like that.
She gave serious consideration to calling him at his hotel and breaking off the date, or
even just standing him up without telling him anything. She hadn’t told him where she was
staying; he might never be able to find her again, and all their mutual problems would be
solved. But, with a sigh, she realized she could never do that. She had promised to meet
him, and promises were sacred things to a d’Alembert. Her family pride would not permit
her the luxury of breaking this one.
She spent an extra amount of care in making up her face this morning, and by the time
she was finished much of the depression bad left her. The face that stared back at her in
the mirror was no longer haggard, and she declared herself satisfied with the results; a
less modest person would have realized that she was devastatingly beautiful. A quick
look at the clock beside her bed told her that she’d spent entirely too much time on her
makeup, though-it was just past 1030. Dressing quickly, she hurried out to the elevator
tube and up to the lobby level to grab a jit. There would be no breakfast for her this
morning, though perhaps Dak and she could go for lunch somewhere.
She arrived at the appointed spot five minutes late, cursing her own tardiness and the
complexity of Vesa’s traffic. Yvette hated to be late for anything; it made her feel vaguely
incompetent. She dashed out of her jit and into the crowded casino, where she began
her search for Dak.
She did not see him immediately, and began to pray that he would be late, too, so that
he wouldn’t notice her own tardiness. Even at this hour, though, the casino was quite
crowded; Vesa, being an underground settlement, did not depend on the arbitrary
rhythms of daylight and darkness, and was in bloom around the clock. Dak might have
been here, saw that she wasn’t here, and decided to mingle in the mob for a few minutes
until she showed up.
Yvette waited. One minute turned into five, then ten. Still there was no sign of Dak.
Impatience began to play on her nerves, taking the form alternatively of anger and
concern. How dare he keep me waiting? He was the one who wanted this meeting so
badly. But what if he’s hurt? What if he slipped in his bathtub and got a concussion.
She began to feel very conspicuous standing there alone in the entranceway while people
milled around her intent on their gambling. Finally deciding to take matters into her own
bands, she walked over to a public telephone, inserted a twenty-kopek piece in the slot
and called the Soyuz Hotel where Dak had told her he was staying. “Connect me with
Gospodin Lehman’s room, please,” she said when the hotel operator answered.
There was a momentary silence at the other end, then the voice came back, “I’m sorry,
Gospodin Lehman has left.
Yvette sighed with relief. “You mean he’s on his way to an appointment.
“I wouldn’t know, gospozha.
“Khorosho. Thank you.” She rang off and went back to the casino to continue her waiting.
She waited for half an hour longer, growing increasingly puzzled with each passing
second. She knew it shouldn’t take him more than fifteen minutes to get from his hotel to
here. What could be keeping him.
Could some other business have come up so pressing that he had to stand her up
without notifying her? She was modest enough to think that a lot of other things could be
more important to him than she was, but she remembered the pleading, desperate tone
he had used yesterday while begging her to meet him. He had sincerely meant that, and
it was hard to imagine anything coming between him and this so-desired date.
But he wasn’t here, and his hotel said he had left. Could there have been a traffic
accident along the way? She looked outside and as far into the traffic tunnels as she
could; there seemed to be no impediments to the flow of vehicles approaching the
high-domed intersection out side the casino. For the moment she ruled out accident. But
what was there left to explain his absence? Where was he? He couldn’t have just
vanished without a trace. . . . `
Suddenly, Yvette froze with horror. “Mon Dieu!” she exclaimed under her breath. “It can’t
be. It just can’t!” But her logical mind told her that it all too easily could. What exactly had
the hotel operator meant by saying he’d left? Suddenly, nothing was more important in
the Universe to Yvette than finding out the, answer. Racing outside to the sidewalk, she
flagged down a jit. “Soyuz Hotel,” she told the driver breathlessly. The woman nodded
and calculated the rate from here to there. Yvette stuffed a wad of bills into the driver’s
hand without even bothering to count them and went to the back of the jit to sit by herself
and think.
She found, though, that thinking was a difficult process at the moment. Her normally
crisp, clear mind was drifting hopelessly in a sea of confusion, circling the problem
without ever stopping to focus on it. She did not want to face the issue, even though she
knew she’d have to in the immediate future. Her body was numb with fear, normally an
alien emotion to her. Fear for herself was almost an unknown quantity, but fear for
someone she cared about was a chilling thing.
After seven eternities the jit pulled up in front of the Soyuz Hotel. Yvette prodded her
shocked body into action. Running out of the jit and into the lobby, she raced up to the
desk clerk on duty. “Do you have a Gospodin Lehman registered here?.
The man checked his records. “We did. He checked out last night.
“Gospodin Dak Lehman?” “That’s correct.
“What time last night?.
The clerk consulted his records once more. “About 0130 hours.
“Isn’t that rather a strange time to be checking out?” “Not on Vesa,” the clerk shrugged.
“Time is meaningless here.
“Did he leave any forwarding address?” Yvette asked, grasping at straws.
“Sorry, none.
The realization of what must have happened was worse than a physical kick in the
stomach. This was not some meaningless statistic in a musty old police file; this was a
flesh-and-blood man whom she happened to love very much. It couldn’t be true.
In desperation she ran to a public phone in the lobby and invested a small fortune in
twenty-kopek pieces. She learned from Empress Spaceways, the company that owned
the Empress Irene, that Dak Lehman had cashed in his return ticket and no, he had not
bought one for a different date. Calls to every other transportation company servicing
Vesa brought only negative results-Dak Lehman had not booked passage with any of
them.
Like hundreds of thousand of people before him, Dak Lehman had vanished from the
surface of Vesa without a trace.
When the conclusion was at last inescapable, Yvette sat down on the seat in the phone
booth, turned her face toward the wall and cried. Damn it, it was supposed to be me,
Dak, not you. I was the target. I could have fought them back. Why did they take you
and not me.
Her brain felt as though it would burst, and the wall she was facing held no answers for
her. She sobbed uncontrollably for several minutes, letting the emotion wash over her.
When her grief had been expended, she lifted her head and the tears stopped flowing.
Once again she was the cold, calculating supersecret agent, dedicated to the Service of
the Empire. But the icy fury lurking behind her eyes would give warning to all that she
was no longer a lady to tangle with casually. Yvette d’Alembert was out for blood.
She had started out of the booth when something across the hotel lobby caught her
attention. Ducking back inside, she peered out through the crack in the door opening and
watched the tall man she’d called Gaspard walk up to the desk and start a conversation
with the clerk. From the way the clerk was shaking his head, it was a cinch that Gaspard
was asking much the same thing Yvette had asked-and was getting much the same
answer. Yvette hoped that the clerk wouldn’t mention the woman who bad asked these
same questions just a short while ago.
Apparently he didn’t; from her own conversation, Yvette recalled that the man
volunteered no information if he could possibly avoid it. At any rate, Gaspard grimaced at
the clerk’s answers and walked abruptly away from the counter out of Yvette’s viewing
range. The SOTE operative gave him a fifteen-second count, then opened the door and
stepped out of the booth.
Gaspard was nowhere to be seen, so she surmised that be had left through the front
door. Without a moment’s indecision she went after him. He and his friends were her only