Cerberus: A Wolf in the Fold

CHAPTER NINE Aftermath and Reset

Sunday afternoon on the boat the three of us, with Sanda back in her own body, held something of a party to celebrate. I was particularly proud of Sanda, whose major reaction was that she wanted to do that kind of thing again. Dylan was more serious about it all; she knew the risks and the improbabilities of the thing as much as I did. We were a lot alike, Dylan and I, despite our very different backgrounds, except she was far more practical than I. Like those who would investigate this caper, she was fully capable of working out the details and dreaming it up, but she would never have gone through with it on her own. Had she not been in on it, she wouldn’t have believed anybody would have. That, of course, was the ace in the hole for those investigative types.

“Look,” I told her. “The people who run this world—the corporation presidents, syndicate bosses, central administration—are the survivors. They are the ones who were audacious enough and smart enough to pull off their own operations and eliminate their competition—and lucky enough to get away with it. There’s a share of luck in all success stories, and only the unlucky ones make the headlines.”

“Well, we were lucky this time,” she responded, “and we did it. Your luck’s bound to run out sometime, though. If it had last night, your mind wouldn’t be going to the moons of Momrath—Sanda’s and mine would. She can do what she wants, but is it for me. I’m not risking my neck on your harebrained schemes any more.”

“You won’t have to,” I assured her as sincerely as possible. “Help, yes. We’re all partners in this, we three. But this sort of thing you do once. From here on in it’ll be something different—and only I can accomplish the final objective.”

“You’re still going after Wagant Laroo?”

I nodded. “I’ve got to, for many reasons.”

“And if you get yourself blown away?”

I smiled. “Then I’ll try again. They’ll just send in another me, and another, until the job gets done.”

That afternoon I also filled Sanda in on the rest of the truth about me. After what she’d gone through, I thought she had a right to know. I admit I was soothing Dylan with my promise of no more risk to her. I really didn’t know what was going to happen next, and who or what I’d need, but it certainly would involve at least her boat. Concerning the promise that we three were partners as long as we were together, though, I was dead serious. I really did like and admire these two very different women, such a contrast to, say, those two I’d spent the evening with Friday night, with their shallow dreams and shallow fantasies about body-swapping clubs and office gossip.

The next few weeks were nerve-racking. I had depended on the system being efficiently and competently run by people who understood the criminal mind because they too each had one. But after the success of our mission I was beginning to fear that I had been too subtle.

However, late one afternoon Turgan Sugal came down to see me, looking like a man who had suddenly found eternal life and fortune. “They suspended Khamgirt today,” he told me.

“Oh?” I tried to sound playfully ignorant, but inside I felt a rising sense of satisfaction.

“Seems he had a hidden gambling vice. He was in hock up to his ass and still owed, so he had been siphoning off corporation money and spreading it thin in a lot of small bank accounts. A banking securities check a few days ago turned up the account pattern in the banking records, and they traced it to him.”

“Well, what do you know about that!” I replied sarcastically.

He stopped for a moment. “It was you, wasn’t it?” he managed, as if struck by a sudden revelation. “You—framed him? How?”

“Me? I didn’t do any such thing,” I replied with mock seriousness. “Hell, do you realize what it would take to fake something like that? Impossible!” And then I broke into loud laughter.

He laughed along with me for a moment, then stopped and stared at me strangely. “Just what the hell did you do to get sent here, anyway?”

“The usual. Computer fraud.”

“How the hell did they ever catch you?”

“The same way they caught Khamgirt,” I told him. “That’s what gave me the idea.”

He whistled. “Well, I’ll be damned. All right, I won’t ask any more. Things are pretty turbulent right now, and there’s an investigation of the whole thing, since Khamgirt has not only denied everything but has passed a truth scan.”

“Sure. They know it’s a frame. But that won’t help him. Oh, don’t worry—they won’t kill him or send him to the mines or anything like that. They’ll pasture him, with a slap on the wrist. Not for embezzlement. They’ll know he was had. For getting framed. That means he is not only unable to protect himself and his secrets but vulnerable. The syndicates don’t allow you to make mistakes. Just remember that when you get on the high and mighty side.”

