The Cold Cash War 3 страница

“You mean we can shut down their communications any time we want? And you have infiltrators at the command level of the Oiler forces?”

“In both forces, actually. Nor are those our only advantages. As I said earlier, this is not a casual effort. I trust you will be able to find some way to maximize the effect of our entry?”

With a forced calmness, Tidwell finished his drink, then rose and extended his hand across the table.

“Mr. Yamada, it’s going to be a pleasure working for you!”

Mausier paused to wipe the beads of sweat from his forehead, then bent to his task once more. Adjusting the high intensity lamp to a different angle, he picked up the watchmaker’s tool and made a minute change in setting in the field terminal in front of him.

Without removing his eyepiece, he set aside the tool, reached over to the keyboard at the end of his workbench and input the data. Finally he leaned back and heaved a sigh. Done. He flexed his hands to restore circulation as he surveyed his handiwork.

The field terminal was a work of art. It could easily pass for a cigarette case, as it was supposed to. But if you pressed in three corners simultaneously, the inner metal lining folded out to reveal its interior workings, stark but functional. Two wires on mini-retracting reels were concealed in the hinge and could be pulled out to connect the unit to any phone. On the side of the lid was a tiny viewscreen. On the other side of the unit was a small keyboard containing both numbers and letters for data input. There was also the thumblock. Once the connection was made, the agent pressed his left thumb onto the metal square which would scan his print for comparison to the one on record in the master file. It would also check his body temperature to see if he was alive and his pulse to see if he was in an agitated state. If any of the three checks didn’t match, the unit would self-destruct. Nothing as spectacular as an explosion-merely a small thermal unit to fuse the circuitry.

The Japanese had outdone themselves in producing these units for him. All he had to do was to make final adjustments for the individual’s code number before it was issued. This allowed private communication with the individual client in addition to the general announcement postings.

Mausier smiled proudly at the unit. He had come a long way from his coincidental beginning in the business. At a cocktail party, one of his acquaintances had almost jokingly offered to pay him for details on a new machine modification Tom’s company was working on. Tom had just as jokingly declined, but expressed an interest in the sincerity of the offer. The result had been an evening-long conversation in which his friend enlightened him as to the intricacies of corporate espionage and the high prices demanded and received due to the risks involved.

A short time after-within the week in fact-another friend of Tom’s, this one within his own company, had admitted to him over coffee the dire financial straits he was in and how he was ready to take any reasonable risk to raise more money fast. Tom repeated his other friend’s offer and volunteered to serve as a go-between.

In the years to follow, he served in a similar capacity for many similar transactions. Some of the people he dealt with were caught and dismissed for their activities, but he always escaped the repercussions due to the indirect nature of his involvement. Eventually, his clientele grew to the point to where he could quietly resign from the corporate world entirely and concentrate his efforts in this highly profitable venture.

Like most people who went into small businesses, the demands he made on himself were far in excess of any the corporation had ever made, yet he labored willingly and happily, realizing he was working because he wanted to and not because he had to. He was his own man, not the corporation’s.

Mausier set aside the field terminal and stretched, rolling his shoulders slightly to ease the cramps from the prolonged tension of his work. It was late and he should go to bed. His wife was waiting patiently, probably reading. If he didn’t go up soon, there would be hell to pay. As it was, she had already commented tersely several times in the last week about his lengthening his already long hours.

Finally he made up his mind. To hell with it! A few more minutes couldn’t hurt. Having made his decision, he settled in at his desk and turned on his doodlescreen. It never crossed his mind that his wife might grow impatient enough to enter his office and interrupt his work. She might nag or scold or sulk once he entered the house, but she knew better than to interrupt him when he was working.

The workspace he keyed for was by now hauntingly familiar. The Brazil workspace. He still thought of it as that even though by now it had spread to cover other areas. He should call it the Brazil-Iceland-Africa-Great Plains workspace, but the two items from Brazil had gotten him started, and it stayed in his mind as the Brazil workspace.

