“Hello?”
Vanessa answered in a low voice. “Martin?”
“Hey! Where are you?”
“I’m at the house, so I’ll keep it brief. He’ll be leaving in the morning. Expect me at the lab by ten-thirty. Are there any changes of plan?”
“None. We’re all set as agreed.” There was a pause. “You, ah, don’t have any . . . second thoughts, then?” Payne’s voice held a curious note, a hint, almost, of disbelief.
Vanessa shook her head curtly into the phone. “What is there to think about?” she said, and hung up.
It was the first time that she had talked to Payne from the house, she mused to herself as she sat looking at the phone. But what of it? By the time the bill came in with its record of the call, it would no longer matter.
Martin Payne put down the phone, rose, and carried his drink slowly across the drawing room to the window facing out across the lake. The night was starless and murky, with swirls of mist smearing the lights on the far shore into watery blotches of color. The forecast for tomorrow was unsettled. He hoped the weather would hold sufficiently for them not to have to call off the planned cruise following the party.
So it was on. What had begun as an exchange of “hypothetically speakings” with Vanessa after their decision two months previously to eliminate Jack had in the space of one short, impossible week become reality. There had been times when Payne wondered if they repeated them more to flaunt their bravado at each other than from expectations of being taken seriously. Or at least, he suspected that Vanessa might have merely been playing a game. But it was he who had provided the quality of decisiveness to turn the remotely possible into actual. He trusted that she would take note and be appropriately impressed.
Of course, Vanessa liked to believe it was she who had provided the inducement and given him nerve—but that was to be expected in someone of her peculiar vanity. He hoped that Vanessa wasn’t going to spoil things by turning this into a rivalry once the ugly part was over and the two of them had it all. Having to deal her out after all this would be a shame. But, one hurdle at a time, he told himself, looking over at the clock. He tossed back the last of his drink, went back to the phone, and called Finnion’s personal number.
“Andy?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“Martin here. We’re go for tomorrow. Double-check with the lab that we’re set there. I have to leave right away to meet Victor and some people in town. Could you call Phil too, and let him know we’re in business? Call me on my mobile number if there are any problems.”
“Sure thing,” Finnion confirmed. “Is everything okay there with the boat?”
“I talked to Mike ten minutes ago. He’ll be moving it across the lake in about another hour.”
“Fine. Have a good night out with the guys.”
In the security manager’s office at Microbotics out toward Redmond, Andy Finnion called up a directory screen and paged to the entry giving Garsten’s number. Asking Finnion to question a decision from Payne would have been like arguing with a traffic cop over what the speed limit ought to be. If Finnion’s years of police work had taught him anything, it was that you didn’t dispute the motives of whoever gives the orders. The real world that most of the public never saw was a rough place, and the only art that mattered was staying alive and surviving. The reason why most people never had to worry too much about basic truths like that was that they were insulated from that world by a protective layer of professionals who took the risks for them. Being one of the professionals meant going by the code that professionals understood. The first part of the code was that you hung—or got hung—together.
Jack Anastole hadn’t understood that. If he’d been content to stay East and enjoy a moderately good life, he’d have been left alone. His transgression had not been in being greedy—hell, who was there among them who wasn’t there for what he could get? Where he’d overstepped the line was in coming back as an outsider threatening the integrity of the group in its obligation to protect its own, and that was not acceptable. It seemed that now Heber didn’t fully understand the system he was part of, either.