He nodded. “Makes sense. But what if they figure it out and trace the whole thing back to us?”

“What do you mean, us?” I shot back. “You weren’t involved except in supplying some inf ormation they can’t specifically trace to anybody in upper management. And I really wouldn’t worry about it in any event. They’ll have some grudging respect for whoever pulled this off. It was a risky operation that took a lot of luck, but it worked. They might figure out how it was done, but never who did it. Just relax and take advantage. I assume you’ll be moving up?”

“That’s what I came to see you about. They’ve asked me to fill in as corporate comptroller while the comptroller assumes the acting presidency. I’m finally leaving this place—and none too soon, either. We can’t possibly make Khamgirt’s artificially high quotas this quarter. Fortunately, as comptroller, I’ll be able to adjust those to a more realistic figure on a temporary basis, maybe even show the board of directors that Khamgirt was conducting a vendetta against us. They’ll be happy to believe anything of him now.”

“And how soon am I paid?” I asked him slowly.

He paused a moment. “Give me a month to get a handle on the operation there. Then I can act—they won’t find it surprising for me to reward several old associates. It’s done all the time, to put our men into the underpositions. That’s the earliest I dare move.”

I nodded. “Fine with me. I have a lot of work to do here before I leave, anyway—company work, don’t get that stricken look. But there are two other things.”

He started looking uneasy again. “What do you mean? We had a deal.”

I nodded. “And I’ll stick to it. The other two are in the form of favors. One is simply that I be able to get an appointment, maybe a business lunch, with the acting corporate comptroller once in a while. Just to keep my hand in and find out the latest company gossip.”

He relaxed a bit. “That’s easy enough.”

“The second’s a very different favor, and it’s not a requirement or condition. If necessary I can handle it in an underhanded manner, But it would be easier if you could do it normally.”

“Go ahead.”

“There’s a young woman who did us both a real service, and she’s stuck in the motherhood and doesn’t want to be. That’s bad enough, but she’s extremely bright and talented and has a lot of guts. I’d like to get her out—I kind of owe it to her.”

He thought for a moment. “I can see your reasons, but it’s pretty tough, you know. I don’t know of anybody with the power to do it unless you could force a judgment—catching somebody committing a crime against her. And that’d be pretty rough on her.”

I nodded. “Just thought I’d ask in case there was some way out.”

“Look, tell you what. Give me some time on this, a couple of months at least, and I’ll see if anything can be done. Fair enough?”

I agreed. “It’ll wait. She’ll have sixty days’ leave coming soon, so it’s not that pressing. Only if you can’t, tell me, won’t you? And don’t you want her name and address?”

He grinned. “Don’t need it. I keep very good track of my employees.”

That brought a little feeling of admiration from me. Still, I felt compelled to nail him down a bit.

“As you can see, I’m a good friend—and a loyal one, Mr. Sugal. I won’t cross you now or in the future as long as you don’t cross me either. Just remember we have a mutual stake in each other’s protection. If you get in trouble, a psych probe could smoke me out. If I do, the reverse is true. So we have a stake in each other’s welfare.”

“Funny,” he replied. “I was about to give the same speech to you.”

Events proceeded in a slow, relaxed fashion after that, but right on schedule. Sugal was promoted, and within the month Tooker quotas were slashed and an industrial investigation team from the government evaluated maximum production potential with the staff we had against the quotas imposed and declared the quotas unrealistic and false. That gave us a great deal of breathing space.

Also during this period a particular fire district had a completely new alarm system installed, and our night janitorial supervisory staff was changed and its cleaning methods modified. Several staff members, including me, were discreetly questioned, known associates, that sort of thing. The investigators found nothing, of course, and the heat was off as quickly as it had appeared.

At the end of the month Sanda had her baby, a little girl, and within a week after was looking and sounding more like her old self again. I’d told her I was working on her problem, but that it might take time, and she seemed to accept that. After our little caper, she had the utmost trust and confidence in my ability to deliver—and of course that meant I felt honor-bound to do so.