He concentrated on the screen. From the original two items, it had grown until the items listed covered over half the screen. Still, there were several things about the way the problem was progressing which perplexed him. A pattern was forming, but it wasn’t making any sense.

He adjusted the controls on the screen and all the items blinked out except the names of the eight corporations. He leaned back and studied them. It was an unusual assortment of business concerns. There were four oil companies, a fishing concern, two mining corporations, and a communications conglomerate listed. What did they have in common? Some were international while some were local. Some were American in origin while some were based overseas. What was it they had in common?

Mausier frowned and played with the controls again. The eight names sorted themselves into pairs and moved apart, two to each corner of the screen. Now he had the two mining concerns (Africa), two of the oil corporations (the Great Plains), an oil corporation and the fishing concern (Iceland), and an oil corporation and the communications conglomerate (Brazil) grouped together. It still didn’t make sense. It couldn’t be mergers. The interests of the Iceland pair and the Brazil pair were too dissimilar. What’s more, if the articles in the business journals were to be believed, the mining interests in Africa and the two oil concerns in the Great Plains were bitter rivals. It couldn’t be mergers. What was the common factor of all eight corporations?

Almost unconsciously his hands twitched across the controls and the notation “C-Block” appeared in the center of the screen and blinked like a nagging headache. Another pass over the controls and solid lines appeared, linking each of the eight corporate names with the C-Block notation.

The C-Block had identical standing offers in for the same information on each of the eight corporations: Any information on new hires and/or terminations at location. Mausier’s hands moved and new lines grew like a spider web. One of the mining concerns had identical standing orders in for the six corporations at the other three locations, as did the communications conglomerate. Both the oil concern and the fishing interest had identical requests in for the pairs on the Great Plains and in Africa.

Mausier should have been very happy. With duplicate requests for the same information, he could either collect his broker’s percent for a double sale or see his fee skyrocketed by a bidding war. He should have been happy, but he wasn’t. Whether or not the corporations knew the C-Block was watching them, they knew about each other and were watching each other.

Watching each other for what? What was so vital about the personnel at these locations? It was as if there was a pool of specialized workers that the corporations were passing back and forth, but what could it be? Engineers? They had new engineers beating down their doors with resumes. They could pick and choose at leisure. What was so special about the people at these locations? The geography and climate varied dramatically from location to location, so it wasn’t a matter of acquiring a work force accustomed to working under a given set of conditions.

He suddenly realized he was working from negatives. Arriving at a solution by process of elimination was always tedious and often impossible due to the vast number of possibilities. It was always better to work with the facts at hand.

He cleared the screen and keyed for the other information requests coming from the eight corporations in question. He scanned them slowly and was again disappointed. Nothing out of the ordinary here, just the usual interoffice political bickerings and ladder-climbing. How is a specific executive spending his time away from the office? Does anyone have any inside information on a rival’s presentation plans? Any information on plans to shift a meeting site to another hotel? If interoffice communications ever improved, Mausier would lose a sizeable portion of his clientele. Still, there was nothing to add to his speculations.

He cleared the board again, this time using the display of a newspaper article. This was one of the few hard fact items in this file. He leaned forward to study it for the twentieth time.

His agent had not been lax or killed when he missed the rendezvous. He had been involved in a traffic accident and was still in the hospital. This article from a Brazilian newspaper gave the details of the incident. It all seemed very aboveboard. His agent had been stopped at a red light when another car hit him from behind, pushing him out into several lanes of busy cross-traffic. Nothing suspicious, except... except the driver of the car that hit him from behind was an employee of one of the corporations everyone was watching.

Mausier studied the article again, then shook his head. It had to be coincidence. He remembered what the rendezvous had been about, the sale of plans for some piece of electronics gear being used by the communications conglomerate. The driver, a Michael Clancy, was an employee of the Oil Combine. If he had been aware of the transaction, he would have either allowed it to happen or made some attempt to steal the information himself, which he hadn’t done. It must be just what the article said it was an accident while the employee was out joy riding with some waitress he had picked up in a bar.

