t broken any laws in doing it—
they
certainly watched for that—but he had, arguably, bent a few. “It’s my rainy-day fund.”

Filip shook her head. “Hardly. You sloshed your wealth around in very unusual ways. You triggered trip wires in more money-laundering audits than I care to admit.” She cut off his objection before he could do more than open his mouth. “Relax. You did nothing illegal. Not quite. You kept the individual funds transfers
just
below the banks’ required filing threshold. And once my colleagues determined the ownership of all the blind trusts, they saw none of the money had even changed hands.

“Given what you do—you’re very good at it, by the way—you knew exactly what would happen. You knew the pattern of activities would flag those accounts. Sigmund, you went to a lot of trouble to create bank accounts the authorities would forever watch.”

Sigmund shrugged. He could feign nonchalance all he wanted, but were sensors even now picking up the pounding of his brand-new heart?

“Rainy-day fund? It apparently poured yesterday in the Mojave,” Filip said. “From an account long idle, suddenly there’s a million-star transfer into a numbered account in a Belter bank haven. It set off all kinds of alarms. I wondered: If you
wanted
attention, why not just make the transfer using a duress code?”

Because a duress alarm wouldn’t say enough! If a duress code caught your eye, you might not look any further. Wasn’t that obvious?

“I dug a bit deeper,” Filip said. “You could have used any of those red-flag accounts. Did your choice matter? Banks assign account numbers, but account owners choose their own access codes. So: I ran your access codes through crypto software. Each of your funny accounts had its PIN derived from the name of a high official in the UN Inspections Directorate. The PINs changed, but not the pattern.” She patted Sigmund’s arm and he flinched. “The PIN that released those funds decrypted as ‘Grimaldi.’ He was at Mojave Spaceport when you authorized the payoff.”

Sigmund couldn’t help shivering. He pulled his thin robe more tightly closed, but he doubted it fooled her. Then it
was
true: ARMs traced people through the transfer-booth system. He’d always worried about that. Transfers had to tie back somehow to people, for billing purposes.

Or the Trojans were even cleverer than he’d feared. Grimaldi might
have recorded his PIN as he authorized the transfer. If Trojans had decrypted his code, they might be testing him now.…

“Sigmund! Come back.” She laughed, somehow kindly this time. “Who but a paranoid sets traps with the ARMs to implicate their co-workers? You came out of the autodoc as paranoid as you went in. I see it in your eyes. Surely
you
noticed. Have you asked yourself: Why?”

He sat still, afraid to speak. Why
hadn’t
the autodoc reset his brain chemistry?

Filip said, “Here’s where we become friends, Sigmund. You’ve heard the rumors. Senior ARM agents are paranoids. It helps us with the job. We get that way chemically. We’re pumped up for the workweek, and pumped out when we go off-duty. Most ARMs, that is. Like you, I’m a natural schiz. I’m drugged before they send me home for the weekend.

“The thing is, today is Wednesday. A workday. After your little mishap, you went into an autodoc. Ours see nothing unusual with a bit of schizo brain chemistry. It’s no accident you’re as messed up as ever.

“Sigmund, that’s the reason I understand you. We’re the
same.”

He wanted to believe. Of course, he’d heard the stories. Who hadn’t? The thing was—

“Sigmund,” she snapped. “Stay with me. You’re thinking: ARMs put out the rumor that they’re paranoid to trick you into revealing that you’re paranoid. I did, too.”

For the first time since Sigmund had climbed out of the autodoc, she peered directly into his eyes. “Bright and paranoid is a license to be miserable and alone. Miserable maybe I can’t help. But alone—that’s something else.”

He accepted the new ident chip she offered him. When he held it just right, a blue globe and his name shimmered above it. It was supposedly keyed to his DNA and would get him into the ARM academy in London. He struggled into the plain, black suit she whisked from a cabinet. It didn’t surprise him that it had been synthed to his size and preferred style.

He admitted nothing, promised nothing. He was, finally, apparently free.

Free to go? Free to be followed? Festooned with tiny cameras?

Beyond the clinic door, an office buzzed with activity. No one paid Sigmund any attention. Ignoring the transfer booths, he found his way outside. Large five-pointed stars shone in the pedestrian walkway. Grauman’s Chinese Theatre stood across and just down the street.

He turned. Above the double doors through which he had just exited,
stone-carved letters read: Amalgamated Regional Militia, Los Angeles District. A faux ARM office could hardly be fabricated in such a public place.

Sigmund fingered the ident chip Agent Filip—Feather—had given him. It suddenly seemed possible, after more than a century alone, that he had finally discovered a place where he could fit in.