Shortly afterward Tooker was reorganized, with a new manager appointed and many of my colleagues and co-workers promoted, moved around, and in a few cases, canned—particularly if they had been known Khamgirt people. As for me, I was made president of Hroyasail Limited, a wholly owned Tooker subsidiary. The job paid extremely well, but as I knew, wasn’t all that necessary, being one of those ornamental posts mostly used to pasture people like Khamgirt. My promotion raised no eyebrows, since it was explained as a personal decision based on my relationship with Dylan.

And so it was I had the upper offices of the Akeba marina cleaned and redecorated. There I was, a company president in less than a year—never mind that it was a dead-end job. Technically I was in charge of a fleet of four hunter-killer boats and sixty-two trawlers, plus assorted warehouses and processing centers for the catch.

The offices were a three-story affair overlooking the harbor and perched in the branches of a couple of huge trees. One branch had been cut and a deck put on it that extended, bridgelike, back to the offices, so there was a clear walk down to the boats themselves.

The lower floors contained basic administration and records processing and the initial holding tanks for the skrit, a reddish little creature somewhere between a plant and an animal whose internal body chemistry provided, among other things, chemicals that made superb electrical conductors. Once a week or so, more often if business was good, a big industrial flier would arrive, take the tank off to Tooker for processing, and then drop oft a new, empty one.

The upper floor, however, had been closed off since the last president, at least eight years before. I spent Tooker’s expense money lavishly, fixing up not only a comfortable office suite but also a huge luxury apartment with all the amenities. I moved in quickly. Shortly after, Dylan moved in as well, and we drew up and filed a marriage contract. Marriages were not usual nor necessary on Cerberus and existed mostly among people belonging to religious communities, but there were reasons for this one. On a practical level, it clearly defined joint and separate property and allowed us to establish a joint credit line. In that sense, it fulfilled my original promise of full partnership, and her position in Hroyasail suddenly became, as the boss’s spouse, one of greatest among equals.

And of course our relationship made my request for the Hroyasail position all the more credible to any suspicious onlookers. But there was more to it than that. I felt comfortable around Dylan, and not as comfortable away from her. She was a close friend and absolute confidante, and I’d never had that close a relationship. It was more than that. Being with her felt good, somehow—having her there, to know she was there even when we were in different parts of the place doing different things. However, this dependency bothered me, because up until now I’d considered myself immune to such human emotional weaknesses.

We slept together as a couple, too, causing frequent body switches that bothered neither of us. As Class I’s we did our regular job no matter who looked like who, and the experience brought us closer than any couple I could remember.

As for Dylan—well, all I can say is that I seemed to fit into a hollow space in her life, possibly left over from her previous career in the motherhood. She needed someone very close, and sleeping together without shields was more important to her than to me.

The only two things that bothered me were her cigars, which were pretty smelly even with the blower system on full, and the fact that most mornings she’d go out on that damned boat and risk her life. I wasn’t on my post more than a couple of weeks when they brought the first bodies back, mangled and bleeding if the sailors had been lucky, or in parts in body bags if they hadn’t been. I didn’t want to see Dylan come home like that, but I couldn’t talk her out of it. It was her life, In her blood, and no matter how she felt about me I knew I’d always come second to the sea.

Sanda, of course, was the extra element in all this, but it wasn’t really so bad. Both Dylan and I were nearby now, constantly within a quick elevator ride of Akeba House. So Sanda couldn’t have been happier, although there was a wistful envy inside her that she could witness this but was prohibited by virtue of the motherhood from its paradoxical freedom and stability.

I had heard a few times from Sugal, who was digging into the comptroller’s post so solidly that it looked like the “acting” titles for all of the board would soon be removed and the positions made permanent. Khamgirt, as I predicted, had been convicted of the charge, placed on probation, and pastured to president of a regional shipping line that was also a Tooker subsidiary.

Things were going well for me, but I resisted the temptation just to let things slide. There was still Wagant Larao to catch, and all I could do was keep my eyes and ears open and wait for a new break.