Mausier suddenly realized he had been at the doodle-screen for nearly two hours. There would be hell to pay when he went home. Still, there was one more thing he wanted to check.

He cleared the article and keyed for one more item-today’s entry to the file. There had been a new request on the board today from the C-Block, another request for personnel new hires and terminations. The group under study was a group of Japanese business concerns.

Mausier scowled at the request. It bothered him on several levels. First, it was a new factor in his already complicated puzzle, a new front, a new location. But there was something else that concerned him. One of the Japanese businesses listed was the company that manufactured his field terminals. For the first time, Mausier began to feel deep concern for the security of his scramblers.

“It’s Pete, Eddie. Can I talk with you for a few?”

“C’mon in, Pete. I’ve been expecting you.”

The door slid open, and Pete stepped into Bush’s office. The opti-print on the wall was blue today, matching Eddies suit. Pete ignored it and sank into one of the numerous chairs dotting the office.

“Okay, boss, what went wrong?”

“With the meeting?”

“Yes, with the meeting. What happened?”

“You sound mad.”

Pete blew a deep breath out, relaxing a little.

“A bit. More puzzled. I’m trying to be level-headed about all this but I get the feeling I’m not playing with all the cards.”

“The meeting didn’t go that badly...”

“It didn’t go that well either. And it isn’t just the meeting, it’s the last couple weeks. All of a sudden you’re dragging your feet on this thing. I just want to get the air clear between us and find out why.”

Bush didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he rose from his desk and keyed a cup of coffee from the Servo-Matic machine in the corner. Pete refrained from pointing out that there was already a steaming cup on the desk. He knew better than to crowd Eddie while he was collecting his thoughts.

“I guess you could say that I’m having second thoughts about our approach to this thing.”

“The implementation or the basic idea?”

“Both. More the basic idea, though.”

Pete closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

The team had been busting their butts on this thing, but it wouldn’t go if Number One didn’t believe in it.

“Okay, let’s take it from the top. We all agree that if this thing blows up in our faces, we’ve got to have public support behind us. Right?”

“Right. And mass media is the fastest way to get it.” Eddie’s voice sounded mechanical.

“Now then, to do the job up front, to set the stage and create the atmosphere, we’re proposing a saturation campaign of movies and specials, all on a military theme, stressing the right of the individual to protect his personal property and emphasizing the evils of government intervention.”

“Whoa! Right there. Our whole strategy is based on the assumption that something will go wrong, that word will get out. At best, it comes off as negative thinking. At worst, it sounds like an open accusation of poor security or lack of employee loyalty. We aren’t going to be able to sell this program if we come on hostile.”

Pete tried to hide his impatience.

“That’s why we slant the entire presentation on a ’better safe than sorry’ format. C’mon, Eddie. We’ve been through all this before.”

“And that government intervention thing. Why drag the government into it?”

“Okay, from the top. If this thing hits the news, our problem isn’t going to be with the Oil Combine. There we’ve already got the white hats on. We’re clear on everything we’ve done because all we’ve done is protect our own property. First, we sent the mercenaries in to protect our copper mines when the revolution threatened them; then we merely continued to defend the mines when Oil got the idea of using their mercenaries to take over the mines themselves. Everything we’ve done can be publicized as being for the good of the customer, us keeping costs down to keep prices down. Hell, even using our own mercenaries fits the pattern. We’re paying for this out of our own pockets instead of using vital taxpayer dollars by lobbying for government troops. It was even our idea to rent land from Brazil to fight the war on instead of endangering the mines with on-site combat. As far as us against the Oil Combine, we’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“I thought it was their idea to use Brazil for the fighting.”

