“All of a sudden they don’t care if everybody on the street at rush hour turns black and dies?” May asked rhetorically. She gestured again at the gas and high explosive ranked about her. The boy laid a proprietary hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off impatiently. He drew back with a moue.
Lacey tongued his lips. “They’ve got an insider,” he said. “I never heard the name but I saw him. He’s supposed to take you out—and all this—before it drops in the pot.”
There was a sudden silence in the big room, marred only by the whisper of the telephone. Black May leaned forward, frozen.
“An old guy, about a meter seventy,” Lacey went on. “White hair in a fringe behind his ears. But mostly bald, you know? Very thin, with a nose that’s twice as long and half as thick as it ought to be.”
“Swoboda!” somebody hissed behind Lacey. May’s hand slashed him to silence as she thought.
Wank, bent over the telephone, missed the byplay. “Colosimo checked it on the scanners, May,” he said. “Says it’s just like the fellow says, a fag turns around and bumps him and this guy cuts the shit out of him. Blade wasn’t very long, but it wasn’t no fake. The crash crew had to collapse a lung, and if the flit pulls through, he’ll do it on one less kidney than God meant him to have. It was real.”
The news deepened the tense silence.
Lacey met Black May’s eyes for a moment, then blinked. “Look,” he said, “I got to take a crap.”
The woman chuckled. “Well, don’t look at me, sweetie,” she said. “You’ll have to ease it yourself.”
The tension broke in general laughter. Lacey flushed and said, “Look, I mean . . . where?”
Black May waved her hand. “Take your choice,” she said. “The honeywagon’ll get to it sooner or later.”
As if embarrassed, Lacey moved off into the shadow of a stack of explosives. A suspicious thug—courtier was too pretentious a word—peered around the corner a moment later, but she disappeared when she saw the Southerner was squatting with his pants down.
A thirty-gram ball of C-9 plastic explosive had been concealed in Lacey’s rectum. He molded it quickly into the seam between the floor and a container of Amatex. Its detonator pellet lay against the stone flooring. If all went well, Lacey would be able to retrieve the charge and place it as intended, at the controls of the fusion plant. If not, it was where it would do some good as soon as somebody sent the right ground-conduction signal. Nature had left Lacey no choice but to remove the tiny bomb from its hiding place soon.
Lacey shuffled back into Black May’s presence. The queen broke off in the middle of an order to the lanky red-head captaining her guard. “You!” she snapped, pointing a finger as blunt as a pistol’s barrel at the Southerner, “How’d you come to see this traitor?”
Lacey shrugged. “A captain, Nootbaar, was briefing me three weeks ago Thursday when they first brought me up from Greensboro,” Lacey lied. He had ordered a computer scan of the data banks to cull out any appearance of Swoboda on the surface during the past year. As the Southerner had expected, the physicist had come topside a score of times. The most recent instance had been three weeks previous; Swoboda had talked to a former faculty colleague in the latter’s living area. If the City hierarchy had been alert, they could have arrested Swoboda then without difficulty—but that would have raised questions as to why the physicist was wanted. Besides, the search would have tied up great chunks of computer time in a subregion in which availability was already far below requirements.
For now, all that mattered was that Swoboda could have been doing just what Lacey described. “This bald geezer walked through the room on his way up to twenty. Nootbaar pointed to him and said he was going to zap the big bosses and their goodies just before we dropped in on them.”
“Wank?” Black May queried.
The secretary spread his hands. “No way to tell, May; a precinct helmet won’t get us into the City Central scanners. Colosimo can follow Swoboda himself, maybe, if he keeps it to short segments and don’t get the oversight program in the data bank interested. But Swoboda was topside that day—I met him as he went out and told him to get a tan for me, why didn’t he.”