“It was, but we got it in writing first. That puts it in our pocket as far as history or the press is concerned. We’ve got ’em cold.”

“That’s well and good, but what’s that got to do with government intervention?”

“If word of this thing gets out, the real battle is going to be with the government. You know Uncle Sammy-anything he can’t tax he doesn’t like, and anything he doesn’t like he meddles with. It’s within possibilities that he’ll try to make us compromise with the Combine and divvy up the mines. If that happens, there will be a brawl, both in the courts and in Congress. If we’re going to win that fight, we’ve got to have public support solidly behind us. That’s where the saturation campaign comes in. If we can get the spark started before the specific case becomes public knowledge, it will be easy to fan it and point it in a direction. Hell, Eddie, you were the one who pointed it out in the first place.”

“Well, I was just...”

“You were just asking questions that we answered in the first week we had this assignment. Now I thought we had a pretty good working relationship going, Eddie. I could always count on you for a straight answer no matter how unpleasant it was. I’m asking you plain-what’s going wrong? If you can’t tell me, say so and I’ll back off, but don’t give me a smoke screen and pretend it’s an answer!”

Bush was silent for a few moments, his eyes not meeting Pete’s glare. Finally he sighed.

“You’re right, Pete. I should have leveled with you sooner.”

He opened a drawer on his desk and withdrew a sheath of papers, tossing them on the desk in front of Pete.

“Here, look at these.”

Pete picked up the sheets and started leafing through them. They were photocopies of the rough drafts of some documents. Crossed-out paragraphs and note-filled margins abounded. Whatever they were, they were a long way from presentation state.

“What are they?”

“That’s some of the rough drafts of Marcus’s presentation.”

Pete raised his eyebrows in inquiry.

“Don’t ask how I got them. Let’s just say they got detoured past a copier on their way to the shredder.”

“Do you have stuff from Higgins too?”

Eddie made a disparaging gesture.

“Some, but not as much. He’s pushing for a joint effort with the Oil people to save cost. Frankly, I don’t think it has a snowball’s chance in hell of being accepted. Marcus is the man I’m watching.”

“Okay, what’s he got here?”

“It all boils down to one assertion. He says we should win the war.”

“Win the... really? Just like that?”

“Oh, there’s lots of back-up. He works off the same supposition that we do-that if the war lasts long enough, the word will leak out. But instead of trying to cover up afterward, he wants to finish it before it leaks.”

“Does the boy wonder bother to mention how we’re supposed to do this?”

“Rather explicitly. We’re supposed to outgun them.”

“Hire more mercenaries? We’ve already...”

“No, outgun them. Better equipment. So far everybody’s been fighting with government surplus weapons modified for simulated combat. Anything really new the governments are keeping under top security wraps. He’s saying we should go directly to the designers and manufacturers and outbid the governments for the new stuff. That would give us enough of an edge to finish the fight once and for all.”

“That’d cost us an arm and a leg!”

“Not as much as you’d think. He points out how much the corporations pad any bill going to the government and suggests by exerting a little economic pressure, we could drive the price down considerably. Then again-pull page four out of that stack for a minute.”

“Got it.”

“What you have there is a document he intercepted. Apparently the bastard has inside information from the negotiating sessions.”

Pete was scanning the page.

“What’s a ’One-for-One Proposal’?”

“It’s some new rule the Oil types are trying to push through. Basically it means the mercenaries would have to destroy equipment and Ammunition as if it had actually been used.”

“That’s insane!”

“Our negotiating team is giving it an eighty percent probability of passing. If it does, cost estimates for continuing the war go as high as fifty thousand dollars a day.”

Pete whistled appreciatively.

“With that tidbit under his arm, Marcus’ proposal doesn’t sound nearly as expensive.”

“So where does that leave us?”

Eddie pursed his lips.

“That’s what’s been bothering me. This proposed program has a lot of sparkle and romance to it. It’s going to get a lot of support. If we decide to fight it, it’s going to be an uphill battle.”

A warning bell went off in the back of Pete’s mind.

“Did you say ’if we decide...’?”

Eddie sighed.

“There’s one more bit of information that I haven’t told you. It seems that Becker, Mr. Big himself, has been talking with Marcus at least once a week, sometimes daily. If he’s taking a personal interest in seeing Marcus get ahead, we might want to think long and hard about our own careers before we set out to try to make the golden boy look bad.”

The cliff towered grim and foreboding, fully the height of a three-story building. Except for a few scrawny weeds dotting its face, indicating outcroppings or crevasses, it was a sheer drop onto the rockslide. It was enough of an obstacle that even the strongest of heart would take time to look for another route.

The man at the top of the cliff didn’t look for another route or even break stride as he sprinted up to the edge of the precipice. He simply stepped off the cliff into nothingness, as did the three men following closely at his heels. For two long heartbeats they fell. By the second beat their swords were drawn-the world-famous Katanas, samurai swords unrivaled for centuries for their beauty, their craftsmanship, and their razor edges. On the third heartbeat they smashed into the rockslide, the impact driving one man to his knees, forcing him to recover with a catlike forward roll. By the time he had regained his feet, the others were gone, darting and weaving through the straw dummies, swords flashing in the sun. He raced to join them, a flick of his sword decapitating the dummy nearest him.

The straw figures, twenty of them, were identical, save for a one-inch square of brightly colored cloth pinned to them, marking five red, five yellow, five white, and five green. As they moved, each man struck only at the dummies marked with his color, forcing them to learn target identification at a dead run. Some were marked in the center of the forehead, some in the small of the back. It was considered a cardinal sin to strike a target that was not yours. A man who did not identify his target before he struck could as easily kill friend as foe in a firelight.

The leader of the band dispatched his last target and returned his sword to its scabbard in a blur of motion as he turned. He sprinted back toward the cliff through the dummies, apparently oblivious to the deadly blades still flashing around him. The others followed him, sheathing their swords as they ran. The man who had fallen was lagging noticeably behind.

Scrambling up the rockslide, they threw themselves at the sheer cliff face and began climbing at a smooth effortless pace, finding handholds and toeholds where none could be seen. It was a long climb, and the distance between the men began to increase. Suddenly the second man in the formation dislodged a fist-sized rock that clattered down the cliffside. The third man rippled his body to one side and it missed him narrowly. The fourth man was not so lucky. The rock smashed into his right forearm and careened away. He lost his grip and dropped the fifteen feet back onto the rockslide.

He landed lightly in a three-point stance, straightened, and gazed ruefully at his arm. A jagged piece of bone protruded from the skin. Shaking his head slightly, he tucked the injured arm into the front of his uniform and began to climb again.

As he climbed, a small group of men appeared below him. They hurriedly cut down the remains of the straw dummies and began lashing new ones to the supporting poles. None of them looked up at the man struggling up the cliffside.

They had finished their job and disappeared by the time the lone man reached the top of the cliff. He did not pause or look back, but simply rolled to his feet and sprinted off again. As he did, five more men brushed past him, ignoring him completely, and flung themselves off the cliff.

Tidwell hit the hold button on the videotape machine and the figures froze in midair. He stared at the screen for several moments, then rose from his chair and paced slowly across the thick carpet of his apartment. Clancy was snoring softly on the sofa, half-buried in a sea of personnel folders. Tidwell ignored him and walked to the picture window where he stood and stared at the darkened training fields.

The door behind him opened and a young Japanese girl glided into the room. She was clad in traditional Japanese robes and was bearing a small tray of lacquered bamboo. She approached him softly and stood waiting until he noticed her presence.

“Thanks, Yamiko,” he said, taking his fresh drink from her tray.

She gave a short bow and remained in place, looking at him. He tasted his drink, then realized she was still there.

“I’ll be along shortly, love. There’s just a few things I’ve got to think out.”

He blew a kiss at her, and she giggled and retired from the room. As soon as she was gone, the smile dropped from his face like a mask. He slowly returned to his chair, leaned over, and hit the rewind button. When the desired point had been reached, he hit the slow motion button and stared at the screen.

The four figures floated softly to the earth. As they touched down, Tidwell leaned forward to watch their feet and legs. They were landing on uneven ground covered with rocks and small boulders, treacherous footing at best, but they handled it in stride. Their legs were spread and relaxed, molding to the contour of their landing point; then those incredible thigh muscles bunched and flexed, acting like shock absorbers. Their rumps nearly touched the rocks before the momentum was halted, but halted it was.

Tidwell centered his attention on the man who was going to fall. His left foot touched down on a head-sized boulder that rolled away as his weight came to bear. He began to fall to his left, but twisted his torso back to the center line while deliberately buckling his right leg. Just as the awful physics of the situation seemed ready to smash him clumsily into the rocks, he tucked like a diver, curling around the glittering sword, and somersalted forward, rolling to his feet and continuing as if nothing had happened.

Tidwell shook his head in amazement. Less than a twentieth of a second. And he thought his reflexes were good.

The swordplay he had given up trying to follow. The blades seemed to have a life of their own, thirstily dragging the men from one target to the next. Then the leader turned. He twirled his sword in his left hand and stabbed the point toward his hip. An inch error in any direction would either lose the sword or run the owner through. It snaked into the scabbard like it had eyes.

Tidwell hit the hold button and stared at the figure on the screen. The face was that of an old Oriental, age drawing the skin tight across the face making it appear almost skull-like-Kumo. The old sensei who had been in command before Tidwell and Clancy were hired.

In the entire week they had been reviewing the troops, he had not seen Kumo show any kind of emotion. Not anger, not joy-nothing. But he was a demanding instructor and personally led the men in their training. The cliff was only the third station in a fifteen-station obstacle course Kumo had laid out. The troops ran the obstacle course every morning to loosen up for the rest of the day’s training. To loosen up.

Tidwell advanced the tape to the sequence in which the man’s arm was broken. As the incident unfolded, he recalled the balance of that episode. The man had finished the obstacle course, broken arm and all. But his speed suffered, and Kumo sent him back to run the course again before he reported to the infirmary to have his arm treated.

Yes, Kumo ran a rough school. No one could argue with his results, though. Tidwell had seen things in this last week that he had not previously believed physically possible.

Ejecting the tape cassette, he refiled it, selected another, and fed it into the viewer.

The man on the screen was the physical opposite of Kumo who knelt in the background. Where Kumo was thin to the point of looking frail, this man looked like you could hit him with a truck without doing significant damage. He was short, but wide and muscular, looking for all the world like a miniature fullback, complete with shoulder pads.

He stood blindfolded on a field of hard-packed earth. His pose was relaxed and serene. Suddenly another man appeared at the edge of the screen, sprinting forward with upraised sword. As he neared his stationary target, the sword flashed out in a horizontal cut aimed to decapitate the luckless man. At the last instant before the sword struck, the blindfolded man ducked under the glittering blade and lashed out with a kick that took the running swordsman full in the stomach. The man dropped to the ground, doubled over in agony, as the blindfolded man resumed his original stance.

Another man crept onto the field, apparently trying to drag his fallen comrade back to the sidelines. When he reached the writhing figure, however, instead of attempting to assist him, the new man sprang over him high into the air, launching a flying kick at the man with the blindfold. Again the blinded man countered, this time raising a forearm which caught the attacker’s leg and flipped it in the air, dumping him on his head.

At this point, the swordsman, who apparently was not as injured as he had seemed, rolled over and aimed a vicious cut at the defender’s legs. The blindfolded man took to the air, leaping over the sword, and drove a heel down into the swordsman’s face. The man fell back and lay motionless, bleeding from both nostrils.

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